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.