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.