the wind is blowing again

ash on dead grass

a dry invasion, portent

species gone wrong

tall, ugly, denying fact

floating on every ocean

littering the sky, the earth writhes

an era of annihilation

sating hunger at the expense

of other species: bird, reptile, insect

a continuum the plants didn’t predict

harvesting carbon dioxide

making loam

red moon

blood moon

we thought they could be gentle

they could, they weren’t

clumsy, angry, stupid

it was unexpected

shifting the ecosystem

picking flea beetles

from dying, laced up leaves

setting fire for spite

dying for fun

we loved them we loved

them, we waited for carbon

symbiosis, the bloom

the flowering

but they were

uncultured, too fast

too rough, and we were

too soft.

Dangle

Tempting as shrivelled apples

I would taste but my tongue

Would parch like dried rivers

Breaking open fissures

That would stop even cane-toads

In their leaping/marching tracks.

Is it cassowary plums that lay

As blue/grey eggs on the ground?

Will we see crocodiles

Break the skin of the Daintree river

As ferry cables past?

The forest rains,

Leaves funnelling drops

Into basket ferns; stagnant elkhorns;

The strangler fig’s embrace

Strangling day, and the last glow

Of yellow-bellied sunbirds.

I split quandong on my lips

Gauge narrow tracks

That pitch between plantations

Sea will belt its rhythm

On shattered coral sands;

Wash up box jellyfish

And waste itself on the spill

Of Mount Formartine granite

Winding sediment into the waves.

On country is the time to talk of these things.

“Plants have their stories too” Auntie told me, “lots of them.

They tell us what’s happening, and we know then, straight away;

When the bloodwood’s in flower the possums are healthy

And aretharre blows when the tea tree blooms.

Once that sick-wind comes, then it’s watch out for snakes

And prickly wattle blossom shows the kangaroos are fat.

Stories like that we get from plants”.

Back through town, I mark the trees

That grace the streets with their ardent purple show.

“When the jacaranda’s out” the old lady replied –

No trace of tease or that well-known cheeky grin –

“We know the children are sitting for their exams

And all the tax returns are in”.

There’s no morning on that slope, east

against the day, all granite’s flat

tree-crotchets of staccato in the dim.

One abuts a boulder; trunk slim

bark reptile-tight, a sinew strained

between the gristly eucalypts.

And far from grey! A crown

of lusty lime, quill-tipped

finger kisses with each waft.

Amid the arid, olive gums, this teen

in green looks on across the hollow

to the light, where vast-limbed

Grandmother stands squat

clinched and struck, her Moses

staff into the deep, cleaved

through stone. Alone, folioles drop

in copper clatter, gnarled arms retreat

with April’s moisture from the slope.

In language of the ages

– quartz-sap, tap-root, lace-bark –

She’s sending messages

by lyre bird, fungi filament

quoll, nomadic Silvereye

Rosella, Figbird, Oriole.

Maybe by that slate-dark Euro

tip-toed, tail in tripod then

languorous beneath the leaves

or on some ancient breeze;

a millennial shimmer, rainforest

glimmer. God’s prophet

of vestal woodlands, sounding

through the lipped abyss and

down to the scourging sea.

6

Stunt to spare surfaces like a local norm, won’t dress the given shadow     let nature’s other side take to the etiolation, its converse universal network until sheer plant filament stretches inclusion to its outright

As a fox will fathom a forest from fierce fastenings, as such already within paddings of horizon, exposure to no further insistence     drag-marks haven’t shifted but transfer alliance, motion of what needed to prove it probed

trees are plants
to the event, other-
flanked without
derision, coastal
where it drains on
infinite distance

ask trees for their
belonging-towards
as birds take off
from leaf before branch,
the immediate quake

Multiscalar then gusted onto the shell of trees     woodland mesh unruffled by what it doesn’t have (what it hardened) being what it does     stagnant but lignant enough to connect to gift reserve

Arboreal disposition (prevalent woodland) doesn’t need to disparage other sides of gift (little grafted as such) since no prime materials are simply for loan

8

Greennesses facing semi-soluble flow, blanker side tidal only at the roots     while leaves surge up their summit pools, woodland precipice

No expense of reserve that couldn’t arise nakedly as world     a leaf garners any counter-slide until naturals by gift breathe their one other side

pale periphery
in trust of
prominent tree,
one other spring
set back

porously relays
through a
brittle filter its
unlosables,
reducibles

Trees alive, resolves well past their parkland     only such fugitive bands might have thinned enough     nature’s further side a rail to its adjunct once again

Overtaking green with unseen array and hold     nature reserves its lessers for a rarer take which won’t be slighted, the weather-side of gift

11

A wood’s gone trailing coned from root     unspurned but waiting for its nether face among the post-naturals

Riven from trees their nature’s other speed, unhesitant root     where a spinney troops to communion, heavy with not yet ventured calluses

nature’s rind
lifts off
two-sided
necessities

or a collision
of pine opens
like a cone
missing its
curb

routines of
gift owing
the new hand-
icap of prayer,
lenient to
leaf among the
bending co-
consternations

Blurted slipways unbinding but slackening differentially through forest     against such trunkage ontological invasion is double-sanded, root-rubble provided

Rucks raggedly across the other side of nature     porous externals in poorer folds deprived of any provisional opposition to gift

When I first heard your name

uttered by farmers and clearers

chopping out tracts

of our grandfather’s Western Woodlands

I could not fathom

origins of your contorted title

for I thought more of penetrating

steel tools, drilling

in the grasp of carpenters.

But then was shown among

blackbutts and casuarinas

your manic twisting green trunks.

What tortures twirled these mallees?

Was it suffering salinity

or surviving inland biospheres

here in these arid parts?

Perhaps, in youth, you gimlets blindly

followed progress of the blazing sun

circling the sky each day from the east,

your craning necks winding your trunks?

Otherwise, like the rest of the trees

you would grow straight and tall

only branching out to provide roots

with a private patch of shade.

Gimlet, we stand respectfully to salute

you as a worshipful dervish

of such semi-desert lands,

whirling with this spinning earth!

June, 2018

(feral)

just here / between creek & river / the track a swampy confusion /  green vines & broad leaves /

air sticky thick / a green you have to wipe off your skin / a ghetto of exotics / escaped from a

suburban captivity

(green)

they float out on the water reaching for us

ducks avoid the violent mess of green

a sudden movement suggests a fifties horror movie

i wait but the monster moves too slowly

for my camera.

(marketing)

the future is unnaturally green with possibilities

bulging with cliches & marketing slogans

biofuels & energy drinks & politicians

denying the inevitable

Touching each other they think themselves old.

Fingers on temples, gazes overlapping.

Perhaps it’s what fingers will bear

and tendons will lose to make them exist.

But today they were a space trembling neither with peace nor conflict.

They were the idea of a flower opened-up sterile.

They say we get old so we can know about living

they say we’ll die so we can push an idea of peace or conflict

to pull real flowers from branches to sun.

Translated from a poem by Maria Borio:

Si pensano vecchi toccandosi.

Le dita sulle tempie, gli sguardi che coincidono.

Forse è quello che sopporteranno le dita

e che i tendini perderanno a farli esistere.

Ma oggi erano spazio che trema senza pace né lotta.

Erano l‘idea di un fiore aperto e sterile.

Dicono invecchiamo per sapere di vivere

dicono moriremo per spingere un’idea di pace o lotta

a tirare al sole fiori veri dai rami.

Last night the trees loved each other like Indians: podocarp and ulmo, Patagonian oak

and hualle, tineo and litchi, knot to knot, loved each other

so lovingly, Chilean acorn trees

browned each other’s bark, so many coigües

kissed each other’s roots and beards and new sprouts,

until love awoke

in the birds that had been lulled to sleep

by the feathers of their

own trilling loves.

Correspondingly, the huinca shoots

lovingly buried each other, and the chola

waters opened their luminous watershed, naming

each other sip by sip, all alone and telling each other: good waters, lovely

waters, oh but we have been violated, Rahue waters,

weeping swallow, flowery, midwifing and still happy,

streams hopping like hares

over the mountains and hills.

And eared doves were soon united

by the same love,

the Inallaos’ green

springs, the Huaiquipáns’ fierce

honeys, the Llanquilefs’ swift

eyes, the breasts of the Relequeos’

thrush, the brown hairs of the Huilitraros’

soapbark tree, the Paillamanques’

new raulí beeches.

Huilliche love, last night they loved more

in the middle of the chola grove, under the

perpetual pomegranate Indian sky,

they loved each other, piled up

like water fillies and like lit anchimallén fireballs, in the fragrant

dawn they loved each other,

sweetening the seed just

like clay pots filled with muday.

Translated by Cynthia Steele

Huilliche: the southern portion of the Mapuche Indigenous people of Chile

Rahue: a river in the Los Lagos region of Chile; in its middle course, it flows through the city of Osorno

huinca: name given by the Huilliches to any outsider to their people, especially an enemy

Inallao, Huaiquipán, Llanquilef and Huilitraro: Mapuche last names and lineages

Paillamanque: Lonko Anselmo Paillamanque (d. 2012) was a Huilliche leader who played a key role in creating a network of indigenous parks and in recuperating Mapuche territory, culture and identity

chola: a somewhat derogatory term for mixed-blood castes in the Spanish Empire

anchimallén: mythical Huilliche creatures that take the form of small children and that can transform themselves into flying fireballs, emitting bright light

muday: a fermented drink made of macerated wheat

Modesty on

the individual level

nevertheless it’s still

self-assertion

a choral mass

by virtue of each

feeble & reedy voice

joined to the next

and then it soars

blood-stemmed

arterial in reach

along every edge

you choose to travel

and some you don’t

ubiquitous at this

time of year but not

to be overlooked

just because slight,

pink & delicate,

underestimate at

your peril this tool

of puck or sprite

whose whole leaf

one day turns florid

kept out of the house

for its plain alias:

death come quickly.

Commonplace,

held under

anyone’s chin,

though unrevealing

of preference,

merely transferring gloss,

hot lustre

nothing but mirror

a proffered face

in multiple –

so many the same on offer!

I could never wear yellow like this,

my undertone cool,

distorting to jaundice

thus I keep distance,

but recognise

an intimacy nearly sisterly,

hermaphrodite

with guidelines built in,

for luring to pit,

to spot,

to nectary –

or you can poultice it,

bring up your red,

your blood,

relieve

the pounding head, the tooth,

curing your ache to the root.

Potent as spears, black-boys  rise sentinel

after the fire has passed

New life sprouts along the blackened stem

A spray of green circles the base   spins wild

as grass skirts on young men dancing

Initiation Ceremony

They learn the secret value of Gul-gad-ya

the power in each spike and root

A magic resin stronger than string

holds spear tip to shaft

cements a stone axe to the hilt

Brave Gadigal men hold the knowledge

earn their place as hunters

Make a draft from crushed flowers

their manhood stored in heady wine

maturing with age

Trophy parts.

The dismembered:

thud-echoes to

amber litter to

vanished

bright, curved hands, tumbling bright

cleaved loose from timber:

limb

by limb

milled,

framing up the south-east corner

and beyond.

Rosenstengel’s pin-up

each torso measured twice,

sawn and fashioned into function:

weighing down

the curled-up corners

of hot-box bedrooms

clinging steadfast

to dwellings of timber and tin

window joinery and panels.

Grevillea robusta

her resilience, a force

across drought seasons:

holding fast

to loam and basalt

decades before legislators

slowed axes

growing quietly,

bearing relaxed thicknesses

of honey coils,

ready for bees.

Beyond a firebreak,

appraised

by new craftsmen

oceans distant

in Larrivee’s workshops

the length of her body

worked carefully

to fine, fluid

acoustic shells:

strummed.