and the quicksilver pulse of roach or rudd

and these circles they riffle on the pool

and the jack pike passing under that spooks them

reminds me of when we were here in winter

 

how a hairline crack in the ice shook us

how we froze as water scuttled our shoes

how the reeds we rushed to are now further out

and how a mind is a drift of roots

 

and nothing sits passive in its place

by the time they woke

the sun was gone

 

night had fallen

in love with itself

 

they were breathing dust

and hoarding numbers

 

be quiet

i already told you

 

they will

not survive

Her eyes are her grandmother’s

opioid blue

—quells storms

the willy willy                 she leaves tranquillity in her wake

 

Small hands conduct the hot silence

no alpine butterfly can resist

her fingers     wet from the spring

            —a tangerine bracelet

 

Gravelly gaze                her burning precipice

to walk the crosscut saw

is to leave behind new skin

& old

                       

watershed                     deluge

in her sweet skin

rain                  cloistered heat           

&  squall

 

a generation is a river bank

    no stock cross her waters

 

My daughter the debbil debbil

My daughter the stream

The way grounds become tired

of being told or dreamt

 

and weeds, from the work

of growing unattended, unregarded

 

they’re ordinary, half-wild

and won’t be stopped easily

 

by the great mutants

the pests of language

 

attached and rootless in

the same unwelcome

 

beyond mirrors or concepts

meeting places

 

flowering and simply kidding

about being flowers

 

being sneaky and queer within

and beyond spaces

 

a bit part, a wall, a crack

broken field, a darkness

 

paths not quite flagrant

defiant and silly

 

a bitterness in fresh forms

taking and straying

Oparure Road, Waitomo

 

Not quite stubble, more the plucked flesh of fowl,

after the maize harvest, cut to the grain, close cropped

paddocks. An April sun draws shadows across the land,

 

velvety black, thick as sump-oil, the air glass bright,

though filtered as if the light voltage had dimmed, but

nothing as definite as that, except for the sliding

 

partitions that are invisible, so that the plucked flesh

has become crew-cut paddock, and barely a minute gone.

The scene slipping by seemingly so ancient every second

 

caught up in an eternity of stillness, and the light that

lacquers the surface of everything, shiny as an iridescent

backed beetle on line-after-line of maize stubble, in

 

the slow and wondrous tilt of the earth, barely audible

yet felt—each valley holds its own set of mediaeval ruins,

as if one fortified town had fallen one after the other,

 

reduced to foundations of stacked limestone, half buried,

boulders strewn over hillsides, loosed from some trebuchet;

the violence long since retreated back to the underworld.

In memory of Judith Wright

 

Persistent rain and wind gusts downed

branches, whole trees, electricity fees,

returned a wood fire and candlelight

 

to prominence. The fire, like passion,

brought warmth to the room. Candle-

light, like memory, gave enough light

 

to write on the windfalls of that winter

when her eyes became readers with

glasses. Resting on her ears, the glasses’

 

arms heard of drifting and dendrite

years — its leaves of envy, animosity,

acuity, amity, tapping on her window

 

on days of denouement or how so.

Is she looking at a windfall kept

for the fire, or seeing a winter’s wrap,

 

would she dwell on convex and

concave* lenses, place a magnifying

glass on the map staring at her

 

and write on tracts of eucalyptus

and pine trees, spinifex and ivy,

discover place and pith?

Theoretically at work, I have slacked off

to do my duty, noting the antic motions of the Topknot Pigeons,

the Catbird’s tinking,

and the Carabeens with their lofty wooden sails,

and capturing for the nth time

the cowled flowers of the sweet-smelling Cunjevoi

in artless photos that will die with my hard drive,

never to see the light of day, but which I take

anyway, just for the gesture.

 

Through the deep mysterious forest

tourists are charging like steam-trains,

trailing puffs of deodorant and conversationally

yelling at the tops of their voices.  Though they do not see

me, lurking in the shadow of a plank buttress,

or the million year old beings quietly eating lunch, we are all of us

engaged on the same project, our one duty to worship

the life we didn’t ask for or deserve.

“Was Gold blind

to have thought

it would find its light

in the Iris of mother Ghana?”

 

I pity the bars after it

if only, there would be any

to restore its Kingly pride.

 

Cocoa did itself

by being inquisitive

to have come from Fernandopo

by not opting to be slaved

to marry the palm trees of Jericho.

 

I hate why it caught the eye of Tetteh Quarshie

or, were you smuggled unduly?

For,

I pity you on a land of capsid bugs.

 

Was timber deaf

to the robust sounds of the chain saw?

Had you not heard of the parks in harbor country?

 

I pity your death,

For you would have been a spot for some birds

and a serenity of lush strings for lovers.

 

Hey rivers!

“Couldn’t you have waned as vapour

to deploy an array of ways to explore you?”

“Don’t you know you are the epicenter

around which much of humanity lives and thrives?”

 

From the Nile in Africa to the Ganges in India

From the Cano Cristales to the Danube in Europe

From the Zambezi to the Rio Negro of South America

whose color looks like a darkly brewed tea,

 

I pity our godly Birim, Tano, Pra and Densu,

for losing that visual feast of memories

to this sin of galamsey and excreted human waste.

 

Agoo!

To be continued is an excuse

to flee from this poem

in this un-chiefly land

of twisted tongues

where our Oil find is a curse

in a meeting of Spiders.

“Mutton birds or short-tailed shearwaters are in the middle of an annual migration from Siberia to the south east coast of Australia to breed. But this year, many of them are not making the distance,” ABC Bush Telegraph (14 November 2013)

 

Pushing through the wind, spirit finds weather.

Sea steeping with panic at too much sky.

Unfeasted, the mutton birds deck the beach

rioting among trunks of kelp. Starved at

the end-point of love, their climatic passage

beats out high Siberian drama. We are all gulags

aren’t we?    Migratory cycles

of need, the energy and failure of the body.

Listening only when the expected comes unstuck,

deaf to the incoming tides. You reverse all charge,

rehearsing calm over the day’s ragged events,

a finetuned lament of self, adagio mia down the phone line.

Feathers pile thick on the shore, some of them mine

although I fail to recognise them.

Out-moulted passion, pastoral gifts of the said.

As are those birds, so are you to me.

I am not an ocean narrative. My feet

are fingernail-soft, long hair

and wide gaze tangledrawn

to shifting tides that rip

and rail against the sand.

 

Sea-horse, island-bound

my carousel horizon

draws shipwrecks, lung

foam. Desperation echoes,

rebounds my own expulsion.

 

Sand and salt forced familiar,

my tongue grows stern

on sea-grass. Thickening fog

bars guests who would wring

copper or coal from our bodies.

 

Weedy morass, short-stumping

this newbred hide grips

all Atlantic spray. Pendent swing

of ice shies fetlocks upon

the slopes. Agency through exile.

 

We are our own.

Storm plains flex narrow dunes

to claim marrow. Cold bones

sink to sea, where we need

no hand to steer us home.

underwater life size sculptures by Jason de Caires Taylor, near Cancun off the coast of Mexico

 

… an up-stir

shoots sand quick to slow sideways

as a grey stingray trails free of a dust-like cloud;

fluting cream underwings it flies away

low through the aged-blue ocean

soft-shadowing the newly reefed

vertical beings of deeper shades

as if here their height had yesterdays.

Sun shrapnels leisurely

through skylights of wave and wash

floating fragments down

dart-dappling waiting upturned faces

unaware

gathered they share shallow warmth

on sculptured flesh

and yet   stone-alone

obsessed only with the act of drowning

in bliss – lips smiling eyes closed.

Now a cello growls;

vowels round all four hundred figures

its breath skimming

intimate as sharks’ silk circling newcomers –

a rolled-brim knit-hated girl lollypop-cheeked

grins double-gripping a coins-unspent handbag;

a woman bare-breasted drape-hipped

arms cradling her belly

offers light’s wisdom to her near born;

a man keeling head up leaning back on his heels

arms wide palms open offers thanks

as if in a lightening-blue field of drought breaking;

a  nun with Please for a mouth

her face shadow-wrinkles in no other prayer;

a young man head-scarfed coral-knotted

hands at work but suddenly paused

senses love about his neck;

a man chin-relaxed blowing fish silver

bubbles mute sings ahhhh hymns;

a small curly crowned boy head down

sleeps sitting up without rippling fins;

a man arms crossed shields his face

from yet another promise soon to darken.

Shoals straining through the plankton melody

nibble from an English lady’s scarf

from a Buddhist’s large earlobe’s algae

from a mother’s orange sway-growing coat

from a hunched Chinaman’s toes.

And while fish of colours and stripes circumnavigate

feeding off the immortalised – all are unaware

souvenir hunters are dropping

black as frogs

snorkelling

against the light.

we made pleasure our guide, an ideal

excitement amid the pedants and perfection of delicate elders

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

 

we found a savage torpor

habit gratifying those masters of rustic conversation, who expressed their birthright

while we made their pleasure our guide, an ideal

 

divination for self-abandoning minds

playing parlour games with the lower harmonies of scholars sharing trademarks

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

 

the enragements egalitarian, law and benediction

rational as museums and causing intolerable disgust, we were (necessarily)

made for pleasure, guided toward an ideal

 

facsimile of elegance, the vanities of gentlemen

cadent in oversmiling and transfigurative language, commonly violent

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

 

operative manners are a shortcut to rank

while nature germinates huge forms, visible companions within our empire of gourmands

pleasure is our guide, an ideal

in the heirloom of boredom’s salon

(i)

 

They say it’s the length of Japan, if that group

Of home islands was stretched out beside the

Queensland coastline; a great lung of Poseidon’s

Branching from the continent’s spine of white

Beach, exhaling microscopic spores into the sea’s

Vast cavity. Atlantean sunk beneath the Pacific

Ocean’s mythic blue abyss, the living tissue is

Larger than Cook’s England, as legendary as

Arthur’s Albion & as treacherous as Lyonesse.

After all, it conspired to hole the Endeavour.

 

 

(ii)

 

Along the brain-corrugated reef, light harpoons

Into water translucent & smooth as Murano glass.

Photons lobotomise; calm waters protect volcanic

Nibs of mountains we call islands. The reef is a

Front gate; white picket fence that keeps out sharks.

You can make out clam bunkers shut fast against

Riptides that blow subterranean wind in their faces.

Here, the wet metamorphosis of garden caterpillars;

Black & yellow striped nudibranchs, inch over polyps

That house migrants in their hundreds of thousands.

 

 

(iii)

 

It is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ultramarine.

A billion generations have crowned its hard teeth

Before we came down from the trees. Here, time

Is measured in the millennia that green turtles have

Spent heaving their way up beaches to deposit their

Golf ball-sized capsules. Or how barnacles cling for

The length of the British Empire’s reign upon a rock.

Such perspectives diminish our enterprise; as bulk oil

Carriers slide carefully around the razor-edged reefs;

Like a sapper probing for mines in the Afghan sand.

 

 

(iv)

 

The rich organ now wears Asian funeral white. Its

Cancer the antithesis of black Western mourning.

The technicolour algae depart from their luxury posts

Like passengers on a stricken liner, leaving ghosts in

The shell. The sea is on a slow boil. The coral is dying

Its emphysemic death as parts of the great lung collapse.

It is falling into the shade of bleached whale bones as

Pieces of brain wash up on the beach; a tidal keepsake.

No need for a glass-bottomed boat to sail the future.

It is a scab on the ocean’s leg that is best left to heal.

Two green parrots wing across a granite sky.

Grief and hope together again, as close as

fingers on a hand, feathers on a wing.

 

They don’t fly straight as arrows do into

a standing target, they are not ammunition

fired out of the sky’s dark mouth. They dip

 

and rise, weaving sinew and delight into

strands of effortless grace, calling as they go.

What do humans know of the calls of birds?

 

But it sounds like liquid pleasure, it sounds

like they laugh and make merry against

the backdrop of the approaching storm.

he’s noticing the guide’s sparkly clips

holding back

her hair we read

as it suits and hangs

 

she is imagining

dismembered bodies of little penguins

caught in the street mural   everyone ignoring

civil and warring

parties tackle the bigger issues

they dismiss fifty years of research

respect for filling the dish

by winding up and moving

forward

 

sandbars submerge under objects in currents

in the end we’re wandering in

and out    with muscle loss

water drop-off

 

electrons in multi-wavelength

energy levels like rungs on a ladder

seeing with radio eyes magnitudes of bubbles

the black hole’s cosmic jet

and still we’re misunder-

standing debt