BATMAN IN THE BUSH
A new road, magic, over by the creek
One man one day just bulldozed through the bush
A gash of gravel, cool on curling toes;
We skittered then and yelled through tumbled trees
So easy now, but ... it came to us at once,
Our haunted house, the roofless shack up there
Sang dread and tempted, easy now, go on.
Volleyed rocks from space lie rolled and poised
Round Darlington, and some are high as roofs;
I jumped in Batman cape off one of these,
Ballooned a moment, gravity held off,
But dirt came cannoning to make its point
Against my knees in sudden red and brown,
A buckled sack of rags beside the road.
From school we used to pass a swathe of rocks
That strewed a moonscape flat across the hill;
Creviced bones cried sadly once at me,
This place, too, taboo. An evil boy
Would take the littler girls there if he could
For who knew what, our minds uncompassed flew
To galaxies of darkness far away.
One Christmas, eighty miles or so from there,
A boy my age strayed off into the bush;
Footprints shimmered in an oven wind
And tricked the thousand searchers and their dogs.
All week a sough of adult wireless talk.
I died with him this while until they found
The gulley, less than half a day too late;
Me, I sort of grew up in a rush, alive.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly March
1983
then in Wordhord – contemporary Western
Australian Poetry 1989
ROCKFIGHT AT MARALUNGA DI LERICI
We were killing lizards with our slingshots
Fausto five, me four and Vito two
Splatter slivers of grey and green quicksilver
On the rockface among the prickly pears.
There’s a shout “Come on quick, a gang from town!”
And five small boys run up in full alarm.
“Nascondi la fionda,’ hide the slingshot,
Says Vito, “we’ll do better chucking rocks.”
They challenged, we choose weapons, which is easy
On a dirt road thick with powdered dust
Countless stones the size of children’s fists.
They have slope and numbers in their favour
Quickly force us back to the pinegrove park
And the first shots rain through flimsy cover
Gathered, hurled back up for both sides see
There are no rocks on the sand-and-needle floor.
“The churchyard!” then a fifty metre gallop
Down steps to a stucco barricade
Walling in a small and sullen chapel;
Soon heaven showers missiles to this sanctum,
One passes by my face as I peer upwards,
For the moment we’re quite safe, but well trapped.
Fausto, Vito, several of us jump down
Through the olive orchard hidden at the side,
Creep in the lee of retaining terrace walls
Up through the trees to the road by the pines.
They’ve seen us too soon! No, too late for them
Now they’re attacked from two directions,
One casualty each, thirty near misses;
But the end comes fast : “Curse you wretches!”
It’s Fausto’s father, “Rocks in my house!
Will you kill someone!” He chases the foe;
Like wind in the olives our gang melts away.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Westerly March
1983
WHAT WENT ON IN EINSTEIN’S
HEAD, ORDINARILY?
Everyman dreams he’s extraordinary
Such analysis is proof enough.
Wheatfields of the mind extend
Ripe and yellow, end to end
Ear to ear, deadly flat.
In the mirror just awake
I rake the stubble with the back
Of a nailbit hand and think
Of peasants with their rightsize plots
Scything sheaves and heaving sighs
Backs cry quietly to ease the curve.
Only tractors and vast machinery
Track across my waving thoughts;
If I could squat against a stook
And chew a stalk and watch ants walk
Things less ordinary might .....
Might what? I shrug. Might germinate.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September
1980
THE RANDOM ELEMENT
Weeds know it’s war
Mild-mannered gardeners hack wildly at weeds
Slipping singly between sentries
Or on spring nights overrunning
Duly furrowed beds neat
As camp lines
Man’s particular compulsion to
Decrease the random element
With mixed results. Take Paterson, pioneer,
In New South Wales who planted English
Purple bells of viper’s bugloss
Which spread like revolution
In panic grasses, knelling in wheat country.
Ill winds blow. But way out west
It hardly rains and ribby
Staring sheep survive on purple bells
We’ll call Salvation Jane.
Prickly pears have won big battles here
And hunnishly laid waste vast tracts;
In Europe bells and pears succumb
To slugging armies’ juggernauts,
Whole farms have died.
After wars weeds grow especially well.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly March
1982
SWAMP BIRD
Madeleine reckoned I wallowed in gloom. But
Admit it, she flits like a bird in a swamp
Picking nit-things from hippobacks. Lumbering grey
Footballers misty on Saturdays witness her sometimes
Rugged up on touchlines, guess her ambiguous jeers.
Feminine ridicule trenchant at twenty; well
Take for example the library silences
Breast brushes elbow in sssh-sorry bookstacks;
And after the game she must smile at the captain
Wrinkle her nose at my white muddy knees
And be missing all evening. Have you seen Madeleine?
Flash in the courtyard, goading gold plumage,
Door shuts behind her. Then dark swirls despondent,
Moodiness, ooziness still I remember,
A dozen years later and still I slip under.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly June
1982
then in Wordhord – contemporary Western
Australian Poetry 1989
OF PARABOLAS AND PARABLES
Speck of black on blue
Arcs slow, stops, drops perpendicular,
The y-line of its graph,
An eagle on a kitten.
Geometric goddish death
Like this should come to us
The to-be-smitten.
Dot is blown into a globe
So poets, preachers, artists generalise
Axis of each eye particular
Tangential wheeling
Souls in Paradise are skylark
Spirits pencilled curve suggests a
Bird of feeling.
Sower’s arm extends in seed
In falling dots to goodish ground;
Sparrow frailly turns its skull
To curving cat, and all of us are bitten.
Horror later fades: vernacular
Sermons, poems and equations draw out fate
The to-be-written.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant October
1982
JERASH
It looks as if those tumbled hills were shaken
By some gods and then forgotten. And forsaken
High among them lies the carcass of a city
Picked very clean: time’s jackals had this pity.
A humbled giant left his frame in shattered
Colonnaded ribs, his spinal discs lie scattered
All along a central street of wheel-scarred paving;
The charnel grass that spreads beyond is dead but waving.
And now a minor armageddon’s stirring;
Archaeologists are slowly disinterring
Bits and pieces; tourists come in ever greater numbers.
Theatres, gouged gullets, twelve hundred years unsounding
Cough with shoes and chatter row by row rebounding;
Lizards slither; down below the forum slumbers.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant April
1982
OR
North-south, black-white must separate
Are split with and or or
Subjects have their predicate
It’s never clear what for
Picoseconds calculate
Which switch is off or on
Then as our facts accelerate
Are they here or gone
Psychologists like yes-no tests
No answer is “correct”
But pattern-forming manifests
So selves can be cross-checked
And politicians opt in twos
Whole mandates we elect
By simple votes and people lose
When plebiscites reject
It’s we who seek polarity
No real reason why we should
For Deists, singularity
Encapsulates the All and Good
And nature says with clarity
There’s east and west and realms between
And space beyond : disparity
That artifices leave unseen
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant December
1982
SULTAN ON A SKATEBOARD
Mid-late summer, flame trees now died to embers;
An avenue of embassies and grey once-gracious villas.
8 a.m. but down there on the corner squads of flies
Manoeuvre on the prickly pears. Beside
His handcart sleeps a shrouded figure, puzzled
Insects buzz to find a face. Two legs protrude,
Or rather one, bare, brown: the other just a
Cylinder of wood, rough as the barrow’s.
One city with a thousand limbless men
Patrol on after routine desert wars;
Bombs and hot-wind blasts and mines
Whump bodies, bits of them on prickly sand.
Well, yesterday, a few streets back,
Suburban wadi, cars dug in both sides,
An old soldier saluted to his turban when given way,
Trundled by his son - torso, arms, head,
Dignified, superb, sultan on a skateboard.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February1983
then in Wordhord – contemporary Western
Australian Poetry 1989
PENSIONED
Newspapers flap on the 8: 15 platform
Commuters jerk birdheads
Crane at announcements
Movement of lips
Doors suck at cold air
Funnel feet, joggle bags, dished-up faces
Shun an old man slumped
Nodding mumbling. Then shudders
Run up vertebrae
Sun bursts in blackness
Big buildings accelerate
Lines criss-cross his window
As drab suburbs burble
Nothing is real unreal
Diffident peering
Through panels of glass.
This was escape from a gulped-coffee kitchen
Doll-eyed grandchildren
Respectfully making
Shapes with their mouths.
Parents move quickly
Hard monosyllables
Shrug codes none too secret
Questions are guessable
When to dispose of you - eightyish, seventies?
No comfort that people
See less than you hear.
He’s deaf you know.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly June
1985
ANACHRONISMS
Black doodles score the phonebook
Graven nerves from June-July
Bad connections hum and garble
In each ear and hollow eye
Unplug me in the bathroom
Silver faces mouthing why
I should see you now
The new girl soothes like unguents
And I hallow her today
Her amber and her marble
But anachronisms play
Like hands. You used to flinch
At fingertouch. I pushed, you slipped away
But I feel you now.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1985
BALANCED HORROR DIET
Kidneys, liver, spinach made me scream
To eat, with shrill entreaties these were “Good
For You!” Such vileness fortified the blood,
Allegedly. A yell can let off steam
And that’s not bad. The odd horrific dream
Evens out in daytime as the flood
Of fantasies is dammed and understood
And channelled down some safe and conscious stream.
Children maybe need to feel real fear
To get things in perspective, to ignore
The routine dread; so bogeymen appear
In Grimm’s gross shapes - though nowadays they’re more
Boxed and processed, fast-food violence, near
As screens, blurbed urban gundeaths, ketchup gore.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March
1985
then in Australian Poetry 1986
TO THE DOGS
Our great-grandfathers dug like dogs
For gold or clearing scrub for farms and kept
The hours of sun till as their logs
Cadaverously strewn they slept
And crapped in dirt and open air
Then on verandahs pets and humans stared
Tongue-lollingly around at all they shared
The hanging heat, the flies and shaggy hair.
But now our dogs are hopelessly behind
We roar away in private cars, cocoon
Ourselves in gauzy comfort, find
New sciences to blow up life’s balloon
And if perchance we saw it disappear
In God-great powercuts or world disputes
Our pets would laugh at us, we sudden brutes
We’d yelp and snarl and sniff each other’s rear.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant December
1985
COMPONENT
Wonderful things, machines,
Like those that manoeuvre in space
But every component must work
To grant all dimensions their grace
When a disc in the spine slips askew
It brings down the vegetable curse
And only the eyes can now move
In a never-you-touch universe
Soldier, this bullet’s for you
Astonished he falls to one knee
A small telescopic dark hole
Astronomers bow down to see
On elastic the stars race away
Will stretch and then stop and rebound
Like an echo, or snap and go on
Like a scream or a vanishing sound
When she left I sat on the steps
And strained all the powers of sight
Things hurtled and crashed in my mind
An aircraft blinked red in the night
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant September
1985
OUTREMER
Culture shock is social intercourse gone bad abroad
Tourists gag on squalor, new cuisine and crowds
Bewildered troops misvalue foreign parts and rape and raze;
It goes both ways. In 1915 Aussies wrecked
Haret el Wazzir as pox and prices ran amok:
Egypt handles criss-cross armies, like the host
Of Louis IX, surrendering - so many so in fact
Hundreds were beheaded every day, until the King
Was ransomed, handsomely. Now dollar-laden tourists stroll
In Shagarat el Dor, just slightly ill at ease;
A semi-soldier, fists around two wooden blocks, accosts
Americans, who
blanch and shuffle back, repelled.
Piastres, conscience-money, serve to keep the stumps at bay;
With doubling of its revenue the State might keep
Its war-torn heroes out of sight - as we do back at home.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March
1985
ON THE MARGIN
Above the battle Marshal Someone scans
Uniforms swirling
In time to his plans
(Battalions’ shellburst individuals lose
Orientation
No chance to choose
(Democracy makes choice its bugle note
The middle will hinge
On the marginal vote)
And those now led and leaders in cahoots
Echelonned advance
In praise of grass roots)
Beyond the bottle derelicts disperse
Out on the fringe;
Like those who read verse
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant June 1985
UNCHAINED
The weather has gone bad but is having some fun
Gales of laughter and doubled up palms
Gogo girls’ tresses, fiesta of spray
Breaks on promenade railings
Down the tap-dancing roadway
Grey facades clap; things are sort of contained.
Constraining is part of the picture: take work -
Steam engines, factories, nine-to-five grind;
Or Saturday sport when the clock-fearing train
On tracks to break records.
And the tightness of music:
If drumskins were slack or the strings loose who’d play?
“All power is delightful,” a satirist says
(A balloon from the mouth of Idi Amin -
In newspaper boxes our monsters are tamed)
“And absolute power is
Absolutely delightful;”
Breaking the rules in a zero-sum game.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly June
1985
PEEKING
China is changing too much for your liking?
A modern Ming golf course in planned for the Tombs,
Look, cranes make great letters that litter the skyline,
Mush of Hilton and Sheraton rooms.
What do you think of the leaden lid lifting?
Forbidden things curve as eaves in the air;
Serge is outmoded, no longer loose-fitting,
You see shaped bums now in Tienanmen Square.
Oldstyle, white bloused girls at the Beijing Hotel
Guard a glass counter where foreigners buy
While utilitarian plush crimsons fade:
Silks, lacquer, strange roots, bottled non-ageing spell;
One hitches a stocking quite high on the thigh -
You surge, as light glancing on evergreen jade.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September
1985
CROSSING
Sometimes dusk-killed colours rise again and flare
Briefly for the skyline’s passage into night,
A parable perhaps of gorgeous death with light
A miracle at last. It used to be that prayer
At bedtime guaranteed the journey on from there:
Hand to forehead, breast, in pious fright;
Then sleeping sicknesses and hazards out of sight
Like germs, like faith, like madness transited the air.
Eyes close. Red Sea waters in our minds divide
Historians interpreting remark the tide
Explanations blow along Great Bitter Lake;
In dreams the chronically irresolute decide
Bridge-burnt ventures thirty miles wide
Dunkirk’s still-staggered morning-after pilots wake.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1985
EUCLID OUT OF DATE
Earth suspended like a coin mid-spin
Sleepy astronaut looks down and nods
An O, so flat, no wonder off was real
To ancient mariners; yet here I feel
The tiny outputs from five billion ids,
All man means, come cone-like up and on.
The Christmas pudding dome is dark
Eyes dart and wait each wedge mumchance
Warm bulgemouth tongue tip sneaking thick
Sifted silver
Threepenny pieces might be mine.
Machines created us and weaned
Us, weightless, watched us try a cube
On sphere just once, the switches flicked :
Playpen marvels!
Binary codes will work this out.
Henry the Navigator, dreamed
Up from nowhere, looms in sight
Of tribesmen, mainsails crucified,
Galleons curving
Good hopefully down, unblank the globe.
Some things, like faith, are out of date:
Old Euclid too, although his blueprints track
Misshapen space eternally towards
Jerusalem anew, all arcs and chords
And perpendiculars which intersect
Ungraspably; explorers land too late.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant July 1985
HUNTER VALLEY CAMOUFLAGE
The green myth of faraway hills in Sunday school hymns
Fills the Middle Hunter,
Paddocks and vine-lined slopes,
Higgledy-neat Golf Club swathes and swards,
Prosperous groups move against the trees; forearms arc.
The town itself is camouflaged with dots of brown
Horses, rusting tin roofs and flat facades;
From the air you’d not spot
The beer bottles in the cemetery
(A four-iron slice, say, from the roadside tee)
Catholics and Protestants in back-to-back lots
Practically forgotten;
Some mad park planner responsible perhaps
For these few acres of dead-heart hinterland,
Grassless, graceless,
Plastered on the healthy Singleton skin.
Pioneering names and dates have rubbed away,
Later generations peer through the stones:
Four children under five serially side by side,
Lonely Irish ladies of great age,
Some puzzled Germans.
Broken glass, few feeble weeds, slab on slab,
A sudden shock of fresh-placed flowers
For a daughter drowned now thirty years ago,
These the single colours in the place.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1985
DAYDREAM
In fact
Nothing occurred.
Night by night
I rehearsed, was word
Perfect, gestures right,
Schemed the best time
For this act,
For this mime!
When the chance came
It skipped in dumb dance;
But in daylight’s
Real dreams
Same things play
To a different script.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April
1986
HOME, VIA DARWIN
Official top-end disorientation
Reminiscent of a sheep-dip;
First up a pre-dawn landfall,
Woolshed-type terminal,
Wall-eyed new arrivals dressed
Down by bellying boy scout
Customs men in khaki shorts.
Carpark acres
Prop a toppling circus of stars,
Orion cartwheeling
Head over heels down under.
Noonday corrugated copperscapes
Gibber round Mt. Isa
Shimmering with fahrenheit;
Airconditioned waterhole,
Breezy tee-shirt voices, clumps of glasses.
Back on board an accidental miner
Lashed and screened from tourist class;
Mushroom nimbus,
Ansett lurches in hot pot-holes,
We nervously
Order scotch shock absorbers.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April
1986
ROTHKO OPERA
For me? A bath of red paint upended,
One dark swab swished thick with a
Hard yard broom. I see no sense.
Michelangelo dissects a tracery of sinews;
Behind pen-nib lens and fine wire nerve
Lies sight, however, washed in red veils,
Which alarm clocks rend yellow at daybreak;
Officeworkers unblinded at lunchtime,
Rubber drums rumble in Midtown,
Orchestras honk, screech and sink sounding;
Ears under water hum and guess voices.
Imagine a bath full of French perfume,
Outrageously spilled and the headrush depicted,
Abstracted chiaro in scent-swamped oscuro.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April
1986
OVERDOSE
To a leaf near me
A butterfly floating
Down interrogative
Dies. I too wonder.
Might time’s brief beauty-filled
False cocaine high
Which colours and flatters
And fools us and fades
Have ever been otherwise?
Who so intended?
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly September
1987
OBVERSE
A standing joke - we still begrudge the cost
Of separate records bought before we went
Together. Then all manner of cement
Bound our budgets, lives; wires well and truly crossed.
We’re one coin, that’s what, two sides. If tossed
We both get dizzy, sure, if you were lent
They must lend me, spend you and I am spent:
They can’t lose you without my being lost.
And now, but now? Apart, this isn’t real -
I’m Ixion, splayed criss-cross on a wheel,
Abstrusely damned and strapped at wrists and knees
To luck’s dead disc. Then in this dream I feel
An obverse pressure soft against my heel,
Fingers backing onto mine thread round and squeeze.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant September
1988
TOAST TO GROTEFEND
Grotefend read the first writing for a bet
Made boozing with his mates in Gottingen
He said, I’ll tell that gibberish in cuneiform
Chiselled in the tablets of Persepolis;
Harsh German Ach-du-Lehrer! belly laughs.
Schoolmaster’s beer-bubbles disappear
To outer space where good thoughts drift
At edge of eye a sungleam winks
An unfound star must be - it is!
For the record, Flood and Ark were
Scooped in the first tale of Gilgamesh
And Hammurabi’s legal code predates
Israel’s plaint in Babylon.
He won his bet.
Wedge-shaped scalpels maybe cut between
Grotefend’s thunderdark ganglia
Let lightning in - king, son of king
Xerxes bursts from the insoluble.
Bubbles blip in sun, well, drink to this:
Our thoughts fill vast dull libraries
Not anyway decipherable.
But genius, two lines in tomes,
That’s all, one sip worth thirsting for.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September
1988
AGGRO AGO
Gruesome tortures, spikes and screws
Are gone for good. In olden days
Darkness ruled and towns killed Jews
And heretics in public gaze.
As recent holocausts accuse
This was not a passing phase;
We’ve multiplied, with longer queues
And criss and cross in lots more ways,
But may have peaked. We use
Machines which work, obey,
Detect minutely every clue:
Violent crime will scarcely pay.
Warlike major powers, too,
Dissuade each other, stash away
Their bombs for now without ado.
Zero growth, new worlds go gay;
Some brave dreams we guess come true.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant September
1988
ANCIENTEST POWER
He’d rid himself of underlings unconscionably -
This one displeases me, and this -
Not reckon orphaning and laying waste to dreams.
An hour or so from now a hall will graft
To his words, poise to applaud
Announcement of further usurpations.
Power redefines itself at altitude,
A common, queenly smile has hold of him,
Mocks all indulgences available.
He waits for her return, but schemes collapse,
Words fail. He is unmanned. Another smile:
Please do up your seatbelt, sir.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant October
1988
AT THEBES
A year was the somnolence
Between the river’s floods.
Beneficent, like them, dynasties
Would swell and burst and wash away;
The fat-wet Nile slurped towards the sand
Which, detesting water, rolled repelled
Away out over Africa. It never rains.
In the stony dunes above the Nile
The scarab feeds on camel turd
Yet Ramses’ priests thought him divine:
Ramses who stood ten times life height,
In stone ten thousand times its weight,
Now lies in bits. A camel’s back bore
Too much straw, perhaps, a beetle
Nosed away three grains of sand,
Provoked the thunder of those mighty tons.
The earth in Egypt rarely quakes,
It must have trembled then
At history’s massive hiccup.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Westerly September
1988
MARCH 1918: ORDERS TO HIS MEN
1. This position will be held, and the section
will remain here until relieved.
Some crazed janissary might so command
To hold the untenable, but for what end?
What programme might he have in mind?
2. The enemy cannot be allowed to interfere with this programme.
3. If the section cannot remain here alive
it will remain here dead,
but in any case it will remain here.
Glow-eyed youths marvellously alive
Race stooping on the slope
And yaw in death; yesterday’s
Clawed figures on the wire.
Tomorrow pounces on the eye-blink now.
All the tenses stare together now.
4. Should any man, through shellshock or other cause,
attempt to surrender, he will remain here dead.
I surrender to my own command
The double jeopardy of every contradiction.
I am a local God. All few of us,
The living dead, grin at my, at our apotheosis.
5. Should all guns be blown out the section
will use Mills grenades and other novelties.
God of black winters
And presumably seasonal cycles of peace
Bring evolution, that time not so indecently be held.
6. Finally, the position as stated will be held.
* The six orders, written in pencil, are in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. The lieutenant who wrote them was a clergyman before the war. The position was held, until relieved.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Sydney Review
December 1988
TERROR OF ELEANOR
The bashed guard and broken-ankled teller
Missed most of it. There were moments of hilarity;
Jangling bells, swizzle of TV monitors, one
Father Christmas shot the tea machine
Hiccupping. Eleanor’s earring snags the carpet,
Sideways she watches striped socks,
A queue of creased suits stepped among.
Keyboard years reel giddily, venetian blinds,
Dead hands on keys, stale air, square screens,
Paper truths in bins strewn everywhere.
Things, God, cannot ever be the same
Or this high point looked back upon
For ever after gossiping;
Throats catch at fear and ribs are kicked,
Dignities like dropped pants
Stripped ludicrous,
Hey you.
Later the sergeant says
J’see that fat hostage smiling?
Like she had a good time.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February
1989
PARALLEL LINES
She is gone in unreachable pain
Furrowed from him. In case
Of return he waits in this place:
Uselessness seethes from a train,
Gone generations of soot strangely linger, and black
Bowler hats bob on blank faces in jackpot cascades,
Strong current warnings that passengers can’t cross the track.
Pain in the other direction accelerates, fades
As some dense distant given-out star which is now taking back
Ambient light and identity. Louvres slice blades
Of sun through clouds in his brain,
Curve with hers, lane by lane race,
May meet by infinity’s grace?
The bow bends for gold after rain.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February
1989
SS AT ADELONG
We fix fascist murderer searchlights
On the cabin, to interrogate curfew-breakers:
A silly image this, like the clodhopper
Stopped glass-eyed in our glare
Blasted, hacked with a sticky black axe
Hunks tossed in the truck for the station dogs;
We heave homeward over front paddock.
Before breakfast mein host has other pests
Telephoto magnified posing on hummocks,
A live flop-eared soft toy sniffing
One good jump ahead of the trigger;
Later plastic bottles on a post
Better my aim, show the sights do need adjusting,
So we’ll go back to that ghetto tomorrow.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February 1989
ORAL HISTORIES
There was this joke-teller
Who with wicked, slick,
Quick-as-Picasso
Cameos misrepresented life
Recognisably, had us in creases:
You envied his repertoire,
Deftness in this most
Portable artform.
You know we’ve our gallery
Of memorable anecdotes
Sketched and resketched
Fixtures adorning the walls
Of our years.
You can embellish them,
Fuzz edges, shift colour -
Friends puzzle a little,
But words are like brushes
Dipped in impermanence,
Like everything naturally.
There’s something to be said
For such histories,
Possibly.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant June 1989
THE FEAR FACTOR
In Hamburg they manufacture
Precision simulators,
Tank turrets, bazookas etcetera,
Arms which judder, replicate
Flash, smoke, cacophany.
The Bundeswehr trains gracefully.
Only they can’t copy
Inkling terror,
Neurons to prickle napes,
Troops’ shitscared jittering.
The city booms,
Prospering for decades.
It had to be almost completely rebuilt.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant May 1990
OFF BROADWAY
Here they live elevated and apartmented
Dense ad libbed lives
And the sidewalks, blocks gridded
Are boxed like shows
Everybody’s cast
No wonder the dramas enacted
Under the street lights
Of 41st and Fifth
A quartet apart declaiming
Peakcapped labelled SULLIVAN;
Lady, do you mean that?
Driver, offended, goes into attack
Middleaged black man moves back
Bystander angry with shopping bags
Claims a main role
Theft, knockdown, badly parked?
Eyes hood in the halflight
Palms sweep unheard words
Roles seem to switch
Black man mocks
Bystander nods
Cop arms akimbo
She with the keys stands shocked
A one-man audience
I exit
Check my ticket
Beware of pickpockets
Must rush
To the real theatre
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Poetry Australia 129, Autumn 1991
LONDON LADIES DANCING
Furred Chelsea lady, you dancing
At your age by parked cars, red letter box,
Or crippled, St. Vitus ...? Ah, no, rather
A soft shoe-shit shuffle, she stops now
Mid-pavement to scrape.
High wind in Hyde Park, pale sunshine,
A black-brollied matron diagonal
Billowed and tacking on tiptoe
Foot-lifted comes happily singing.
The dog-walkers dodge.
Office girls skip in the Underground.
Exploits near Leicester Square, fair sex
Cavorting, some decent; the dirty old
Buildings transvested in neons,
And all London dances.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1991
SPOUSETALK
We slip
Messages on silver trays
Smile through candles and flowers
The silent longitude of a rosewood dining table
Chandelier tinkles
Little to say.
Or yell
Red squabbled waddyameans
Above the kids while television
Blurbs the racing horses on a raining afternoon
Matrimony rankles
Welter of words.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly Number
Four,1991
ROMANY
I wish (I think I do, I hold
In hand a brassy wish-distorting telescope
Through which we see our climber-daughter bold
Cling to the cliff) I had her hope:
Despite the overhang she trusts the rope,
Swings, reels in, is up. And from our cold
Further reach we stare down the slope
And see her not come on to us, unfold
Instead Icarus-wings and launch
Unsteadily at first down then
In some gasp of God lift
Skyward, a lark, a swift
Borne careless singing
Out across the valley.
We had plans for greying on and old
Conventionally, drifting into soap
Opera characters. The sun glints gold
On her, a flash of heliotrope,
Purple scented,
Oiling our canvas,
Hilling our flatness,
Streaking our laughter
Out across the valley.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly Autumn
1992
EPISODES
Kookaburras guffaw in clumps of gums
At me running to ward off middle age;
And she eighteen now slews and crumples
Off the road beyond that hill.
You can’t see it from this twisting track
Which meets town streets, the bush behind is
Continuity; the immediate distance hums.
The jog, shower, drive to work print themselves
Each day regular as newspaper,
Local stories, uncomplicated features fill the page.
She is held in unconsciousness.
Hospital announcements worse and worse
Until the last bulletin:
Tomorrow they will switch off the machine.
Birds and rocks in their own way wait to shout
At the flashed commercial: a mock-gold sun ascends;
Tubes and valves function in me like TV.
I watch serialised lives
Dotted with little dramas
To be one day declared redundant;
To be then written out.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly Number
Four,1992
CURED
The last white sheep stood stoic blackened by the smoke,
Mute monument to whims of God and acts of man endured -
Unbeaten track, drought, fire, overdraft insured,
With city salaries to stop us going broke.
We shot the philosophic ewe and neither spoke;
The house we built survived all right, it’s still unsewered,
And our orchard with its apricots not quite matured
Attracts sulphur-crested cockatoos. Next day we woke
To March flies’ drone; vague thoughts of bills obscured
The chores, the stocktake, sudden fencelessness, our charred
Marvelling horizons gazed back through hazy space.
That was three weeks ago. We have another place
Now which looks out over roofs, and has no yard.
Yes, we’re here for good. In our new flat. Totally secured.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly Autumn
1993
ROUNDHEADS 3 CAVALIERS 0
Hundreds of years since Edgehill & Marston Moor
Charlie, and we’re still at it
Tromping around Worcestershire
Waiting to engage: kick-off due at 3pm.
Our musketeers are holed out in the pub
With their drummer-boy wives and girlfriends.
Caravans like baggage trains parked round the back
Disgorge the newly-changed in smock and breeches;
Cannon are unloaded from a hired truck
By yeomen bankers and real estate agents.
You and me, Charlie, officers and bookmakers,
Not spoiling for the fight as much as urged
Like them by the universal lust for dressing up.
I don’t know how pleased Oliver Cromwell
Would be at all this achieved egalitarianism.
At last a little after quarter to
The fifes and pennants form in line with
Cavalry from the local pony club
Plumed and snorting on the flank;
Over from Germany a troop of skirmishers
Just revelling in the reenactment,
And then it’s on. Clumps of rugbymen
With 16-foot pikes slowly mesh together
Like great mating hedgehogs in several scrums,
Leather heels pedalling in soggy grass.
There’s a clear risk of broken ribs and noses,
With mock or real gore on gorgeous silk.
Game, spectacle, film-set; an amplified voice
Elaborately directs levels of reality
For day-out families behind the barriers
Where knots of tourist camaramen aim and fire;
You could conclude we’re surfeiting with peace,
For nearly fifty years without a proper war
Is doing strange things to us, Charlie.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1993
KING’S REVENGE
Do you recall years back
Crazy near Wonju high
On the steep deep-pile grass
Tumulus of King Sejong
Doing forward rolls?
First tight as a fist then
Pulled open by the slope
Stretched into looping dives
Rabbit-punching our vertebrae
Over and over. The king must
Have jerked his neck in his grave,
Demanded tribute; history
Somersaults, you never know
Come-uppance, scowl now
Under the gyrating catscanner,
At the subsequent cross-sections,
As lifesize
stone courtiers
Did at the lèse-majesté.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1993
THE PLUMED SERPENT
I let this chum, this ordinary man,
Talk me with duller talents into joining him
And sundry Indians exploring - scarce a plan
So much in terrae incognitae as a whim;
And what I find beguiling was not that we
Survived all manner of ordeals in Yucatàn
Nor that, in the very place it ought to be,
We found the jungle-strangled city of Copàn
Which time, adored there once, had wholly spurned:
But that the curtain rose on us on that strange stage,
Drawn in off the street with lines unlearned,
Sudden mummers, and that you who scan this page
Of dry historic script have been yourselves turned
By it, tutored by the theatre of our age.
John Lloyd Stephens riding near the front
Ponders Keats, and Cortes who two centuries before
Escaped this way, imagines their surmise.
Unholy symphonies strike up, monkeys squeal,
Razor fronds, mosquitoes violinning on the skin,
Machetes whack the headhigh grasses, other sounds
Of slush and thud and English oaths bespeak
Catherwood and his mule flank-deep again in mud -
The draughtsman must bemoan moist cartridge paper,
Damn the canopy of palms and spread mahogany,
Their blotched penumbral subterfuges sucking colour,
Eyes already fever-raw cannot etch or frame
An underworld, an undersea, such edgeless swirls.
And then a yell, and there before them runs a wall.
Steps did rise. And I confess I blessed
The sight of proud rightangles, those first
Made-by-man miracles, and we both guessed
At reaching causeways, buttresses, palaces immersed
Occluded yonder; next hacked between trees,
Whose leaves pressed on frets and lattices, roots burst
Through flagstones, throttles of vines; a frieze
Freed from green at last had everything reversed:
For here entombed stones moved wondrously alive,
Here might snake-curled columns and intricate relief
Of heads of hosts of hook-nosed tongue-lolled men survive
Despite the rictuses and grin in joyous grief.
My plaint was only how could fluid planes connive
To thwart my mirroring, hence contemporary belief.
In a cleared plaza Stephens confronts the god,
Plumed, ophidian, and seemingly amused
By the antics of humans and tributes of war.
These captives have their beating hearts removed
By self-mutilating priests with thorns in tongue
And penis, all the faces hideous; a dark
Nation of masons who might be thought civilised
Did not the very stones protest their barbarism.
In Mexico and Guatemala hells
Were multiple and ever near at hand as when
In that Year of the Serpent crazed Spaniards came
And Montezuma erred in deeming them divine,
Dooming the Aztecs; but Copàn had long since gone
In weird, colossal demographic nemesis.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant October 1993
IT CAN’T HAPPEN TO ME
Jostling lab rats scoot today
Careless round their Nurburgring and
Free until the experimenting hand
Drops down selectively so that we may
In twos mesh our cogs unpenalised, gland
And hips interconnected connive
To surge the virus and drive
Like the clappers perhaps to expand
Commuter odds of nine to five
On the orbital, a steering pin gives way
And ambulances’ unmelodic sirens play
Luring spectators in yonderness meaning I’ve
Yet again proved quite conclusively
That it did not happen to me
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Westerly Spring
1994
THE CLOCK COLLECTOR
Near-meticulous my love
Like a clock collector
Seconds tick correct
But inexactly synchronized
Very striking
Dustless place, particular
But cluttered bookcases
Characteristically
Smoke-choked ashtrays
Time for me unregulated
Sets in moons and moods
Alarms forget so
Daybreak cocks don’t doodle
Each watch unshowerproof
Shaving mirror mesmerized
Reflects a sprinting train
Ormolu love
We click we talk you
Save me time
And time again
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February
1983
IMPROBABILITY
It is PROBABLE that this or that
It is PROBABLE another thing
It is PROBABLE the theories
Babble on. Our science teacher
Knows he drones so scribbles
Oratorically but I stop slabbed
Against the bolder print which
Blobs and blubs like all the tests
We ever did with gas in glass retorts;
Molybdenum and plumbic lead
Aren’t probable but do have poetry
In plosive liquid consonants.
Steele, are you here or somewhere else -
Perhaps you’ll tell the class ...
The droner interrupts and rubs
His board, my smile gone with
Chalk and all that alchemy;
Sudden problems sneer insoluble
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Westerly December
1983
THINKING IN CHUNKS
Chess grandmasters beat machines: they chunk
Their thoughts in patterned strategies. The flank
Attacked at Austerlitz, a hilltop link
To feints at Ulm and infantrymen bank
Around. Corporals also, other ranks when drunk
May plan from heights like this, but shrink
Back sober into line. Loose ideas junk
Like jigsaw pieces, pawns, odd lead soldiers, sink
As scuffed survivors in a nursery trunk:
Where anyone might stoop, stare down and think.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant July 1983
IT STILL SEEMS ODD SOMETIMES
It still seems odd sometimes
When shoe in hand I realise
My own enormousness,
How grown proportioned
Feet of me will fill these boats;
Shrink thinking back to infancy
Big brothers, teachers,
Kindergarten City!
Blockhouses, asphalt acres,
Hubbub in the street,
And all unedited. For then
A foot might individually
Step out ahead, a thought drift on
Beyond its foursquare edge.
Across this room
Still, small, full-size, you
Curl asleep as I get dressed
And add to me,
My oddest prize of adulthood.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant July1984
THE CUTTING EDGE
The ink could well be dry before I end the line
To contradict reporting in the present tense;
But it’s about the past and future that I write.
As tourists dulled by cobblestones these thoughts of mine
Protest the Palais de Justice’s dungeons, whence
Aristos are being led in groups of twelve, in white
Rough rags up dragging steps; and cocky warders shine
With actuality at vileness to commence,
At violence for change, for good. Drum, tambourine
Are dinning individual signals to each spine
That this must cut and end; the craning mobs can sense
The thrill of continuity in their machine.
By chance the Paris Marathon is on today.
Spectators congregate in Place de la Concorde;
In bunches thirteen thousand runners from the right
Appear, red poppy singlets blink against the grey.
Perversely dazed with Michelin Guide I make this horde
Come streaming through in `93, and out of sight.
The Romans may have had massed games right here and they
Were civilised, reformist, excellent; adored
Odd gods for whom grand public deaths were not obscene.
Benign we jog for human rights, and who’s to say
This leads to excellence? Democracy restored
But dawdling: excellence may race the guillotine.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February
1984
GRAIN
The oculist slips lenses over me
To hone the outer rim of things I see
Oh yes dear me they’re grinning into view
Outstanding. Letters click and loom and through
Them now appears their grain
Stippled grey streaks of rain
Sharp blurring all behind.
Grain could be a requirement of the mind
For linkage. Sawn-off cedar logs have rings
Discrete but subtly joined. It seems all things
Are joined save words doubled up like tiles
Stacked or scattered files
In cabinets. Pulp words
From paper trees. Birds
Alone sing knots and gnarls and might aspire
To spell the screwed-up lines that fuel my fire.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February1984
SUSPENSION
Plane hangs
Ambiguous
Giotto flatout on a fresco
Yearns for perspective
Space layered, foreshortened
Palest sky plaster
Sungold disk sparkles
Flying halo
I grunt
Staccato disbelief;
Characters in novels converse oratorically,
Actors elocute rounded considerations
Better than real, straighter than lines,
Picasso
Blurts disjunctions.
Boeing bounds down the tarmac
Heathaze shimmering dimensions.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September
1984
THE GARDEN PATH
Man standing
Dangle-hand Dad
Palm cupped up-
Side down buffs
Fair fuzzy
Feeling hair
Path sword on end
Cuts two lawns to
Yellow door
Stuck in bricks
Chimney puffs
Fluffy clouds
Mum at a window
Toe stub shoe stump
Door steps open
Jump a jump home
“Did you have a good time, eh?”
Smile for her
“Not yet”
Grownups stare sideways
Lean forward laughing
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant December
1984
MUMMYBEADS
Strings of
Bright coincidences
Link us like talking points
Among acquaintances - how did you two meet?
Oh, it started when he tore a ligament
And then in hospital
Thanks to this
Thanks to robbers
Hacking dark at crumbly wood
Linen bandages, broad beaded collars ripped
aside
For diadems, gold, pectorals of lapis lazuli
Cheaper tributes strewn in sand
Along the dynasties
Not traced
Till Sunday
Head down pointblank scavenging
On all fours, bums up in the air
We scanned Sakkara’s desert floor that
afternoon
Sifting a necropolis for tiny beads
Four thousand years old perhaps
Got thirtyeight
Creating starts
In darkness, mucking round with
Hieroglyphic thoughts at first and wonders
Subsequent revealed. Under the sun
There may be nothing new perhaps
So what
About these thoughts
They slip as sand between fingers
Timegrains in a pharaoh’s hourglass
Gembits picked out chuckling strung
On catgut roughly knotted
Poetry for you
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant May 1984
VULGAR AND VAIN FRACTIONS
Thumbs drumming
Gashed wood desk top
Knife blades splay
He couldn’t count for nuts
Fractions were worst
Chopped up ugly numbers
Would use his fingers
Trace hearts, initials
Slice one in half why not
Properly for a
Tenth, one over nineteen
But he was finicky
Scour back a written page
For uncurled ells
Any ems missing legs
Fret about spots, buttons,
Fingernails, dandruff
Was this womanish?
She took her eyes off
Traffic for a fraction
Mirror-tamping a curl
Kids skid dinking whip
Lash headon windscreens
Vanity out of all proportion
Some things like wheels
And bodies absolutely
Have to be perfect
This he can understand
Reaches down fingering
Each wheel rim
Propelling him
Paradoxically
Backwards.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1984
TRIAL AND ERROR
“Soirée of avant-garde Japanese chamber music”
All manner of contradictions promised here
Open air with creaking wooden seats, floppy-
Shirted citizens, hot
Geraniums in flowerboxes
Tuning themselves.
Grand Yamaha pianoforte, doll-like pianist
Plunging on the extremities, and once or twice
Into the works;
Bamboo shakahaji sucked and blown
Puffed syllables exotically pronounced
A harp plucked, belled and beaten,
What’s going on?
We put two big rocks,
Japanese-style, in our yard
Deliberately; one mossed and bossy
Shapeless, like half-heard haikus
On a cramjam train, irregular
As nature; the other tall, a dolmen,
Contemplative, alphabetical,
January through December.
Tribute to a logical tradition.
Gravid rain ran down them both
Differently.
I try things double-mindedly
Err maybe orientally
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant June 1984
VISIT TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY
Heads are like new-fangled boxes, stacked deliberately
With odds and ends - mirrors, tangled strings, and eyes -
Mine peer, detached, set back inside behind their frame
At angled collar, elbow, program-holding hand;
Impressions linger on the face, just out of sight,
Reflected in third party posturings. “What
Pollock meant ...” as though his head was on display revealing
Strands of anger, doubt, exuberance, securely tied;
Of course a real painter may have single themes,
Not be alarmingly detached like me. And proper critics
With their index fingers have no trouble tracing lines
While dinkum highwaymen might range the bush, quite witting
In the dramas they must act before they hang.
Masks are messages, messages and masks belong
In hollow halls. It’s closing time. I knot my tie
Vainly in revolving glass, and step outside.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March
1984
PILATE’S QUESTION
They say that pig fat made the sepoys mutiny:
I say they say since victors smear the facts of history
Notoriously. Things set solid yesterday
Elasticate when told in court by witnesses;
Conviction hangs on tricks of advocates,
Not to mention simple jurymen’s credulity.
It’s how you come across - this politicoes,
Groomed for success with manicure and maquillage,
Know well. Words convey much less in interviews
Than body signs. Words do have power, though, for whispering,
In innuendo, rumour-form, out-shouts the gospel truth.
Well may you ask yourself what evidence
Is unequivocal.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant May 1984
ON CLOAKS
Montaigne coming home would doff
His mayoral cloak and civic power
And, denuded, family-nagged, be off
To refuge in the chateau tower.
His hidebound book about himself,
Friends, cannibals and education,
Liars, smells etcetera on my shelf
Is private in its ostentation.
Boots and buckles on parade
The colonel’s swaggerstick inspection
In dress the point is smartly made
Ranked in scrutinised subjection.
Scruffy object in the dock
By wigs and gowns misrepresented
When clothed authority may mock
The Emperor is complimented.
Philosophers, Montaigne maintained,
Cannot avoid a mental spasm
Thoughts collywobble if constrained
To walk a plank across a chasm.
Terra firma’s lines are straight
But try for equal footfall spaces
Sages bend their mind and gait
Duffers step out perfect paces.
What then? Though covered by degrees
All reputations shall be dented
But “Dad, help me with my essay please”
(This artform M. of course invented).
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant July 1984
THE BIG QUESTIONS
Little questions, schools, bills, holidays and health
Curl around me, weather-like
Mild, early morning fog, a chance of rain.
To be read about are droughts and floods
In other places massive pressure troughs
Extremes of mercury, God knows, monsoons
Flat surfaces with heaving under
Family dwellings fall. I wonder
What the storm’s eye can
And seeks to see.
At desolate out-stations one-man weather posts report
Their bitty data. Just before the evening news
A bulletin, computer-based on satellites, balloons
Soothing predictably.
They are often wrong.
I ask myself.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant November
1984
UNTITLED 83
Down the green mats Mick’s little girl
Unravels her calligraphy, gentle arc,
Quick easy strokes, curl, flourished question mark;
Turns, still, and then a draft of arabesques whirl
Down and bound, rebound, resound exclaiming!
Mick’s not a talker, doesn’t read, papers naming
Her, hand-funnelled, tumble shoe-scuffed unfurl.
“Your little’un’s an acrobat, they say.” This remark,
Casual enough, would make Mick mad, he’d bark
“Bloody artist, you mean!” at his mate; and swirl
Of match struck in darkness, red leotard slurring
Flares his black mood,”See?” Blind nod concurring.
First round in January angry with gifts
Ungiven Mick and his mate hurl their grey truck
Grumbling past gardens, unlikely their luck
Will change now; but random shifts
Of garbage from loose lids set things stirring
In Mick’s mind, a first-thought, an outline recurring,
A wrapper trapped and flapping swells and lifts
Out free. And in well-ordered borders they chuck
A calculated quantity of household muck
Along the meanest street. In melaleucas drifts
Of trash; kerbs, driveway strips, fences all framing
A free man’s statement, nature-like, declaiming.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February
1985
HARD WORDS AND LULLABIES
Cribs, cots, cradles rock like seas
Like hammocks crescented in C’s
Sinecures and fantasies
How here on in it starts to ease
At halfway-marking-time
Paces downhill stretch or shrink
To come to terms
But come oh darling come to bed
No compromise now in this word
Bad nightmares of the long long wed
Arguments too often heard
Bones on boards, stone steps ahead
Time concertinas, big jobs bid
On their own terms
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Westerly March
1985
GIDDY DOWN
Smoke, noise, no, I don’t remember these
But clearly see the heads or tails
In steelwheel minted pennies on the track
Below our house: we’d wait for trains
Chance madly down the bank and squealing back.
We moved that year to somewhere middler class
And with shifts in time improved on that address
In upward social spiralling. From here
I see my kids have never walked on rails
But out of sight they must have plunged in fear.
It’s giddy-making looking down from planes
Or highrise buildings at the mess
Of have-not mediocrity, delayed
By accident of time in shock which sees
Recurring dreams of Railway Parade.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Westerly March
1985
REAL TIME
Then they were prosperous
Plus-foured and jodhpured
Posing in sepia
Groups, moustaches and parasols
News crepitated via
Clothfronted wirelesses
Grandchildren bowling hoops
Flatnosed at sweetstores
Airplanes were gimcracked
Loops looped quite silent
Crick-necked observers aahed
In slow motion
Free time now marketed
Incomes disposable
Plastics and gimmickry
Leisure in living rooms
Audio video
Kids with controls in hand
Stare at black windows
Printing out phosphorous
Data, looped programs
Space simulations
Quick-reflexed participants
Slip to the future, click
Instant replays
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Southerly June
1985
SIXPENCES
Bits of reminiscence
Chink like
Sixpences
Collectors’ pieces
The heads are girls’
Glimpsed scenes, afternoons
Silver minted or
Else fingered thin
Glint as I
Cup my palm
Pocket them
And grin
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February1985
STRANGE RITES, NEAR TRING
Hertfordshire papyrus reeds good for thatch
Ripple along the canal where mummies crouch
Swaddled, age-frozen, hoping for the touch
Of Ra to reel through their veins and rush
Them. A rooster practises against the hush.
From time to time the surface tension pops, fresh
Silver writhed parabolas whose fate is mesh
Basketry at waterlevel, for the catch.
When it’s time to go they’re all tossed back : I wish
I knew what for. An angler makes a speech
About life and continuity; look they splash
Off happily as anything. But don’t they mind the gash
That signals certain death? We peer at each
Other uncomprehendingly. You should ask the fish.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant December
1986
PRECARIOUS
God teeters and freezes
Top tightrope walker
Unencumbered by gender or number
Balance is perfect
Earth spins serenely
Though weather turns turtle
And all else seems random
You hold your breath, wonder
Will I keel over?
Crave as a favour
Rightness
I favour
Chewing left side
Sleeping left side
I write right
Am odd and distorted
People in the street
Eyes lined with the horizon
Twist and limp though it hurts
To keep even
Bodies
Never mind minds
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant December
1986
AGOSTIN O PAZZ
Black cockaded stallions clop
Through cobbled backstreets
With their hearse behind bedecked
In arum lilies, arabesques and curling scrolls;
Family mourners sheepish trail
And pseudo-sombre raggle-taggle
Queues of curious swell the rear;
In Via Roma mocca coffee wafts with
Aromatic fumes of fuel and cooking
From flats above small shops;
The shoppers stop to see a funeral
Proceed and men salute with
Hand to head for grace of God
And genuflexive reverence.
Then crescendo thunder
Up the street illegally against the flow
Of metal drums and cymbals
Hammered mad, a
Huddled motorbike
That checks, rears, screeches
Off through pavement tables
Down a basket-selling alley
Ululates towards the port.
The mob soul-jolted sighs instinctive
“Agostin o pazz!” and many smile.
The madman kept at large like this for months
Till caught, locked up, and freed at last;
To star in films of Agostin. which roared
On screens in Pòrtici and Vòmero.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April
1987 then in Australian Poetry 1988
THE VILLA OF MYSTERIES
In the Villa of Mysteries we slip-rope a door
Down an umbra of steps to a cellar below
Dark, forgotten; thin steles of sunlight won’t show
Where we huddle each other in dust on the floor.
Up there tourists pose with their cameras, restore
Form to the inchoate, snap status quo
Onto jumbles of ruins; but buses must go.
Ghosts take the stage then, alone, as before.
Performances, lines learned from guidebooks, rehearsed
Histories; thus passing years replenish
The carbons that flamed in full life then dispersed.
Go back? Oh, how might not these years diminish
That date ... unless, one red second could burst
Astonishing, fixing for ever, then vanish.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant May 1987
INCIDENT IN SICILY
Eyewitnesses cross themselves and lie
Roundmouthed, photographed in the lit lunacy
Of judgement night, glazed red and cream by turns,
Sirens keening.
The mayor glimpsed amid milling villagers, cries
In the road, still things, made by God or man,
Lose meaning.
The driver, perhaps come round to Hell,
Backs from the shawls, the eyes, the law
Shrugging.
An unscathed donkey bursts its lungs.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant May 1987
RUNNING OUT
Come back with something duty-free
Aunt Mary said, the widow’s cruse
Runs out you know, except in parables.
Down there men can in hand
Have left their cars beside the road
To trudge for oil or something else
That is like them adaptable;
Lifelong forests, see, capitulate
In concrete fields, wilderness is dammed
Erosion’s duller coloured uniforms
Advance in dunes and factories
Towards the wen, ah, clouds shroud it all.
I don’t know if I will go back.
The cramped and yelling flat
Would probably adjust to this quite soon,
Quite well.
Things aren’t so durable
These days.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1987
REMEMBER HOW WE WILL BE CHILDREN
Remember how we will be children
Nursery years ahead;
The big printed books that taught us to read
Help us to unlearn instead
Continence, arrogance, freedom to speak
All you want. The weak
Watch where they tread.
Spring is snug in the black buds of winter,
Time’s grandparent tense,
But tomorrow for old men and babies
Makes little sense.
Good old days, simple times, hanker these back,
They were grim; and smack
Of mental defence.
Today in the full fledge of science
Those long in the tooth
Can with plastic and chips and new organs
Get back bits of youth;
Ordinary miracles, nothing too strange
Or impossible: now change
May synthesise truth.
In playgrounds first lessons in chaos,
Brutes sort of conform;
In a dark hall the seniors assemble,
Ephemeral fads then perform;
Sundown clouds clamber as night starts to fall;
Who wants to recall
The probable storm?
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Westerly June 1987
THE CROW AND THE BABY
Harsh drawled bird call without consonants asks
What point there is, condemns all truth as trite,
As irony: experience comes too late.
Crap, claptrap, shrieks the infant king, see
The given world is rearrangeable, so might
Is wrong, may will, and winners hesitate.
Family of crows like black sheep baa
With pecked-out eyes, spare themselves the sight
Of drought ahead dead certainly laid down by fate.
Off with their heads! And four and twenty tasks
Are to be jumped to, bottles, clothes and pies await
The hopeful yells of short-fused gelignite.
Soft ground sets under me like quick cement, turns cold,
A car starts cursing, other sounds drown out debate.
The sun of a sudden comes up in the campsite.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Westerly June 1987
WIRELESS
Into the first emptiness stuttered
Instructions, making
Order; apartness; beguiling;
Adam done and undone.
Arguments crackle
Like axed wood whacking
Ring swallowed in a doorway opening black.
Tom! Hey, darling, it’s Tom!
Moods flick like chinking glasses
And murmured voices fade
Into distance as the nameless music lilts
Andante ma non troppo
Gentle babel.
Here is the news.
In further violence today
Angry mobs roamed
Streets strewn with glass
Interrupt to bring martial music
Advertising
Click.
In the garden knowing voices
No bigger than an apple in the hand
The radio speaks:
The lines are down, we can’t speak.
Sometimes I despair of getting through to you.
As for God, he might be the BBC,
Whistling.
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Southerly June
1987
CLADDING 1988
The final touch: the granite cladding
On the Great Parliament of Canberra, adding
Gloss and lustre to the pile. Dreamers build
This way since Chephren sheathed his middle
Pyramid of Giza, white limestone filled
The awkward steps, veneered the riddle.
So lace and frills bedeck a wedding
And veil the coming lust of bedding.
This is not just decoration
(See the armour on the back
Of tortoises whose coloration
Stands up well against attack);
Externals are a celebration
And sacrifice to what we lack.
The House is landscaped, chambers surging
Up from re-laid lawns submerging
Offices where light gleams dulled;
One role of Form is to befuddle,
Eyes are tricked and minds are gulled.
Later pharaohs also huddle
Underground and all their splurging
Is Form, is lost, eternal purging.
Let Content have a nobler notion,
Prefer, to brick, a rough-hewn rock,
Not require such self-promotion,
Beware of tendencies to mock,
Weigh the word and weigh the motion,
Never have to watch the clock.
The flag on giant flagpole flapping
Drowns the sound of cliché’d clapping,
Clashes of each different symbol.
Internaliszing one may mumble:
Had Ramses foresight he might tremble,
Anticipate the robbers’ scramble,
The stab and then the bandage ripping,
First and finest asset-stripping.
None escape from such dissection,
Values stood upon their head:
The critic has the last inspection,
No Content ever left for dead.
Form deemed sometimes near perfection
Is honoured in its life instead.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Southerly September
1989
GRAFFITI PARADOX
Red paint soaks into brick’s
Sticky bed. Get that off.
Maddened powers grab some kid
Who, drubbed, must scrub with kerosene
And make a filthy mess of Ks
That kicked, Rs marching, double E
Now with broken teeth.
The writing, yes, was on the wall
The space still calls
For its message. You hear mumbling
In bus queues, the word is out. Odd:
If it needs to be said
It need not be said
And vice versa.
The writer knows they should also
Hate the space.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant May 1989
IT IS NOT FINISHED
for
Elizabeth
Light scatters evenly like passing time
But hemmed it tunnels undiscovered night,
Dark ages strew their nothing years around
Celled monks; yet long-charred stars shine bright.
We drive in shifts across flat slabs of map,
The windscreen films the back of New South Wales -
Yass, Gilgandra, Moree, on till Queensland shrugs
In setting sun, and then that distance pales.
The final petrol stop, and chance to phone;
Christ, God, she’s gone. Our meaningless dismay,
Our terms, frail terms of reference block the view,
And friends and priests and doctors turn away.
Black eyeless windows watch the street move by
Or looking in and lit the room reveal;
In glass you strangely see your printed self
On scenes beyond, believe intangible is real.
How much of us is us? We live outside
Ourselves in mirrors, children, anecdotes,
What other people think about these clothes,
The independent image of us floats.
34, but this is less than half a life.
Cells run no more berserk, sure, pain has gone.
But light persists on silver iodide,
And in our mind her photograph lives on.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in The West Australian
26 August 1989
FROG FROM
Not.
Gone.
Join the dots up.
Turn the fan on.
Whirr you here
I wish
Jogged once
Drought just broken
Got croaked at
Soggy grassclumps
Jump, hey, where you
Frog from?
I squat
Crossleg yogaman
Bake my mind
Dry as a creek bed
Less hot before breakfast
Stand on my head
Thoughtless
Then you hop
Sun spotted emerald
Down on my lilypad
Membrane brain
Startling choruses
Chortling remember
Pondsplash
I pour grog
Get a frog
In my throat sometimes
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February 1990
YOU LIKE A GOOD MURDER
I like a good murder
Splashed red in the newspaper
Some knotted family cut with a kitchen knife
Bits and pieces by Agatha Christie
Ask yourself why
Outrage, mind-fire
A type of desire
I, you, mathematically
Cubed and rooted in rooms
Social decimals
Behind bars like equal-signs
And the night thrills between.
Your honour, look at you
Drool at the details
You are my client
Some of this blood
Too, is yours.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February 1990
NO SMELL MUSEUM
Before embalming
Pharaoh’s brains were hooked on wire
Unbundled through the nose:
Choice thoughts twitch in the Egyptian section.
You turn and pull a face that’s
Held in glass cases;
In stale, tomby conditioning of air
One stone scarab bends so smoothly
Rubbable.
Outside, red double-decker hubbub dubbed
On tapes that play, replay
For me the sounds and sights of us
Collected with a single mind and
Catalogued.
From the hotdog stand
You come at me with verbs and vowels
As shooed pigeons
Frittering
Against grey buildings
Peel stalely away;
You say exhaling, “ “,
Onion paragraph dabbed with
Cologne
Alone and dozing different senses
Can be trundled through the head
And logged : not smell.
Their flat-stacked histories
Fill museums; but scent ungathered
Never might have been
Like mumbled words, quick kisses, idle thoughts,
Instead this is the here and now, the being
Hooked.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Southerly September
1990
ATHENS HOSPITAL
DIAGNOSIS AND THERAPY
I decypher broken-boned sigmas
Split spheres and known symbols
So walk by
Gastro, physio, ophthalmo something
All Greek to me
In the waiting room
Small traumas and dramas
Wheeled athletes, stoic mothers
Old men, hyped children
Through open windows eye-sized
Swabs of cotton wool
Buoyed in the oxygen
What is this?
The doctor shrugs
Spring
Nothing to worry about
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Southerly September
1990
WALKOUT
A few friends telephoned today
Guessed me keening round the house
Yes, ironies of permanence are everywhere
Mementoes of Till Death Us Do
Arts that mimic fucking life
Obscenely, like the photographs
Snap-freezing grins assumed just then
Or acts illogical when framed
In dismal interruptuses
Just just outdated, slipped in time
Irony and vanity, slip me biblical
Beneath a temple toppled
Blindly by my strongman
But he walked out free
The children stand there stupidly
Columns that forgot to fall
But I am more or less in bits
These phonecalls advocate and indicate
We’re modular today, can put ourselves
Together differently, Hang in!
I hang in different ways, hang up.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly Spring
1994
CONTACT LENSES
These two just-got fingertips
Of plastic have doubled
The optical miracle
So from here I see nimbuses
Omo-laundered merinos in
Millions cavorting below me
Jumbo droning half dreaming
Not one week since I saw you
There’s a fuzz to your silhouette
Mother then father now fading
Not affection nor incidents
But the retina’s photographs
I’m brought a gin cocktail
Which fights the myopia
Of gently lost contact
From Obverse and Parallel
Lines
First published in Quadrant
July-August 1994
GIBRALTAR GLORY
From his rock, his Jebel, Tariq smote
The king’s army, helped by local treachery
Or incompetence, and contemplated Spain’s
Jagged sierras blocking off the north.
His raiding party down to nine or ten
Thousand men and his Arab master
Musa surely fretting back in Africa;
But glory powered Berber swords
And Allah’s storm proved irresistible –
Wind behind him, zeal in the ranks,
Tariq headlong into territory unknown
Took Toledo, and all Andalusia.
Next year Musa came and had his servant
Flogged for such egregious cheek
But granted him to keep command
And push the Arab empire on to France.
Gratitude is fickler than the wind:
Damascus summoned both its champions home
To pay for savouring their lavish victory,
Tariq reassigned to household servitude,
Musa to exile, poverty. With an afterthought,
A delivered gift from the Khalif,
The head of the son left in charge in Toledo.
From Academy of the
Superfluous
First published in Hobo September
1998
THE LAST
The last great Western martyrdom
was probably in Otranto
which the Ottomans besieged
and gave the 800 holders-out
the choice to change belief.
No deal: they stepped forward
to be decapitated one by one
on an August afternoon.
Showcased cluttering behind glass
in the duomo’s farthest reach
are all the massed skulls,
plus some ornamental bones.
I reflect, while mirrored eyes
waver in the sockets:
yes, zeal perhaps at first,
but for the queuing last
wouldn’t futility, pragmatism,
God’s presumed mercy
justify declining?
Modern heads nod:
too odd for words anybody
would opt for the axe.
Afterwards the executioner,
by such witnessed faith converted,
was also put to death.
From Academy of
the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February 2000
flying.monk@copertino
Joe - this is a dead dull town down at the heel
of Italy, just a hop and a skip from Brindisi.
Streetsigns for your natal saint are pure cartoon - a smiling haloed catapulted apteryx in robes -
thither the stable where he was born, impeccable credentials. Seems St Joseph was a real dunce at school. Flukily, the exam for the seminary
set the only text he’d ever memorised.
But could he fly! He’d shoot up in ecstasy
(no innuendoes) to ceilings, to treetop height,
took friends along; all this is
documented.
He flew at court, over crowds, sensationally.
Pope Urban the Eighth witnessed it, furious.
So what is weirder: that Joe defied every known law, or instead that we shrug the achievement off?
Ask your students: he’s their patron saint, after all.
From Academy of
the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April 2000
UMBRIAN MUSEUM HORROR
It’s like old socks and sneakers peeking out to spoil
the fancy gown: those ads and petrol stations coil
along the plain, while grey-green olives gently curve
up to the gemmed and clustered turret-towns observing
safer from malaria and wars the undulating soil
whose crop transfuses under granite wheels to golden oil.
Convert a church - a museum that will take its place
unearths a chute of corpses tossed from grace
and sudden nineteenth century plague all preserved
miraculously with clothes, teeth, skin and hair,
a booted fusilier, a friar’s leathered face,
two little girls whose wrists are sheathed with lace.
If their eyes were now to flick awake they’d be appalled
to see steel beams, double glaze, the razor-cornered wall;
if they levered up on elbow, might meet some tourist’s stare;
and if they tottered to the door and gazed below despairing,
would shriek at factories, cement, the autostrada’s scrawl,
at Umbria sprayed, painted, pyloned, the ghastly sprawl.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Meanjin 2001 No. 1
BEYOND THE GOODRADIGBEE
Those were desperate pioneer days
in off-axis mule-arsed hills,
rank ti-trees gouged our faces,
logs and hollows toppled us backwards -
like fool pilgrims hour after hour
on our knees tracing the gold race
from the dead mine to the briared river.
We were human water-haulers then,
hewers of iron-hard rimy wood
as the sun rose, and when its heat burst
we faced flies big as boils.
But with defeat finally admitted
and nothing whatsoever accomplished
we abandoned Smith’s cottage
forded the bouldered shallows
breasted the evening ranges
whereupon we got out our mobile
phone to the unbelievers
for the only time that weekend.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Meanjin 2001 No. 1
DEVELOPING ZOO SOLUTIONS
Trapezoidal roof and verandahs silhouetted
Against the sky suggest the head of a giraffe.
Instead it’s an elegant wood queenslander gazetted
To go - out of its place, the shapes here all
Rightangled perpendiculars, blocks of flats looming
On a knoll above Brisbane, ideas mushrooming,
Turning to concrete and glass developers’ tall
Stories, their pride in prices bound never to fall.
You can sense the machine of mad safari guns booming,
The knell of earthmovers in nestling gums dooming
Numberless old architectural creatures great and small.
Zoo-like compromises however might make you laugh:
This beauty can be moved somewhere nice, unregretted,
Unendangered, easy - it just gets first sawn in half.
From Academy of
the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February 2002