Change and Change and Change

Selected Poems by Mark Allinson

Here


Here where summer lingers,
Here where pelicans soar
Aloft on feathery fingers
Of the sea-breeze ruffling on shore,
I watch the river turning
Till the twilight sets it burning
And all my restless yearning
To be moving stirs no more.

I was tired by a world of hustle,
And worn from a life in want,
But now I am rich in the rustle
Of the she-oaks’ breathing haunt,
And walk the dawn flushed beaches
As one among the creatures
The living moment teaches
Fear of being can’t daunt.

Here will I lay down worry,
Here where the autumn rains
Flush runnels to a slurry,
Swelling streams like veins.
Here where the owl in springtime
With a falling note will sing time
Till its final call will bring time
Down to what remains.

Salinity


The old path to the sea is strewn with clumps
Of salty-dusted dew-tipped marram grass;
And on the dunes the charcoal-hearted stumps
Of bush-fired tea-tree curl like melted glass.

And there where the sea hums in the smoky plume
Of spray as it drifts a mist to wet my face,
The waves curl then slap as they consume
The sand, to be swilled and dumped in another place.

In the patches of wrack that fleck and pock the beach,
Glistened bladders shine and blink like lights,
Lifted blind by current-hands that reach
To pluck from the ocean floor in the darkest nights.

All we can see of the sea is only a part
Of its width, its draw, its depth, and its awful rise;
And the salt aswirl in the pulse of its mighty heart
Is the same salt in our blood and the tears in our eyes.

What I Heard


I sat upon the sifted sand
Fringing the restless sea,
Attending to every sound and
Here’s what came to me:

The rumbling breakers led the way
Booming boiling sand,
And then a hiss along the bay:
A tympani-cymbal band.

The wind which wrinkled tidal pools
Hurled grains of powdered rock
Against my jeans heaped micro jewels
Sizzled like oil in a wok.

I heard my thoughts that chattered on
Until I stared them down,
Then like dropped shells they shattered on
The jagged rocks to drown.

I heard sounds shallow, some profound
Like the sea-eagle’s call,
But deeper still than any sound
The silence under all.

The Bottom Line


Last night the sea erupted, breaking hard
Thunder blows of waves on my piece of shore;
The look-out cliff-face crumbled, chipped and scarred
As wind-forced spray cut ruts down to the roar.
At dawn I walked the strip bespread with ore
Of shrapnell-rock the blast blew from the wall
And strewn where breakers fell to scrub and score
The sand from off the beach in a foaming maul.
Dark wreathes of bladder-wrack had laid a pall
Along the length of once high golden dunes,
Draped on tussocks and pasted in a scrawl
Across the rocky wall in weedy runes.
I pondered long on what these sea-words meant,
But change and change and change was their intent.

Elemental


The sea in the night calls my bones and tells
Of the debt they owe to its elements:
Of calcium soaked from its crush of shells;
Of sodium distilled in filaments
Of swaying kelp, churning nutrients
From oxygen, hydrogen and carbon
Atoms that bond and crack in the solvents
Of time and life; recycling silicon
In shifts of sand, and the nitrogen
Falling with the sulphur of tropic skies;
It tells of the blood-debt owed to iron
And of phosphorus sparked in fish-cold eyes.
Your bones are mine, calls the sea in the black
Depths of the night, and I will have them back.

Opal Days


Summer days when the north wind ruffles the river like seal-fur, 
Whitening banksias against the blue where wisps of cirrus 
Gather to merge in a smooth and opalescent sheen:
These are the precious colour days on the Sapphire Coast.

Afternoons I sit and shelter beneath the she-oaks
High on the lookout at Melville Point, watching the ocean 
Greening out the blue beneath a solar rain 
That first warms, tingles, then scalds the naked skin like acid. 

Splashing over the sea the corrosive light exposes 
Colours trapped in the bluestone ore of water, burnishing 
Sapphire and aquamarine jewels from tidal pools, 
Fusing the golden bands of sand to molten platinum. 

Then to walk by the river, watching the dunes firing 
Grains of sand to hiss across the wind-crazed skin 
Of water, and where the grains strike the wavelets flare
Prism lights, like the rainbows alive within a diamond. 

Few leave the house on days when the sun and wind’s power 
Keep even pelicans huddled together among the mangroves. 
But what a loss, to miss a chance to see the world 
Turning to opal – fire-blazed, turquoise, fragile opal.

Old Man Banksia

At Burrewarra Point above the waves
On crumbling cliffs an Old Man Banksia stands,
Grinding his groping roots down to the caves
Echoing surf below on hollowed sands – 
The powdered remnants of the ancient land’s
Antarctic rock, ground from the mother lode.
Listen and you may hear his prising hands
With lumpy knuckled grip make stone implode,
Tightened by the hydraulic sappy goad.
His gnarl-flecked corky bark is split and scarred,
Spotty badged with a mossy lichen load,
And sticky weeping wounds all black and tarred.
In sunlight, moonlight, calm and stormy days,
Steady in frost, reborn when bush-fires blaze.

Losing It.


All are clear and I alone am clouded –
Lately I’ve been feeling like Lao-tzu:
While others dress for power I am shrouded
In doubts and often haven’t got a clue.
Expressionless I stare into the blue
Of sky and empty ocean like a child
Or like a fool who simply can’t construe
The meaning and is easily beguiled.

And yet some days bring moments when I smile
To feel the world as if myself, yet be
Alone to walk the sands along the wild
Dunes attuned to the constant pulsing sea.
Home in the dark each thunder-hush of wave
Empties the room as surf flushes a cave.

Spring Storm



Crumpled feathers tumbled on the waves,
Part-interred in low-tide sandy graves.
High-tides flush and dig them up again;
King-tides dump them where they will remain.

Tangled bodies salted from the surf,
Shearwaters drowned and turning into earth.
Sun and rain will soon make hollow bones
Little whistles when the west wind moans. 

Survivor


A Cootamundra wattle found itself
Stranded alone, high on a coastal dune,
Where storms from lows off the continental shelf
Regularly gave the sapling a cruel prune.
Decembers had been kind, but every June
Had thrashed and beaten back each branch that tried
Reaching to south or upward until soon
The tree could only grow to the leeward side.
Like a blown plume of smoke or like the tide
Dragging the river weeds in the same way,
The tree lay prone to northward since denied
All other ways by wind and salty spray.
But sheltered by itself since beaten down,
Each spring it wears the dunes’ sole golden crown.

Beached

Surf sizzle, cicada hiss, sultry breeze
Gusts rustle the tough Banksia leaves.
Horizon-breaking combers buzz my bones.
Sand is silent, but sharp fragments of shell
Tinkle with mother of pearl sparks.
The sun strums the bright strings of its spectrum.
In a single white chord of summer hum.
A flotsam log oozes and drips black drops
The thunder water packed into its lumber.
All such sounds my inner ear conducts
To the hollow bell of my bliss filled brain.
Then, on a lucky day, frequencies rise
To a sweet crescendo and I am gone
As surf-sizzle and cirrus become one.

Odysseus on Ogygia


There sits Odysseus, weeping, disconsolate, watching the ocean,
Waiting for rescue he knows may not happen; is sure will not happen.
Why is he watching, and why is he waiting, for something impossible?
He watches because he knows she is watching the very same water.

Water before him and the water she watches are flowing together
Blended forever; dividing the lovers, but never divorcing.
Thus the man sits by the ocean all day, to be near by the symbol
Linking with Ithaca all of his longing for all that he loves.

Evening is calling his name and is drawing him back to the friendship
Owed to Calypso, who saved him, her plaything now, almost a bond slave
Obeying her whims and assenting to passions despite his decision,
Sworn every night, and nightly re-sworn, but unsworn by dawn.

Nearing her forested, secretive place, he smells the split cedar
Flaming with sweetwood and wafting like incense all over the island,
Drawing him back to the cave where she sits, plying her shuttle,
Singing and whispering spells that will make him hers until daybreak.

There lies her cave, all veiled by poplars and pungent with cypress
Drawing the birds to a sleep they can’t spurn, helplessly luring,
Darkly consuming their vision of daytime in magical sleep.
He, like a wandering eagle, is drawn to his roost in her forest.

Dark is the mouth of her cave with the clusters of ripening grapes;
Bubbling and sibilant rustle the fountains of sweetly sprung waters;
Meadows are fading to pools of rich shadow, studded with violets.
Even a god, he feels, would be seduced by such powerful beauties.

Waiting to greet him inside lay the goddess, lustrously, languidly
Draped in her gown. Offering him to drink of the nectar
Held in her golden cup, eat of ambrosia, warm by her fire.
Helpless as evening birds, drowning in darkness – soon he was sleeping.

Many the night Calypso has begged him -“Odysseus, please,
Let me make you a god.” Ever the same has come back his answer:
“Gods cannot love. Only we humans, who know we are dying
Ever know Love is the daughter of Death.” Thus spoke Odysseus.

Surf’s Up


A surfer surveying a dead-calm sea,
I wait and watch for poetry.

No will can make a wild wave rise,
Only a wind from unknown skies

Can push flat waters till they wave,
Making me rise at dawn, their slave.

Blue-Glass Cities



A spatter of blue-glass strewn on the beach;
Spark-glitter mounds of vitreous rubble
Of a thousand Venetian vases reach
The length of the sandy bay: the bubble-
Float-sails of the sea-faring cities
Of creatures called Portuguese Man-O-War
Jelly fish. But the wild ocean pities 
Neither blessed nor cursed nor ship nor sailor;
And now these cities are grounded in doom,
Blown by depressions and seasonal tides
To be hurled and shattered on the breakers’ boom
And waste into sand while the sea derides.
In my own blue glass city I sometimes hear
A sound like the pulse of a surf quite near.

Clarified


Frosted webs tangle
Silver chains in tall grass;
Wafted, they spangle
As the dog-walkers pass.

Crystal-dew beads
Strung in long looping threads
Link jewel bestrewn weeds
Wherever one treads.

Sunshine and a breeze
Will secrete them away,
Hidden by degrees
In the warm spring day.

The Body is the Visible Part of the Soul

(says William Blake)

My soul is the mycelium that lives
beneath the ground

My body is a fungi that erupts
and looks around

A tall upstanding toadstool, white fleshed
with ribs beneath

I was pushed into this world of light
to gnash my fungoid teeth.

An expression of the underworld,
its dark’s my true abode,

let all the mushies long for heaven, but down
leads every road.

And when my looking’s over and it’s time
to gather home

my soul down-folds its periscope to stay
warm in its loam.

And since the soul’s mycelium forever
there remains

who knows, the day may come when I
will sprout some other brains.

Two Trees


Two beauteous trees this forest bred:
One is dying, the other dead.
The dying tree’s all leaved in gold
And takes your breath as you behold
A Grecian goldsmith’s hammered art
Of finished work to make you start.

The dead tree’s white and smooth as bone-
China or a stone alone
Sculptured to limbs by a desert wind,
Pure as holy and marble-skinned.
Its leaves are gone, it needs no breath
To speak its silver praise of death.

Uprisings


Woven within the under-seethe of loam,
Among the tangle of root, rock and humus,
Insinuating fibers swell to bud.

As hair-line creases crack then split to fissures,
The earth stirs, lifts, is pushed aside
And a bald head breaches its sweaty dome.

Now, where bare ground has opened, a mushroom
Or toadstool bulks-up a spongy body,
Or a stinkhorn erects to propagate its must.

Forest-floors quake as the white-gilled giants
Shoulder aside twigs and leaves in their strain
To burst-up from the feculent mat of litter.

Leathery puffballs disgorge from earth to swell
With spores that smoke at the flick of raindrops
While slick jellies ooze and quiver from the bark

Of rotting logs where they cling, glistening beneath
The watery light of a cool, autumn dawn.
Dreams arise at night from similar threads

Of memory, whose intersecting fibres
Weave in the dark loam of the brain, pushing up
Strange underworld fruit to the morning light.

Depression


Yes, I know, you were harmlessly gathering
the gorgeous wild flowers in the meadow

innocent and maidenly pure pastime
on a day of late and sultry summer

when the earth yawned a sudden cave
of black fear and down you went.

How hateful is this pall of filthy mist
when you remember the day you left.

And most of your agony now is stretching
on tip toes trying to retouch the light.

Forget it. You are here for the duration.
Turn and embrace your new husband

The King of Death. In the crush of his love
your coal black being will form a diamond.

Strangeness and Charm


Consider the human body 
from the level of the atom.

The atom itself is mostly a cathedral
dome of empty space – a tiny pea of energy 
in a whispering gallery of void.

Then each of these domes of mostly nothing
are in motion around each other – rippling
chain-mail of eternal night rustling.

Billions on billions of links building
swords, nails, rocks, houses, cars, trees,
mountains and the seven swirling salty seas.

And when a trillion galaxies of these domes
link and spin in certain uncertain patterns
a voice from this loose assemblage will say “I”

when in fact there is really no one
there. It is not always charming,
but it is certainly very strange.

Gone Fishing with Grandpa


The floor of the boat is the inverted
roof of a wooden hut, where you look down
on purple clots, fins and rust baited hooks.

We sit inches above the keel sloshing
stale weedy bilge slop, firing where it wets
the flat glaucous sheen of mucus-glued scales.

My grandfather’s shoulders gleam as he rows
the swell like a film-starred bronco buster, 
oars squeaking in rowlocks like saddle leather.

And then we are so far out that we stop.
And all you can hear is the lap, lap, slap
of blue and unthinkable deeps of sea.

Now it was time to trick fish into dying.
So we slice up the flesh of poorer fish
to tempt richer ones to bite on our steel.

And the swell lifts us up, and let us down,
and lifts us higher, and let us down worse.
And for hours and hours and hours and then,

swelling depth of blue above, blue below,
cramp you between two hard eternities
until you pale and vomit up your fear.

The Dead Tree Lesson



Last night, walking in the garden
meditating on the changes,

I looked up and noticed the old dead tree,
the knobble bones of its long fingers

pain-curled in an evening prayer. And no other tree
in the garden had such power.

The pear tree dripped a few sappy green
globules. The crab-apple in a crimson pool

of its own fruit. And the oak glistened
in the shimmering green pride of its life.

But in the gesture of its supplication
to the evening sky

the dead tree was revealing the ways
the wind had twisted its desires.

The Dark Ray


In the heat of sparkling days we loved to burst
The blown up paper-bags of clouds afloat,
And shred them in the ribboned pools of light:
Among the rocks we did our very worst.

All summer long we wallowed in our sport,
Exploding mirrored clouds with body-bombs;
Well buoyed upon the ample seas of time,
We never thought we ever could be caught;

Until I glimpsed below that shocking ray,
A massive arrow head of poison black
Slid fast below our treading, tensing soles;
I still recoil to think of it today.

And every day I see it sliding fast,
In gulfs of dreams that make me swim awake,
And in the mirrored pools of tv screens,
The ray has come to stay—will not swim past.

Alone



What I like most about being alone
is the green translucence of the fig leaves

which conversation, no matter how witty
and diverting, seals off from perception.

The blue sky too may be fogged by the breath
of someone exhausting their opinions.

It is amazing to find the world’s colour
return to its face as the last guest leaves.

Being alone allows me to descend
to where all colour is born in the dark.

Down where the bass drone of the primal ache
creates a velvet pad for diamond bird calls.

Up there on the surface the piranhas
of talk nibble me down to my wish bone

and leave the world washed of all its brilliance:
grey flat world of nattering chatterers.

A Paper Weight


I have a dog’s brain-
sized coral-crusted 
shell in my hand:
a gob of foamy 
spittle spat 
from the throat of Poseidon. 

Chalky phlegm-clot 
with a worm-twist
of burst tubercle
coating a hollow.

You might call it ugly
as rotten luck, 
but I place it
in the altared space
on the shelf with the best
of W.B. Yeats.

If I can grow 
as gnarled and tangled a coat 
on my void as this holey 
brute, I will be such 
a rich, foul rag of bone.

Travelling


Sorry, my friend, that I have not written
Sooner, but I have been travelling, far,
Over scored glacial plains where the bitten
Thornwood crouches beneath the north star;
Then farther, to where the seas roll like cold tar.
I sailed that congealing, snow-crusted sea
Till it set hard and ice snapped my boat’s spar.
So cold it was, not a tear could flow free,
And none trudged that frozen desert but me.
When night condensed from the twilight gloom
I stumbled, numbly, unable to see,
My ice-thistled coat as hard as a tomb.
But morning has brought a fall of rain
Thawing my hands, so I write again.

Congo Creek

The creek at Congo Camping Ground runs red,
As red as blood or wine to a rusted sea, 
When seasonal rains flush tannins to its bed 
And set a gorgeous flood of colours free. 
From the sap of gums and decaying blooms of flame tree,
To the slurry of mud from melting termite mounds, 
Colours gather from the swamps to the south of Broulee
And flow in streams and rills like coffee grounds, 
Where they stew till rains and tides do their rounds. 
Add to these the raw flesh inner bark 
The rain-stripped limbs of spotted gum compounds 
Dissolve to imbue their indelible crimson mark.
From time to time the bush must burn or bleed,
And green turn red is its eternal need.

Thought

I once thought I was thought.
Every thought came with my name.
Clearly embossed upon its silver side.

No thought came which wasn’t mine.
I was thought and this is what I thought.
Till one day no thought came.

My mind was nothing
Without a thought to call my own.
A mind in search of an anchor thought

With no thought chain or rope to haul it
Up to the light of consciousness 
Is a mind of panic.

Like when my Blue Heeler entered
The sea for the first time
And lost all secure footing

Then thrashed the water white with all
Four legs churning in terror at the void
All around him, pulling him under.

Then he realised, I saw in his eyes,
That the nothing of water was supporting 
Him, perfectly, and he could swim.

So too I found the thoughtless mind
Is a supporting void, like the sea,
And in joyous silence I may swim.

The Silence I Send


I hope you are enjoying the silence I send
Regularly now, everyday, for these last months.

I know you know I send no silence of enmity;
I send you no silence of contempt or disregard.

I send you the silence of deep mountain passes,
Where thought is stilled and the upland grasses

Wave with a meaning beyond all human grasp,
Yet the message caresses the heart to unclasp.

I send you the silence of moon-silvered seas,
Where thought dissolves and the soul finds its ease.

I send you the silence of a field of graves,
Where that silence brings the silence that saves.

The Big Dry


Worse than sudden flood or fire:
The wait for the rains to fall,
When a pallid crust of pungent dust
Spreads a ghastly pall.

And colour fades to shades of grey
As fields whiten and die,
Where wheat and grass with stalks of glass
Brittle beneath the sky.

When shattering light entrenches night
And thunders rattle hard
You hear no rain and when you wake
The world looks baked and charred.

You search for signs of frontal lines
In skies but clouds are rare,
And should one form you pray a storm
Might break this shell of air.

Harder to bear than fire or flood
The hardest weight of all
Is not to care as you sit and stare
And wait for the rains to fall.

When the Wind

When the wind moves on the waters
Little ripple-beings are born
And they move as if they have a life alone.

We are separate individuals
Distinct and self-defined
And we rise above the waters on our own.

Soon the ripples grow to wavelets
And the wavelets rise to swells
And the swells roll taller, faster every day.

We’re above the level waters
Powered by ourselves alone
And we’re growing taller, stronger every day

But as the distant shores grow surer
And the surf is heard,
They start to stoop and lowered heads turn grey.

Then all begin to stumble 
And then finally each falls
In the hiss and rush and rumble of the bay.

At last they crash upon the sands
And with a final sigh
Return the breath that set them on their way.

The Way 


Steel blades on slick black ice,
and the frozen ledge descending 
narrows into the dark.

Off the ledge is certainly the quickest way 
down; a few take it; Others undecided end up 
skidding, slipping and screaming down backwards.

Most of us attempt balance, and speak
crushing mundanities about the weather, 
since we believe the whispers of the wind to be worse.

Some collect postage stamps, wives, 
or dollars as time slips them down the way, 
to distract them from the gravity of the situation.

Most amusing is the way the proud go on and on 
about control, as if the tangled twists 
of their tumbling slips were achieved virtues.

Best way to go is straight ahead, head held high,
hands on hips, staring down the tube
till the speed of descent equals your song.

The Meeting


Freud, in a railway carriage, saw the face
Of an old man behind the last glass door:
An ancient bare-skulled chap, headed his way;
And since the elderly deserve some grace,
He bowed and stepped aside. But then he swore:
“Mein Gott!” That face he knew, so livid grey!
Oh Thanatos! His own approaching face!
Unknowing, hollow-eyed, he’d bowed before
His image, and beyond it, empty space.

Memo to the Puritans


Remember, every rising thought,
No matter how pure to you,
No matter how high or holy its bent,
From matter that thought-seed grew:

Like a pearl secreted from mollusc-oozy-
Plasm in a bony shell,
Lapped by the ancient salty flood
Of fish-blood flushing each cell

Of a brain that recapitulates
All evolutionary moves,
From snaky-brain amygdala
To the ape-brain folds and grooves.

Desires of every earthly beast,
Bacterium to bear,
Lie within your pulsing skull
And flavour thought and prayer.

Initiation


Who says the myths are only myths? No more
Will I blaspheme the Gods as others do,
Who laugh because they have not felt the awe
And shock of being dragged into the blue.

Persephone, I was a type of her,
So innocently gathering the flowers,
Enjoying all the easy joys that were
As if forever in my fields and bowers.

I gathered up the violets of love,
Weaving them with lilies of romance,
And there was not a hint of cloud above
To mar the idyll of my languid dance.

But then one afternoon the cool wind fell,
Bringing down the silence on the trees,
And from the earth there rose a certain smell
Of sulphur that evoked a strange dis-ease

Which turned into a rising rumbled sound,
And then I felt the earth begin to beat
Breaking up beneath me as the ground
Revealed the empty space of my defeat.

And so I came to know the realm of death
Where every thing and person was a shade
While still my heart was beating and my breath
Affirmed that I was living, and afraid.

Now I must describe my greatest shame,
To tell how I was held against my will
And I was forced and broken, stripped and shorn
And ravished on the filthy floor of hell.

But let me say that here I learned to love,
Because I saw the truth that he loved me.
And with this love I let the world above
Go on without me, and this set me free.

Returning to the motherland I knew,
Of flowers and light, it is a different place;
A gem set in the velvet blackish blue
I carry in my eyes with Hades’ grace.

Meditation on a Wattle Tree at Dawn



This tree, its power drawn from loam,
Lifts into light, where, each alone,
Reflecting globes of dew are born
Upon the wattle blooms, this dawn.

And we, as they, are drops of night,
Born to riddle the morning light;
Little mirrored spheres of knowing,
Worlds within each other growing

A rising sun in every one
And every one a rising sun.
But each one shines a different way
Depending how the light beams play:

While some reflect, some are closed
And cast in shadows, some exposed
To beat a fiery pulse of red,
Some green – some get the blues instead.

And some hide under shades of frond
In tear-like longing for the pond.
Still others tremble on the breeze
They fear may end their brief dis-ease. 

But mounted high, in middle or low,
On bloomless twig or blossom’s glow,
We each form in such careless care
On vacant presences of air,

Whose down-felt pressure forms and moulds
To shape the soul-drop as it holds
Each in its place of risk or bower,
Waiting on a higher power:

The sun, whose rising brightness grows,
Lifts us to where no body knows
The bark’s harshness, nor the sweet
Breath of nectar, sublimed in heat. 

Forever giving well of night,
Silent echo of delight,
Sparkle, as the sun sets free,
We jewels upon your wattle tree.

Squid Pro Quo

How lucky the abyssal squid
Jet-propelled and off the grid
Barrelling through eternal night
To grope for fishy flesh to bite
And every beak-torn gob goes down
The donut hole his brain’s around
A brain as big as fifty cents
But big enough to get him hence
And hither to wreathe his arms until
He cuddles tight his latest kill
To feed the three quick hungry hearts
That surge blue blood to all his parts
Down where sunlight reaches not
In living darkness he will squat
To squirt some bio-luminescent
Bait his quarry at first finds pleasant
No laws nor regulations bind
His freedom unlike humankind
Where words are used to crush the soul
His life alone does him control
And all his life he lives to fish
He has no plans no wife no wish
He knows no day so knows no night
Abyssal squid have got it right.

Flame Flowers


Within the window’s green and blue
The flame-tree’s scarlet flares like hate.
Its seed-embedded fruit pods grew
Black bats that were the summer’s bait.

Such neon-spiked display implies
Volcanic urge of savage lies
Just below the safe serene
Of seeming tranquil blue and green.

Upon the sign-post squints a crow
At every lurching butterfly,
His black eye shouts a mortal “no”
And never blinks or winks a why.

Search and seek to find this why
But never will you satisfy
The cat down-hunkered in the grass
For gentle blue birds, should they pass.

Sutra of the Irish Buddha

i

The term “human being” is wrong,
We cannot bear Being for long;
Instead of awareness
We’d rather stay careless
And drift comatose with the throng.

ii

In preference to Being we dream
And work on the image we seem;
And the image we seem is
The ego whose dream is
To flatter its proud self-esteem.

iii

So drifting in dream is our lot,
Where we plot about what can be got;
And acquiring possession
Becomes our obsession
Till Being is that which is not.

iv

But that which is not makes us fear
Its void we sense threateningly near;
Since we cannot profess it
We strive to repress it
And cover the gap with more gear.

v

And possession depends upon time,
Since time is the essence of “mine”;
So when time fills our brains
Little Being remains
To live in the now – life’s sublime.

vi

In order that goals may be gained,
The ego must not be restrained;
If it ceased its becoming,
Acquiring and summing,
You’d find little ego remained.

vii

To empty oneself is a death
Which the ego treats as if Death;
It refuses to know
That beneath it, below,
Is the place where our being is breath.

viii

And breath comes and goes as it will,
Emptying so it can fill;
To hold it means losing
The flow and abusing
Life’s natural rhythms until

ix

Our world and our wonder are lost,
With bitterness part of the cost;
We resent feeling sad
And believe it’s too bad
When our aspirations are crossed.

x

So “human becomings” we are,
A term more appropriate, far;
But the pity is seeing
That missing our being
Means we forget that we are.

Scene from a Drought


Crusted in creek-mud, the fur-pocked skull of a ‘roo is grinning
A thirst-yawning rictus, a grim, stark monument of misery
For a rich land deserted, even by the crows for southern road-kill,
Leaving the skies a clean blue slate for the willy-willies.

Towards the gully, the blackened stumps and heat-crazed chimneys
Of the Jackson place remain, a homestead since the 1880s.
Only a year ago the house stood intact, a famous cattle-run;
Home for a man and his wife and their wide-eyed, ten-year-old daughter.

A life-time of drought and her parent’s anguish had stunned the girl’s vision,
Watching the world and the life about her slowly withering.
Tumbling stars of weeds now gather around the chimneys,
Stopped in their wandering search for some solid earth to hold them.

Sometimes at night when the thunder cracks like a hunting rifle,
Threatening sparks to ignite a long-feared conflagration,
Local folk shudder, and feel as if nature itself is echoing
The final breaking rage of men who have just had enough.

Jack


Sunday mornings Jack goes down
The river with his bag,
A long trek from the little town
For feet that scuff and drag.

Old Jack is nearly ninety one,
His face as rough as bark,
His rheumy squint shuts out the sun,
His love lives in the dark.

And round the river’s final bend
Where sweet meets salty wave
He kneels in she-oak bush to tend
A space marked like a grave.

He sits then slowly spreads his flowers
Before a driftwood cross
And settles by his love for hours,
Rich in what some call loss.

Down


Seek the joy in desolation,
Plumb the deepest ache;
Beneath the snow a red carnation
Longs to come awake.

Never fear the crack of heartbreak,
Follow the fissure’s fold;
Oftentimes only an earthquake
Reveals a vein of gold.

Sound in silence every sorrow,
Plunge beneath those waves;
The jewels that divers find tomorrow
Lay in shipwreck graves.

She-Oaks


Where the Tomaga river bends
Then ends in the roaring sea,
Bearing the mud of hills it blends
With salt and sand beneath the quay,
A stand of she-oaks seems to be
Reflecting on the tidal round.

Bound by webs of root each tree
Supports the rest, secures the ground,
As spindle-leaves weave a gauze of sound.

But now the river wants the soil
They stand upon and all around
Their bared roots warp in the waters’ roil.
And when both wind and tide are high,
The she-oaks touch, and sigh, and sigh.

White Feathers



Sneeze or laugh, and the pure white chook would fly
And flutter to her hide all fluffed with blame.
Oh, I was out to get her. She’d deny
My proffered hand of grain, and when I came
To lock the roost, she struggled with the shame
Of a creature forced, finally, to admit
She had no other choice but being game
To shuffle in with others and submit.
I never saw her wander, never sit
In dirt-baths in the warm hen-loving sun;
She stayed clean in her shed, preferring it
To the shocking world that made her flap and run.
The safe wall of her shelter hid the brown
Fox who jumped her perch and ripped her down.

Aeolian House


Tin roof, low trees, guy-wired antenna,
And a house seasoned as a violin,
Will whirl your mind to Rome, Vienna,
To the opera, when the winds begin.
Strummings of harps usher easterlies in.
Northerlies swing crabapple boughs to drum
And rattle snares on the cold taut tin.
Westerlies drone an overture hum
Bowing guy-wires with the cherry plum
And playing Haydn till the rains come;
Then some Verdi sighs and Bellini trills
As the gutters gush and the tank fills.
But when the southerly buster breaks
Led Zeppelins crash and the whole house shakes.

The Cure

Anxiety is ego-solvent,
Let it take its course.
Beneath the turbulence of thought
There lies the silent source.

Watch the fizz and let it bubble,
Boiling you alive;
When you’re dissolved and gone for good
In silent depths you’ll thrive.

Tempus Fugit


The Cossack waves came pounding in,
Turquoise horses with silver manes;
Each one charged in their line to win,
The sand interred their cold remains;

The subtle evening stole away
The late possessions of the sun
Until the jasmine’s lush bouquet
Snuffed his light and left him none;

The summer seemed so sure, so strong,
Foundations poured with molten steel
That set the blue so high so long
We felt secure in our Bastille.

Each wave, each day, each season comes,
And each of them seem strong, alone,
But every single one succumbs;
Beneath each lovely face, the bone.

Every day, each moment, brings
The changes we might curse or bless,
But as they pass the heart-beat sings:
“One less, one less, one less, one less.”

The Darkling Kookaburra


Daylight saving had begun
To blaze the sky past eight,
In longer light the busy sun
Insisted, bed must wait.

High in the west the contrails spanned
Like molten crimson bars
Setting steel above the land,
Imprisoning the stars.

One by one within the gloom
Of evening, lights came on
In kitchen and in living-room,
Then curtained, almost gone.

Home together and each alone
With telly or internet,
Or talking on the telephone
To get, or to forget. 

Soon the whole world seemed to be
Shut up and sealed inside,
Distracted by the gadgetry
We often use to hide

Our loneliness and emptiness
And sullen lurking fears
Benumbed in our bemused excess,
Swallowing our tears.

But as I pondered on our fate
A near-by laughing voice
Chuckled at a rapid rate
In a tone that said “rejoice.”

He laughed, and yet he was alone, 
He laughed like one who knew 
How to live in joy at home 
Beneath the deepening blue. 

Our Kindly Mother

“Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her …”

– Wordsworth


So they say:

Who never felt foundations shake
In a nine point Richter quake.

Who never heard the hollow roar
Of tsunamis swallowing their shore.

Who never gagged as Eucalypt
Incensed their tears as wild-fire ripped

Across the sky to eat a town
Then spew it back all black and brown.

Who never heard a cyclone whine
And soak a city’s heart in brine.

Who never saw the sky aglow
As lava’s pyroclastic flow

Engulfed a mountain-side to scorch
Flesh like an acetylene torch.

Who never watched a river rise
And rise until a village dies.

Who never after quake or flood
Watched cruel diseases rot the blood.

To me such stunts are actions which
Suggest this Mother’s quite a bitch.

A Oz Thunder Storm



On the early morning breezes of a sultry summer’s day 
Came the warble of a magpie as galahs began to say
What the currawongs were chortling and the crested cockatoos
Were screeching out to everyone – the latest weather news
That a thunder-storm was brewing like a billy-boil of tea
Abubbling on the range above the hills past Bungaree.

By noon the air was sparking like a crumpled rayon shirt
(Or like those office carpets that can make your fingers hurt
When you touch the bloody door-knob as the boss yells out “come in”
And he hears you shout out “shit!” before he hears you say “hi Jim”). 
The atmosphere was charging up and tension in the air
Was enough to send some women to the hell of frizzy hair.

On the path outside the lib’ry where old ladies come to look
For a murder mystery or perhaps a racy big-print book,
The ants were going mental, scrabbling over ochre stones
As they butchered up the remnant of a possum, save the bones,
Before the building rain-storm came to wash the corpse away,
Flushing all their tucker down the drain into the bay.

In the west the clouds were cauliflowering white upon the blue
Where they boiled like a stratospheric mono-veggie stew.
And as the creamy under-side grew darker by the minute
With pendulous mammatus dangling down you saw within it
How the little winking lightning flashes synchronized below
With static in the cricket on the AM radio.

As the town-hall clock struck three PM (which everybody knew
Was really four by summer time – next month it would be true)
The growing-louder rumbles like the furniture of hell
Being rearranged by demons shook the air in the hotel,
And jarred the glasses in the racks to rattle touch and tink
And made old Johnny Watson pause and look up from his drink:

“Shit” he said “it’s gunna piss down any moment now
I betta swill this schooner quick and go and check me cow
That calved last night is high and dry, and nowhere near the creek
Which in a flash-flood flows as fast as auctioneers can speak.”
So Johnny wheelied west a worried man for he was sure
This storm would be a ripper – “shit, it’s gunnafukin’ pour.”

And then the heavens opened as they did in Bible times
And punishment descended as it did for Bible crimes,
Like when Sodom and Gomorrah were expunged from off the plain
There were flashes booms and bangs and bloody seas of muddy rain.
The corrugated water tank behind the general store
Was blown right off it’s wooden frame and spewed up like a bore.

Because it hadn’t rained for seven years or maybe eight
The land around the town was oven-baked and hard as slate
So when the water hit it like a fire-hose on granite
It didn’t penetrate the soil but swiftly over-ran it
And thundering down the valleys now it drove the farmers balmy,
Watching barren hills disgorge a pastoral tsunami.

When the foaming wall of water hit the town of Nottawurrie
It swamped the public dunny in a tidal wave of slurry
As it gurgled down the gutters till they burst and over-flowed
Then it swept some bins and shopping trolleys down to Nobbies Road.
Amazed to see his town dissolve, the Nottawurrie mayor
Recited “holy shit!” – which is a Nottawurrie prayer.

So many years of drought when every cup that you could save
From shower, bath or washing, kept a flower from its grave,
When every drop was precious as a drip of diamond dew
Such cruel superfluity made every bastard spew!
The old Olympic pool which had been empty for a year
Was swamped as if beneath a lake of murky foaming beer.

By the time old Johnny parked the ute and grabbed his drizabone
The rain was pelting like the fallout in a geyser-zone,
And all the granite hills were draped in leaden sheets of rain
The wind was dragging over wheat to strip the heads of grain.
A very pissed and dripping drongo wondering what to do,
Old Johnny thought, “I’ll chuck it in,” but then he heard a moo.

He had a squizz below him, then he looked to left and right,
Then he waited for another moo to get his bearings right.
Then thunderstruck by what he heard he felt a certain dread,
Not because of lightning but the moo above his head!
And looking up the gumtree there was wriggling in the breeze
A gum-leaf studded udder and two pairs of bovine knees.

But soon the grumbling storm was drifting out towards the bay
Where it hailed some holidayers who were camping in its way,
The campers were disgusted, sullen, making no pretence
Of their anger at their dimpled cars, their misery in tents.
And as the storm was fading into evening’s rising dark 
The currawong and magpie flocks were gargling in the park.

Dialogue


Oh let me rise and fly to the ideal
Platonic realm of touchless mental-space
And leave this swamp of flesh which makes me feel
Such ugly muddy moments of disgrace.
How perfect life if science might replace
These organs with a laser drive to run 
In deathless cyber-space without a trace
Of blood-bone murmurs subtle minds should shun.
Hush now, the night-dew falls, thought’s day is done.
My melatonin waves will wash this mind
Back to the marrow where this mind’s undone:
The cyclops-eye saw far, but now is blind.
Hear the surf, breathe darkness, die, be sane,
Knowing thoughts bubble from the blood-swamp brain.

Dialogue II


My being is a light, a wind, a fire,
An eagle with the world within its eye;
A passion, spear-keen, a sharp desire
To fly toward the sun beyond the sky.
I keep my self clear, detached and dry,
And like a demiurge above the flood
I seek forever ever asking why
This world of mine has worms in every bud,
And every hope, and every drop of blood.
And you below, the source of futile pain,
A swamp of filthy waters, flux of mud,
Must I too rot within your dying brain?
Come. Put out your light. Fall into the deep
Night and practice death with a little sleep.

The Natural Born Bastard


“Is there any cause in nature
that make these hard hearts?”
—King Lear


There never was a reason why
The silverfish can never fly;
Though it seems a perfect beetle
Its problem’s not exo-skeletal.

The fault lies in that fiery flash,
This world of which is fading ash,
For when that primal oodad popped
Some plans for wings were simply dropped.

And as the loaded die was cast
The laws for missing wings were passed;
No use your bitter hows and whys,
We cannot all be butterflies.

So never try to glue false wings
On sly destructive creepy things;
Some hole-darn housewives miss their fate
Without a silverfish to hate.

Noctifers

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” 

– C.G. Jung

The liberating angels stand
With faces flushed by light;
A wise, a pure, a righteous band
Who clearly see what’s right.

But as they crowd the cheering fire
To celebrate the glow
Of standing tall and reaching higher,
Their low dark shadows grow.

Uniform Whiskey Bravo 


They plug her in, raise a thumb.
Behind the whishing prop, a hum
Of starter-motor whirring till
Unmuffled stacks cough puffs of flame
With bangs that shake her silver frame.

A roar evoking primal forces
Pounding hooves of a thousand horses
Gravelly rustle of oiling gears
Thunder-crackling clanging bell-sounds
Barking of a dozen hell-hounds.

Now my boyhood Mustang’s muffled,
But still the thrill as her backwash ruffled
And stirred the pines on the boundary fence
Re-starts, and magically I’m there,
Rapt in Merlin-shattered air.

To Psyche 

That scientist who would deny
Berkeley’s esse est percipi
Does not perceive that consciousness
Alone saves all from nothingness.

His mind, obscured behind a face
That looks and thinks of time and space
As there, means he will fail to see
The truth of Mind’s centrality.

And since the soul cannot be seen
Nor scanned within a smart machine,
The soul, says science, is in fact
A biologic artifact:

Electro-chemic, nothing more.
This is a fact, they are quite sure
The mind is merely what they’ve seen:
The twitching of a meat machine.

Objecting, outward looking man,
Learns all about this world he can,
Except the knower of the way
Who brings our being into play.

He thinks – if mind had never been
Evolved in beings in seas unseen –
The world of water, air and land
Would spring and fall and forest stand;

That winter’s gales would still blow cold,
Despite no one there to behold
The lulling calm in twilight truce,
The glitter on the snow-shagged spruce.

He thinks this world would still remain,
Regardless of regarding brain;
That consciousness is not required
To have the sun and planets fired.

Sorry man, who fails to see
An unknown world could never be:
All Being needs to be perceived
Or absent Being be conceived.

The forest tree that falls at night
Might fall unheard and out of sight,
But yet the question of its fall
Must form in minds, or not at all.

Imagining a mindless land
Is scientistic sleight-of-hand;
Imagining no mind to see
Returns the mind by trickery.

No hills, no trees, no rocks, no seas,
No sky, no stars, no cloud-damp breeze,
Could Be without a shaping mind
To colour, structure, shape and bind

The pointless mass of buzzing stuff
The scientist believes enough
To constitute a universe:
A mind-denying dream – perverse!

The magic loom of mindful brain
Weaves empty chaos on its frame,
Blueing the sky and wetting rain
It shuttles dark to light again.

Negate the presence of a mind,
What then divides the pith from rind,
Divines the petals of a flower
Or tells forever from an hour?

Take all mind from time and space
And void alone usurps their place;
No place from which you might retort,
No time to disagree, in short:

A universe bereft of mind
Is less than tasteless, deaf and blind;
Less than unfeeling, less than numb,
The very idea’s completely dumb.

Without a mind there’s no expense
Of spirit, body, any sense;
No sense makes non-sense of the claim
That mind may go and world remain.

Which means the psychic cause must be
The spark igniting energy,
The breath from our original face
Whispering worlds of time and space.

Her name is Psyche, Queen of Night,
The darkness underlying light;
The knowing Being in each “I”,
The seeing which contrived the eye.

Psyche, sound of depth’s sublime,
Close keeper of this dance in time.
The many worlds will pass away
But Psyche, who is Now, will stay.

Sounding below all dream and sleep
Beneath the void where she will keep
The very image which we are
Born again her morning star.

And more of Psyche flows into
The billion-bodied points of view,
Like the living point of you,
The core of beings old and new.

This is Psyche, the soul of night,
Beginning, ending, dark and bright;
Emotion, knowing, all Her care;
Attention to this world, Her prayer.

Noctornus

That night I felt his breath caress my face,
Ruffling my hair and mingling with my own,
I breathed then in the presence of a Lord
And stilled as if being held in an embrace.

In rumbles of the surf I heard his voice
Resounding in the marrow of my bones,
Shaking down all memory, will and thought
Until I was attending without choice.

And choicelessly I felt him sweep away
My lonely sense of self while he remained
Luminous and moving, full of being,
His dark transcending brightness of the day.

Then he revealed a truth surpassing sight:
That light is drawn up from his font of dark;
And strewn like starry diamonds on black felt
Our lives float on the living breath of night.

Paranoia


The impulse is right: look below
the surface for the truth.

But when you stop. Having found
(you believe) the bedrock of hidden fact

you betray the impulse in exchange
for a sense of certainty.

And in this pursued certainty lies
the foundation of your madness.

Admit it: your search for hidden facts
is powered by a desire to be safe.

A desire to possess the correct map
and know just where you stand.

But isn’t this a betrayal of life, cowardice,
to place your own safety above movement?

A desire for what to be safe? A mistake
you call by the name “I”.

That ghost of you in the revolving door
keeps you going round and round.

Remain true to the fire of your first impulse,
and dissolve the discovered bedrock 

in the volcanic heat of underground
revelation, which continues down, layer on layer,

each bedrock shelf melting in the glow
of the liquid moving truth of lava.

Now you are in free fall, and very close
to what I would call Being Alive.

My House in Lyonville



My house in Lyonville
is probably seventy years old.

The elderly trees gather around
the borders of the lawn
like veterans 
of a dozen different wars,
each proud in his own distinct
battle-spattered uniform.

And I love each one
as if against the siege of storm
he had fought
to save my life.

They face the house
and honour the boards 
their boughs address.

And there is so much about this house
I love.

The brave stand of cornflowers
by the water tank
for instance,
bearing the diamond dust
of a salting frost
like a sugared benediction.

But most of all I love its small windows.

So many houses today are all window,
enlightened beyond any body
of restraining walls.
They let in all the light, all of the light,
until there is nothing
beyond the seeing of everything
with so much eye
that nothing means very much.

But these small windows mean
between the darkness of walls
the compression of Autumn
glows like a topaz in boxed velvet.

Pan-ic Attack

Be wary in the faunal noon
When light is crystalline,
For that’s when Pan may pipe a tune
To shatter your crystal mind.

He lurks until Apollo’s sun
Attains its highest mark
Then leaps and shrills and makes you run
In a world of sudden dark.

One trill upon his syrinx will
Liquefy your bowels
As the notes buzz like a dental drill
To drown your thoughts in howls.

He’s drawn toward the lighter things,
Adores a flighty nymph
With thoughts afloat on tinsel wings,
Whose blood’s as thin as lymph.

But as you, nymph, so innocently
Run empaled with fear,
His sweaty body will intently
Ground you now and here.

Enlightenment

“Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!” 
– Plutarch, Moralia (5.17)

Now all the gods are dead as Pan,
All mere fantasies of Man;
Our science searched but failed to see
A single god, now we agree

That all we see is all there is:
An accidental atom-fizz 
Where biospheres make selfish genes
Compete to scale a hill of beans.

There are no gods, no powers beyond
Our selves alone – there is no bond
To tie us or to bind us to
Beliefs our science proves untrue.

So light as wisps of thistledown
The wind released we drift around:
Weightless fluffy clouds of vapour,
Thick as fog and thin as paper.

But what if Pan instead of dead
Is a power that loves an air-filled head?
Diaphanous nymphs were His delight
To chase, to snare, to ravish – quite;

Our post-enlightened lightweight mind
Would turn Him on, I think we’d find
We’d be quite prone to Pan-ic fear
Were Pan not dead, but lurking, near.

The Dark Time 

When the Bang had flung its matter
down the alleys of created space,
all was dark for a while.

Millions of years passed as the clouds
of primal dust gathered in the weight
and density required to spark stars.

And at this stage God Himself
might have said: What a damp squib I have set:
let me rub this slate clean and start again.

But just as He was about to pull
the plug on a failed show
on they come, here, there – galaxies!

And in this way it goes:
first the explosive event,
then the dark weight begins.

So let the little clouds gather
together into big ones. And let
the heaviness grow and grow.

And don’t let them tell you
all this is wrong, and the darkness is not
the necessary womb of all new worlds.

The blacker the cloud the heavier
the weight, the denser the mass,
the quicker comes the spark.

Song


Hear the pulse of Dreamtime song
Still beating on this billabong,
As down each drooping she-oak frond
The mist-drops drip along the pond.

The plip and plop of water-drop-
Lets dripping round and on the rock-
Lets echo to an ancient beat
Of click-stick songs and stomping feet,
While under drips of falling dew
A blow-fly drones its didgeridoo
As if the pond were dreaming on
Corroborees once heard, so long.

A sudden gust, a flurried fall
Of drops – now there’s no song at all.
The she-oaks shake their boughs and sigh
And on the wind, the curlews’ cry.

Counsel

I.

Build your life on rock and clay,
The gnarl-bark pine above the bay
Says, stand your ground, reach below
And draw from darkness strength to grow.



II.

Give your life to wind and sunlight,
Sings the star-spiked tumbleweed,
Live on air, make life a fun-flight,
Sever roots for height and speed.

Taste



I hunger for the taste of hot, fierce art.
Something Yeatsy, with a gut-kick ending;
Or Donneish, with a batter-my-heart-fierce-start.
The cool taste rules, and no use pretending:
A common recipe involves the blending
Of wry-dry whimsy with refined despair.
Add a sweet dash of wist to the ending
And you feel like you just ate a plateful of air!
Give me a Hopkins-like tongue-searing prayer!
A sour taste of Hope, or dark seasoned Hardy
Meditating life on a cold-stone-stair!
Chili-hot meats from the Devil’s party,
Cellar-cold wines laced with cinnamon spice:
A taste like a Yeats-fierce dawn over ice.

Mors Janua Vitæ 

The selfish soul has never seen
The glass reflecting deathly sheen;
For if it had, and read its fate,
This vision then would liberate
Its grip upon the shadow things
That ignorance to substance brings.

How strange the shifty mind of man
To juggle fact from hand to hand,
To recognise all humans die
And yet not have this truth apply
To self: While Death remains ideal
Its liberating power’s unreal.

But when we see our Death is here,
Death’s life turns out the death of fear;
When Death’s embraced with empty arms
This pyre of world’s aglow with charms.
For when there’s nothing left to lose
You have no need to pick and choose.

On Proust’s Madeleine


Sensual under strict religious folds,
The scalloped, spoon-held piece of madeleine 
Is soaking up and swelling to retain
The faded blossom scent the warm tea holds.
Then taste, a rush of pleasure for which gold’s
A metaphor too weary to explain,
And far too poor a substance to sustain
The sense of treasure now the past unfolds.
Contingency, mortality, both fade
Beneath this flood of bliss which is a joy
Vicissitudes of life cannot destroy,
Nor fears can worm a way nor doubts invade.
When taste and smell set our remembrance free,
A world thought lost may spring from a cup of tea.

Retort to Lucretius

“The stars,” she whispers, “blindly run”.

– Tennyson. In Memoriam, III.

If man is matter, and his mind
Is made of atoms, running blind,
Then reason’s just a certain way
Chaos takes to have its say.

Your Epicurus says we’ll find
We’re stumbling atoms, intertwined;
But if blind atoms run the brain
Its thoughts must run as blind again.

And if thoughts run by random chance
How can one take a rational stance?
If accident alone is true
Each thought is accidental too

And any answer given now
Is like a creak from a swaying bough:
An accidental sound and it’ll
Ultimately mean so little.

Unless the home of reason lies 
Secure in deep Platonic skies,
Then reason lacks a solid base
To build a reasonable case.

So reason ruled before the world
Of matter and our minds unfurled.
Apollo’s sun now rules the sky
And clarifies the atom’s eye.

Belief and Faith

In the dark room of self, belief,
Impatient for a light,
Will paint a dawn to gain relief
On window panes of night.

Faith, which born of living trust,
Opens windows wide,
Lives in darkness, as it must,
Lest sunrise be denied.

The Death of Pentheus

(A translation from Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses)

Pentheus sentenced Acoetes the Lydian to death after torture,
Raging against his belief in Dionysus, the god beyond reason.
Nothing provoked the son of Echion more than this madness
Of belief in the gods, for him mere names for crazed human fantasies.

So Pentheus went to visit mount Cithaeron, the source of this madness.
There he was shocked at the air set aquiver by long-drawn-out-howlings,
Heating his anger till it blazed even hotter, aghast at such lunacy.
Climbing to the top of a towering pine-tree, Pentheus monitored

All of the weird goings on from a distance, safe in his vantage-point;
Until he was spotted by one of the women revelers, his mother.
Calling to others, she ran with an axe to the foot of his tree.
Her sisters soon gathered, to chip and hack at his towering hideout.

Echoing down the valleys shot the snapping cracks of the tall-tree falling,
Dashing to the earth the amazed king Pentheus, felled by his mother.
Rushing and ripping at him, the maenads came grabbing and rending sinew
Away from muscle and cracking and splintering bones like tree-limbs.

Calling Autonoe, his aunt, he begged her to show him some mercy,
But she pulled at his right arm, and Ino his left, until they unjointed them.
Showing the gaping wounds to his mother, he called to her, begging her;
Uttering a shriek, she tossed back her hair and tore off his head.

Crepidotus


Who dumped these peels of orange
At the base of an old ghost gum?
Nothing will answer orange
Till the winter wattles come.

And so, intrigued, I wandered
Closer to where the gold
Rinds some hand had squandered
Were heaped on the grey leaf-mold.

But no, no skin of fruit there,
I found at the ghost-gum’s base
A fungi-infected root where
Gold oozed from a darker place.

As if a boil of the underworld,
Lanced by a gum-root’s bite,
Up-bubbled, set, and under-curled
Bright plates of pus to the light.

Moon Rise on Malua Bay

How many miracles can you take
on any given day?

It begins with the littlest 
of fish, all powered along
with pefectly tiny hearts.

The greatest jewel-shapers
could never hope to hollow
chambers in such fine pin-head rubies
and make them
beat against the tide.

Then a pelican wheels onto final approach,
dips and tilts stately as a jumbo
rests on its fat cushions
of air,

hovers, stalls, settles on the water
shattering my reflections – and the water
receives its weight like love
takes sudden trouble:

a splash, a gash
in its sheen soon healed
from ripples to clarified reflection.

At first you think the silence
is the space between wave slaps

but then you are exposed

to the silence
the waves themselves
ride on to the sand.

And to cap it all off you stood

amazed as the ten thousand
trillion tons of rock
rose from the torn fronds of cloud
like a new born coral egg.

Upsides


Fire razed my garden shed,
Now I’ve a moonrise view instead;
The spring frost bit the damson plum –
No fruit: no bins of fly-blown gum.
Old Bluey died, but now the lawn
Is safe once more to tread upon;
And since my tabby Pussens went
The little lizards are content.
Lobelia bursts like love-grenades
On ground long-held by pungent shades,
For since that storm in late July
No pine-tree saps their sun-supply.
And since the goldfish died, their pool
Is still, translucent, deep and cool.

Fish-Wish

To be a couta, fired with icy blood,
A bullet-snout torpedo at a shoal
Of mackerel, or at a school of cod,
And after blood and flesh to have no goal.
And never have to argue with a soul,
Yet be alive to sex, though never touch:
Enough to make me wish away my role
Of being human, prone to care, too much
Whirred by gears of hope that grind and clutch.
Sure there’s fear in sighting a shiver of shark
Or dodging a lunge of moray eel and such,
But the blind thrill of drilling into the dark
Of ocean night toward a watery dawn
In wonder, to feed and fly and spawn.

The Underground


In the 70s, in London, I lived for a while
In an old, cramped, single-bed room
Above the underground Central line.
Lying in the dark I could feel below
As the tunnel filled with passing strangers
Being carried home from a long day:
A faint rumble would grow till it quivered 
Then shook the narrow bed like a tremor,
Blurring figures on the digital clock,
Jangling wire hangers in the closet,
Buzzing pill-bottles on the table.
And I thought of that cold, dark river
Of air below being pushed out ahead 
Of the train, and manholes breathing out 
That earthy, sour, underground odor
Into Soho alleys, as the rattling 
Carriages clattered through echoing space
In the tunnel, down there, beneath my bed.
Some nights, awake in the early hours,
Long since the last train had passed,
I could still sense this dark space
Below the foundations of the old building,
Waiting under tons of earth and rock:
Nitre crusting the blackened walls;
Scrabble, plash and scuffle of rats.
And even now, thirty years later,
Living on the other side of the world
In a quiet country town by the sea,
Sometimes, sleepless in bed, I feel
The dark tunnel still below, 
Echoing drips through an unlit night,
Waiting to carry more passengers home. 

Li Po’s Fire Poems


Some say Li Po burned
only his bad poems

freed them like fire-flies
to spark down the rivers
of night.

But that is all wrong.

I recall a night
of ice and frost,
high in a cave
in the Tai-hang Mountains.

Surely we would have died
that night, but Li Po
unrolled his best work,
read each poem softly,
then handed them
to the flames.

I remember one —
about a young girl he caught
praying to the moon —

the warmth from that poem
keeps the chill from my marrow
even now.

After Tao Yuan Ming (A.D. 365-427) 


I built my small hut near the town
And yet there is no hubbub here.
You ask: How do you keep the sound
So low, yet leave the air so clear?
I answer: when the heart is still
A stillness blooms inside the home.
I gather for my window sill
Chrysanthemums, and then I roam
In mind to wander southern hills;
The mountain air flows in my hut,
The sky is filled with flocks of birds,
And everything has meaning, but
The meaning lies beyond my words.

To A Talkative Guest

(after Po Chü-I)


The visitor from town was glib
And prattled like a running stream;
The country host, more demurely,
Rambled in his rustic theme.

“I beg you, sir, as you enter,
No more news about Ch’ang-an;
Upon my knee my just-tuned lute
Is poised and waiting for my hand.”

After Li Po’s “Green Mountain”

You ask my why I live up where
The mountain greens in clear air.

I smile, nod, make no reply
As I watch the waters rushing by.

And as the peach blooms on the stream
Drift away, I muse, serene,

Transcending every human bond,
And like the blossoms, go – beyond.

Turn

Lay your weight
Upon your being, 
Let this moment be
Everything, 
No need to fear it, 
Fall, 
Get lost,
And see.

Let now-ever
Drown your will 
And wash you with it 
Down
To the place
Where nothing is 
The only solid ground.

Never seek
To find an answer 
In the mind alone,
Life exceeds the mental
And is not
A thing to own.

Turn your back
Upon the sunset
Face the rising night,
Let your spark go
For the darkness 
Mothers every light.

Night Blooms

A mega-star will rage like fifty suns,
Eating its heart away a thousand times
Faster than the mere four million tons
Our sun consumes each second as it shines.
This brilliant matter-factory combines
Two nuclei of hydrogen to gain
Helium then carbon till it refines
The element that makes a prison chain:
Iron will be the last, and will contain
An atom-bomb twelve thousand miles wide,
Where grinding atom-crunches soon entrain
A blast as fusing nuclei collide.
In violent birth the dying sun will shower
The elemental seeds to grow a flower.

A Splinter

It happened.

No intent.
An accident.

Didn’t want it in.
But it pierced my skin.

An image of you
Just like a splinter

All my efforts 
To remove drove deeper.

Till now it’s such
A futile job

I’ve given up

Just 
Let
It
Throb.

Broken Loose

She doesn’t care, she doesn’t care, old heart.
But ox-dumb heart is thick and won’t be told.
Reason frowned and argued from the start:
Her skin is fine bone china, and you’re old.

But ox-thick heart is nothing if not bold,
And paws the ground and snorts and doesn’t care,
And foolishly refuses to be told:
Stay in that pen, you beast, and learn despair!

Reason ruled as the conference went to air.
Six weeks unseen, I watched the screen in dread, 
My hope she’d dress in grey with tied-back hair.
But her black hair was down; her top, pink-red!

That’s when my ox broke loose, now I can’t stop
Him running wild in reason’s china shop.

Hymn to Apollo

Have you won, Apollo, your father’s place
And stolen his lightning rods
In order to blitz the heavens and blot out 
The lights of the lesser gods?
Your skies are clear and only the single
Eye of your solar mind
Rules the heavens above us now
With a light that can dazzle and blind.

Yet, today, we aspire to be like you
In all ways, lord Apollo. 
Yours is the standard of brightness we love
And we all long to follow;
High above turmoil, watching it broil
Safely aloof with your distance,
Looking down with your detached
Cool resolve of resistance.

The women who followed another god
Now serve you, lord Apollo,
That you are reserved a god for men
Is a slur they will not swallow;
All depths are superficial, you
Have lost your fraternal twin
Who was of old the women’s god,
And now you are free of him.

Certainly we are in love, Apollo, 
With your slender body of marble;
We dwell on it eating, running, shopping, 
And lifting the barbell.
Across the world today, Apollo, 
We work and live by your grace,
As we watch you fire your hunting arrows
High and far into space.

Your silent, holy light, Apollo, 
Beams down on everything,
And bedazzled nights flooded out by your lights
Make even the birds sing.
Your logic and judgment move and probe 
Past science, your creation;
Your reason rules the arts today
And Muses take your dictation.

The images we adore, Apollo,
That make us laugh or sigh,
Each bodiless, spectral frame of light
Was frozen by your eye,
And then projected by your beam
Upon a wall or screen
For us to contemplate, you are
The god by which we dream.

Clarity, clarity, light upon light, 
We bask in your bright effulgence,
Entertained with your optical shows 
And bemused at your indulgence.
So we pray, Apollo, beam us up, 
To the Elysian fields of your dreaming;
Enlightened and free we are ready to soar
With no earthly soul for redeeming.

Pas de Deux

Afternoon sunbeams sparked on the ripple,
Flaring the sea to the sands of Broulee,
Where, from a cavelet, obscure in the stipple,
Still, in a pool, she was looking at me.

Doubtful she saw me, I knew when I moved,
Moving, she showed me she certainly could;
Dancing together, I rocked when she grooved,
Backward and forward – she understood!

Two beings rapt in uncanny rapport,
Swaying in unison till a late wave
Told me the time and I waded to shore;
Back to my room, and she, back to her cave.

Polyhymnia

When the power failed I shrank
To a face on a glass screen
Reflecting on the vacuum
Under surfaces of light.

For so long before I was
Hardly myself: determined:
The paradigm of engines,
Till the breakdown of silence.

Then eyes gazed into the black
Centre of myself and knew
This absence was permanent
And wonderful as the night.

That centre could never hold
Anything but anarchy,
Trying to constrain many
Voices under rule of one.

And the one who had been one
Died, and in dying gave birth
To my singers who sing now
Apart-together, like stars.

Until That Dayl

I saw the sea as blank as slate,
A plain of cloudy grey,
Or glistening in the sun to make
A mirror of the bay.

A loose-sprung floor, a moving stage 
Curtained by a squall;
A surface surfers rode to climb
And skitter down a glassy wall.

Until a slash in the mirrored sky
Slit its silver skin –
A dark gash opened by
A blade of living fin.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

– Rilke


His fabled head is gone, we cannot know
The look as his bright apple eyes matured.
Yet like a baffled lamp, its light obscured,
An inward gaze still makes his torso glow.
How else explain the dazzling breast, the smile
Insinuating the loins rising curve
And moving down as if a living nerve
Still kept the seed-source vital all this while?
Cut short, without his gaze still bright inside,
The lucent stone beneath the shoulders’ fall
Would never glisten like a raptor’s hide
Nor radiate in star-like spikes of light
That break from every surface of the stone
Transfixing you, demanding – change your life!

Selige Sehnsucht

(Holy Longing)

– J.W. Goethe



Tell nobody but the wise,
The mob will mock and call you liar:
The very stuff of life I prize
Whose living longs to die in fire.

Calm in the glow of loving nights
Which bred you and in which you breed,
Intimations of new delights
Within the candle’s glow you read.

Held no more in shades of dark
A new desire sweeps you above
The world now you have caught the spark
Of union for a higher love.

No distance there will hinder you
As you, enchanted, see your aim:
Become the light you fly into –
A moth no more you are the flame.

And until that night you know
The fiery death that is rebirth
Your life will only pass to show
A sad guest on the dark earth.

ἔρως

(After Diotima’s description in Plato’s Symposium)



Eros is not Cupid,
No biddable little boy,
For I have met with Eros
And his arrow is no toy.

He is a mighty hunter
A master of artifice,
Seducer and enchanter,
No cheeky imp of bliss.

His hair is lank and tangled,
He sleeps on naked streets
In doorways and on benches
Where the sleet and hail beats.

His feet are bare and blistered
And his self-respect and home
Are lost, like Need, his mother,
Who weeps in want alone.

And day and night he haunts me,
This wounded, hunting youth,
Desperate, looking hard, as any 
Lover of the truth.

On the Absence of Hymns to Hades


Why, O Muses, have you neglected
The brother God of earth-quaker Poseidon,
For whom you send hymns for those subjected
To his wrath on the seas when wild storms widen
Their eyes and move their lips to ask pardon;
And hymns for Zeus, the brother god of the skies.

But for the third brother, no hymns ever rise —
For the Lord of the Underworld most utter lies.

Cleaving

Then came our season of fire and ice,
When the snow blew into the bush-fire flame;
When I felt the white hot lightning bolt slice
Through that frozen cloud, and I lost my name.

I entered a world where sense was split,
Where heat was born of the bitterest frost;
I reached to feel warmth but my hand was bit
By a steel-mouthed coldness, I learned, to my cost.

Embers in the hearth shone cool as sapphire;
The red-hot-pokers grew cold as their roots;
Rabbits froze in the light before gunfire;
Chill jonquils burst from sulphurous shoots.

And I became split as the world around,
Where the heat and the coldness wrestled in strife;
We were two entwined, unsure where we were bound,
Or if you were the hot or the cold man’s wife?

A Ruined Fortress


I spent a night by haunted stones,
Chiseled square by Persian slaves
Who set them over splintered bones
Of those who made these walls their graves.

Legionaries, saints and knaves,
Blue-veiled Tuaregs of goat and salt,
And pirates of the golden waves
Left ghosts to walk that fortress’ vault.

Wearied, sore and forced to halt
I slept nearby those wind-worn rocks
And heard at dawn of that assault
Which razed the walls to shattered blocks –

As if the scarlet mouth had spoken:
“Impregnable, I was breached – broken.”

Sketch of a Day in the Australian Bush

The Southern Cross of stars dissolve
As black to pinks to blues resolve
Blank lattice works that spoke the breeze
To twigs and boughs and trunks of trees.

The fractal fronded fern unfurls
Long tongues of birthday whistle curls,
And pokes them at the bloody sun
To celebrate the day begun.

Soon granite boulders start to glow
And coruscate as light as snow;
White cockatoos flare sulphured heads
Then rip the muslin air to shreds.

By noon the air is diamond right
To slice and ring the brook with light,
Illuminating amber ants
Sucking sap secreting plants.

The sun declines to make more heat
As ever longer shadows beat
From shrub and trunk and rock and hill
To purple pools of fading will.

As dusty dusk begins to set
In jellied light dark mosses wet;
The flies and beetles of the day
Decrease and fold their wings away.

Snail slug and leech begin to stretch
Dry necks and for some liquor letch;
Embracing eucalypts kiss the dark
Then merge as stars begin to spark.

Angels 


This and the following sonnet were inspired by various passages
from the 17th century sermons of John Donne.



Creatures with less body of flesh than froth,
As boneless as a vapour, fog, or sigh;
And yet a Seraph steeled with holy wrath
May crush a millstone finer than its rye.
God’s first sons, none a minute elder, fly
Still weightless, born of light, as they were made
Before the Lord divided earth from sky,
Six thousand years and not a whit decayed.
And with those yet to come, theirs will not fade
To winter faces under snowy hairs;
No spongy lungs for damp sobs to invade
A bony breast and drown a heart in cares.
But come that day, this host will envy me
My body risen for eternity.

Equally to All



Ashes of an oak in a fireplace
Provide no epitaph of how it grew;
Tell nothing of the flocks its shelter drew,
Nor men it injured in a fall from grace.
The dust of great men likewise leaves no trace
Of epitaph to tell their names or who
They were in life, or what high men they knew:
All dust is dust when dust blows in your face.
Winds sweep from marble vault and pauper’s mound
The dust of princes, and of wretched men,
Mingling in the nave, to be swept again.
But who will judge of dusts that time has ground:
“Patrician, this, and this, the noble man;
This, yeomanly, and this, plebeian bran.

Fulgurites

This heat will forge an anvil out of ice
Where ice on ice is beaten till the spark
Within each crystal builds a bolt to slice
Through night and spill its silver in the dark,

Flashing just for a moment to be lost.
But if the bolt should find receptive sand
The transitory shaft of light may last,
Exhumed and fixed in form in your own hand.

Emergency


From tropic earth as red as meat
Dyed deeper red in rain
And rising in the tropic heat
You may behold a stain
Upon the air a twisting coil
As if a smudge of smoke
Issued from a pot of oil
On fire – is this a joke?

Has someone buried in the ground
A clump of fuming punk?
But how when here and all around
An inch of rain has sunk
Into the earth until it oozes
Mud between your toes.
And so you stare for it bemuses
How such smoke arose.

Drawing near your wondering eyes
Soon notice down the way
How in swirls to leaden skies
Rise other fonts of grey.
Not smoke, ah no, but living things
Rising to aerial birth –
A billion ants with silver wings
Astir beneath the earth.

Gum-Rap


Black Gum, White Gum, Orange Gum, Blue,
Snap and Rattle and the old Wandoo;
Warted Yate, Soak Yate, Mootwingie Mallee,
Gully Ash, Mountain Ash, Scaly Butt, and Mealy;
Stringybark, Bogong, Yertchuk, and Fuzzy,
Coffin Bay, Brown, Badgerabbie, and the Monkey.
Sometimes alone, but often they mingle
Like an Alpine Cider with a Yellow Tingle.

Powder-Barked, Silver-Leaved, Large-Fruited Grey,
Twin-Leaved, Jarrah, and the Mallee Mount Day;
Bell-Fruited, Pear-Fruited, Apple-Topped Box
Feeding possums and the fruit-bat flocks;
Cabbage Gum, Apple Gum, Pumpkin Bark Gum,
Sugar Gum, Peppermint, yum yum yum!
Some good for building, some not so good,
And some refuse, like the Bastard Bloodwood.

Spearwood, Tallow Wood, Goodwood, Spinning,
Shining, Glistening, Dropping, Weeping;
Fluted Horn, Silver Mallet, Alpine Ash,
Are pulping-gums for dunny-paper cash;
Diehard Stringybark, Silver-topped Gimlet,
Bimble Box, Red Box, Rosebud, Goblet.
Search for the Manna and build a bush-hut
But never try to undercut a Tenterfield Woolybutt.

“Why would you want to live up there?”

(A View From the Ridge)

My town friends wonder why I chose
To rent a farm on so exposed
A hillside on this Otway ridge,
Where winter, like a frost-locked fridge,
Sets paddocks hard as ice-block trays,
Where hail-stoned Friesians ache to graze.
Where hammer-fisted storms beat down
And nail old blackwoods to the ground;
Where August’s barb-wire gales can scar
While whipping you from house to car.

But when they come on such a day
As this, in April or in May,
When autumn lights on fields of clover
Spark the prismed dew-gems over,
They revel in this atmosphere,
Beyond the calm, transcending clear.
They scent the feathery drifts of plumes
That waft the burn-off scrub perfumes,
Delighting in the mystic light
That diamonds lake Corangamite.

And then in sunset’s afterglow
An opalescent moon will show:
The more exposed to wintry pain
The clearer views of joy we gain.

Dido’s Passing

Pity poor Dido, riven from sanity, seeking a darkness
Only the sword she feels can let enter, letting the light out.
She falls and it pierces, slicing through silks, slitting through muscle,
Spreading her blood all over the marriage bed – grim consummation.

As she lies struggling to gasp for the breath she would rather surrender,
What are the images passing before her as the light starts to flicker?
No, not Aeneas. He has departed. Now she sees sunlight
Dappling the grape vines there in her window, piercing each globule.

She hears in the distance the lowing of cattle, coming for milking;
Remembers the beat of the hot-frothed fluid filling the bucket.
Rising she falls as the grate of her breast-bone rasps upon metal;
Now she is staring down where the floor was scarred by a soup bowl.

The moment the bowl fell is passing before her, and all of the fussing
And all of the blame attending that accident showing the human
State as we know it: distress in a world where falling is common;
Where candles extinguish, bowls may be dropped, and promises broken.

Rising she falls again; rising she falls, with Iris descending,
Colouring over the world with her gold, rainbowing everything.
Gilded days of a royal life are passing before her,
Never to be recalled. Never, passing, forever.

Otways

When Vulcan lashed these hills with fire,
And blistered them to mountains higher
Than steaming peaks of wild Peru,
These knolls were then some thing to view.
But eons falling with the rain
Have scrubbed them back to hills again.

But hills with still some remnant charm
Of prehistoric fern-tree balm,
Of lizard licking dappled light
And silver moth sipped drops of night;
Of swamp reflecting copper beech
Where stalked in stealth the tiger leech.

Where once the liquid lava flowed
The hand of Nature gardens sowed.
In mossy gully damps and darks
Evolved unique botanic parks
Where pigmy possum, owl and quoll
Could watch the slow millennia roll.

Ten million holocaustic fires
Could never parch vast tree desires
To squeeze red clay in fists of roots
And lick the mist with lapping shoots.
Ten million storms of thunderous hail
Did little damage, till a sail.

Which brought arboricidal man
To strip and pillage, farm and dam
The slopes of myrtle, mountain ash,
All milled and pounded into cash.
A single sail was all it took
To blight the forest, foul the brook.

The uglifying work goes on
In running saws the whole day long,
The sneering trail bikes slash the tracks
For flabby four-wheeled louts in slacks
To rip the tender soil to shreds
And beer can the river beds.

O Vulcan, might you come again
And flail with fire the backs of men,
And scour back to molten rock
Your work undone by men who mock,
That future times might once more try
To hold in trust, not sell and buy.

When Summer

When summer with its purple dyes
The sways of grass, the eyes of flies,

And strums its passion on the strands
Of morning webs with febrile hands,

That summer sweeps the seeds of doom
From paddocks on its dusty broom.

So watch if fretful lightnings trace
The furrows on a much-loved face

As prophecies of winter’s will
Tumble down the mist-bound hill.

Even the reddest rose must go
Down in summer’s purple glow.

That Grace

Oh have you squarely looked on death,
Studied the steely face

And seen into unseeing eyes,
Oh, have you had that grace?

And have you stared into the pit
Where loss forever dwells

Huddled on that freezing plain
Where nerves clang on like bells?

Oh have you seen the many dead,
Whose lives have gone before

You were aware of being here,
And are you not as sure

As some were, till the hour arrived,
That death might yet be stayed,

A little longer, even more,
Postponed, at least delayed?

Now is the time to look on death,
Upon its steely face,

And see with still reflecting eyes,
Oh may you have that grace.

Prime

When the monster corners you
And traps you in its hold,
Wrapping chains about the metal
Box you’re locked in, cold
Of darkness thick as mud or blood
No chinks for light nor air
To penetrate and dissipate 
The stench of your despair –
Then let the darkness-pressure rise
Until a tiny spark
Leaps up as the horror strikes 
The flint within your heart,
For when it does, the chances are, 
If you have primed it right,
That box you’re in will burst in rainbow 
Colours on the night.

On the Shipwreck Coast


Here the on-shore gales come laced 
With flecks of foam and flicks of weed,
Blasting the grit of white-quartz sand
Into diamond dusted salt

To carve and hollow caves on the flanks
Of the crumbling Apostles and sandstone cliffs.
Few things grow because most cannot stand 
The force of such withering assaults,

Except for the juice-thick fingers of pig face, 
And the crusted, rusty blades of marram;
And the tea-trees, gnarled by the blast of the Roaring
Forties, which dare to crawl

Right to the verge of the long rolling waves 
Of dunes. But there on the brow of the hill 
Above the cemetery, a lone cypress leans
Against the wall of wind,

Risen again from a fallen trunk,
A firm base of storm-polished steel,
Absolved now from any fear
Of wrecking winter gales.

Storm Treasure


When that great King tide of moon-signed Easter
Foamed down the paths and tracks of the tea-tree,
We were so excited to find the world
In revolt against its moderate habits.

The daily grind of tide, tickling pebbles
To give up their grains to the grist of sand,
Was overturned. Like a Mardi Gras parade
The sea abandoned its straight persona.

The moon’s new ruinous love for the ocean
Exposed virgin creeks to a salty flush,
Wrapping limbs of Myrtle and fouling Gums
In a twine of brine-soaked straps and thongs.

The old wooden bridge on the creek was lost
Beneath a rush of slick and vicious milk,
Cream foam dense, cold and sudsy as the churn
Of lather in vats of refrigerated steel.

Dark and the foundering reports of sailors
Struggling to climb benighted crags of sea
In oil skins, and sea boots weighty as lasts,
Came in, and made us shudder at the roar.

By dawn on Sunday the great miracle
Of calmness fell upon the sea, and we
Walked the wrecked beach, silent and racked with loss
Of dune and grass. But there we found the beautiful

Nautilus shells, paper crimped skin of pearl,
Miraculous, as if light bulbs had passed
Through the guts of a crusher, and were still
And illuminated there on the sands.

Dawn 

Before the breach of pearling dawn
I walked the summer sand.
The moon with shining out was worn
And waved a parting hand.

The light which failed to separate
Calm sea from surfing cloud
Allowed the heart to contemplate
What reason ne’er allowed.

The sky was sea the sea the sky
And starlight on wet sand
Erased the earth beneath and I
Felt all of space expand

Till time and I were washed away,
Gone as a broken wave;
And save for ever-rising day
Was nothing left to save.

A Red-Gum Log


Hour by hour the log endured
The metamorphosis of flame,
But when its bark was burnt away
It glowed the colour of its name.
By alchemy the log became
Transmogrified, crystalline;
And incandescent in its frame
Pulsed rubies bright as cherry wine.
Then as they shrank to discombine
The pulsing cubes of crimson dice,
The log retained its size and line
Then shattered into crimson ice.

Tarn


That summer, floating on the mountain lake, 
Dark as the tarn in Poe’s tale of the Ushers, 
Was an initiation into reflection. 
Lying prone on the air-bed, 
Looking into your face, you could see you were nothing 
But a skied image on the water, the halo
Of gums and wattles around your head, a fragrant 
Wreath sent up from Hades. The lake was a sermon 
On the truth that the way up and way down are the same. 
When a goshawk, tailing finches, passed, looking down 
Into the tarnished mirror, you could see precisely 
How high he was. The sun you noticed was dependent 
Upon a cool-quivering void to cherish its fire. 
Upward staring water-lilies found reflections in cumulus 
Blooming in the deep blue. At evening 
The swallows fell from the west and tore
At their doubles with thirsty beaks. And once,
As the full moon rose from the eastern hills,
I watched her twin bathe her sun-flush in the shallows
And grow ever brighter as the dark water deepened.

Monsoon

One thing worse than any monsoon
Is no monsoon at all;
When the river and the swamp and the green lagoon
Turn a khaki to appall.

When the clouds sag down or just hang around
All day but refuse to rain,
And the tensions build till you feel ill-willed
To the itch in your twitching brain.

And the snakes and the spiders and the leeches creep
From the dark to find some wet,
While the distant lightning signals relief
That may come, but not yet.

And the crocodiles and the lizards leave
Their nests in search of food,
And slither down linoleum halls
In a steel-fanged vicious mood.

Yes, one thing worse than the worst monsoon
Is no monsoon at all,
When you stand and stare at her empty chair,
Waiting for the rains to fall.

Crays


With fleet hands flecked by solar spots
My father wove the wicker pots
From wire and tea-tree twigs for crays
To meet ripe meals and then a maze.

In silver summer dawns he oared
The pot-stacked boat to where the fraud
Of free lunch would be offered where
The hunted hunkered in their lair.

Dependent on their bobbing buoys
In seethe of bubbles sank his ploys,
Each rigged with glassy rabbit eyes,
Full fathom five my father’s spies.

Then one by one in sea blue night
The stalked crustaceans sniffed delight
Of paddock-fattened rabbit flesh
And scrabbled to the woody mesh.

Next dawn he stowed his dripping oars
Above the mass of frenzied claws,
Fiddling in the wood and wires,
Crimping hopeless crabby pliers.

My Father hauled the fizzing rope
And felt its weight confirm his hope –
A crimson-crusted boon disgorged
To flap and clatter on scaly boards.

I well remember drums of steam,
The shrill-pitch whistle of a scream,
The claw-entangling hessian sack,
A stalky eye gone blanker black.

But then we cracked, we split and snapped
Great knobs of claws, spoon-hammer rapped;
We sucked and slurped and clacked and clucked
And gobbled the cool white gobs we shucked.

While time’s harsh tides have seized those snares
That hung weed drapes in long gone airs,
And sunk them deep, those pots remain,
Snaring feasts in my sea-salt brain.

Ephemerality

Man is the dream of the ghost of smoke,
A foam-flower a quiver on the strand;
A lily when the stem is broke,
A coal fading faster fanned.

Man is a dew-globe in the sun,
Still shrinking in the morning light;
A web the wind is winding undone,
A berry greying in fungal blight.

Man is as the stain on snow
When westward winging geese depart;
A coruscation breezes blow
From Mountain Ash boughs when they start.

Man is an ephemeral pool
A summer shower leaves behind,
Soon to be emptied by the cruel
Drought of time that dulls his mind.

Man is a state of passing through,
A soon to be gone and cannot stay
Cloud adrift across the blue,
A dream of steel but made of clay.

Fish-Wish


To be a couta, fired with icy blood,
A bullet-snout torpedo at a shoal
Of mackerel, or at a school of cod,
And after blood and flesh to have no goal.
And never have to argue with a soul,
Yet be alive to sex, though never touch:
Enough to make me wish away my role
Of being human, prone to care, too much
Whirred by gears of hope that grind and clutch.
Sure there’s fear in sighting a shiver of shark
Or dodging a lunge of moray eel and such,
But the blind thrill of drilling into the dark
Of ocean night toward a watery dawn
In wonder, to feed and fly and spawn.

Hydrangeas


Last night I must have left the garden gate 
Unlatched, for in the chill of autumn dawn
I woke, the yard shuddering – earth quake?
Friesian steers, their breaths fogging the air.
The lure of dewy lawn had drawn them in
After a long, yellow summer of dried hay.
Then, I saw with pain, it wasn’t the grass
They wanted – no! – but your billowing turquoise
Clouds of hydrangea! Flapping arms I chased them
Across the divoted lawn, bolted the latch 
And surveyed the damage. Flower stalks stripped bare
As toothpicks! My dear, please forgive my careless 
Error. Nothing can restore your ravished 
Blossoms. But imagine how they tasted, cool 
As sprays of sweet blue snow after dusty stubble.

A Risky Move


Motionless in a sleeping lion’s paws,
Your face down in the dust, afraid to stir,
Knowing that any move might clench those jaws
To crush your chest, should you disturb her purr.

Or struggling as you sank until you were
Up to your neck in a slick, quicksand pit,
Where frozen immobility might confer
One last-ditch chance of your surviving it.

Or snared in jungle webs with enough wit
To realize the danger of your plight:
That any jerky move might well transmit
A signal calling down a lethal bite.

But here’s a move more tricky than these above:
To risk a dear friend by declaring love.

On Falling


A dirigible balloon was being docked
When a man who held the tether line too well
Rose with it on a gust as his hands locked
Until a mile high – and then he fell.

Some clearly heard a parachutist yell
From a thousand feet to earth as his ‘chutes failed;
Perhaps his falling felt like time in hell,
But he was still once gravity prevailed.

A mountaineer, leaving a granite face,
Guilty of a lost footing, fought for a while;
And though he pled with parabolic grace,
A snap of chafing rope ended his trial.

Some awful falls, but this one’s worst of all:
To fall in love, and fall, and fall, and fall.

How Good!

[For Chris]

A marvellous thing it is to be loved
By someone looking at you,
When you bask in the dreaming beam of an eye
Whose look is the meaning of true.

A wonderful thing to feel such a love
You wonder if you deserve,
But there it is, and how can you doubt
A reflex quick as a nerve.

A world-saving thing it is to be loved,
To be given the peace just to be –
It lets you attend to the shadow-rich end
Of a long summer’s day by the sea.

Recall 



Do you recall that day
When I tried, in the city square,
So hard to find a way
To make you understand?

I reached to touch your hand,
Whispering near your hair;
You let no feeling show
Through the twists of your wedding band.

The explosion of your “No!”
Blew doves to darkened air.

Recall II


Recall that day
You cut the rope

And let me fall
From reach of hope?

You watched as I fell.
I saw you see

My hollow dreams  
The bones of me  

Break on rocks
Terminally. 

Wisteria


Late spring when we first saw the house,
With its back door a cave obscured
Behind high breaking waves of blue
And white surge-foam of blossom.

Bees, pollen and petals made it
Difficult to weave your way in;
And in the drench of sun-showers
The water-falls of flowers purled.

Summer slowed the fall to trickles.
And since you’ve missed most of autumn,
Let me say the wisteria
Now is mostly air and grey cloud.

The few curved spatulas of pods
Rattle like the wood-slat clackers
Of a ghost-dispersing wind chime,
High against Himalayan grey.

Sheets to the Wind



Last night I heard the wind make love
In mooned and wavy sheets of tin

And choose the long-nailed one above
The rest to rend his silken skin.

And as her rust-red nails were raised
To rake and ripple raptured pain

Her rising-falling curves he praised
And raised and lowered her again.

His stroke on silvered skin, moon-lit,
Induced a hum; she whispered more;

Then hard and fast his frantic fit
Of love made her his love adore.

Prised ajar she opened wide
Receiving him like billowed sails,

Flapped and arched in his potent tide
She screeched and tore her rasping nails.

Upon his breath she rose and fell
Faster, faster now she wailed

Enthralled in free ecstatic hell
So loose upon the beam impaled.

And when the wind had come and gone
And flung the sheets of his desire

I’d lost my will for sleeping on
My own, my heart, my sheets of fire. 

Diagnostic


They speak today of pheromones and genes
When trying to account for such a state
Most often seen in young folk, in their teens
Or in their twenties, signalling a mate.
They would not think a man turned fifty-eight
Should be a candidate for such a blast
Of chemicals, or genes, or luck, or fate,
To blow him forty years back to his past.
His family and friends would be aghast
To hear their wrinkled sage bay at the moon
And warble that he’d found “the one” at last,
And call him “fool”, or worse, “romantic loon.”
But they don’t know because they were not there 
To breathe the lethal darkness of your hair.

Cycle

In flowers of fire lie seeds of ice
That sprout when all the blooming’s done,
As we now see our Paradise
Grey in the wake of passion’s run.

Once all the trees and clouds and hills
Shivered in a blossoming fire;
Now ice-seed sparks from ash and fills
The heart with hope they’ll sow desire.

Orpheus Redux


Singing her up from hell when almost home
We met the one who’d stung her, in the street. 
I spoke of things like weather — “damn this heat!” —
We parted when we passed the Safety Zone.
But as I turned to take one final look,
She dropped my arm. That was all it took.

The Great Change

The thought-birds of your mind have been your life.
You have studied them, catalogued them, banded them.
You have celebrated the dawn choruses.

You have marvelled at the plumage of peacock ideas.
You have listened to the mournful owl musing on autumn evenings.
You have identified with the eagle thoughts, and denied the starlings.

You have dispatched hawks to hunt dove-thoughts.
Irritated by swarms of greedy sparrows.
You have watched these bird-thoughts individually, and migrating in flocks.

Sometimes your sky has been darkened with their masses.
Now your attention shifts.
You have been mesmerised by the birds.

But now you see they are not yours, these thought-birds that come and go.
That flap and flutter.
You are the silent empty sky through which they move.

Bell’s Theorem

Dr. John S. Bell demonstrated (mathematically) that “if quantum mechanics is valid, any two particles once in contact will continue to influence each other, no matter how far apart they may subsequently move.” 


How far from truth who say we live apart,
As well divide the beatings of one heart:

Systolic you and diastolic me,
As I clutch it all tight, you set it free.

Then turn about, so now I have my chance
To give to your take in our hearty dance.

As electrons touch at the core of a star
Then supernovaed off to spaces far

Apart from each other, so we as well
Still influence each other as we tell

How the spin we gave each where we met
Still shapes every thing we give or we get.

Though the stretch of roads and rivers may be
A hindrance to some, it proves none for we

Having touched at the centre of such fire
Vibrate like the strings of a single lyre.

The sun of my parade unfurls your street,
Like Donne’s gold leaf to airy thinness beat.

So Long


A terrible thing it is to kill 
The one you have loved so long.
So long – the very idea makes you ill, 
Yet staying feels even more wrong;
When she says nothing for day on day, 
And you know what she’s not saying,
And the snap of each page as she riffles her book 
Says it over and over again.
Then silence is shattered in words, then in acts, 
And you fear what horrors might come
As you bludgeon and thump her with horrible facts 
Till she sickens and slumps, cold and numb.

Then it feels like you’re holding a sparrow, 
Wounded with a cat-crushed breast,
And the pity aches in your marrow, 
So you comfort her till she’s at rest.

But your killer’s heart, though the cause seems just 
And warranted in your eyes, 
Wears a wound from the acid scalding of tears 
Your pride denies to your eyes;
And the salt drips inward and scorches and burns 
Till you foetal on the floor in pain,
And the doctor prescribes some pills for your turns 
Which fail for the cause will remain.
So you try once more, since you can’t go on, 
And backwards seems the best way,
But life with a corpse only lasts so long, 
And so long is a long, long day.

Neon


Waiting for the cook to call their order,
They watch the mirrored road in evening rain
Reflect the flush of colours from the sign:
Hot Fish & Chips – in tubes of neon light.

The young man draws nearer to the window;
His eyes are staring, wide, amazed to see
That gas in glass is glowing true as ruby,
Topaz, emerald, amethyst and pearl.

He beckons her to look – how cool’s this blue!
And for the first time she sees neon too.
They gaze, bemused – the cook calls “ready” twice.
They run through sparks of rain to his old car,
Eager to begin the quick unwrapping,
And watch their windows fog, cool as neon.

CODA from Coffee Shop/Supermarket Amoretti

Seeking Lily

I so much missed my Lily I would drive
On Sundays down the road to Tuross Head;
To keep her image for me still alive
From fading any farther in my head.
I wouldn’t meet her there, I knew; instead
I went to see a vision that might ease
My loss, relieving grieving pains ahead.
I knew from trips before this sight would please
But in a sense, I knew, would also tease.
At Tuross, in a park facing the sea,
Down a Norfolk Pine path, the salty breeze
Behind my back, under a bridge, I’d see:
A host of cloud-white lilies dancing there,
Relieving me of loss, easing my care.

The Ivory Curl Tree

There is a tree I know in Batemans Bay,
Sheltered from the southerly icy blast;
And often I will go out of my way
To stare at it as I am driving past.
Then when my business has been done at last,
I park my car to walk and look again,
Especially if feeling low, downcast;
It is a sight that eases every pain.
And on wet days, after a shower of rain,
The curly flowers purl as water flows
To murmur softly as the droplets drain
In longer silver chains as each flower grows.
But most of all its gorgeous flowers that curl
Remind me of a much-loved missing girl.

Tina

Wherever I see beauty I see Tina,
I see her as the dew flares over lawn;
The Smooth-barked Apple wears her skin patina;
I hear her voice when wind makes She-Oaks mourn.
The artful inkings which her arms adorn
Spring to my mind when I see bright bouquets
Of flowers on wedding days by bridesmaids borne.
Even the terror of savage wildfires’ blaze
Carries the beauty of her fiery gaze.
And summer storms with thunderous lightning flash
Remind me of her fierce and angry days
When she with brilliant scorn a fool would lash.
Tina was at one time all of my world,
Now into the world her beauty has unfurled.

Broken Hearts Alone 
Let In The Light

Impossible loves will force us to enter
That labyrinthine pit where souls are mined;
Our love-pains drive us down below the centre
Of that velvet cell of self where we’re confined,
Forced underground where eyes and thoughts go blind.
When our Persephones are Hades-bound
In the underworld of loss where we can find
No gentle goodnight kiss or arm around,
Only remembered images abound:
But in this dusty pit we build our soul,
A space we clear from rocky psychic ground;
A dark-illumined place that will console.
Though we might skin knuckles to dig this way
Our blindness may turn inner night to day.

Epilogue

Images of Tina, Lily, Laura
Live on within my underworld of soul,
Enlightening the dark like an aurora
Whose colours flare and fade beyond control,
For image is our source, substance and goal:
We are such stuff upon which dreams are made;
Imagination keeps us sole and whole.
The image is the stuff of that brocade
We call the world, designed, woven, displayed 
By Psyche, Queen of Heaven, source of all.
Worlds surge up from Her ocean, and will fade
Like waves from ripples rise to crests then fall.
And we are born Her bubbles, flowers of foam
To form then burst upon Her sea, our home.

Ingrained

The grinding wave wears rock to sand
For wind to sculpture dunes
So king tides at the moon’s command
May fill and choke lagoons.

Then melted shell will bind and lock
The quartz to alluvial plains
Till beds of sand compress to rock
For waves to grind to grains.

Everyday the world must change
As elements all rearrange
And bone like rock be worn to dust
Then blown to somewhere else it must.

And though great mountains wear to grains
The Now wherein things change remains.

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