Winter’ tries to be ‘winter’ but out of kilter

the whipped-up fronts and temperature

fluctuations change emergences and regressions,

and we ride the erratic currents. Orange splintered eye —

oracle we are drawn into, compelled to discuss

as best we know how, dragging a-priori

and dredging precedent in the heady moment

all surface and rapture under the Milky Way,

and those false prophets we dream over,

all those reassurances that our way is the best way.

 

Nonplussed in the encountering moment,

mesmerised or infiltrated by spikes of tissue

formed to replicate all mysteries, not just

tawny frogmouth language and knowledge.

 

And Tracy tells me Len Collard, who is greatly

respected in this house, told Tim that Tim’s totem

is the tawny frogmouth, and today in half-

formed light I note the play of York gum

bark and how camouflage is a condition —

that what we see is what we want to see

which is no great revelation until we

come close to the tawny frogmouth

unhindered, and its bark-like feathers

seem an almost frictionless surface

over which the slightest air current

rolls in perfection.

 

And we hear

how Guru, returning from Jam Tree Gully

after a day mowing, saw another

tawny frogmouth poised under

the rising moon, poised on the front

gatepost of the York house —

below the ancient mountain, Walwalinj —

news compiling between dwellings.

 

Guru also tells us of an echidna

he coaxed off Burgess Siding bridge, guiding

it to the safety of the near bank.

 

This is all

in the sunless aura of the Perth Art Gallery

I visited last week with Tim. We saw

Australian and American nineteenth-

century landscapes wherein the land buckled

under the gaze of the classical subject fled,

and shadows hadn’t yet been let loose

from the palette, quick to curse

the lie of the land.

And when I looked at the fella

staring into his dead fire  in Down On His Luck,

I said, Wait until darkness falls

and the frogmouths test the light, show

another way of pushing back loss.

Is there a lack of beauty in what I write?

Doesn’t the curve of the sky

behave in an appropriate way

in the lines I pin it to?

 

This fantastical imitation

of a tree falling to its grave,

insects clinging to bark, birds

trapped with fledglings in a hollows

 

These are declarations, and beauty

has to find its way out. Those sculptures

of our habitation, our shelter

under that virulent sun.

 

Standing before a masterpiece

that has hung on walls for too long,

I can declare beauty touched and retouched,

fading colours retuning the senses.

Storms rushing down from Wongan Hills —

it’s imperative to clear the gutters,

drain the trap after such a stressed dry.

Even now, it’s forty-three centigrade.

 

So, I go out, and the trap yields only

a trickle, and inland thornbills are anxious,

hopping near my feet, and I know I must

raise the lantern of my blood onto the trestle

 

to empty the gutters of dry accumulations,

under a blunt, brutal sky of prophecy

for all that’s gone down in this region of late,

the fewer trees to take up the slack,

 

the fewer cockatoos to short-circuit a rampant

craving for electricity, the burning-up of our

fossil identity, our ancient selves, our interiors.

And in the anterior world I rise up, and thunder

 

just far enough away to make the act not quite

foolhardy, though as I scoop the leafage

and scatter it to the dirt below, I wonder

if this tempting of lightning — a serial encounter

 

in parallel circuit — might actually be my last.

I hurry the job, removing feathers of five species —

thornbill, ‘28’ parrot, magpie, robin, and weebill —

as I go, plus the down of fledglings I can’t identify,

 

and the air thickens and simmers and the leaves

I hook out are covered in arrays of wasp galls

that have burst open, dried in their moment

of abjection — think the pods from the Alien films,

 

especially as earlier today John Hurt passed away

and the alien that burst from his chest knows its DNA

is willed-on by the greed and corruption of the industrial-

military complex — cometh the man cometh the hour;

 

though far more sensitive analogies are forgotten

with the storm-threat, with thunder short-fused.

I know I must descend before it’s too late, pondering

my relationship with this space on the radar,

 

and all I have seen and all I have talked through

with friends and family, have gestated deep

inside an electrified psyche bamboozled by static,

the dry about to be broken, ruthlessly shattered.

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

Thin-legged wolf spider, oatstraw, orchard grass, hedge mustard,

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

 

Douglas fir, Himalayan blackberry, lemon balm,

mâche, mâche, mâche, mâche,

rockcress, Lover’s moss, chard,

 

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

Thin-legged wolf spider, lemon balm, orchard grass, hedge mustard,

 

Winterbor kale, Siberian kale, Siberian salad kale,

chickweed, sage, crocosmia,

henbit, honeybee, parsley,

cabbage, orchard grass, garlic,

iris, iris, Marsh marigold, cattails, Curly dock,

 

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw,

Thin-legged wolf spider, oatstraw, orchard grass, hedge mustard,

Thin-legged wolf spider, oatstraw, orchard grass, hedge mustard,

Creeping buttercup, Creeping buttercup, dandelion, Creeping buttercup, oatstraw.

Man

enough about straw stick and snow

the odd dog out or about does not con company

for the price of every mouse the country of

a blind few has words first in every renaissance

 

Law

unto the jungle of gravity possession is order and

unwritten averages abiding the long break

Often said, going to Cuba

feels like going back in

time. The cat & I may be

inseparable, but I sure wish

she spoke better Spanish or

 

had prepared an autoresponder

before becoming the primary

host for a wide range of plant

& animal species. She’s so good

at going off of the pick & roll.