Sand flats and salt bush

mean nothing to us

yet in this sparseness

I marvel at the repetition

the clinging on

and the way I manufacture

kindness in needle bushes

parasols against the sun

Some days I could get used to

leaving tracks like wild dogs

an emu and his

chicks, a stumpy or a snake

Once I sailed Cooper Creek

on a flatbed ferry

this time I blow the top layer

off the gibber plain

in a truck         But we have arrived!

invading homes of spitfire birds

the intrigue of a lizard slide

At dusk jibber-jabber

up and down a tonal ladder

Always the urgency of a parrot

Gnats have started their

corroboree in a column of sunshine

before switching down

while a black snake effortlessly

lifts himself from the neck

of the gas bottle like a symbol

After lines by Brian Turner

They lived on the flats of Nhill

the old woman will tell you

She’s seen the eyes of shop fronts

glaze over,

vacant on the day we drove through

in our hybrid cars in matched silence

She swears on her mother’s grave

young wheat turned grey soil green

silos cracked with grain in good years

flowing over in low mountain ranges

tarped in white canvas, kept dry

She’s seen the creek run wild,

then collapse again

And she says   Let me tell you how we lived

How the dead stay alive in the mind

Like today when a Salvos’ mannequin stands

with hands on hips under a beach umbrella

in the main street

Pyramids of dead men’s clothes

brush the clouds     dusty colours saturated

by a rare shower    limbs spilling over the sides
This is my town, the old woman says

This is her man and his John Deere

Look!        Everything for sale

After the meal     they sit together     at the table.

Striations of tomato sauce     cross their plates

showing the pathways     of their chips.

His reading glasses sit cross-legged     on the scrubbed wood.

In the lenses the reflection     of his face     is much smaller

than his actual face     the way she knows she holds      only the smallest

image of him     in her mind     never really knowing

who he is     who she is     where they stop

where the outside     begins.

She touches the back of his hand     where the star at the centre

of their universe has touched it     wrinkling and freckling

leaving its mark.     He knots his fingers     around hers.

Behind him     the kitchen door     is open.

An earlier rain has pixelated     the flyscreen     making a pattern

like a calendar     with some of the days     blocked in.

From outside     comes the racket of crickets

sawing through     the evening’s minutes

splitting them into     their infinite parts.

She lets go     his fingers     and watches

her hands     move in     around her cup

which is full of tea.     She blows down on it

so that the surface     coruscates into miniature     waves that break

against the inside edges     and move back to the centre     and she thinks

of the sound-waves     of the crickets     moving the hammer and anvil

in her ear     sending their song     to her brain     the way the outside

acts upon us     all the little     physical touches     so that we carry

the universe     in our skin     in our tiniest     of bones.

Wind blows through     the flyscreen     popping empty

some of the squares of water     changing the pattern.

She feels the rush of it     the sky moving in     around her

her self     becoming     part of it. Soon     she’ll get up     clear the table

but first she stops     to pay attention:      pigeons’ feet prattling

on the tin roof     blowflies elipsing     the porchlight like planets.

Even each of the spaces     between     the blades of grass     in the lawn

is alive with something:     beetles and grubs     seeds and roots

all     the little things     doing their work.     And what is her work?

Maybe it’s just to listen    to hold in her mind     the fraction of reality

that she can understand.     She can’t remember     what else she thought      she needed

but she knows now     this is all there is.     The myriad fragments of the world.

It is enough.

Mournful in the mulga and mallee, long-noted

longing, then a skip of hot jazz through the Galilee

Terrestrial presence, not hiding, not seen

the woodland becomes its own language

olive-bronze, metallic sheen, cream buff-bellied,

eyes tiny coins of ebony, white brow and

the black

stripe

coal, night

that steals the domed nest

a planetarium, deep space

beneath which all life stirs (feathered, beaked)

where a dark egg is laid in the heart

When I first arrived I let men spray poisons and I lived alone.

Something called time did something like pass and just as I became ready for

company, the toxins wore thin and evaporated.

The surfaces

once again became organic

trailing with smells, with food, with my five fingers of I didn’t even know what.

Over the years, as the wood rotted and the water leaked and the cracks appeared, ants

built pheromone freeways extending all the way from their somewhere nests into my

kitchen and life. I watched them and tried not to harm them.

An ant expert who keeps ants in a Tupperware container in a lab said she doesn’t have

empathy for ants because they “don’t get discouraged or care”, but I do:

have empathy, get discouraged, care.

The queen, an ovary machine, sits in the nest laying eggs.

Virgin queens of formicidae fly outside my field of vision; whole cities are

constructed, communist colonies flourish, attended by workers, soldiers and drones.

The commensal, parasitic, mimetic swarm rises, the kingdom.

Animalia, arthropoda, insecta, hymenoptera, apocrita, vespoidea.

The morphology: elbowed antennae, exoskeleton.

They have no lungs you know.

Lungless, oxygen passes through spiracles.

All but blind, their eyes of tiny lenses — three atop the head — do not, I’m told,

see me bent down in study.

The expert calls them “incompetent”, marvels

at how “mindless individuals collectively can do so much”, yet even she cannot deny

the intrigue and pathos of one ant carrying the carcass of a larger ant on its back,

laboriously transporting the corpse, to eat, to mourn, to mystery.

What emerges from this emergence and who are we to say?

King Solomon instructed, “Look to the ants, consider her ways and be wise”.

Work together, yes?

See what hive mind holy order takes shape when we forget ourselves.

See what great works create when we are small, become ourselves.

Ants have no corporations, no stock markets, no matchstick factories crammed with

brown bodies earning less in a month than what I ate for lunch.

They’re working with the tide, working with the weather, working with the light, with

the drop of juice from a peach.

The problem was that I was killing them. I tried not to, but

the numbers overwhelmed me. They

found the bin so I moved it. I left no food out and washed the dishes,

but still they came in scattered fews or marching columns or frantic dozens and an

inadvertent plate would land on one, or

I’d notice too late the bodies swimming in a tiny pool of sink water.

I rescued those I could, in elaborate operations of relocations balanced on the flashing

silver of a clean butter knife, but the casualities were many and I grieved every one.

For their own good,

to stem the kamikaze flow,

I summoned a handyman to block up the cracks

they filed in and out of.

Widely held to be the most successful species on the planet,

with territories everywhere but Antarctica, ants

farm fight garden have generals organize wars keep livestock and

slaves nurse young engineer tunnel build design have no boss:

they do all this nearly blind and brainless, drawing diagrams, routes, fortuitous

architecture, information loops.

Traffic, signals,

neighborhoods of pheromones,

look closely at the ants,

at the antness in the whole and

you come to the crucial question: where is the thought?

Where is/the thought?

Where is it ever?

“Buried in the system” says some boffin. “Ants as authors” says another. A Princeton

biologist has an “ant map” of evolutionary errors. The death of the author! “Does the

painting materialize on its own”? Who makes a society?: “Everybody and nobody”,

neurons firing off each other in bodies firing off each other. Finally, a mathematician

weighs in: “No cell in your 100 billion cells in your brain is having a thought, but

together they are.”

Thank you. That is helpful.

The cell that alone is as mindless as an ant makes thought only in concert with the

other cells; the cellular ensemble makes sensation, motivation.

Together the cells are getting dressed to go to work, making love, deciding what to

cook for dinner, perpetrating genocide, adopting a child, writing a novel, playing a

cello, paying the phone bill, meditating, posting a photo to social media, heading to

court.

The ants that individually respond mindlessly to a chemical united build a nest. And

then there are equations outside of math. Each ant, like a cell, unable to think,

together make thoughts in action, make vibrating scents/sense, make super circuitries

like the Internet, deep in the earth, in my kitchen walls.

“Who conducts?” someone asks.

Wrong question.

“What is consciousness?” asks another. Listen: they exist.

Six legs attached to mesosoma, with a hooked claw at the end of each leg; nuptial

flight; larvae; pupa; sound; touch; pheromonian orchestra conducted with antennae.

“A crushed ant emits an alarm pheromone that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy

and attracts more ants from further away.”

Thriving in biomass, mutualistic presence making sounds by stridulation. “Some ant

species use ‘propaganda pheromones’ to confuse enemy ants, causing them to fight

among themselves.” What, then, is the right question, or are there already too many

questions for such obvious answers?

So the handyman comes to plug up holes and cracks.

Stomps in heavy-limbed and hard-done-by, all

resentful niceness like cheap cologne splashed over a stench,

talks to his apprentice like shit.

The apprentice takes it, wears it, hovers covered in the shame, holds in his pain, his

anger, his accent, because he might not feel he has the option to say “I quit” in his

language, and the handyman looks at me exasperated and says, “So, you want the

cracks plugged up. It’s an old window. Why bother?”

Because of the ants, I say; I want them to stop getting in so I don’t accidently kill

them. He starts filling up holes and cracks and then he turns to me, his face a pall of

contempt and spits, “Why don’t you just use some spray? They’re only ants!”

I don’t have the time and energy to explain, cause often cells outside me form a

thought I cannot change; I look him in his wide sure eye and say: because I like them.

He shakes his head and sighs, goes back to his work.

“Buried in the system”, I think — my cells, collectively, think.

“Who conducts?”

I have the answer, I long to tell him.

I have the answer: they want to live.

On the track, with crisp cracks at birdcall,

chainsaw and the rewind of a mechanical

shutter, the lyrebird whips and whirls close

by without pause. Our children collect stones.

The gums give way to floored trunks covered

in moss, thick enough to hide your hand, even

on boulders near the rich ferns by this creek.

Chartreuse and char-grey, the air water-heavy.

To have time to know the way light enlivens

texture, with you summing up the rocks and soil,

narrating the eras; perhaps this is where we’ll

get to one day when they’ve gone. Or to linger

and let this world lie inside somewhere. Right

now the children scamper for their game. Soon

they’ll be hungry, their lungs full of mountain air.

Already the little one is asleep on your back.

Swainsona formosa

There, above the gibbers and crusty

earth, the rise of red on a wash

of green—red flags, red keels, the dark

lustrous boss in between, ready for birds,

ready to seed for the long odds of summer;

florid David among the arid Goliath.

I’ll grow you here, in the newly parched,

seed you in a bed of dry bark and creek

sand. To course rampant down my brick

walls, to carry the cool stars of a desert

night, the light swamping a red-ochre range,

and the optimism you ride, on a whiff of rain.

River

A considerable natural stream of water

flowing in a definite course, usually into

the sea.

Stealthily the river snakes

a passage between grains

of desert sand beneath river gums

frugal with treasure

whispering comfort

to tree roots underground. Refusing

to spill into bright air

it surfaces in caves

under overhanging rocks

guarded

by serpents.

Lake

 A body of water of considerable size,

surrounded by land.

The lakebed stretches wide

iced with salt

revealing in sand hills eroded by wind

the bones of history.

The sun, just-blown glass, rises

over bear-fur mountains. Flint, steel,

brass, and copper filament mountains.

His bed on the alkali flats warms.

This is the day her bicycle will be stolen

and her miniskirt will be gold chiffon;

this is the day her camping stove will melt

the hem from below, as she lights a firecracker.

Was the alkali dust here filigreed

so finely by rattlesnake drifts, or the fingertips

of the little wan girl

he saw, yesterday, wearing her father’s—or her

brother’s—boots like bear feet

or anvils—or has he, perhaps, slept lightly

and heavily enough to be the artist?

It would explain his bloodied fingers.

Petrified fern leaf inside the envelope

in his front left pocket, from Montana,

which he has half a mind to eat. Which

Nevadan ghost town was it where an ounce

of gold once bought a loaf of bread, a straight razor shave?

This is the day he will learn.

Golden Ash: Fraxinus excelsior ‘Aurea’

Under the arms of the silver birch I find another diminutive forest

of golden ash seedlings, a spreading bonsai under-storey, taken root.

I pull them out, one after the other, feeling the stem’s wiry strength,

the moment of grip before release, how life hangs on. They colonise

all the corners of the garden, any foothold they can find purchase.

Every few weeks there are more miniature plantations, another crop

hidden under seaside daisies or by the acanthus clump. Only since

the mother tree came down, never before. How do they know to sprout?

What sets them ticking? It was not the tree’s fault that the neighbour’s

drain masqueraded as underground watercourse, pulling the roots irresistibly.

Fault or not, the tree was felled. Not how they used to bring trees down –

battle with a worthy adversary, the necessity of brute strength then

the dreadful glory of an almighty crash, the sound ringing out through

the forest – a last post.  But, here, this was piecemeal dismemberment

with no honour in it. I could hardly watch. The night before the loppers

arrived I went out for farewell, for warning, as if the tree could suck

it’s life force back into the earth somehow, protect itself from the

chainsaw’s teeth. I put my palms to the bark, rested my forehead

against strength. Acquiescence to the inevitable but I grieved for the

grandeur of the tree, gift of a cool summer canopy, arabesque

of arms in winter, the palette of colours its leaves painted on the

autumn sky. Now its offspring are charged with the challenge of life.

It’s been months; still they slip their periscopes through the soil and

when no-one is looking, triumphant, they unfurl another green banner.

the old whaling station

stood here

wasted

away

now

sand

slightly

thicker

blood

or whale blubber

ghost whales

swim offshore

songs of harpoons

pikes and rifles

remember

a crimson ocean

picture

a whale carcass

on a trolley

&

rows of workers’ cars

lined up

in a sandy carpark

(i)

He sees concrete pylons set like giants’ bones

in Wagners’ yard as the train glides forward.

These carboniferous fossils will be transplanted

into flyovers and urban bypasses, strengthening

the new body’s industrial backbone. Perhaps a

coal port terminal to cough up the country’s lungs.

Peeling paint bulges, green cysts dot sound

barriers where teenage identity has been deleted.

Where there should be striped marsh frogs

are megafauna effigies of striped marsh frogs

clinging to a bus shelter’s wet mass. The tips

of their fingers magnified as defibrillator pads.

Orangemen repair railway bridges, their hands

explain how this is done in a secret sign language

reserved for the hard hat tribe. Flattened,

nineteenth century brickwork is smothered

by cement’s grey butter. Iron will outlive most

of us. Stenciled honeyeaters perch on a rock cutting.

Here I am

In my state of the art, cutting edge, fully computerised, titanium alloy, hermetically sealed ship,

surfing the solar winds.

Above me, the hard hot points of a million stars,

below me, a mottled blue opal.

I remember the sting of salt in my face as I surfed the ocean waves at

Manly Beach, Bells Beach, Byron Bay,

as I sailed the reef from Whitsundays to Cape Tribulation,

from Cairns, to Fiji, to Samoa, to Niue, to Tonga,

hopping from island to island,

the deep dark blue lapping my fragile wooden craft,

made with my own hands.

Alone in a blue desert.  Never lonely. There is always life in the desert.

Seagulls screeched near land,

flying fish flipped,

dolphins purled in my wake,

their bucking and leaping an echo of my own boat’s cresting the waves.

I remember storms –

the sky, a vast bruise pressing down,

the sea  like lead,  like pewter,  like mercury, like quicksilver,

riding those monstrous waves like a bucking bronco,

my little boat bending and flexing but never breaking.

I remember the sun after the storm, the rosy welcome dawn!

The sky tear-stained like the face of my lover after a quarrel,

the sea was a mirror,

my boat was a skate over ice.

If I step outside of my new, state of the art, cutting edge, fully computerised, titanium alloy, hermetically sealed ship,

I will be the only thing alive in the hell of infinite night.

No little green men; no dripping fangs; no space teddy bears.

This is no desert, it’s a void.

I remember diving off  Broome,

a whale shark, awesome, stupendous, colossal,

Leviathan itself.

Swimming beside its bulk, I stretched out my hand,

found the true meaning of sharkskin.

It opened its maw, ready to swallow the universe.

I know how Jonah felt, when invited to enter the belly of the beast.

The monsters of the deep are the only true aliens.

Blue, the only colour visible from space.

from “at Ålvik”

the weather has come

after only a season

the weather is back

there’s a mood now

I think it’s the weather

the day has lost an hour and more

hours vanish if you think of them

here’s the whole blond town

procession with wheelchair too

out for the weather and with it and in

the man with the pipe is raking his leaves

he’s a little factory – wind has his whiff away

one window open and the weather’s in

can’t chase it out like summer’s fly

of course the weather’s how we’re here

light a lamp and wait for snow

turf over our heads and huddled with oven

we dreamt everything up for the weather

crawl under the covers – it’s gone

and over the weather

all up above

there are the stars for everlasting

there’s the deep round blue

every bird here sings of the weather

what else is there to say?

As long as I stay invisible, I am everything

you don’t know.  A casual glance won’t unpick

my lock – this glass case of bramble stalks,

prickly, soaked.  I’m an illusionist, arrow

and cross-bow, plant or insect, a specialist

at playing dead.  Woody in winter, independent,

I strew my fatherless eggs disguised as seeds

on the leaves beneath me.  All my girls

are silk, small preparatory sketches.  Blind

to night and day, they twitch and skitter

slowly, practise disappearing.  I’ve lost

a leg, as if I were growing into my own

brittle pretence.  The longer you look,

the more you’ll see – this whole case transparent,

crawling with what you’re certain can’t be phantoms.

throbs in beauty.

I bring it nothing, just

what it wanted for Christmas.

The island cares, sometimes

fails miserably stealing from itself.

Beaten up, its fists are raw from self-harm.

Then it wakes up naked & whole again.

This place is old but has danced all night.

It forgives the minor scars.

Liturgies of passion. 200 homes, more stories.

Each is a revelation, set aside for a moment.

The humility of radiance, a casual pillage

from our favourite kookaburra, then a cup of tea.