BATMAN IN THE BUSH
A new road, magic, over by the creek
One man one day just bulldozed through the bush
A gash of gravel, cool on curling toes;
We skittered then and yelled through tumbled trees
So easy now, but ... it came to us at once,
Our haunted house, the roofless shack up there
Sang dread and tempted, easy now, go on.
Volleyed rocks from space lie rolled and poised
Round Darlington, and some are high as roofs;
I jumped in Batman cape off one of these,
Ballooned a moment, gravity held off,
But dirt came cannoning to make its point
Against my knees in sudden red and brown,
A buckled sack of rags beside the road.
From school we used to pass a swathe of rocks
That strewed a moonscape flat across the hill;
Creviced bones cried sadly once at me,
This place, too, taboo. An evil boy
Would take the littler girls there if he could
For who knew what, our minds uncompassed flew
To galaxies of darkness far away.
One Christmas, eighty miles or so from there,
A boy my age strayed off into the bush;
Footprints shimmered in an oven wind
And tricked the thousand searchers and their dogs.
All week a sough of adult wireless talk.
I died with him this while until they found
The gulley, less than half a day too late;
Me, I sort of grew up in a rush, alive.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly March 1983
then in Wordhord – contemporary Western Australian Poetry 1989
ROCKFIGHT AT MARALUNGA DI LERICI
We were killing lizards with our slingshots
Fausto five, me four and Vito two
Splatter slivers of grey and green quicksilver
On the rockface among the prickly pears.
There’s a shout “Come on quick, a gang from town!”
And five small boys run up in full alarm.
“Nascondi la fionda,’ hide the slingshot,
Says Vito, “we’ll do better chucking rocks.”
They challenged, we choose weapons, which is easy
On a dirt road thick with powdered dust
Countless stones the size of children’s fists.
They have slope and numbers in their favour
Quickly force us back to the pinegrove park
And the first shots rain through flimsy cover
Gathered, hurled back up for both sides see
There are no rocks on the sand-and-needle floor.
“The churchyard!” then a fifty metre gallop
Down steps to a stucco barricade
Walling in a small and sullen chapel;
Soon heaven showers missiles to this sanctum,
One passes by my face as I peer upwards,
For the moment we’re quite safe, but well trapped.
Fausto, Vito, several of us jump down
Through the olive orchard hidden at the side,
Creep in the lee of retaining terrace walls
Up through the trees to the road by the pines.
They’ve seen us too soon! No, too late for them
Now they’re attacked from two directions,
One casualty each, thirty near misses;
But the end comes fast : “Curse you wretches!”
It’s Fausto’s father, “Rocks in my house!
Will you kill someone!” He chases the foe;
Like wind in the olives our gang melts away.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Westerly March 1983
WHAT WENT ON IN EINSTEIN’S
HEAD, ORDINARILY?
Everyman dreams he’s extraordinary
Such analysis is proof enough.
Wheatfields of the mind extend
Ripe and yellow, end to end
Ear to ear, deadly flat.
In the mirror just awake
I rake the stubble with the back
Of a nailbit hand and think
Of peasants with their rightsize plots
Scything sheaves and heaving sighs
Backs cry quietly to ease the curve.
Only tractors and vast machinery
Track across my waving thoughts;
If I could squat against a stook
And chew a stalk and watch ants walk
Things less ordinary might .....
Might what? I shrug. Might germinate.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September 1980
THE RANDOM ELEMENT
Weeds know it’s war
Mild-mannered gardeners hack wildly at weeds
Slipping singly between sentries
Or on spring nights overrunning
Duly furrowed beds neat
As camp lines
Man’s particular compulsion to
Decrease the random element
With mixed results. Take Paterson, pioneer,
In New South Wales who planted English
Purple bells of viper’s bugloss
Which spread like revolution
In panic grasses, knelling in wheat country.
Ill winds blow. But way out west
It hardly rains and ribby
Staring sheep survive on purple bells
We’ll call Salvation Jane.
Prickly pears have won big battles here
And hunnishly laid waste vast tracts;
In Europe bells and pears succumb
To slugging armies’ juggernauts,
Whole farms have died.
After wars weeds grow especially well.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly March 1982
SWAMP BIRD
Madeleine reckoned I wallowed in gloom. But
Admit it, she flits like a bird in a swamp
Picking nit-things from hippobacks. Lumbering grey
Footballers misty on Saturdays witness her sometimes
Rugged up on touchlines, guess her ambiguous jeers.
Feminine ridicule trenchant at twenty; well
Take for example the library silences
Breast brushes elbow in sssh-sorry bookstacks;
And after the game she must smile at the captain
Wrinkle her nose at my white muddy knees
And be missing all evening. Have you seen Madeleine?
Flash in the courtyard, goading gold plumage,
Door shuts behind her. Then dark swirls despondent,
Moodiness, ooziness still I remember,
A dozen years later and still I slip under.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly June 1982
then in Wordhord – contemporary Western Australian Poetry 1989
OF PARABOLAS AND PARABLES
Speck of black on blue
Arcs slow, stops, drops perpendicular,
The y-line of its graph,
An eagle on a kitten.
Geometric goddish death
Like this should come to us
The to-be-smitten.
Dot is blown into a globe
So poets, preachers, artists generalise
Axis of each eye particular
Tangential wheeling
Souls in Paradise are skylark
Spirits pencilled curve suggests a
Bird of feeling.
Sower’s arm extends in seed
In falling dots to goodish ground;
Sparrow frailly turns its skull
To curving cat, and all of us are bitten.
Horror later fades: vernacular
Sermons, poems and equations draw out fate
The to-be-written.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant October 1982
JERASH
It looks as if those tumbled hills were shaken
By some gods and then forgotten. And forsaken
High among them lies the carcass of a city
Picked very clean: time’s jackals had this pity.
A humbled giant left his frame in shattered
Colonnaded ribs, his spinal discs lie scattered
All along a central street of wheel-scarred paving;
The charnel grass that spreads beyond is dead but waving.
And now a minor armageddon’s stirring;
Archaeologists are slowly disinterring
Bits and pieces; tourists come in ever greater numbers.
Theatres, gouged gullets, twelve hundred years unsounding
Cough with shoes and chatter row by row rebounding;
Lizards slither; down below the forum slumbers.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant April 1982
OR
North-south, black-white must separate
Are split with and or or
Subjects have their predicate
It’s never clear what for
Picoseconds calculate
Which switch is off or on
Then as our facts accelerate
Are they here or gone
Psychologists like yes-no tests
No answer is “correct”
But pattern-forming manifests
So selves can be cross-checked
And politicians opt in twos
Whole mandates we elect
By simple votes and people lose
When plebiscites reject
It’s we who seek polarity
No real reason why we should
For Deists, singularity
Encapsulates the All and Good
And nature says with clarity
There’s east and west and realms between
And space beyond : disparity
That artifices leave unseen
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant December 1982
SULTAN ON A SKATEBOARD
Mid-late summer, flame trees now died to embers;
An avenue of embassies and grey once-gracious villas.
8 a.m. but down there on the corner squads of flies
Manoeuvre on the prickly pears. Beside
His handcart sleeps a shrouded figure, puzzled
Insects buzz to find a face. Two legs protrude,
Or rather one, bare, brown: the other just a
Cylinder of wood, rough as the barrow’s.
One city with a thousand limbless men
Patrol on after routine desert wars;
Bombs and hot-wind blasts and mines
Whump bodies, bits of them on prickly sand.
Well, yesterday, a few streets back,
Suburban wadi, cars dug in both sides,
An old soldier saluted to his turban when given way,
Trundled by his son - torso, arms, head,
Dignified, superb, sultan on a skateboard.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February1983
then in Wordhord – contemporary Western Australian Poetry 1989
PENSIONED
Newspapers flap on the 8: 15 platform
Commuters jerk birdheads
Crane at announcements
Movement of lips
Doors suck at cold air
Funnel feet, joggle bags, dished-up faces
Shun an old man slumped
Nodding mumbling. Then shudders
Run up vertebrae
Sun bursts in blackness
Big buildings accelerate
Lines criss-cross his window
As drab suburbs burble
Nothing is real unreal
Diffident peering
Through panels of glass.
This was escape from a gulped-coffee kitchen
Doll-eyed grandchildren
Respectfully making
Shapes with their mouths.
Parents move quickly
Hard monosyllables
Shrug codes none too secret
Questions are guessable
When to dispose of you - eightyish, seventies?
No comfort that people
See less than you hear.
He’s deaf you know.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly June 1985
ANACHRONISMS
Black doodles score the phonebook
Graven nerves from June-July
Bad connections hum and garble
In each ear and hollow eye
Unplug me in the bathroom
Silver faces mouthing why
I should see you now
The new girl soothes like unguents
And I hallow her today
Her amber and her marble
But anachronisms play
Like hands. You used to flinch
At fingertouch. I pushed, you slipped away
But I feel you now.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1985
BALANCED HORROR DIET
Kidneys, liver, spinach made me scream
To eat, with shrill entreaties these were “Good
For You!” Such vileness fortified the blood,
Allegedly. A yell can let off steam
And that’s not bad. The odd horrific dream
Evens out in daytime as the flood
Of fantasies is dammed and understood
And channelled down some safe and conscious stream.
Children maybe need to feel real fear
To get things in perspective, to ignore
The routine dread; so bogeymen appear
In Grimm’s gross shapes - though nowadays they’re more
Boxed and processed, fast-food violence, near
As screens, blurbed urban gundeaths, ketchup gore.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1985
then in Australian Poetry 1986
TO THE DOGS
Our great-grandfathers dug like dogs
For gold or clearing scrub for farms and kept
The hours of sun till as their logs
Cadaverously strewn they slept
And crapped in dirt and open air
Then on verandahs pets and humans stared
Tongue-lollingly around at all they shared
The hanging heat, the flies and shaggy hair.
But now our dogs are hopelessly behind
We roar away in private cars, cocoon
Ourselves in gauzy comfort, find
New sciences to blow up life’s balloon
And if perchance we saw it disappear
In God-great powercuts or world disputes
Our pets would laugh at us, we sudden brutes
We’d yelp and snarl and sniff each other’s rear.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant December 1985
COMPONENT
Wonderful things, machines,
Like those that manoeuvre in space
But every component must work
To grant all dimensions their grace
When a disc in the spine slips askew
It brings down the vegetable curse
And only the eyes can now move
In a never-you-touch universe
Soldier, this bullet’s for you
Astonished he falls to one knee
A small telescopic dark hole
Astronomers bow down to see
On elastic the stars race away
Will stretch and then stop and rebound
Like an echo, or snap and go on
Like a scream or a vanishing sound
When she left I sat on the steps
And strained all the powers of sight
Things hurtled and crashed in my mind
An aircraft blinked red in the night
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant September 1985
OUTREMER
Culture shock is social intercourse gone bad abroad
Tourists gag on squalor, new cuisine and crowds
Bewildered troops misvalue foreign parts and rape and raze;
It goes both ways. In 1915 Aussies wrecked
Haret el Wazzir as pox and prices ran amok:
Egypt handles criss-cross armies, like the host
Of Louis IX, surrendering - so many so in fact
Hundreds were beheaded every day, until the King
Was ransomed, handsomely. Now dollar-laden tourists stroll
In Shagarat el Dor, just slightly ill at ease;
A semi-soldier, fists around two wooden blocks, accosts
Americans, who blanch and shuffle back, repelled.
Piastres, conscience-money, serve to keep the stumps at bay;
With doubling of its revenue the State might keep
Its war-torn heroes out of sight - as we do back at home.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1985
ON THE MARGIN
Above the battle Marshal Someone scans
Uniforms swirling
In time to his plans
(Battalions’ shellburst individuals lose
Orientation
No chance to choose
(Democracy makes choice its bugle note
The middle will hinge
On the marginal vote)
And those now led and leaders in cahoots
Echelonned advance
In praise of grass roots)
Beyond the bottle derelicts disperse
Out on the fringe;
Like those who read verse
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant June 1985
UNCHAINED
The weather has gone bad but is having some fun
Gales of laughter and doubled up palms
Gogo girls’ tresses, fiesta of spray
Breaks on promenade railings
Down the tap-dancing roadway
Grey facades clap; things are sort of contained.
Constraining is part of the picture: take work -
Steam engines, factories, nine-to-five grind;
Or Saturday sport when the clock-fearing train
On tracks to break records.
And the tightness of music:
If drumskins were slack or the strings loose who’d play?
“All power is delightful,” a satirist says
(A balloon from the mouth of Idi Amin -
In newspaper boxes our monsters are tamed)
“And absolute power is
Absolutely delightful;”
Breaking the rules in a zero-sum game.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly June 1985
PEEKING
China is changing too much for your liking?
A modern Ming golf course in planned for the Tombs,
Look, cranes make great letters that litter the skyline,
Mush of Hilton and Sheraton rooms.
What do you think of the leaden lid lifting?
Forbidden things curve as eaves in the air;
Serge is outmoded, no longer loose-fitting,
You see shaped bums now in Tienanmen Square.
Oldstyle, white bloused girls at the Beijing Hotel
Guard a glass counter where foreigners buy
While utilitarian plush crimsons fade:
Silks, lacquer, strange roots, bottled non-ageing spell;
One hitches a stocking quite high on the thigh -
You surge, as light glancing on evergreen jade.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September 1985
CROSSING
Sometimes dusk-killed colours rise again and flare
Briefly for the skyline’s passage into night,
A parable perhaps of gorgeous death with light
A miracle at last. It used to be that prayer
At bedtime guaranteed the journey on from there:
Hand to forehead, breast, in pious fright;
Then sleeping sicknesses and hazards out of sight
Like germs, like faith, like madness transited the air.
Eyes close. Red Sea waters in our minds divide
Historians interpreting remark the tide
Explanations blow along Great Bitter Lake;
In dreams the chronically irresolute decide
Bridge-burnt ventures thirty miles wide
Dunkirk’s still-staggered morning-after pilots wake.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1985
EUCLID OUT OF DATE
Earth suspended like a coin mid-spin
Sleepy astronaut looks down and nods
An O, so flat, no wonder off was real
To ancient mariners; yet here I feel
The tiny outputs from five billion ids,
All man means, come cone-like up and on.
The Christmas pudding dome is dark
Eyes dart and wait each wedge mumchance
Warm bulgemouth tongue tip sneaking thick
Sifted silver
Threepenny pieces might be mine.
Machines created us and weaned
Us, weightless, watched us try a cube
On sphere just once, the switches flicked :
Playpen marvels!
Binary codes will work this out.
Henry the Navigator, dreamed
Up from nowhere, looms in sight
Of tribesmen, mainsails crucified,
Galleons curving
Good hopefully down, unblank the globe.
Some things, like faith, are out of date:
Old Euclid too, although his blueprints track
Misshapen space eternally towards
Jerusalem anew, all arcs and chords
And perpendiculars which intersect
Ungraspably; explorers land too late.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant July 1985
HUNTER VALLEY CAMOUFLAGE
The green myth of faraway hills in Sunday school hymns
Fills the Middle Hunter,
Paddocks and vine-lined slopes,
Higgledy-neat Golf Club swathes and swards,
Prosperous groups move against the trees; forearms arc.
The town itself is camouflaged with dots of brown
Horses, rusting tin roofs and flat facades;
From the air you’d not spot
The beer bottles in the cemetery
(A four-iron slice, say, from the roadside tee)
Catholics and Protestants in back-to-back lots
Practically forgotten;
Some mad park planner responsible perhaps
For these few acres of dead-heart hinterland,
Grassless, graceless,
Plastered on the healthy Singleton skin.
Pioneering names and dates have rubbed away,
Later generations peer through the stones:
Four children under five serially side by side,
Lonely Irish ladies of great age,
Some puzzled Germans.
Broken glass, few feeble weeds, slab on slab,
A sudden shock of fresh-placed flowers
For a daughter drowned now thirty years ago,
These the single colours in the place.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant July 1985
DAYDREAM
In fact
Nothing occurred.
Night by night
I rehearsed, was word
Perfect, gestures right,
Schemed the best time
For this act,
For this mime!
When the chance came
It skipped in dumb dance;
But in daylight’s
Real dreams
Same things play
To a different script.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April 1986
HOME, VIA DARWIN
Official top-end disorientation
Reminiscent of a sheep-dip;
First up a pre-dawn landfall,
Woolshed-type terminal,
Wall-eyed new arrivals dressed
Down by bellying boy scout
Customs men in khaki shorts.
Carpark acres
Prop a toppling circus of stars,
Orion cartwheeling
Head over heels down under.
Noonday corrugated copperscapes
Gibber round Mt. Isa
Shimmering with fahrenheit;
Airconditioned waterhole,
Breezy tee-shirt voices, clumps of glasses.
Back on board an accidental miner
Lashed and screened from tourist class;
Mushroom nimbus,
Ansett lurches in hot pot-holes,
We nervously
Order scotch shock absorbers.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April 1986
ROTHKO OPERA
For me? A bath of red paint upended,
One dark swab swished thick with a
Hard yard broom. I see no sense.
Michelangelo dissects a tracery of sinews;
Behind pen-nib lens and fine wire nerve
Lies sight, however, washed in red veils,
Which alarm clocks rend yellow at daybreak;
Officeworkers unblinded at lunchtime,
Rubber drums rumble in Midtown,
Orchestras honk, screech and sink sounding;
Ears under water hum and guess voices.
Imagine a bath full of French perfume,
Outrageously spilled and the headrush depicted,
Abstracted chiaro in scent-swamped oscuro.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant April 1986
OVERDOSE
To a leaf near me
A butterfly floating
Down interrogative
Dies. I too wonder.
Might time’s brief beauty-filled
False cocaine high
Which colours and flatters
And fools us and fades
Have ever been otherwise?
Who so intended?
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly September 1987
OBVERSE
A standing joke - we still begrudge the cost
Of separate records bought before we went
Together. Then all manner of cement
Bound our budgets, lives; wires well and truly crossed.
We’re one coin, that’s what, two sides. If tossed
We both get dizzy, sure, if you were lent
They must lend me, spend you and I am spent:
They can’t lose you without my being lost.
And now, but now? Apart, this isn’t real -
I’m Ixion, splayed criss-cross on a wheel,
Abstrusely damned and strapped at wrists and knees
To luck’s dead disc. Then in this dream I feel
An obverse pressure soft against my heel,
Fingers backing onto mine thread round and squeeze.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant September 1988
TOAST TO GROTEFEND
Grotefend read the first writing for a bet
Made boozing with his mates in Gottingen
He said, I’ll tell that gibberish in cuneiform
Chiselled in the tablets of Persepolis;
Harsh German Ach-du-Lehrer! belly laughs.
Schoolmaster’s beer-bubbles disappear
To outer space where good thoughts drift
At edge of eye a sungleam winks
An unfound star must be - it is!
For the record, Flood and Ark were
Scooped in the first tale of Gilgamesh
And Hammurabi’s legal code predates
Israel’s plaint in Babylon.
He won his bet.
Wedge-shaped scalpels maybe cut between
Grotefend’s thunderdark ganglia
Let lightning in - king, son of king
Xerxes bursts from the insoluble.
Bubbles blip in sun, well, drink to this:
Our thoughts fill vast dull libraries
Not anyway decipherable.
But genius, two lines in tomes,
That’s all, one sip worth thirsting for.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant September 1988
AGGRO AGO
Gruesome tortures, spikes and screws
Are gone for good. In olden days
Darkness ruled and towns killed Jews
And heretics in public gaze.
As recent holocausts accuse
This was not a passing phase;
We’ve multiplied, with longer queues
And criss and cross in lots more ways,
But may have peaked. We use
Machines which work, obey,
Detect minutely every clue:
Violent crime will scarcely pay.
Warlike major powers, too,
Dissuade each other, stash away
Their bombs for now without ado.
Zero growth, new worlds go gay;
Some brave dreams we guess come true.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant September 1988
ANCIENTEST POWER
He’d rid himself of underlings unconscionably -
This one displeases me, and this -
Not reckon orphaning and laying waste to dreams.
An hour or so from now a hall will graft
To his words, poise to applaud
Announcement of further usurpations.
Power redefines itself at altitude,
A common, queenly smile has hold of him,
Mocks all indulgences available.
He waits for her return, but schemes collapse,
Words fail. He is unmanned. Another smile:
Please do up your seatbelt, sir.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant October 1988
AT THEBES
A year was the somnolence
Between the river’s floods.
Beneficent, like them, dynasties
Would swell and burst and wash away;
The fat-wet Nile slurped towards the sand
Which, detesting water, rolled repelled
Away out over Africa. It never rains.
In the stony dunes above the Nile
The scarab feeds on camel turd
Yet Ramses’ priests thought him divine:
Ramses who stood ten times life height,
In stone ten thousand times its weight,
Now lies in bits. A camel’s back bore
Too much straw, perhaps, a beetle
Nosed away three grains of sand,
Provoked the thunder of those mighty tons.
The earth in Egypt rarely quakes,
It must have trembled then
At history’s massive hiccup.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Westerly September 1988
MARCH 1918: ORDERS TO HIS MEN
1. This position will be held, and the section
will remain here until relieved.
Some crazed janissary might so command
To hold the untenable, but for what end?
What programme might he have in mind?
2. The enemy cannot be allowed to interfere with this programme.
3. If the section cannot remain here alive
it will remain here dead,
but in any case it will remain here.
Glow-eyed youths marvellously alive
Race stooping on the slope
And yaw in death; yesterday’s
Clawed figures on the wire.
Tomorrow pounces on the eye-blink now.
All the tenses stare together now.
4. Should any man, through shellshock or other cause,
attempt to surrender, he will remain here dead.
I surrender to my own command
The double jeopardy of every contradiction.
I am a local God. All few of us,
The living dead, grin at my, at our apotheosis.
5. Should all guns be blown out the section
will use Mills grenades and other novelties.
God of black winters
And presumably seasonal cycles of peace
Bring evolution, that time not so indecently be held.
6. Finally, the position as stated will be held.
* The six orders, written in pencil, are in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. The lieutenant who wrote them was a clergyman before the war. The position was held, until relieved.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Sydney Review December 1988
TERROR OF ELEANOR
The bashed guard and broken-ankled teller
Missed most of it. There were moments of hilarity;
Jangling bells, swizzle of TV monitors, one
Father Christmas shot the tea machine
Hiccupping. Eleanor’s earring snags the carpet,
Sideways she watches striped socks,
A queue of creased suits stepped among.
Keyboard years reel giddily, venetian blinds,
Dead hands on keys, stale air, square screens,
Paper truths in bins strewn everywhere.
Things, God, cannot ever be the same
Or this high point looked back upon
For ever after gossiping;
Throats catch at fear and ribs are kicked,
Dignities like dropped pants
Stripped ludicrous,
Hey you.
Later the sergeant says
J’see that fat hostage smiling?
Like she had a good time.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February 1989
PARALLEL LINES
She is gone in unreachable pain
Furrowed from him. In case
Of return he waits in this place:
Uselessness seethes from a train,
Gone generations of soot strangely linger, and black
Bowler hats bob on blank faces in jackpot cascades,
Strong current warnings that passengers can’t cross the track.
Pain in the other direction accelerates, fades
As some dense distant given-out star which is now taking back
Ambient light and identity. Louvres slice blades
Of sun through clouds in his brain,
Curve with hers, lane by lane race,
May meet by infinity’s grace?
The bow bends for gold after rain.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant January-February 1989
SS AT ADELONG
We fix fascist murderer searchlights
On the cabin, to interrogate curfew-breakers:
A silly image this, like the clodhopper
Stopped glass-eyed in our glare
Blasted, hacked with a sticky black axe
Hunks tossed in the truck for the station dogs;
We heave homeward over front paddock.
Before breakfast mein host has other pests
Telephoto magnified posing on hummocks,
A live flop-eared soft toy sniffing
One good jump ahead of the trigger;
Later plastic bottles on a post
Better my aim, show the sights do need adjusting,
So we’ll go back to that ghetto tomorrow.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant January-February 1989
ORAL HISTORIES
There was this joke-teller
Who with wicked, slick,
Quick-as-Picasso
Cameos misrepresented life
Recognisably, had us in creases:
You envied his repertoire,
Deftness in this most
Portable artform.
You know we’ve our gallery
Of memorable anecdotes
Sketched and resketched
Fixtures adorning the walls
Of our years.
You can embellish them,
Fuzz edges, shift colour -
Friends puzzle a little,
But words are like brushes
Dipped in impermanence,
Like everything naturally.
There’s something to be said
For such histories,
Possibly.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant June 1989
THE FEAR FACTOR
In Hamburg they manufacture
Precision simulators,
Tank turrets, bazookas etcetera,
Arms which judder, replicate
Flash, smoke, cacophany.
The Bundeswehr trains gracefully.
Only they can’t copy
Inkling terror,
Neurons to prickle napes,
Troops’ shitscared jittering.
The city booms,
Prospering for decades.
It had to be almost completely rebuilt.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant May 1990
OFF BROADWAY
Here they live elevated and apartmented
Dense ad libbed lives
And the sidewalks, blocks gridded
Are boxed like shows
Everybody’s cast
No wonder the dramas enacted
Under the street lights
Of 41st and Fifth
A quartet apart declaiming
Peakcapped labelled SULLIVAN;
Lady, do you mean that?
Driver, offended, goes into attack
Middleaged black man moves back
Bystander angry with shopping bags
Claims a main role
Theft, knockdown, badly parked?
Eyes hood in the halflight
Palms sweep unheard words
Roles seem to switch
Black man mocks
Bystander nods
Cop arms akimbo
She with the keys stands shocked
A one-man audience
I exit
Check my ticket
Beware of pickpockets
Must rush
To the real theatre
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Poetry Australia 129, Autumn 1991
LONDON LADIES DANCING
Furred Chelsea lady, you dancing
At your age by parked cars, red letter box,
Or crippled, St. Vitus ...? Ah, no, rather
A soft shoe-shit shuffle, she stops now
Mid-pavement to scrape.
High wind in Hyde Park, pale sunshine,
A black-brollied matron diagonal
Billowed and tacking on tiptoe
Foot-lifted comes happily singing.
The dog-walkers dodge.
Office girls skip in the Underground.
Exploits near Leicester Square, fair sex
Cavorting, some decent; the dirty old
Buildings transvested in neons,
And all London dances.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1991
SPOUSETALK
We slip
Messages on silver trays
Smile through candles and flowers
The silent longitude of a rosewood dining table
Chandelier tinkles
Little to say.
Or yell
Red squabbled waddyameans
Above the kids while television
Blurbs the racing horses on a raining afternoon
Matrimony rankles
Welter of words.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly Number Four,1991
ROMANY
I wish (I think I do, I hold
In hand a brassy wish-distorting telescope
Through which we see our climber-daughter bold
Cling to the cliff) I had her hope:
Despite the overhang she trusts the rope,
Swings, reels in, is up. And from our cold
Further reach we stare down the slope
And see her not come on to us, unfold
Instead Icarus-wings and launch
Unsteadily at first down then
In some gasp of God lift
Skyward, a lark, a swift
Borne careless singing
Out across the valley.
We had plans for greying on and old
Conventionally, drifting into soap
Opera characters. The sun glints gold
On her, a flash of heliotrope,
Purple scented,
Oiling our canvas,
Hilling our flatness,
Streaking our laughter
Out across the valley.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly Autumn 1992
EPISODES
Kookaburras guffaw in clumps of gums
At me running to ward off middle age;
And she eighteen now slews and crumples
Off the road beyond that hill.
You can’t see it from this twisting track
Which meets town streets, the bush behind is
Continuity; the immediate distance hums.
The jog, shower, drive to work print themselves
Each day regular as newspaper,
Local stories, uncomplicated features fill the page.
She is held in unconsciousness.
Hospital announcements worse and worse
Until the last bulletin:
Tomorrow they will switch off the machine.
Birds and rocks in their own way wait to shout
At the flashed commercial: a mock-gold sun ascends;
Tubes and valves function in me like TV.
I watch serialised lives
Dotted with little dramas
To be one day declared redundant;
To be then written out.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Southerly Number Four,1992
CURED
The last white sheep stood stoic blackened by the smoke,
Mute monument to whims of God and acts of man endured -
Unbeaten track, drought, fire, overdraft insured,
With city salaries to stop us going broke.
We shot the philosophic ewe and neither spoke;
The house we built survived all right, it’s still unsewered,
And our orchard with its apricots not quite matured
Attracts sulphur-crested cockatoos. Next day we woke
To March flies’ drone; vague thoughts of bills obscured
The chores, the stocktake, sudden fencelessness, our charred
Marvelling horizons gazed back through hazy space.
That was three weeks ago. We have another place
Now which looks out over roofs, and has no yard.
Yes, we’re here for good. In our new flat. Totally secured.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Westerly Autumn 1993
ROUNDHEADS 3 CAVALIERS 0
Hundreds of years since Edgehill & Marston Moor
Charlie, and we’re still at it
Tromping around Worcestershire
Waiting to engage: kick-off due at 3pm.
Our musketeers are holed out in the pub
With their drummer-boy wives and girlfriends.
Caravans like baggage trains parked round the back
Disgorge the newly-changed in smock and breeches;
Cannon are unloaded from a hired truck
By yeomen bankers and real estate agents.
You and me, Charlie, officers and bookmakers,
Not spoiling for the fight as much as urged
Like them by the universal lust for dressing up.
I don’t know how pleased Oliver Cromwell
Would be at all this achieved egalitarianism.
At last a little after quarter to
The fifes and pennants form in line with
Cavalry from the local pony club
Plumed and snorting on the flank;
Over from Germany a troop of skirmishers
Just revelling in the reenactment,
And then it’s on. Clumps of rugbymen
With 16-foot pikes slowly mesh together
Like great mating hedgehogs in several scrums,
Leather heels pedalling in soggy grass.
There’s a clear risk of broken ribs and noses,
With mock or real gore on gorgeous silk.
Game, spectacle, film-set; an amplified voice
Elaborately directs levels of reality
For day-out families behind the barriers
Where knots of tourist camaramen aim and fire;
You could conclude we’re surfeiting with peace,
For nearly fifty years without a proper war
Is doing strange things to us, Charlie.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1993
KING’S REVENGE
Do you recall years back
Crazy near Wonju high
On the steep deep-pile grass
Tumulus of King Sejong
Doing forward rolls?
First tight as a fist then
Pulled open by the slope
Stretched into looping dives
Rabbit-punching our vertebrae
Over and over. The king must
Have jerked his neck in his grave,
Demanded tribute; history
Somersaults, you never know
Come-uppance, scowl now
Under the gyrating catscanner,
At the subsequent cross-sections,
As lifesize stone courtiers
Did at the lèse-majesté.
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Quadrant March 1993
THE PLUMED SERPENT
I let this chum, this ordinary man,
Talk me with duller talents into joining him
And sundry Indians exploring - scarce a plan
So much in terrae incognitae as a whim;
And what I find beguiling was not that we
Survived all manner of ordeals in Yucatàn
Nor that, in the very place it ought to be,
We found the jungle-strangled city of Copàn
Which time, adored there once, had wholly spurned:
But that the curtain rose on us on that strange stage,
Drawn in off the street with lines unlearned,
Sudden mummers, and that you who scan this page
Of dry historic script have been yourselves turned
By it, tutored by the theatre of our age.
John Lloyd Stephens riding near the front
Ponders Keats, and Cortes who two centuries before
Escaped this way, imagines their surmise.
Unholy symphonies strike up, monkeys squeal,
Razor fronds, mosquitoes violinning on the skin,
Machetes whack the headhigh grasses, other sounds
Of slush and thud and English oaths bespeak
Catherwood and his mule flank-deep again in mud -
The draughtsman must bemoan moist cartridge paper,
Damn the canopy of palms and spread mahogany,
Their blotched penumbral subterfuges sucking colour,
Eyes already fever-raw cannot etch or frame
An underworld, an undersea, such edgeless swirls.
And then a yell, and there before them runs a wall.
Steps did rise. And I confess I blessed
The sight of proud rightangles, those first
Made-by-man miracles, and we both guessed
At reaching causeways, buttresses, palaces immersed
Occluded yonder; next hacked between trees,
Whose leaves pressed on frets and lattices, roots burst
Through flagstones, throttles of vines; a frieze
Freed from green at last had everything reversed:
For here entombed stones moved wondrously alive,
Here might snake-curled columns and intricate relief
Of heads of hosts of hook-nosed tongue-lolled men survive
Despite the rictuses and grin in joyous grief.
My plaint was only how could fluid planes connive
To thwart my mirroring, hence contemporary belief.
In a cleared plaza Stephens confronts the god,
Plumed, ophidian, and seemingly amused
By the antics of humans and tributes of war.
These captives have their beating hearts removed
By self-mutilating priests with thorns in tongue
And penis, all the faces hideous; a dark
Nation of masons who might be thought civilised
Did not the very stones protest their barbarism.
In Mexico and Guatemala hells
Were multiple and ever near at hand as when
In that Year of the Serpent crazed Spaniards came
And Montezuma erred in deeming them divine,
Dooming the Aztecs; but Copàn had long since gone
In weird, colossal demographic nemesis.
From Obverse and Parallel Lines
First published in Quadrant October 1993
IT CAN’T HAPPEN TO ME
Jostling lab rats scoot today
Careless round their Nurburgring and
Free until the experimenting hand
Drops down selectively so that we may
In twos mesh our cogs unpenalised, gland
And hips interconnected connive
To surge the virus and drive
Like the clappers perhaps to expand
Commuter odds of nine to five
On the orbital, a steering pin gives way
And ambulances’ unmelodic sirens play
Luring spectators in yonderness meaning I’ve
Yet again proved quite conclusively
That it did not happen to me
From Academy of the Superfluous
First published in Westerly Spring 1994