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?