Entebbe Drainhole

My brother lives in Uganda.

Every morning he leaves Entebbe, where he lives,
and drives to some place between Kyamulibwa and Masaka,
which is the place where he works.
Every evening, he returns.

On the way to work and on the way back,
my brother crosses the equator.
There are two little boys there.
They spend their days on an imaginary line
made up in the head of a Nicaean
more than two thousand years ago.
They squat on the imaginary line with a plastic bucket
of dirty water and a rusted enamel kitchen basin
at the ready. The basin has a drainhole in the bottom.

For a Ugandan shilling, the two small boys will pull
the perished rubber plug from underneath the slurry in the sink
in order to demonstrate the clockwise emptying
of the bowl on one side of the imaginary line
and the anticlockwise swirling on the other.
They have never seen an American’s or a German’s bathroom,
but the two small boys know that it is important to nearly all of them -
the way the dirty water circles before it empties out of a drainhole,
at a particular place in the dust.

Perhaps there are other such places
for the Germans and the Finns and the Americans to visit.
Perhaps they travel far, to some scorched and windcrazed maizefleld,
to witness the imaginary line between the starving and the fed.
Perhaps they wander further, to some filthy and slime-spattered abattoir,
to see the imaginary line between the surviving and the nearly-dead.
Further yet, there may be those who travel nowhere,
but stay at home in their lounge rooms,
watching, every night, on their terrible screens
the imaginary line between those who deserve compassion
and those who don’t. Who knows?
Certainly not those two little boys,
mirthfully swilling their mirk, now one way, now the other.

Chickenwire Gully

The hippies of ’78 wanted Tambourine Valley,
imagining something more be-ribboned, be-jingled;
silk-nomadic, spice-romantic; before the wire had entered
their consciousness and rooted them to the weeds.
One of the early escapees came back after twenty years and said:
We never envisaged fences. But this place has changed since they first came
with their fingered scraps of eighteenth century imaginings:

where the sun used to hit the moss on the back of our house in the afternoons,
there’s a bare willow, possum-ravaged and winter-ugly;
puzzling areas of vacant grass are portioned off, like exercise yards for lost hopes,
with exhausted chickenwire fencing, rusted star-pickets, collapsing garden splints.
The old-timers could have told us the stakes were too high.

This is chickenwire land: every struggling patch and desperate scratch
tangled in messy manacles of the stuff, and every grey corner and upright post
buttressed with filigree collars like the token neck-irons of a long-extinct chain-gang.

Even those secret little plots of sweet death sitting up in the bush
have a heavy ration of wire, left behind after every desperate harvest
for children in a hundred years to wonder at the quaintness,
like the old still they talk about found amongst the snaky tussocks.

Sometimes it’s all the old hippies move for: to tend their ganja plots,
their paranoias cycling like mould spores, with the seasons;
while they wait indoors, painting eyes,
their heavy-boned dogs heckling at neighbours, their grown children watching
from the dark wedges behind windows, like Boo Radleys with dreadlocks.

A survivor who lived here as a child has gone to the city to be a sculptor in wire.
She makes genuflecting forms to hang in the corners of bright airy flats,
where they hover toward the light; and angels climbing up the corners
of vacant rooms with ever such transparent wings.

Virgin Time

None of them knows about my secret life; how I wake at night
and become the girl again.
It only works if there has been no untimely death in the family,
if all the children are well, and if there is not another big baby
swinging and jalloping in the saddle of my hips.

I discovered it this way:
the wind came up after a putrid-hot day and a close night,
and the chimes in the cherry tree went troppo, jangling and clanging,
like a devil-bell on a reef. It sent me seasick.
I finally went out to muzzle it with an old school tie,
whispering to our dog, Styx, who thought it a mild joke.
It was such a relief to still those chimes that I stayed out there in the yard,
my thin and faded nightdress, ghostly and blue-lit.
I hung out the beach towels in the soft scudding of the wind.
Styx whimpered at my weird behaviour, while that trespassing beach-sand
made a dry shuffle on the ground.

The moon was just waning: it sailed up there on an unswimmable,
unsalted sea, transparent shoals of bright foam making it list and tack westward
to the ghostly shores of those unpeopled, unfurnished isles.

That was the night I learned the secret-
that I live the wrong half of the circadian cycle.
For when you wake at night, the dear soft world is yours.

While your bedmate snores the Blowhole of Morpheus;
while your children sing to the three-headed monster of dreams,
you can be awake in a sweet dark world that is your own.

A sweet dark world where the rooms of the house are empty and silent;
a whole hunk of hours, untimetabled;
a whole hank of weather, unpredicted;
a world uncommented on by the wise or the foolish;
a stretch of hours uninterrupted by badly-timed
eating, washing, dressing, undressing.
No traffic on the dirt road;
no crazy or strange blue dogs;
no ferreting or dust-bathing fowls;
no hostile passers-by to wave at
as they grimace from their cars.

A treasure! A treasure of virgin time,
when you can sit on the dried-out grass in the backyard
and listen to the chumbling and thumping of wallabies,
the chawing and chiacking of possums;
when you think you can hear rain pattering on grass and corrugated iron
but it is the popping and dropping of shiny black wattle seeds from their red pods;
red pods abandoned in drifts along the edge of the road,
staining the tank water, and making it bitter and scarlet
as a brew spilt for the old god Hymen.

You can be the girl, at last, put to sleep so long ago
she has grown into a new body but not another soul.
That girl-of-the-soul used to sit on a window sill in that blessed abode
watching the night taking its slow course, and half-waiting for the laggard sun to rise.
She would sit with the window opened wide for the breeze, in the dark,
writing letters without a light, using her damp girl-fingers to space the lines,
the writing inevitably climbing upwards on the page,
like promises written in blood.

And finally she would crawl into bed, inside a circle of forgetfulness-
a cave of sleep; hip-shuffle down under cool heavy sheets,
and the wind would come up as she slept, hidden from the harpies
that might snatch a girl to her death.
The cool change would come, whipping her hair at a white white pillow,
and in the morning her bed would be full of wind-debris:
grey wattle feathers and crisp and empty pods;
and the grass outside confetti’d with hard black seeds with tiny curled tails;
the sweet tiny white tails that one day might be wattle trees.

THE GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST (in memory of Gene Stratton Porter)

I wait for the solemn neighbours of my imaginings to rouse
when I confess that I sometimes lock myself inside the old pick-up
on holiday-weekends, but they are used to cranky folk who shut themselves up.
Anyway, that is how I came to see my daughter in the bird-speckled rear-vision
mirror of my husband’s work-weary truck last Sunday.

The hue of her hair has no name for the speaking, let’s just say paddock-grass blue,
with all the tarnishes of marsh-grains gone past ripeness, gone to ergot.
I caught her reflection jigging like a lap-dolly in a long flounced skirt,
like some sweet Floridian hillbilly, and how my heart tapped its foot a reel
remembering the bowing of air against bare armpit skin,
loose fabric ballooning around shadows, twirling on an envelope of secret afternoon.
My tender feet bare, like hers, toes uncurling bracken fiddles, I would run,
like a Seminole, without touching the ground, and my hair would fly
quick as a blind granny’s shuttle.

I remember playing under a blue-green palmetto, in a hammock of swamp
in a way-off corner of the grove. That tarnished oblong of truck-mirror could even be
a window on that other backyard of stunted citrus trees where the oranges grew
paper-skinned and ropey, but you would suck them, anyway,
burning the smile around your mouth with lonesomeness.

Will she ever remember an afternoon as though looking down a narrowing tunnel,
a spy-glass filled with verdigris? or the hundreds of wooden pegs moldering on the line?
or the five black hens playing doggo? Will she remember squatting on the grass to pee?
her body not being a burden? but a purple butterfly? not something she owes
to someone silent somehow? And will the memory bide her through all the long afternoons
of weekends to come? when there are no neighbours at all, near or far;
and no cheerful fiddles whining their lonely wails?

Antipodean Eve

Those yearned-for hills in the west could be sky-woman’s first cooking-place,
scuffed to smuts and flattened into the distance with burn-off smoke.
A giant abalone overhead is calcified inside and dribbled with sea-insect borings;
the heavy sun a whorl of shell-fish meat, black-lipped and attached with sinews.
That fleshy eye of sun is weeping scorched wisps above grass so eden-green
you could sprawl on your back for it, like some wanton of the south:
so juicy-sour, if it grew inside a round skin, it would poison you with bitter-sluttishness.

There is something so wayward about foreign trees gone to autumn,
like plump white women run to butter with too-sweet sex:
as though they are only themselves when they have lost their green sappiness.
And isn’t it strange how every tree you see,
not just the ones dropping their forbidden windfalls,
goes through a whole lifetime never knowing its given name?

More gentle seasons come and go, but always it is the tobacco aftertaste
of applewood pyres, the bossy flipflap and bully glide of seagulls
on a broad-hipped and generous afternoon that you remember,
like some careless mother who got herself up and ran away from home,
before you could even say her name.

Time of Cold Blood

It could be easy to think you were being watched in this too-beautiful
Godforsaken place where you can mark time for days, a whole damn autumn,
without seeing anyone, only sometimes hearing a strange car
grating gravel on the top road, or meaningful footsteps in the house
across the creek at midnight. Or the ugly dog up the gully crying like a bunyip.

It might be easy to think you were being watched, if you went out
in the mossy dark, and just before finding Tchingal and Bunya,
two green eyes appeared in the shapeless black under the big peppermint gum;
not jittering or sliding, just waiting.

There is a man up the end of the gully who has hung
threadbare blankets over his windows, and rarely goes out
now the days are so short. One night he fired a shot into the bush,
he told us. He couldn’t stand it any more, he said. Being watched.

Today I took the key out of the back door, and when the dog barked,
I stopped and wondered, and looked down toward the creek,
toward the willows bare and pink-brushed like skeletons,
and the tussocks of sedges crowding in the slumps of the old orchard furrows
like mourners, and the mustard-apple lancewoods reaching up in surprise,
and the low-slung blackwoods burgeoning downward in suspense.

Anything could be out there, biding its time, silently drawing a bead on you.
Perhaps it’s down there now, watching.
Waiting for its chance.

Indian Summer

It’s the kind of day the family calls a Geronimo Day,
since the fourth child was born in an Indian Summer just like this.
We sprawled on bone-white decking in the unexpected warmth
that morning, under a vacant-blue sky, and the sun turned the paddocks
into a hanging lake of steaming tussocks, so that it could have been a raft
that we were on, lost amongst towheads of bulrush and cottonwood.

But seasons play tricks with their painted Apache faces,
and today I’m alone, in the dark, with a violin fiddle-faddling
a bow of horsehair oh so sadly! for company.
I’m watching a tall stiff-backed man in blue overalls, and a biggish
lolloping black dog, playing fetch on the opposite slope of the gully,
and they look like square-made figures on a tapestry that have come to life,
naively placed by the weaver above a frost-fed creek.
In winter, that water is bluish, and so are the mute smoke signals
that lounge in an unravelling spiral amongst the peppermint gums,
and an absent neighbour’s mildewed tipi.

Sometimes I pace and bend in the stillness;
in the slanted rays of this place, my toes curl;
in this stifling four-walled aloneness I count five windows
over and over, as if giving birth once again,
but in hollering solitude.

I drink too many cups of mate tea, and hunker in front of the wattle fire,
chaffing my hands; and riffle through the pages of the telephone book:
as if it is some foreign testament to not being here forever,
in this wide continent of pain; craving for a voice,
for the relief of a word, a sip of cold between the pangs.
But no-one seems to be at home on lonely days.

Then, when I wrap myself in the square of sunlight that comes
undaunted through a crooked window,
and let the dark clawed bear-thing take me over,
I know I will manage this, one more time:
giving birth to myself from between my twin-sister-selves.

A brave-hearted bird comes in through the open kitchen window,
and flits and shits in fright amongst the red saucepans hanging over my head.
I almost smile into the crook of my winter-white arm.
And wonder why it is so hard for a wild bird to work out that it can leave
by the same way it came in:
by following that small rush matting of light.

An Aesthetic Vein

Early this morning, when it was still really night,
and we were all fast asleep- fastened
like combination locks without numbers-
I woke to a screaming dog-carnage jugular-rippage
and tooth-exposing snarlage of something
that stopped
before I knew what it was;
and I lay still for a time
poisoned with terror, paralysed with the poison,
wondering should I unbolt the .22 from the rafters?
or barricade the door that is as solid as a paper bouncer
in a country pub.

In the morning I say to the kids:
Did you hear the horrible noise in the night?
but I don’t tell them that I think
it was the sound of a young man
with gappy teeth having his throat ripped out.

Already I know who he is.
Saw him yesterday slouching along the road,
hoping for a ride.
He is down there now in the tick-infested bracken;
the sour-stemmed fireweed;
the sluggish, algae-thickened creek.
Emptied of insides, by now,
like a rabbit mauled by a dog,
so that all that is left is a funny glove-puppet
you would never want to put your hand inside.

At 8.20 the children become their other selves
and elbow out the door, leaving it open to the frost.
I sit by the fire, unable to warm my hands,
and read about those post-modern artists
with gappy teeth
morbidly deconstructing themselves.
I should cry, I know, at the futility
of all those butchered bits they will one day leave behind;
but they are ludicrous somehow,
lying in the grass like that
with their guts ripped out.

On the Origin of the Species

Mister Darwin, can you tell me…
do Bag Ladies become Bag Ladies
before they ever leave their sticky golden syrupy kitchens?
Even while the kids are still yeasty and damper-sweet
and all day thumping up and down on peppermint-gum floorboards
like dobs of burnt butter on a griddle,
do those ladies put on shabby woollen coats with stinky ‘roo collars
and wander sludgy paddocks as though they portend
the light-smeared slick of chip-grease-glossy streets
far away?
Even while those talc-fragrant kids and sawdust-clean tartan hubbies
watch the round-cornered telly in dry-as-dirt papered loungerooms,
do Bag Ladies hunch in sodden khaki tents
and listen to silt-brown creeks beyond flattened paddocks
gurgling like gutters after a 6 o’clock swill?
Do they write damp grey letters by the fumy light of kerosene lanterns
and feel the comforting jute of untidy hair unsplicing and
mouldering around their clammy foreheads?…Such Bag Lady hair!
threaded with tainted metal like old telegraph wires
cut from their sheaths.

While the soft grub-faced kids and the moony-eyed husbands
share neat sweet rows of milk chocolate,
do the Bag Ladies sit in the gloom,
the blowsy gloom-
their work-boots scuffed at the toes and bagged at the sides
and their hands cracked at the edges like the
bloody great cracked paws of spud-farmers-
listening for mumbling gummy strangers on quiet treacle-streaked horses
shuffling along the road,
as quiet as eaten-out wattle-galls plopping,
or boof-headed square-chested dogs killing far away.

Are Bag Ladies always Bag Ladies, do you think?
or are they ordinary invisible mothers who somehow get left outside
in the night?

Green Thumbs

Sometimes, it’s a poisoned hemp:
the bile-coloured moss, cross-stitched
in the humps and furrows of an old orchard.
Buzzies are the brown, loose ends of threads;
blackwoods, the rough of cheap saucepan scourers,
the silver wattles daubed with yellow flocking.

Sometimes, I am poisoned with it.
I slump in front of the fire
and it doesn’t thaw what is cold inside.
Burning-cold inside, a fever of day-after-day:
breakfast/ mailbox/ tea;
three meals, the middle one never filling.

Let this cup pass from me:
this goblet bleeding with winter.

Digitalis Wanderingii

Dank day: birds whipping their whistles,
trilling their tiny tin bird tongues,
and three stray foxgloves poise themselves
in the grass below a collapsing verandah
where I sit, kick-starting my heart.

One foxglove is a luminous-statue-at-bedtime Catholic-white;
another is ripe-figs-in-a-box-under-the-sink pink and
Irish-forearm freckled inside;
the last, the green of hard-packed estuary sand in the shade
under a railway bridge at midday on a low tide-
while a train rattles overhead, at full tilt.

Oh, I love them, but what guilt!
Let me explain:
for many years, nothing I planted stayed alive.
Orchard trees- wondrous things with three types of Old Nick’s apples
to a branch, mutilated beyond what’s decent.
Old rose bushes, for decades besieged, grew gargantuan tap-roots,
their tortured shrubbery, long lanky whips, but jointed,
like sad magicians’ doleful sticks.

Then, one day, the foxgloves came!
Where from? Who remembers?
Nothing touched them, and they multiplied.
This year, they crowd the webby porch,
trample the moss-stricken path;
they crop up in screes of blue driveway rubble,
busy themselves amongst the buzzies,
and under the house where the beer bottles are stacked,
they blossom…
even amongst the fireweed that stinks of turps and piss
they flourish.

And what colours!
And all standing erect,
or bent as though their topiaries were pre-ordained
by a whimsical god who, more than anything else,
liked the idea of up.

Noxious things gone wild,
those foxglove weeds have naturalised.
Yet, I see it coming, that terrible day,
when the foxgloves spread beyond the fences and into the bush,
stray along the rivulet…Under the crack willows
they’ll make small furred leaves, and up the gully,
where the native heath shushes its papery wedding bells.

Pull off the flowers when they die! my drear old conscience has advised.
But, look:
their flowers can sheath a little paw,
and there are speckles spackled inside.
And take note of the way they move so quaint
in the sough of a morning chill.

I know I should (but I never will)
tear the heads off those stray foxgloves-
those wanton, inevitable, unsanctioned,
wind-blown loves.

They grow like weeds,
when all else is broken, even killed.
From stray seed, turned tenacious, those lethal blooms-
true, they may be somewhat rampant and, yes! rapacious,
but look inside-
there’s a secret
spattered in bloody red
that kicks your poor heart back to life
when it feels dead.

Feather-stuffed Sunday

My world has turned sluttish overnight-
a used-up whore that sprawls gummily
in a deep and leaden fedderbedden of restfulness.
Last night, we heard thunder knocking woodenly,
far away. What is it? my daughter asked,
from her makeshift mattress on the floor.

It’s only the sound of a storm, I said…
It’s only the sound of my mother and I,
I reminisced,
stifling ourselves in a cramped bedroom,
listening to the sound of thunder
snagged in the three gum trees
on the other side of the railway lines.

Sometimes, we forget which daughter
and which mother we are.

Last night’s daughter’s head hurt.
The room was hot,
the window and the napped velvet curtains
shut against the mindless mosquitoes
that torture our bland and dormant faces every night.
Sometimes, we forget which mosquitoes they are.

In the lonely hours, the rains came.
The thunder was soon right overhead,
exactly as my mother once described:
those obstinate angels, moving their beds.

In a thin, sleeveless thing, I found I had to go out
into the unctuous unwelcoming matte,
the sliding fingernails of rain,
where faceless, voiceless strangers peopled the behinds of
outhouses, amputated willows, sheds.
Returned to the faithfulness of bed,
the bright lick of the teeming
brought a cool and wet dreaming.

And now, the morning has turned jaded.
In a blink, it will be day.
Outside the back door,
bleached bouquets of paper hydrangeas glow,
and orange spikes of nameless bulbs kowtow,
and bruised impatiens blossoms spoon in their tub,
tatty and smudged.

The old lady is sated,
bleared and badger-eyed;
heavy-limbed and sunken
into the mattress of this feather-stuffed Sunday.

I creep around my house,
trying not to disturb the glottal way it breathes.
A puddle of raindrops on top of the stove
could be from a spilt glass of spoilt wine.
Do you hear a faint and worldly snoring?
The cheap blonde of paddock-grass leans askew,
parting to show dark roots.

Cold Climate Martyrdom

And the gully becomes an impatient child
waking you at five am,
chattering its unsullied excitement.
The birds fill the early light with their paper-tearing,
but are tiny and polite,
expressing a cool turn-taking sanity, unlike
those heat-mad demons of the Top End
that woke me that first night.

The week I spent with the crazy birds of Noonemah
was the brutal awakening that broke the
sappy dream-threads
of my sedentary, more southerly life.
Our problem is attitudinal, he said, long-distance,
and when I hung up, we both danced in the kitchen
a lewd squat,
chanting his dumb antipodean mumbo-jumbo:
attitudinal, attitudinal, we leered,
our bums arched back and our sweating thighs splayed
like some big-arsed black mambo mamas of the steamy,
shin-gleamy jungle.

All that citronella-soaked week, out bush,
I was drugged on the scent of mosquito coils-
spiraling, heady, hip-heavy with lust.
It was a ceaseless, pyrethrum night-lust
and I couldn’t get enough poison into me.
I lay pinned under the heaving, cleaving black belly
of the topsy-turvy night,
and it filled me, stilled me,
with its sticky, killing juice.

I am so horny for the night, I told Loli,
through a confession-grille of mosquito-wire.
She seared shreds of purple buffalo steak
and we watched the rain
breaking its tepid waters down the twin trunks of the white tree
that held up the middle of the big, dark Noah’s Ark of a house.
At the base, a circle of river-stones
made obscene slurping sounds of the rain.

Then,
back out into the donga each night,
and how I craved the
amniotic lightlessness,
where I found myself drugged
inside a soporific cavern of bat-webbing blackness.
It’s vibrations hummed me to sleep.
And the Brahmin calves,
and their slack-eyed mothers,
and the persistent hoof-scuffling of a baby boar.
And, in the crazy ward of the dawning,
the paranoid ravings and warnings of the mad morning birds.

I never saw them,
but they clambered and cussed and connived
as the sun threatened to come up
with their daily medication.

Who knows what they were?
The I-am-Jesus-Christ-risen-from-the-dead bird?
the everybody-is-talking-inside-my-head bird?
the clicketty-click hit-me-with-your-rhythm-stick bird?

I loved those crazy birds.
They came to me at the early hour
of my own sticky-sweet and murderous madness.

That was the week I remembered to sleep the sleep;
it was the week the membrane grew back over
the slit-eyed stigmata of
my cold-climate martyrdom.

This Is Death

Home again;
the place stinks of dead.
I discover a rat
under my bed.
It is light as paper
and leaves puffs of soft fur and skin
strewn around the floor like bulrush fluff.
The cast has been cut from my arm,
the limb a corpse belonging to someone else,
the muscles wasted, tendons rigid with a kind of dying.
Layers of skin waft through the stale air,
like desiccated snowflakes, defying gravity-
a waterless snowstorm in a dry and airless globe.
If this is death, I tell myself…
then it is as weightless as a dandelion clock;
as painless as a dead bird’s flightbone,
hollow and full of sunlight.

Deliverance

And the window remains ajar
all through summer.
Once in a while, a little black bat finds its way in
and you hunch under a ripped twenty dollar quilt
‘til its devious echoes bring release.

Leaden possums creak
like bobbies on the beat,
flexing the leather soles of their imaginary
size twelve shoes,
and kookaburras cackle their criminal mouths
at the deepening no-turning-back dark.
Soon, you hear slummocky rain
slip-slopping sullenly, slimily,
off the tops of pocked cherry leaves.

A banjo twangs deliverance
on a broken CD player,
populating the room with
lust and its inbred shadows.

This bedroom has been exorcised
of its goitrous ghost.
The thing was a round, black void
that terrified us
(my sister, my mother)
in dreams.
I might have ended up a handful of slump muck.
Audacity was our one defence.

These dewy days, the only dark is this soft, suede,
hornifying hour
that smudges its moist mouth-print
against the pane of watchfulness
at my still-open window.

Three Kookaburras

Invisible in the twilight,
hysterical, raucous at the
drowning of the day-
the last desperate gulps of the light.
Running out the back door,
my daughter’s cheek
is brushed by a wing.
Another, fat and splinter-grey,
crouches on the verandah railing
ringing a brass bell on a red rope,
while a third perches on a mouldy straw hat
atop a tilting scarecrow.
Fence-paling ancestors,
they watch from gates and stalking-grounds.
The tips of their polished beaks pince wads of weed
as they tilt and turn their creaky heads,
like jerky dancers in ill-fitting costumes
made from stringybark.

Sacrament

Evening, my bedroom a boatshed above the bush;
a wasteland of wattles and eucalypts, the grey gums
named by their smells, by their dead-man shreddy skins.

My bedroom, an aerial hiding-place.
Waves of belated aloneness drag up onto the sand,
the rotted footings of my listing room awash
in the clean green amnion of the waves;
the purple sands imploded from underneath;
the shore flushed, oedematous with the incoming tide.

The wind, onshore, buffets the silvered planks
of this solitary shed. Alone, unequivocal, on clean linen,
I discover the surety, the security, of my boatshed.
What valkyrie shrieks those wild and wanton cries? In the air!

It’s in the air! It’s even in the air- that crystal gleam; the harsh
and unforgiving light; the green of the horizon cold and sour;
the bitter tang; a pallid evening star, downcast.

(Today I passed a woman by the yacht club point
who knelt before a man; I couldn’t help but stare
as I drew closer and saw her splaying
and carefully dismembering a gull. He looked on,
horrified. And I drove by.)

In the rough palings, the timbers of this shed, a curdled stain
with eyes where once the branches forked.
They, alone, watch at night-
those wooden Rorschach eyes.

And the slump-backed tides return, and the chundering tides
retreat, sometimes leaving a stinking flathead flapping drearily.
Other times, dropping a sandpapered Venus
at spurred and calloused feet.

Siberian Sleep Berries

Three o’clock in the torpid hours and a mug of chamomile tea-
the honey leatherwood-sweet as the barely-there desire
of a leathered dream bandit.
Past three am, and in front of the fire,
piss-yellow tea drained from the pot
(the wild daisies left behind in the strainer,
juicy mop-headed sleep berries),
the roof dripping with an acrid creosote cold,
winter-matted dog brought inside.
A rat on the top shelf hangs its tail, a tiny thong;
you hear them in the night,
dropping and thwacking their pemmican tails.

Stringybark in the fire-box burns ferocious,
loyal as a stinking dog,
its orange teeth gnawing away the white bones of this winter night;
the heat through glass melting grey gristle.

Once upon a time, a long time ago,
but not long enough,
a man waited in a bed by a window
with a bad leak and a murderous, brimstone draught;
waited in the small sulphurous hours
for signs of life from his paralysed wife.

Back then,
a sojourn by the fire was a curved and ragged blade
pressed into an already-scarred throat;
a small pot of chamomile tea
was the shaman’s terrible decoction.
How he hated her to flaunt her self.
It was the poison-dipped razor that slit undone
the purple welts of his veins.

A piquant fire,
the rose-water scent of greenish tea
and a moment in the small hours of living the wormwood,
the quinine, the quassia bitterness
of a middle-aged bride.

Sleep, oh sleep.
Steal me, perfect lover.
You curl yourself around, a perfect fit.
There are no word-sounds burbling, babbling from your mouth-
merely the quiet breath of dreams swept up off the plains.
Do you ever watch me with a scavenger’s salt-stained eye?
Your gaze is gentle, I know.
You barely guess me, loving best in the dark,
where all we know is
your chaste touch on the violet flickering of eyelids,
your dry-sand brushings on corrugated lips.

I wake in daylight and lean into brine-smutted pillows.
Blue winter plumes of blackwood smoke
cascade outside the high windows-
they could be wisps of morning cloud surrounding
this piney house that is so much like a mourning-boat
that has dragged its mooring.

How else did I come to live so far away?
Perhaps it was the unshod footfall of the wild horses,
or the whistling voices of the wild horsemen?
the strings of their strange three-note music
fading like apple-smoke when the winds change.
My husband has left me to carry
the smutched parcel of my life alone.

Winter leaves on the dancing fingertips of cherry trees
are little dried mango-skin flags;
and those frost-bleached trees are my mother’s
old clothes baskets,
unsprung from their bindings.
The house on the opposite slope could be
in another country of sad green-swards and long shadows.
Why is it that our neighbour seems so far away?

Peking geese honk a hoarse calligraphy under the house.
They walk like widows to the frankincense stall,
all their grace in their fat behinds.
I could be anywhere; could be anyone.
What more could I hope for?

An autumn fire to keep me;
a cherry tree to fill this anise afternoon with yellow leaves,
and yes!
an oxygen-blue wren, bright as a piece of river-softened china
flipped over to show the blurred pattern of slow oxen.

BLUE LAKE BEANS and others

When you look close enough,
the grevilleas are tiny puffed vulvas
with uncurling tongues poking out
from between fat, tissue-paper lips.
Pumpkins and zucchini self-seed in the compost;
like Brazilian orphans, they multiply
amidst rags of plastic and
remnants of rusted tuna can.
Today, I sit under the pussy willow
and my eyes are like honey-eaters,
the way they will not stop flitting,
sipping the juice out of the sticky cup of the day.
Lately, I’ve found myself talking to the flowers:
the tiny purple quick-wilting vetch;
talking to the verdigrised silvereyes and the wrens superb;
studying the perfect autistic blue of a forget-me-not,
its unblinking yellow eye trained on me.
And, did you know that the very tip of
the peppermint gum is a minute shepherd’s crook?
And that the first leaf of the climbing bean
bursts upward with the old husk encasing?
The quince tree makes translucent runners in the grass,
and the bulging buds of the agapanthus along the road
are nylon underpants engorged with gravel.
*
A brushtail possum can walk down the weatherboards head-first;
and young kookaburras in the silver wattles
sound empty-skulled, clacketty-headed.
Cherry trees have run amok under the bathroom floor,
and the silver-eyes have returned to the velvetted quinces.
Now, the forget-me-nots have sprouted tiny seed-purses
along their stems, like miniscule origami rosaries.
Do they enclose minute blue likenesses of The Virgin,
Her hands joined in microscopic prayer?
Digging a hole for a golden ash can make you hot,
but the hose turned upwards at your face,
slurping cold brown creek slops,
makes you even more glad.
*
It is night, and a bat whirs and stumbles helter-skelter
all the length of the house.
I encase myself in a welter of mosquito-netting
while the bat flaps and flutters
its crêpey Victorian blackness around outside.
In the morning, a scratching wakes me to the sight of a brushtail possum
balancing on the window ledge:
a tentative but determined newcomer boarding a train.
Slummacky rain puddles on top of the stove,
the dog whimpers and scratches at the door.
My bedroom is a cave of faded drapes and veils.
I speak to my workmates of the bats and possums and the scratching dog;
they stare past me, their eyes alighting, like camouflaged moths,
on the resting-stops of their prejudices.
*
Blue Lake beans are forming a clutch of lonely green hearts.
Summers ago, I eked them out:
like an opium addict, I counted the diminishing horde
day by day, foraging for sickle-shaped beanlets,
tender as paper-shelled snail spawn.
Over the grass creep old ladies’ hairnets turned vegetable,
the mesh spangled with blue spittle-drops,
like my own grandmother’s,
but these sparkles moving and becoming iridescent beetles
the colour of a strutting peacock’s bulging throat.
Another bean seedling has pushed through, uncurling,
extending a green neck, like a newborn unflexing
from the crush of its mother’s damp and binding grip.
Who knows, but that the press of soil, friable and sweet,
is not a pounding vice on the head of a Blue Lake beanstalk?
*
Arriving home each afternoon, I shuck shoes
and go for the garden hose. O benediction!
Cold water twisting, a glassy umbilical,
birthing frigid rainbows,
spattering an inky arc,
making the tough leaves of hellebores sound like vinyl,
and the flat, matte fronds of ferns, like eyelids closing.
*
Getting up to a balmy stillness-
purple sky, penstemons hanging penitent heads,
orange nasturtiums hiding under leaves that are fleshy umbrellas;
the red-hot pokers prodding themselves skyward,
the golden ash sapling self-conscious and nubile
inside a cage of wire.
And, suddenly, the morning turns-
grey clouds wrestle dumbly overhead, shouldering away the quiet.
And waves of mute raindrops, like sheaths of dusty tulle,
waft over the old vegetable garden.
Now, tucked up alone in a blue-and-white bed
with a cup of Earl Grey tea,
I recall the primal pleasure of rain on a roof;
and then a memory that always comes:
stale Christmas peanuts, an abandoned black car
overlooking a steel-blue lake, a tangle of periwinkle,
upward-creeping raindrops on the windscreen.
Rain on the roof. Blue and white cotton.
Rain on the roof.
Come and give me a kiss, he says.
He is lying in his bed in the lean-to:
a man with bluish face whiskers.
Nicknamed Boofhead, and not all there.
He holds me still and grazes my face, open-mouthed,
slobbering all over my freckled face,
smearing spit, his hands in my Sunlight soap hair,
until my mother walks in.
Hard rain on the roof. Clean blue and white cotton.
Rain on the roof.

Strange Birds

in Darwin they call it the build-up; sleeping in the donga,
alone, except for the cottony gecko scat
scattered through my sheets
flutes of hollowed bamboo
breath a peculiar music,
and confusions of trills in the wet dark are droplets,
brackish or fresh;
the weird birds unknowable, unimaginable;
they sound like mad ventriloquists
throwing the voices of fake felt macaws
into the steamy corners of the night
the dark leans against the mosquito wire walls
and I know straightaway
I was born to scuff this stone underfoot;
the night air moving over me my bare arms
above the sheets
or lying on my stomach my hands cradling the pillow
the sounds of the night birds oh!
a wild baby pig grunting pacing the dirt with its tiny hooves
outside the door in the early hours
I let the night in between my legs
I let the night let the night
and arch at the wild unseen
moving moving my throat
arrested
I cry out
like one of those strange unnameable
birds
back in Hobart
three degrees
and winding over the saddle through the snow
listening to a didgeridoo, displaced;
and I tell him, It was thirty-three when I left.
Home, and a boobook owl
pops the night with its questions:
pop silence
             pop silence
                                 pop

The Frogs Sang Me Back

Today I let the music in, and remembered
how it softens the cicada-husk of you,
the way sleep does;
how it quiets the circling animal within
the way rutting does;
how music makes the borders around things clear
as though, suddenly, the clumsy hand that colours your life in
learns to stay inside the lines.
Music nectars your half-lit bedroom
until it seems full of an amber chicle.
I recall the first mad months after he left-
my baby daughter would ever so carefully
make up my bed, while I lathered and slathered in lavender.
She would plump hand-stitched pillows and arrange
a sprig of wild fuchsia or a wattle switch, fuzzed with wool,
and when she had put me dumbly to bed,
she would twitch the frog-music on.
My sister had sent it from Rum Jungle,
and to me, it was the tropics,
it was that dry-cleaner steaminess,
and it was those big glycerine drops that slide
off the greasy leaves of rubber trees.
The music was the sound of the little myopic frogs,
like tender jade buddhas, whistling in the dark;
it was the heady come-hither stink of mosquito coils,
and the white fluff left behind in your bed by geckos
that curled up like sardine-can lids from the timber ribs
of a donga built like an umbrella.
Every night, I fell asleep to the mystic drugging of the frogs,
until my daughters could stand the zombie droning no longer.
In that soporific sound, there were the leafy depths of the big wet-
a cyclone-sodden benignity;
the spiraling of a bamboo flute touched with spit;
the dark echoings of a thousand amphibians trapped in the gloom.
Now, released at last from that coma of grief,
I fall asleep to the worry-bead shuffling of the hot-water-heater
and the distant tinkling of tiny temperate frogs,
brown and sober in the sedges.
Now, the night is no longer a subterranean narcolepsy
that fills me with terror.
I no longer wake with dream-tears
on my sleep-branded cheek.
A scrubbed, fresh-painted light washes my room
with godliness.
These days, I sometimes sleep alone
in an empty house
and oh!
how it rings with the lusty singing of dignity.

Too Yellow To Undo

This heady time of year the wattles flood,
Leaving come-scums of yellow flotsam
In the gullies, as though August
Were a savage river of airy sweetness
Filling those hollows scraped and
Scoured by the sharp-edged wait of winter.
Lean goats in hungry paddocks
The colour of their own salted curd
Stand on feisty legs
And strain as greedy as brides might strain
For the tender bluish feathers;
Their soft-muzzled mouths
Powdered with orgies of blossom.
***
Where suede leathering of wattle feather-froths the gully
The bush is crusted with a yellow as greasy as linseed or
Museum oxide tingling under a purple light.
Silver-eyes scoot up and down, all homeless boys
On skateboards; and nearby geese heckle with the sorry
Grace of a Catholic football crowd.
A posh throat on the hill calls toodle-pip! toodle-pip!
A boarding school plum in its mouth; and all the air
Around full of grating bird-hinges needing oil.
Other tiny bird-beasts space themselves on a clothesline-
Snapped wooden between winter-stained pegs,
And a wren hops, below, as though tweaked on a string.
Fowls jut their chins and very-‘umble, leaving the slide-show
Too early. Did you hear the boobook call the time
With the shumble-mouthing of a misplaced wireless?
There are chinks of ice moonstoning the grass, and blue smoke
Silks upward from a chimney, like strong spirits
Into water, aniseeding the bite of the air,
Cloudy-ing it, the morning sky a haze of spring-grass milking,
As though someone has spilt the fatcream, smearing a burning
Lantern lightness in the deepness of a cooling-trough.
That plastic bucket is a dry joke that a crazed one-eared
Painter might spend years of his life quizzing; and it
Would still bucket there when he died, being too yellow to undo.
***
A heifer mourns by the roadside, her bewildered face
Outlined with the sable-strokes of desire;
Her hind-quarters a sunrise of longing.
The willows in the creekbed are still leafless,
But aching in the groin, with that
Bursting out of the skin with lust-
Filling the gully with the sweet yeasty cloy
Of longing longing longing…
Even the sound wetting your tongue
And making your eyes brim with
The coursing of bright blood in your tight veins…
Bright as a blind whore’s plum-poisoned mouth;
Bright as a bright boy-boy eye, tinkered with black;
Bright as beautiful…another whisper-word
That touches your mouth with its own whist.
O beautiful!
You freshen my eyes the way high freshets…
The way wild freesias…
And the blue sky blown huge by some blue breath-god…
My eyes never tire, though they know
It is not a virtue, your Beauty,
But a fact. You wear it like a tattoo
Burnt on you at birth.
And I couldn’t love it, but could watch it
All the live-longing day, passing over you-
A thousand different shimmering shy masks.
And my eyes would never tire.
It is the other one who makes me bleary-tired:
Who makes my dull old heart ache.
I know the matte truth of him in a thousand slow ways,
And when I look at him, my eyes weigh tired
With his big ordinariness, his dear unloveliness.
And when he sees me sudden, and he smiles upwards,
The mask of beauty that doesn’t belong
Passes over his upturned face like a sly cloud-shadow
And it makes me love, with its canny swift cloud-tricks.
It’s the homely man
Who cracks the frosted mirror of your heart.
The dreamy time of year…
The cool kept sweetness in a woman’s deep fastnesses
Wells up and trickles brackish, then rushes
Clean along unlit stone pathways and granite ravines
Gone belly-sour with waiting-
Filling the shaded and fronded hollows
Neglected by a long long winter.
Woman’s throat skin has faded, in the dark,
To the colour of her own salt.
Lie your weight down here, now;
Your length there on her ah! blued feathers;
Your soft-muffled mouth
Licked with yellow blossoms.
Nuzzle, now, the tangy hollows
Abandoned at last by the long, dry spell.
***

My Animal

I know a woman who frisks fresh roadkill
the same way a junkie might rifle a stolen shagpile shoulder-bag
thrown over a fence on Pension Day.
Sometimes she finds what she is looking for-
a smooth-celled translucent embryo-thing maybe three inches long-
a fondleable foetus with bulging Chernobyl eyelids
that she feeds with a bottle and a queer skinny teat.
It sucks, then, as ferociously as the infant horizon sucks the tide
and it sleeps between her speckled breasts under a moss-green
hand-knitted jumper and sometimes when you see her
in the street the embryo-thing is jostling under her jumper
the way men say tits clamber like puppies in paper bags
but all over the place and sometimes in her hair
which is matted like a nest of dolly-bush shreds.
The reason I mention this woman who raises orphans
is this: I have lost my animal.
It, too, was unformed and horrid tender-skinned
and could give strangers a fright if taken unawares by its sucking
o-mouthed or appearing inexplicably sightless on my neck .
Like that woman, I was so accustomed to my animal
I could sleep with it under my breast-flaps
where its tiny claws left graffiti in the bruised hollows.
That woman, she lets her orphans go bush when they feel
the Irresistible Call. Sometimes months later they come back
with wise expressions and climb into bed as though they’d never left.
I’m hoping that’s what happened to mine-
that it’s just gone off for a while
to answer the pull of some wild centrifugal force.
One night when I’m locking the chooks up, in the blindfold of the dark,
I’ll sense it watching me from the blackwood tree.
Come on! I’ll wheedle forgivingly, holding out uncurling fingers
and my animal will hesitate momentarily and then shuffle downwards
like a coconut boy shinnying down the trunk of a tree and once more it will
burrow under my jumper and incyst against my expectant skin and for a time
my joy, hand-raised from a nuzzling blind thing, will be back.

Springing

I smelt spring come in on the wind
at ten minutes to one on a Monday night
and the little brown frogs in the sedges by the sullage
smelt it too-
randy as rutting Valentinos of the veld,
they cried and copulated in a wave of heat
that blew in on a gate-crashing gale.
I felt spring ride in on a sky-tide,
while the wind thumped a bamboo tattoo
against the timbers of the house.
I smelt the armpits of the spring and swooned
at the damp, the must, the salt-tinged fustiness,
the stamen stink of long-damp mast,
mould, mullock and marl:
the hammocky pubic stench of the ground on the make,
the compost mound on the prowl,
terra firma slobbering in her sleep,
rolling over in a wet dream of wattles weighing
their tiny tufts of bum-fluff,
daffodils blurting from mucousy stems,
green nubbins of leaf spurting from neat waxed sheaths.
I heard spring barging over the ridge,
shouldering her way through the peppermint gums,
knocking leprous old limbs from willows,
head-butting branches gone sodden inside,
bulging and soft as mealie meal
and bracketed with fungi like big crinkled lips.
I felt the old world come into season, again-
felt her flank-twitching and nickering,
neighing and tail-flicking like a nanny pacing the fence-
pacing, her disgraceful old heart racing,
her tail an engorged banner of wantonness.
I felt the spring straining and straddling;
she came like a crazy, addled thing,
rapacious and drooling;
open-mouthed! oh! so voracious,
sweet bee-stung slattern of September,
this nipple-grazed and brazen spring.
Do you remember?

Sweet Succubus

Someone let summer
into our house;
someone let summer
creep upstairs
and leave warm sheets
in our beds;
someone let summer rub its sweet neck smells
on our pillows, crumpled and worn.
Someone called the frogs to whistle in the sedges;
to rattle like heated silver pellets inside a gourd;
and someone told the night to stop breathing…
told summer to press its face against greasy windows
and watch us all while we slept,
skin-to-skin with the night,
while the summer stillness at the windows
robbed us of our breath.

Black Sapote

Oh delicious night-
oh rapturous,
oh ravishing,
oh dark,
oh so dark-
drunken and velvet-eyed,
chamois-skinned;
the night a cloth,
a dark swaddling,
an envelope of comfort-
and I remember the dark of Darwin,
the breathy dark of Rum Jungle
where the poison of light
is sucked from your blood.
The soothing suede of the night
eased me, pleased me,
wafted over me, submerged me.
Oh, dark!
You torniqueted my heart and sucked
the poison from my blood-
you left me pale and lifeless,
spreadeagled under a tropical moon;
a sliver of persimmon, only,
enclosing a gummy, black fruit.

Faith of Our Fathers

The gully, a thurible
wafting bushfire smoke;
the smoke pungent, acrid.
Down in Ad-or-ation falling…
we used to sing…
this great sacrament Divine…
while the priest and his entourage filled the aisle
with the embroidered satin and pungent stink of godly things.
The smoke from scarlet-resined gums,
from purple-podded wattle,
from dry bracken and dogwood
cleaving to the towns down south
like burrs to an old grey blanket.
No one can tell where it’s coming from,
so thick and low-lying is the somnolent smoke.
We closet ourselves inside the house
while a million smoke-crazy midges
batter the windows.
At five minutes past ten, the rains begin,
staccato, percussive,
(a benediction!)
then fluid, a chrism,
a million small, finite heavens
sliding on the roof.
Falling, bouncing off,
making runnels in the corrugations,
on and on,
steady and strong,
cleansing the air.
I bring the washing indoors.
It is flecked with white ash
the size of the mosquitoes that
lazily, slothfully,
patrol us in the night.
The rain falls,
softening sometimes…
but on and on it falls,
dousing the terrible flames
we cannot even see.

The Upside-down Sweetness Inside

Five o’clock morning rain,
a kookaburra watches me from the cherry tree;
birds coming to market,
pedaling their squeaky wheels like crazy,
pedaling their rained-on wares.
“Here’s a beau-u-uty!” one of them calls,
holding up the morning like a Chinese peasant
displaying an orange-feathered duck.
The kookaburra scoots a monorail arc
from cherry tree to blackwood,
its wings pumping corduroy air.
The longer I live in this place,
the more I see it:
the dead branches of a wattle
fuzzed in luminous green winding-sheets;
the dark and private places at the undersides of blackwoods;
the silkiness of rye-grass heads drooping purple in the rain;
the native grass along the fenceline yellowed,
as though pissed upon.
The longer I live here, the more I smell
the fresh neck-sweet loveliness:
the faint resin of Adventure Bay pine;
the homely motherliness of the rain,
drowsy and lethargic,
splatting a blue milkiness on the grass,
splotching a lazy fattiness on the verandah roof.
A lone red-hot poker nods by the edge of the floorboards;
suddenly, a tiny honeyeater alights
to prod at the upside-down sweetness up inside.
Just as precipitously, it whirs away,
leaving the flower standing,
a shaggy plastic toy beacon
in the underwater, five o’clock gloom.

Molokai

The wind making cool flares
and black whirligigs
in the night;
the wind humming
a madwoman’s tune, a mad mother’s croon,
at the window;
wheezing ice through
cracks in the glass,
rolling like a sandpaper surf
onto the dark and lightless shore
of this night that is a lepers’ island
without a lighthouse.
Roiling, spilling waves of black silica;
sucking dry the winter-sodden paddocks,
searching for fingerless limbs
ready to drop from trees,
turning this hollow, longhouse
into a boat
left stranded between the waves.

Flint Glass

Raindrops slop in the night
and a lone frog in the grass objects
to the splinters of ice in the air.
You can feel the snow coming;
it will wake me just past midnight,
knapping sherds on the tin.
Those raindrops sound so blasé,
like smokers drumming
their yellow-stained fingers,
they shrug indifferently:
Life is short! they protest,
before breaking open,
showering lazy seeds of light.

Oily Waters

1.
There is winter in the rain,
a quarter of the way
through a queer September.
It seems that life is a series of
washaway promises
and concrete disappointments.
Do you remember how you rescued me
the night our fifth child
turned one day old?
Late at night, you came to kidnap us…
We laughed
about my roommate
(the horrible golfing cocky’s wife)
all the long way back from Coleraine?
Just happy to be going home…
How did it ever happen, then,
that in those sixteen years,
the dry winds changed,
and now I have to pay a cocky
to rescue us from you?
2.
The rain stops suddenly in the night.
Now, it just hiccoughs its last cold sobs
onto the roofing iron.
A goose up the valley
squaaarks as though
its head might be trapped in a vice.
This week, two notable men are, suddenly, dead.
“Doing what they loved”…the commentators said.
But, isn’t that how we all die?
Doing what we love?
Living.
3.
Night, rain,
and a sea of blue and white.
Cotton can be so cold,
but soft and inviting when smudged,
disheveled, askew.
I dreamt of a blue and white batik
the night I realized you would leave.
Ever since, I’ve been waiting for a
blue and white sign:
like my brother,
walking the cliff-tops,
picking up crumpled papers
and hoping for a farewell note.
You wrote me no note.
You merely staged your own death.
It was not a pretty sight-
the corpse that was you
rolled in the soup,
your features eaten off
and tendrils of weed, strings of shell,
emerging from your pie-hole,
your empty eye-sockets
You staged your own death,
and, like Tom Sawyer,
you upstaged your own funeral,
while the cannons carried on blasting
over the oily waters of our lives.
4.
You cannot ever become tired of writing poems
under the rain.
And I think I know why it is.
The rain on the roof,
the titter-tatter of tiny tarsals
on the corrugations
(while, down below,
there is the warm, the dry, the blue and white cotton)
is a perfect construction of a poem
in common nouns.
5.
My time-
night.
And in bed,
I am at last in love
with solitude,
with hot milk and honey,
with the gurgle of the hot water heater.
I remember only vaguely
the night my daughters moved me up her
into this hayloft of a bedroom.
The night before, it had rained,
and a sluice of water
poured down inside my bedroom
all that long night.
I wondered if the ceiling might collapse.
So, I crept into a kind of large cupboard
and I tried not to see
the ugliness or the dust.
Now, two years later, I’m solid again-
no longer like that small island
in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel,
with a perfectly-gouged hole through its middle…

NOSTOS (a return home)

You see a crisply folded grasshopper
and try to catch it in a preserving jar;
carry an iridescent mallard-green beetle indoors,
ruthlessly clasping it,
like poor dumb Lenny with the mouse.
The last days come, and you almost feel a guilty relief
at summer’s well-timed passing…the way it
seems to be dying in its sleep.
Cowering under too-thin polyester quilts,
you listen to the valley, as it becomes a wind tunnel,
heaving and drunken,
the widow-makers cleaving to the ridge-tops.
Upstairs, your daughter clings to her mattress,
while the wind’s calloused palms
pound the slackened drum-skin of your roof.
You stack chain-sawed deadfall and cover furred kindling,
thinking about the ways to keep the winter out-
preparing for the siege of Goth and gloom.
Dahlias bravely bloom their obsessive origami
in an otherwise empty garden, their distant blots
setting like sacred blood clots from a sacred heart.
The rats make haste, sandwiched by the skylight.
You lie in bed, watching their purposeful silhouettes.
It is time to cull the wattle saplings on the creek flats-
they spring up overnight and congregate like street kids.
And, before you know it, the first frost comes,
crusting the mown sedges with sherds of light-bulb glass.
The sky balloons out,
engorging itself with a deep and visceral dye.
There is a recognition on the faces of the people you meet-
the yawning, stretching days curl up into themselves,
making mellow afternoons.
The air is a liquid wistfulness.
And you are a witness.
These are the last throes of summer.

Exterminator

Beyond these massive shrouds,
these enshrining blue curtains-
the city is quiet. Funereal.
A car, far off, a showy ute,
rolls its RIP’s along the road.
It’s almost as quiet as a country town…almost as quiet…
How I miss that tilting, subsiding house in the gully
where the chewing of a wallaby in the night
might be heard above the soft breathing
of a daughter, only feet away,
and the almost-inaudible vigil of the creek.
Thus, one life, sweet and terrible,
becomes the past.
It is merely the undendurable that turns
our coloured, waking griefs to
sepia, gravestone memories:
they are bowls of dried leaves and pallid petals
kept on the black-and-white tiled slabs
of our new and renovated lives.
The worst thing about tragedy is
how easy it is to set up.
After a while, you realize
that your days are spent
trudging over porcelain roses of loss.
You realize the day you filled the truck
was the day one of you died
(while you were taping up the fake flowers)-
that the day your little dog went away
to another home,
to be shorn and renamed,
was another of your deaths.
And you wonder if you will ever get anything back?
whether you will ever stop killing off your life?

"La poesía soy yo..."

- Vicente Huidobro

Is There Heart Here?

Oh, how tired I am!
Too tired for sleep-
my legs like old lisle stockings stuffed with wet sand.
The city at night- it helps me remember,
whispering into my ear
(like the young man who fell in love with a drowned girl
whose skin and hair glimmered with an underwater green):
Once upon a time, I lived in a submarine hollow
with a ragged little dog;
so wet was the matted, dark hollow,
the ground in winter became a corpse
with that stale and pearly breath
that only a corpse can summon.
Come winter,
even the weeds stopped growing-
only the spackled black spores,
the burnished orange lichens
spattering the crooked timbers, flourished.
Things carelessly left lying about in summer
grew a serious skin of grey permanence during June and July;
then came August, and those once solid and useful objects
disintegrated to release the sooty mould of mortality.
Scourer-pads of moss metastasized into a green, malignant mat
that crept over gravel,
encasing weeds in a spongy webbing.
You ventured into the bottom paddock and found
it had become a frigid mire that sucked away your breath,
a sepulchral mush, a primeval swamp squelching underfoot,
scaffolded by sedges sprung with wire and rust.
And on returning, oh! the dismal dreariness of the empty room
without a fire to give it heart,
Is there heart here? the gypsies used to call,
on encountering a gadjo’s dull camp.
Summer will come again,
the fire will chaw and spit its mouthful of acrid heat;
one day soon there will be heart again
in that edifice so cunningly built in the shape of my life.
One day soon, the spark will strike dry wattle twigs
and my sons and daughters will glow in its ragged flare.