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.