Contents
1. Green Heart, Red Neck
Father Neptune
Wilhelmine Schluter at Fourteen
Griefswald, Germany, 1935
The Condamine
Sometimes He…
The Natural Order of Things
He had an Artistry
My Father, the Tomcat, the Razorblade
Domino Effect
He Created High Art
Of Earth & Wheat
Cockatrice
Green Heart, Red Neck
Full Bloom
Black Tadpoles
Gone Shooting Ken & I home Later Warren
Last Words, 1978
The Funeral Service of Warren Neil Dionysius
Some Thoughts on the Absence of Mourning
Instamatic
The Enormous Nature of Things
2. Fatherlands
Fatherlands
Earthing
Ghost Limb
Monoculture
Almost Sixteen Months
Of Fear & Fathers
Crossing
Fossils
Wasp Factory
Wasp Factory 2
Easter
Of Wolves & Children
My Daughter & I at the End of the Century
Of Lies & Nursing Homes
3. In a Forest of V2 Rockets
In a Forest of V2 Rockets
The Man is History
Atomic Shadow
The Wheels Turn Slowly
His Father’s Grave
My Father, the King
These are the Days
Not to be a Poet
The Day the Earth Ate Him
The Cold Work of Stones
Black Snag
Stars in His Pockets like Grains of Sand
Pink Crocus Flowers
Stung
1. Green Heart, Red Neck
Father Neptune
The sea called my brother and I.
My father having fought the ocean
with the herring fleets off Iceland
was pleased; said the rope-work
would make men of us.
My mother, the only true
figurehead in our young lives
stood, silent as a forest of oak;
this carved mermaid, dipping
her long hair into a basin of tears.
Yes, the water was our element.
We soon found out what it was
to be a man riding on the shoulders
of Father Neptune, as the rigging
burnt the flesh from our fingers;
our bodies blackened like the pitch
& the tar we used to seal the cracks
in out little wooden ark.
Once, in a gale we lost
a colony of Singapore monkeys
to Father Neptune’s zoo.
I lost two fingers.
The land called my brother and I.
We left the sea our father, began
to furrow in the earth’s hot skin
as Poseidon sent his frozen spear
through the hull of the Titanic.
Fifteen hundred souls he ploughed
to their secret rest beneath the artic
as the sweat trickled into my eyes
& blinded me like sea-spray.
Fifteen hundred trees or more
my sons & I cut down each month
for four years with the cross-cut
saw & teeth of our youth.
A son & a daughter I gave
as sacrifice so that I could stay.
A wizened, German dryad still
nicking gums into my fiftieth year.
Yes, the water was our element
never the land, never the land.
Once, the sea filled my lungs
with the salt of the air.
Now, there is no escaping
the long dry spell
of the earth.
Wilhelmine Schluter at Fourteen
This is how I first saw him.
There was my father, Claus,
stripped to his waist, perched
on the back of the wagon shouting
orders like he was a ship’s captain.
His left foot rested on a pumpkin;
its skin gnarled & knotted like his brow
as he shouted at his eldest son & the three
new workmen, Jack, Carl & Harry.
They were Germans, straight off the ship
& newly arrived to Sandy Creek.
Kabin boys my father called them.
Always getting into trouble.
Hannah squeezed my hand as we approached
with the mutton sandwiches. The men saw us;
their teeth flashed from beneath
wide-brimmed hats as they dropped
pumpkins where they stood.
My father yelled at Harry because his pumpkin split.
Its pulpy, orange meat licked his boots.
It was so funny, I thought my throat
would catch fire with laughter.
I noticed Hannah’s cheeks flush
deeper when she handed Jack his lunch.
The men sat with their backs’
against the wagon’s rear wheel. Claus would
not let Harry eat until he’d scooped up
every last pumpkin seed into his hat.
When he finished he came & offered
the seeds to me; a gift from which
something giant would grow.
Griefswald, Germany, 1935
When I left the Unification
was barely a decade old.
Now, Mein Fuhrer has stitched
together a fairytale kingdom.
In the main street I see no
Hansels begging for crumbs,
no Grethels selling their bodies
for oven-warmth. The tongues
of cobblestones lick my rawhide
boots like dogs estranged
from their master.
I have missed this squall of memory.
It soaks hungrily into my parched
top-soil skin. I have forgotten
the gait of these stones, polished
smooth by the sea-legs
of my forefathers.
Griefswald.
Village of my youth.
The Baltic still churns my blood.
Salt crystals sing to me;
dissolve on my cheeks, powder
burn the wounds of my thought.
A Roman eagle nests in the hearts
of my sea-folk; tears at the gills
of their days; guts their future
in mid-air.
The Condamine
The river was dry but once.
It had always been a grit-chasm;
a deep canyon of broken river
red gums & silica that dusted
our feet as we played hide & seek
on its twisted, coliseum floor.
It ran through the property
of our lives; this foreshore
unaffected by the moon’s pull,
condemning the stick-scratch
imprints of crow, magpie & goanna
to lunatic interpretation.
After Picnic at Hanging Rock,
none of us could go down by ourselves;
our stalk-hair bristled like galahs
or barley teased by the southerlies.
Time was a dozy copperhead
that hid under the dead bole
of an ironbark in winter
& shed its season/skin;
leaving this flayed totem
as a flood warning.
On the riverbank, no moles
or rats wrestled with weasels.
Only butcherbirds were busy,
as they stitched house sparrows
into their intricate lacework
of barbed wire.
Beads of dried blood sewn
into the shawl of afternoon.
When the waters came they washed
the river clean of its dead things;
flushed snakes, spiders, centipedes
& the occasional cow, down
the hollow fence-line of its throat.
We plunged in regardless.
The foam, dirty snow we threw at each other
marveling at the Condamine’s gift;
our baptism in this mud-brown
fountain of youth.
Sometimes He…
Sometimes he would line the four
of them up on the lawn like empties
after a party & crack his stock-whip
at their toes. The small, white slugs
tried to bury themselves, but the ground
was too hard for little toes to grip.
Sometimes his calculations would be out
a fraction & the rawhide connected with
ankle bone. He would laugh, covering up
his mistake, sharing his big joke with them;
‘That couldn’t possibly have hurt?’
At the clothesline their mother unpegged
some fresh skins & neatly folded them
into the linen basket (its cane skeleton
beginning to come apart at the seams).
Behind her, the thwack thwack thwack
continued; a swell of blood in her ear.
Her lion-tamer husband killing another
afternoon with his own brand of fun.
Poking & prodding his cubs, keeping
them in line for his next circus act.
The big finale, no-one knew was coming.
At his funeral,
bronze-maned daffodils
leapt onto his coffin,
green tails lashing
from side to side.
The Natural Order of Things
It was not the gunshot
or the grey clawed body
falling out of the dead tree
that shocked me the most.
It was my mother usually a silent
woman who would transform
into a harpy, whenever her hens
or eggs were threatened.
It was her boss, Mrs Marney
with her .22 & her good eye
who would shoot them down.
My mother would wade in then
& finish them off with the hoe,
as if she were digging out
dead geraniums.
To me this was the natural
order of things; fleas
clustered on the chooks’ heads;
dogs collapsing from cattle-ticks;
corpses of cockatoos strung on the fence;
my father melded to the Ford
tractor, firing his shotgun
into a well full of black snakes .
This I learnt at an early age;
the blood of the goanna was red
like mine & all things that entered
my mother’s chicken coop
had to die.
He had an Artistry…
He had an artistry of death & language
about him. His .243 was his paintbrush
the Brigalow & scrub country his palette.
Grey kangaroos & wallabies were his subject
matter; his studies in body & motion.
He worked mostly at night in his universal
studio under the stars.
The walls of his thought blacked out.
A post modern Da Vinci; ignored by the world
his mind excommunicated from his emotions.
He had an eye for detail though. Nothing
escaped his minute artistic attention.
Mostly he dealt with the landscape.
In the nuances of distance & velocity;
of wind & calibre. His materials were
all natural. Wood, steel, brass, lead,
nitric acid, sulphur cordite.
His large burnt hands were kept busy
most weekends. Though, he never earned
enough from his art so that he could
give up his day job.
His art saw him through the bad patches.
His language; music to the ear. War-raw
obscenities fell from the tip of his tongue
like ice from the opaque louvres. He was
an artist who loved to publicly exhibit
his paintings; stretching his thick skins
over the uneven canvas of the world.
His pictures feeding a family of six.
My Father, the Tomcat, the Razorblade
I did not know it but she was there.
Not standing beside me, but she was there
watching my father trap the tomcat’s head
between two prongs of the garden fork
& thrust them into the ground.
She was there as he sliced
the razorblade between its hind legs
& squeezed with his fingers;
popping the testicles out
onto the pigweed like corks.
She was there as the tomcat tried
to shimmy its way out of the stocks
crushing its skull into the morning dew.
Its eyes bulged like sacks of grain.
Its spit vomited like seed.
She was there watching, as it
clawed into the heavy, black soil
just as my father tore strips
out of the earth himself at night
with his steel-coated hands.
She was there as my father
with one mighty wrench tore
this Excalibur from out of its stone;
the cat squealing & squealing as
if he’d de-sexed its soul.
And she could remember him
standing there; red sprinkled forearm
grinning at a job well done. And the cat
as it fled into the bush leaving a trail
of bloody breadcrumbs for [Me] Hansel
& [She] Grethel
to follow home. To follow home.
I know it now that she was there.
Not standing beside me, but she was there
watching as I watched my father,
the tomcat, the razorblade.
Domino Effect
All this the child spoke inside me, so I wrote it down.
As if his closing grave were the smile of the earth.
Derek Walcott, For Adrian
The child toppled like a domino; slid
across the backseat of the Holden as it
ploughed through Darling Downs brigalow.
In the front, his father sought a path,
one hand on the wheel, one on the radio;
as he steered between clumps of coolibah.
A thunderstorm converted the road to mud.
The sedan pitched like an inflatable raft;
as the Condamine broke its banks in flood.
It was all over in a matter of nanoseconds;
They sat in silence, cheeks high with blood.
Even his father learned a valuable lesson.
Nothing did they hit, nobody was injured.
Out they drove through the rain depression.
Out; their high-beam blinded a night-bird.
This memory sprang out now; a cuckoo clock
triggered by a couple of lines overheard,
as one day the child listened to Walcott.
Later, the earth smiled; its open maw
a cosmic joke his father entered into.
A domino effect the child never saw.
He Created High Art
He created high art.
Installations of brass & fur & skin.
He achieved his futurist dream;
the metallisation of his body.
His corrugated mind bent light
in strange ways like the spent
shells he left on the side
of the Warrego highway.
At night, I fell asleep watching
him fit percussion caps onto
his stubs of charcoal.
I was there at the height
of his creative powers.
I never slept more soundly.
Never felt safer in my life
as when he cleaned & oiled
his thick, black brushes.
In the hot, December mornings
I would help him stretch out
the skins from his previous
night’s work. Nail them
to the floor of the earth.
Later, I would watch the blood
stain like shellac on the light
wood of the afternoon, while
the meat ants tore apart
his gaudy exhibition
canvas by canvas.
Of Earth and Wheat
He is dying in here & outside
everything is still living.
On the edge of town a breeze
crawls through the infant wheat;
teases the black, powdery soil.
Cracks have opened up in the body
of the earth. Even the sunlight
will not penetrate. He senses
that things are beginning to go
rotten beneath his feet.
Do you know where the man is going?
He is travelling through the wheat
& into the black soil that has sustained him.
He is slipping down the cracks;
he is going deep, deep underground.
Do you know where the man has been?
He has been sowing
the wheat seed inside of his head.
He has been turning the black soil
over & over & over
with the shovel of his hands.
He has been watching it sift
into the cracks in the body
of his earth.
He has begun to rot.
Cockatrice
When the earth took him by surprise
it spewed black beetles the size
of his father’s clenched fists
out of a crack near the garden fence,
where the geraniums pushed
their faces into the wire,
as if they were prisoners of war
staring through the plump
red bulbs of their eyes.
When the earth took him by surprise
it spewed black beetles into his father’s body.
He could do nothing but clench his fists
near the front garden fence,
where the geraniums pushed
their faces into the wire,
where the red bulbs of their eyes
strained to see what was happening.
When the earth took him by surprise
he smashed the black beetles to pieces.
Their ebony skulls he split with a stick
invoking thick, milky liquid to erupt,
staining the pig-weed with insect-shit.
He rejoiced as the beetlejuice congealed
around the cracks near the fence,
like the white powder he shovelled
into the mouths of meat-ant colonies.
A mass murderer by the age of eight.
When the earth took him by surprise
his small world exploded like a can
of mortein thrown onto a bonfire.
Near the front garden, near the geraniums
that craned their necks for a better look,
the remains of rhinoceros beetles
lay scattered in the dirt at his feet
like the darkest of marbles.
Later on, when collecting eggs
from the chook house he noticed
a canetoad, clucky as any hen,
sitting on a nest licking eggs
with the strip of leather that hung
from the rafter of its mouth.
In this way his father
gave birth to a son.
A fair-haired cockatrice
who would never be taken
by surprise again.
Green Heart, Red Neck
The veins in his temples pulsed
red like the inside of a lava lamp
every time the earth angered him
or a breakdown got in his way.
Sometimes, his arms & legs
& face were stained black when
he came in off the tractor.
Hands clenched into fists
at the kitchen table as if he
still gripped the steering wheel
or tried to bend spoons with his mind.
I had no comprehension
of this man who communed with
nature day in day out from inside
his air-conditioned cab.
What did he think about to pass
the dark hours of his pilgrimage?
This cyborg, whose spotlights
would rake the side of the house
late at night like a beast whenever
he turned to cut a new coal mine
out of the deep pit of his eyes.
The False Southern Cross shone
faintly like the windows of a farmhouse;
pointed him in some other direction
to the one he wanted to travel.
Falling stars rained on the night
of his world like the bogong moths
that crowdsurfed on his headlights.
All I knew was that sometime
during the long haul of his ploughing
he made his peace with the earth
& kept it right until the very end.
Right up until the moment
his green, deciduous heart
dropped its dead leaves,
& his red neck slowly
faded out of sight & mind
like a sunset.
Full Bloom
On the first day of spring
his fern-fists pounded the limp
bodies of wheat sacks,
releasing barbed seeds that spun
like swivels on the hard wooden
floor of the grain shed.
Later, rats thick as housebricks
slunk out from beneath the silos
& accepted his small offerings.
Their blind, pink rat babies
praised his name in their secret
incisor language. The baling twine
of their tails flicked out like the
tongues of black snakes tasting
the air for rain & rodents.
When the rains came the bud
of his brain refused to leave its
glossy shell. He arrived at spring
too late. The weeds were clever;
stiched his fingers & toes into the
dark tapestry of soil whenever he
touched the spindle of earth
with his bare flesh.
Beneath his King Gee overalls
his trellis-body temed with new
shoots that competed for the little
space left in the garden of his dreams.
Their thin, green ropes clung to him,
tight & sharp as a new born kitten.
I sat there stripping the heads
off geraniums; leaving a trail of blood
for him to follow under our house –
but he never did. He was too busy
bending the world to his will. Telling
the sorghum to stand up straight.
Hanging snake-stones on the cattle
to charm away taipans. Cutting into
the blue of the horizon
with his silver blades.
I even think
he was too busy to notice
who came in & brushed aside
the shrunken petals of his days;
when his full bloom began
to wither & turn brown
like grass in winter.
Black Tadpoles
His tree frog heart
leapt out of his chest.
He didn’t want to turn & look.
Couldn’t tear his eyes from the forest
that bull-whipped his face with strings
of barbed wire as he fled.
Or avoid the sharp, cigarette burn
of leeches, skinny as shoelaces
that clung to his legs as he crashed
into a stagnant pool of rainwater.
Crickets sizzled with the heat of the day
as he morris danced down the gravel road
his shirt trailing like a loose muffler
his pondweed hair, flat against his head.
His brothers & sisters
hazy as a mirage.
Mountains of red meat ants
swarmed over his toes, arms, belly,
as he crouched in the centre of the track
& screamed, his face cradled
in his sticky hands, webbed
with pine cones.
Then someone brushed away
the ants & flies; dark crescents
of fingernail lifted him up
into the blue sky by the scruff
of his kitten-neck & a great voice
bellowed, silencing even the brigalow.
Beneath his feet, black tadpoles
bellyflopped in archipelagoes of mud
left over from the flash flood.
The thin lips of dying amphibians
opened & closed like cattle-gates.
Gone Shooting Ken and I Home Later Warren
(i)
Mr Warren Dionysius your appointment at the x-ray department is on Friday 27/8/76 at 12.00pm
sorry you’re sick it must be a strange new feeling for you lying there in bed…by yourself! with lots of love & best wishes for a speedy recovery from rosemary and gordon get well soon
(ii)
BARIUM SWALLOW AND MEAL have nothing to eat or drink after the previous evening meal if the examination is to be carried out in the afternoon, nothing to eat or drink for six (6) hours prior to the examination.
get well soon “the eternal god is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” deuteronomy 33:27 a prayer for your recovery god bless you with his gracious love, his heavenly gifts increase; and in his tender loving care, may you find strength and peace; may god’s dear prescence guide you, keep you ever strong, and grant the gifts that comfort & bless to cheer you all life long to dear warren big god bless lots of love mum and dad xxxxx
(iii)
GALL BLADDER dose of agarol (1 tablespoon), or 2 “durolax” tablets, two nights before the day of the examination all tablets to be taken according to direction at 6 p.m. the evening before the examination no food to be taken after the tablets, but water can be drunk freely examination will be carried out at 8 a.m. all tablets to be taken after the 6 p.m. meal on_______________________
a get well push to help you get your health in tow…’till your motor’s revved up and your gear’s in go! dear warren, hurry up and get well love from joy and wayne xxxx
(iv)
INTRAVENOUS PYELOGRAM *non-residue diet as far as possible two days before the examination two tablets of “durolax” to be taken with the evening meal on the day before the examination this should produce two or more bowel actions the following morning a suppository should be inserted into the rectum one to two hours before the examination this should produce one or two bowel actions
dear warren just wondering how your doing and hope you can say that you are really feeling more like yourself today and then, before you know it, may you be pleased to find you’re happily enjoying health of the very best kind many many good wishes! our thoughts are with you every day and hoping you are feeling a little better each day mildred and vic
no fluid is to be taken for eight (8) hours beforehand a light dry meal may be taken four (4) hours beforehand, if desired only the bladder is to be emptied immediately prior to the examination walk around as much as possible beforehand
especially for you light thoughts bright thoughts gladden your day thoughts …sun thoughts, fun thoughts, coming your way thoughts! Hope you’re feeling better from jack and mavis
(v)
INTRAVENOUS CHOLANGIOGRAM *non-residue diet as far as possible two days before the examination two tablets of “durolax” to be taken with the evening meal on the day before the examination this should produce two or more bowel actions the following morning a suppository should be inserted into the rectum one or two hours before the examination this should produce one or two bowel actions fast on the day of the examination walk around as much as possible for 2 hours before the examination
hope you’re feeling better certainly hope you’re feeling just a whole lot better today, and hope you know you’re thought of in the very warmest way to dear warren, thinking of you all the time and hoping you will soon be home all my love, fay, jack, and family xxxxx
(vi)
* “NON-RESIDUE DIET” should exclude all rough and stringy vegetables and fruit and breakfast preparations containing bran etc. fruit juices, milk meat and bread may be taken
get well real soon thinking of you a lot these days and sincerely hoping too that things are going smoothly and will keep improving for you pat budd
IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO KEEP THIS APPOINTMENT, PLEASE NOTIFY THE X-RAY DEPARTMENT, ROYAL BRISBANE HOSPITAL, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE TELPHONE 52011 APPOINTMENTS CLERK EXT 591
(vii)
Gone shooting Ken and I home later Warren.
Last Words, 1978
The last words with
his father had nothing
to do with art or history
or culture or poetry.
They had nothing to do
with the big issues of
the time; Malcolm Fraser
or Skylab or Afghanistan
or Elvis.
They went something like this,
‘You look after yourself, tiger.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘You be a good boy.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘See you when you get back’.
‘Yes, Dad.’
Then his father waved once
& dissolved into the wire-mesh
pixels of the front screen door.
And the next night his small
world flipped on its axis & all
things mechanical revolted
in his face, when he learnt
the king had finally lost
his linoleum crown.
The Funeral Service of Warren Neil Dionysius (A New Translation)
(i)
Pastor: We are all born weak and helpless. All
lead the same, short, troubled life. We
grow and wither as quickly as flowers;
We disappear like shadows. Will you even
look at me, God, or put me on trial and
judge me? Nothing clean can ever come
from anything as unclean as man. The
length of his life is decided beforehand –
the number of months he will live. You
have settled it, and it can’t be changed.
In the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit.
Cong: Amen.
Poet: No. I reject this narrative.
Pastor: Lord have mercy.
Cong: Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy,
Lord, have mercy.
Poet: havemercyhavemercyhavemercyhavemercyhavemercyhavemercyonmetoo
(ii)
Psalm 90: Of God and Man
O Lord, you have always been our home.
(My home was a small wooden cottage)
Before you created the hills
(Beside the Condamine river, Western Qld)
or brought the world into being,
(There I had my first sense of being)
you were eternally God,
(He was eternally there)
and will be God forever.
(Blocking out the sun
with his raised fist)
You tell man to return to what he was;
(No one could tell him anything!)
you change him back to dust.
(He was already turning to dust)
A thousand years to you are like one day;
(When he was gone shooting
I had a thousand-yard stare)
they are like yesterday, already gone,
(The past was a dried up dam
its yellow days; dead carp)
like a short hour in the night.
(Sometimes there was crying
in the short hours of the night)
You carry us away like a flood;
(Sometimes the Condamine flooded;
I once saw a turtle swept away)
we last no longer than a dream.
(In my dreams it was a small boy instead)
We are like weeds that sprout in the morning,
(I can only remember geraniums
& bloodworms longer than my arm)
that grow and burst into bloom,
(that crawled out of the ground after rain)
then dry up and die in the evening.
(I killed these blind creatures;
pretended they were snakes)
We are destroyed by your anger;
(We were destroyed by his anger)
we are terrified by your fury.
(We were terrified by his fury)
You place our sins before you.
(I placed my hands before him)
our secret sins where you can see them.
(I lost his Australian Army Badge
playing war down by the riverbank)
Our life is cut short by your anger;
(I never told anyone about it;
carried the medal-guilt on my chest
His life was cut short by anger)
it fades away like a whisper.
(The walls of the cottage whispered)
Seventy years is all we have-
eighty years, if we are strong;
(His grandfather got ninety one
His father got eighty one
He was strong, but only got forty-five)
yet all they bring us is trouble and sorrow;
life is soon over, and we are gone.
(The cottage is gone, the river still there)
Who has felt the full power of your anger?
(His anger was a small, blue sun;
a supernova that burned in his temples)
Who knows what fear your fury can bring?
(I knew the sun was unstable)
Teach us how short our life is,
(He was a Sun-King of course
who could only reign for seven years)
so that we may become wise.
(I am still dumb with his death)
How much longer will your anger last?
(I do not know, he was my model you see)
Have pity, O Lord, on your servants!
(Did I pity him? Do I even care?)
Fill us each morning with your constant love,
(In the mornings the giant sat at the table
his catapult arms thundering; LOVE & HATE
etched in the skin of his knuckles)
so that we may sing and be glad all our life.
(I was always glad to leave the table)
Give us now as much happiness as the sadness
(Tears dried quickly in the dry heat)
you gave us during all our years of misery.
(Was I a good son? Did he think so? Say so?)
Let us, your servants, see your mighty deeds;
(Once I saw him lift two wheat bags over his head)
let our ancestors see your glorious might.
(What will his fathers think of me?
Now that the wheat seeds sprout inside my head?)
LORD our God, may your blessing be with us.
(Did I even say I loved him? On that last day?)
Give us success in all we do!
(Did he call for me when I was not there
Did his lips trace my name before he imploded
Before his body burned like a magnesium flare?)
Pastor: Glory to the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Cong: As it was in the beginning is now, and shall be forever more.
Amen. (Congregation sits)
Poet: No glory. No father. No son. No Holy Spirit. No beginning.
No forever more. No Amen. (narrative can never sit still)
Some Thoughts on the Absence of Mourning
Picture this.
A small, mousy blonde boy of seven
taken aside by his friend’s mother
one summer night on a farm,
halfway between Tara & Dalby.
Being told that his father
died an hour ago.
Waking up the next morning,
the springs of a strange bed
digging into his cricket ball
skull wound tight with memory.
Dust motes hung with suspense.
These tiny angel of mercy mobiles
in orbit around his head.
Cartoon stars exploding in
his face with tunguska force.
His small world leveled like
a permafrost pine forest.
Can you picture him?
Staring into a bowl of uneaten
Fruit Loops, dissolving molecule
by molecule into pink milk.
Or sitting in the car, coaxing
the landscape to jump & snarl
at the window; crude sling-shots
trained on him by semi-trailers.
Riding with the Premier’s inertia
as it avoided shreds of kangaroo
studded on the thick, blue belt
of the Warrego highway.
Magnetic specks of meat
attaching to the hubcaps
like iron-flesh filings.
Can you picture his house in mourning?
Blood relatives who got there first.
His mother ironed into the grieving press.
Her pain transferred into speechlessness.
Him, staring at his parent’s wedding photo
on top of the chipped glory-chest;
its lacquered tongue wagging all
over the small country town.
Him, searching the house from end to end;
checking under beds, in the downstairs
laundry, outside toilet, garden shed
& finally beneath the house.
Wishing the blue sky could
burst into tiny shards.
Can you picture him?
Hugging a rough, hardwood stump.
Ignorant of the redbacks eavesdropping
on his private world; whispering
their petty hatreds in their
faint, clicking speech.
Him, too afraid to go to the toilet;
fear dribbling down his leg into
the split, black soil where they
would soon pour his father, covering
him with a quilt of dead lawn.
Wishing the world could
be wound back like a clock.
Can you picture it?
The ant lion of time sitting
patiently in its house of sand;
waiting for the next boy to wander in
& never get out.
Instamatic
There he was.
One hand holding the reins
the other patting the cheek
of the palomino; its pink nose
quivered like a hare’s.
There he was in the saddle.
Joined to the mother-mare by
a thick slice of leather &
the blood-brother bond
of man & beast.
They shared the same circulation
of sweat & destiny. If one got sick
they both fell ill. If one tripped on a stone
they both stumbled. If one was called by name
they both pricked up their ears.
There I was. The only one in the photo
left alive. The mare, already half brown,
slipped into sepia first. My father, mostly white
took a little longer to succumb to the polaroid
decay of the seventies.
But, by the end of the decade
it had stamped him too.
The Enormous Nature of Things
When he was seven his father
dissipated into the steam of time
right before his seam opal eyes.
His flesh evaporated from his bones
like a pot of water boiling dry on
the electric stove hissing with defeat.
Sometimes after a thunderstorm his
siblings placed him on top of a mud
castle & left him there to harden.
At two, he was the Lord of Muck.
From the photographs it seemed
that his father too, was buried
under a scalp of earth.
At seven, he learnt about
the enormous nature of things.
Of how his kittens could never
be returned once his mother bashed
their skulls against the house stumps.
Of how his father was never coming back
no matter how much he tugged & tugged
at the time capsule to release him.
2. Fatherlands
Fatherlands
for Raymond Carver
What was it about him?
Was it the way he scraped
his boots, home from work
guts full of horse-fly bites,
fingernails blunt as butter knives?
Or slivers of dried mud curled
into a fist on the wash-house floor,
his leather belt singing the same
old hymn? Dry lips drawn apart;
blood atoms stealing
into a blue-grey dusk?
Was it solar flares that leapt
from his eyes & burnt holes
in your heart’s cheap furniture?
Or his creosote hands sealing
your mother’s softwood throat
as he fell down the front steps?
A metal colander arcing through
the space where his head had been;
a motherland sputnik seized by
its small window of opportunity.
What was it about him?
The way the rabbit felt hat
cast a rain-shadow over his eyes
as he belted his brother-in-law;
his shoulders heavy as a plough?
Or the way he held his daughter
on Suzy the mare until she screamed?
Or the way he raised a flagon
of white sherry to his lips:
a conch shell heralding the future?
Was it the way his famous strength
capitulated against the chrome
rails of the mechanical cot-bed?
Or the way his children looked out
the window, unaware of the hospital’s
slow decay into infinite sepia?
What was it about him?
Was it the way the polaroids
only ever captured
half the picture?
Earthing
The thunder echoed clear across
the plain like a child jumping on
the top of an empty rainwater tank.
The boy, familiar with the short
fuse of summer storms raced out
of the small, weatherboard house
to rescue his mother’s washing.
As he started uprooting pegs
the sky erupted like a chromakeyed
backdrop & smothered him
with blue fire.
When he opened his eyes he found
himself lying on his back, elbows
barnacled with black dirt. He saw
his grey school shirts hanging limp
& defeated & he found the Hills Hoist,
incandescent as a xmas tree, rotating
back & forth like the confused
needle of a compass.
Bolting back to the house,
he made it just as hail rained down;
little, dirty comets earthing themselves
where the impact of the boy
still quivered in the red
memory of clover.
Ghost Limb
The chicken was still warm
when his mother found it by
the front gate. Its head
torn clean off like a hand
rinsed through an auger.
Blood flecked the grass;
grains of sorghum spilt
at feeding time.
Before he had even sat
down to breakfast his mother
spied the fox from her kitchen
window. His step-father grabbed
the old .22 from where it hid
in a corner; a walnut bloodhound
straining on its links of memory.
The fox riddled with the mange
did not seem to notice the bullets
screaming over its head; a flock
of harpies fitted with spurs.
After five shots his step-father
handed him the relay baton in this
new competition to see who could
kill the fox first. He took aim
eager to end the mid-morning blood
lust & return to his breakfast.
His bullet kicked into the wheat
stubble with the velocity
of a startled hare.
Eventually his step-father
punched a hole through its hip bone.
The fox jack-knifed into the ground.
Its tongue lolled as it dragged itself
over the cultivation on its front paws.
Then his step-father placed the barrel
behind its right ear & squeezed
the metal fingernail moon.
They left the body of the fox
in a drainage ditch for the crows.
His eyes usually steel-grey
clouded over with blood & blue sky.
As they cut through the dead grass
his trigger finger itched
like a ghost limb.
Monoculture
(i)
He imagined his deep, blue blood
soaking into the black ox heart
of the Darling Downs. He thought
of him feeding the great artesian
anima of Queensland. He watched
as his manliness was peeled away
like leaves from a head of corn.
He was not there when they drove
him to the hospital. He did not
know when they lowered him into
his fertile tomb. He did not see
thin ribbons of guests wind their
way back to the parking lot. He
did not hear the rotary-hoe start.
He never witnessed the water-level.
Never noticed them plant their high
yield, bumper harvest around him. He
avoided their plasma stained sorghum
& white-celled wheat. He could never
fathom his father’s winter-crop rotation.
(ii)
He did witness his daughter’s birth.
Her emergence; blue skinned seedling
blood freckles on her face, his father
in her veins. Once, he was not allowed
to watch his father die & eventually
colour photos were passed his way;
polaroid heirlooms that kept falling
out of his head-album or kept being put
back in the wrong order & getting mixed up.
Bamboo thin memories that he pressed under
the fingernails of his mind’s eye; drawing
down the rains to wash away his monoculture.
Almost Sixteen Months
My daughter
Almost sixteen months
Drowns her plastic dolly
In a tub of lukewarm water.
A flotilla of ducks
Surround her like the Seventh Fleet.
She has risen out of the depths
Of our subconscious,
This Godzilla girl-child
Smashing lives in her wake.
At almost sixteen months
My daughter has already
Learnt the basics of her race.
That her hands can crush
Butterflies into a cloud of fairy dust
And that her brain is the best
Weapon of all when it comes
To laying whole cities to waste.
Of Fear & Fathers
He’s so afraid of his daughter.
Of her blue & red handprints
that smear their blood message
across the face of his world.
He’s afraid of when her genes
start to kick in, of when each
memory canvas, each illumination
is discarded as if they were a
cicada shell; still fearsome.
He’s afraid of the things he plants,
that take root each season; but are
slaughtered, like children caught in
a gymnasium by a bogeyman with a pair
of 45’s. Their small bodies, heavy
as medicine balls. He is afraid of time;
How many football fields of memories
are cleared each day from her mind?
How many thoughts are planted?
He is so afraid of history. His
photographs make a mockery of the
events. His family album is thick
with dead men & women who did not
know him, who will never understand.
He can feel a bloody revolution
waiting to break out inside her.
He must topple the lichen stained
statues of his fathers; sell them
on his black market soul.
He can feel the glacier of his fears
begin to crack wide open & sink into
her bitter sea. The waters rise more
as their noontide rushes to engulf.
He must not let his daughter drown
in the sorrows that eroded his skin
& bone coastline. He must keep her
head above the chrome ocean of fate
that claimed his fathers.
He noticed his daughter has
the blue-grey eyes of his mother.
She is the alpha & the omega.
She is the first & last
of his fathers.
Crossing
He was surprised at how much it didn’t hurt.
Punching the smooth cup of the pedestrian button
hard as he could with the side of his left fist.
Three times his flesh smote the steel; he, the
ogre who would crumple his daughter’s iron spirit
(as if it were paper). Sticking his paw out for her,
he grasped thin air instead. He looked at her then,
his blue slitted eyes burning with St Elmo’s fire.
“I don’t hold the hands of grumpy people!”
she declared coolly, fingering the pink, plastic
ring on her right hand, trying to use up one
of her three wishes. “It’s alright. I’m not angry
at you, I’m only angry at the bus”, he growled
feeling his wrist start to throb with poison.
They stood there hand in hand, waiting
for the little red man to turn green.
Fossils
for Rhiannon
(i)
Once, on a small hill-top
that stood out like a bruised thumb
on the flat palm of the Darling Downs,
I found my one & only treasure.
The fossil of a leaf. Its diamond shape
impregnated like Manson’s swastika
into the forehead of silurian rock.
Its veins collapsed into thin coal.
(ii)
I carried the fossil for weeks
wrapped in his school jumper –
an injured magpie fragile as knowledge.
My science teacher though, doubted
the validity of my find,
said it was nothing more
than cement with scratches,
& heaved it out of the classroom
like a housebrick.
(iii)
My step-father, a rock collector
himself told me that once, he
& his brother-in-law unearthed
a fossilised tree some 30 feet long,
& not knowing what to do with it
ploughed it back into the paddock.
My thylacine jawbone
unhinged in shock.
(iv)
In a sandpit at the Queensland
Museum my daughter dug up her
own fossil. A fragment of a two
hundred million year old ammonite.
Curled her fist around it like a
Jurassic lollipop. On the footpath
outside she pointed to the imprint
of a leaf etched into some new cement
by mistake & asked,
“Is this a fossil too, Daddy?”
(v)
“Absolutely”, I replied,
shading her from the glare,
my petrified trunk rooted
to her eternity.
Wasp factory
The wasps hovered about the clothesline
like thin wisps of cigar smoke, drifting
for hours on tobacco leaf wings,
long after their nest had been napalmed
by an old copy of the Sunday Mail
& a platoon of red head matches.
Cocooned in their honeycombed big-top
the albino wasp larvae withered like
beeswax candles before a flamethrower.
When the scorched nest was knocked
to the ground, worker ants tried to tug
the unborn out of their hexagonal cells
like circus clowns out of cannons.
White death masks covered
their young, insect faces.
That afternoon, everything ran its course.
Green ants snapped their bull-whip
mandibles & began strutting up long
blades of grass like psychopathic
acrobats. Dragonflies dipped their red
ladle-long abdomens into the algae souped
up pond. Smaller ants flensed two beached
guppies, opening their rib cages like cans
of tuna. Empty cicada shells clawed
the callistemon, decorated the backyard
with Easter Island statues.
Later, the washing dried
in its own good time & the paperwasps
fled like a squadron of Huey Cobras;
their mission aborted for now,
their black & yellow bodywork flaking.
The neon sting of their defeat buzzing
around their ears like tracer.
Wasp Factory 2
I tell my daughter as I tuck her in
‘The wasps are back under the steps again.’
This, their third incursion in two months.
She is scared of the things outside.
Not the dark itself.
Just the things that are in it.
Dracula. Frankenstein. The Black Prince.
Wants to know as I press my lips
against the silk wires of her head.
‘What are the bad things
adults dream of?’
What can I tell her
when fifteen minutes ago
I saw a kidnapped boy-soldier,
forced to fight for the rebels
in Sierra Leone, naked & squealing
as he was hog-tied to the back
of a Toyota landcruiser by
two Nigerian ‘peacekeepers’.
This small hive of a boy
disoriented as a dying bee.
When I don’t answer
she changes the subject;
suggests that in the morning
we can burn a newspaper,
trap the wasps in her bug-catcher
& make them fly into the flames one by one.
They stung her once, you see.
On the ankle as she was standing
at the bottom of the back steps
just observing.
As I kiss her goodnight
it occurs to me that she
may have been captured too.
Forced to think like an adult.
As I turn to leave, I notice
her tropical fish eyeing the algae
blooming inside their tank.
Their mouths, wide with panic.
In the pond-black darkness
of the hallway I stumble;
cannot get a grip on the fear
alighting on my heart’s dim bulb
in a small flurry of wings.
Easter
The red panacum sweats
inside my step-father’s silo.
As I help him lift the auger
my fingers rub some congealed grease
& stiffen, as if they’ve tasted blood.
Out of the corner of my eye
I notice the rats, plump with time,
begin to outflank us.
All afternoon he pumps seed into
a truck, parked beneath his father’s
grain shed they put up together in ‘66.
The dust mushrooms under our slow dance.
Over the corrugated tin roof, a sonic
April sky booms. Later, in the
bathroom the solvol soap grinds away
my skin’s dying universe.
It is Easter.
I have not been back for a year.
My step-father’s thinning hair
is turning the colour of his shed.
At lunch, my mother points her finger
out the kitchen window to the dirt
I once played in, now replaced
by a new couch lawn.
Things are greener than
they were last time, she says.
That night my daughter stuffs
the hay she collected into two
baskets for the Easter Bilby.
Places them gently beside her bed
like twin basins of holy water.
In the toilet she pokes a tree
frog which squats on the cistern;
its skin fragile as silver wrapping.
Outside, a rain-ring orbits the moon.
Next morning, over breakfast
I eavesdrop on her telling
my parents of her discovery.
Of how he squeezed in through
a rip in the fly-screen.
I watch her spit out the words
like splinters of painted egg-shell
caught beneath her tongue.
Of Wolves & Children
Some days I stare at my daughter
with the eyes of a maddened wolf.
I am the rogue dog, who has been
expelled from the pack & left to
fend for myself in the desolate
tundra of the mind.
See me plundering the garbage bins
of your subconscious for scraps of
thought, for shelter from my animal
instincts. When I walk into the room
I want you to cry wolf.
I do not know how I came to hunt
alone. All I know is that now I prey
on the weak & the sick & the young.
I use my wits to avoid the steel traps,
my strength to run down the innocent.
I am protected from the bitter cold
of my canine exile by the fire in my
blood. But it will not last long.
See me wander off to die of starvation.
Watch the snow & ice cover my miserable
flesh with the cool pelt of winter.
In the spring see my daughter
poke around in the floe & uncover
the conspiracy of bones & teeth.
See her lip curl into a snarl.
My Daughter & I at the End of the Century
(i)
I war upon myself.
My daughter is a bystander
her eyes cameras recording
every image, every sound I make.
I know she is memorising my crimes.
I have declared civil war upon myself.
My daughter is an innocent caught
in the cross-fire of my heart.
I cut her down with the
friendly fire of my soul.
(ii)
I think I am not so much a
warrior as a prisoner of war,
of my own private bloodshed.
My father failed to complete
his training in the acts of killing.
I was his little blond, Spartan boy
who kept a collection of 303 shells
in a shoebox under his bed.
I used to fall asleep underneath
the goose-feather eiderdown
as my father fashioned bullets
out of the thin alluvial air.
(iii)
What is it that makes little
boys into little soldiers?
It is the steer shot in the head.
It is the goanna punched out of the tree.
The chicken anointing the chopping block.
The lamb with its throat slit open.
The kangaroo stuffed on a grid-
post on the way to St George.
It is the zebra finch that
crumpled into the pineapples
on my Uncle’s farm.
(iv)
At the end of the century
I will tell my daughter these two things:
that once when I was a boy
I buried my box of shells so deep
I could never find them again,
and that unlike my father
I will never be able to fashion
bullets for her out of thin air.
Of Lies & Nursing Homes
for Nan
My grandmother is losing her way
in the Redcliffe Nursing Home at
the end of the twentieth century.
She is trapped between the summers
of 1922 & 1952; a xmas beetle caught
inside the screen & sliding doors
of her memory. Her brain has been
flipped onto its glossy carapace
by the small child within her;
she hisses with stories, unable to
extend her wings, fragile as thought.
On the bedside table a bunch of wilting
paper daisies from an impossibly long
dead friend flower-press the white-stucco
walls of her room with their dying scent.
The statues of Lenin & King George
raised in her youth are now bearded
with the market economy of lichen;
the nationalism of moss. In the glass-blue
sapphires of her eyes I sometimes see her
dancing the Charleston over & over
in the great depression of her mind.
Under the bedsheets, the bulge of her legs;
frozen by a bout of polio that plagued
her childhood like a lost puppy she
once took home & kept tripping her up.
Her children, old & worn themselves
weave in & out of her memory’s stupor,
have nothing now to say to their mother
keeping warm under the crocheted quilt
of her decline. My Uncle on a private
visit to the Home shouts his second born anger;
stills fights with his mother to upset her.
In the eucalypt fresh ward grey nurses whisper
to each other & nudge on. Nan tells us that her
handsome, eldest boy (my long dead father)
visits her in dreams. Hands outstretched he glides
through the chrome & bleach of the Home; I’m over here
Son, she calls out to him, but my father does not hear
& walks through the ward without saying anything.
No one can tell her that the sorghum & wheat last
drained through her son’s thresher-fingers twenty
years ago, leaving nothing but a cancerous wind
to disperse his husk. The dark, fertile plains
of the Darling Downs having repossessed his ribs
& his black tongue. Nan’s statements of;
I’m going home tomorrow! are softly ignored
like Majorie Somebody? nesting in her own shit
a metre away. I take hold of her hands wrinkled
in the fashion of her 1920’s flapper hairstyle.
Cold as the rings of Saturn, her wedding bands
circumnavigate an intricate galaxy of blue veins
& bed sores. I try to drain my youth into them
like an intravenous drip, but the universe
of her cells is silent in their rejection of me.
On the foot of her bed, my three year old daughter
fidgets with her toys & Wiggles books;
does not understand who her great-grandmother
is & asks, Why is she lying there? In the next
bed Majorie mutters like an untuned radio
& drowns out my answer. Nan clasps her
small, grubby hands & pats them like a kitten;
says how much my daughter looks her father.
I think of my father & of how I shot up
around his legs like the buckwheat & ryegrass
that eventually smothered him. On the way
out my daughter blows her a ghost-kiss
& asks, Is Nana May coming home with us?
In the corridor, I notice a blank-faced
Sony television poised like a gargoyle
waiting to administer the last rites
of this plastic millennium to her.
Outside the Nursing home the air
begins to stink with salt & down
on Sutton’s Beach we find a used
syringe & the maggoty corpse
of a dead seagull. My lies continue
all the way back to Brisbane.
3. In a Forest of V2 Rockets
In a Forest of V2 Rockets
(i)
There is a coolness here
that you cannot get out; mixes
with your liquid oxygen heart
fueling arteries & engines.
Forests are efficient factories;
young stems reach for the sky
& aerial roots rain down
on Europe’s great cities.
Beneath the green canopy
our glow-worm veins pulse
like ignition keys.
(ii)
In the forest of V2 rockets
a clarinet of log reclines;
the deep notes of its decay
imperceptible to the ear.
Over the sea of leaves
Glenn Miller reaches
for a Lucky Strike as
our fingers play along
buttons of brass
coloured fungi.
(iii)
Suddenly, we cannot
see the mountains
for vapour trails.
(iv)
In a glade we notice
a wedding finger of trunk
banded by an infinity of vines.
A mushroom smell sautés our skin.
Here, the doodle-bugs shed
their iron casings; drop
to the forest floor & die
in their hundreds.
(v)
Guidance fins draped
with Grandfather’s Beard;
buttressed to the ground
by the sheer weight of staghorns.
Up ahead, a slender Oppenheimer
picks his teeth with a blade of grass.
If you listen carefully,
the air ticks with
water-cooled metal.
(vi)
Over the campsite
the moon wraps itself
in a black & white
skin of explosive.
(vii)
When we finally trek through
nothing remains but the skeletons
of leaves, fragile as bird skulls.
Antlers of moss challenge us
at the gates.
There is writing
beside the cobwebs of wire.
Overhead, the last sub-sonic
cry falls silent as lichen.
(viii)
As we leave the camp,
a Prince Albert lyrebird rakes
over its continuum of leaf litter;
scratches at the surface
of stories, buried deep
in bunkers of humus.
(ix)
A blue tattoo of mildew
on a wrist of Antarctic beech
stains the late afternoon,
a dark, stagnant hue.
The Man is History
Man is a history making creature who
can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
W.H. Auden
Back.
Even if he wanted to. He left him & cannot go
back.
The burnt out, tram-shell of him accelerated
to the edge of the universe where he waited;
as the world festered beneath his fingernails.
Every flicker of the Astor television channel
surfed images/thoughts/memories/fantasies of him.
Every frame murdered him with a conspiracy plot.
On US farms, secret government biological tests
& the presence of windrift caused cancer in him
twenty years later; barrels & barrels of the stuff
dumped into his body, black cells multiplying;
disgust with what was happening to his operations,
powerlessness at his foreign, top level betrayal.
He saw things in black & white. Fences had to be
put up; kangaroos brought down; the blonde tips of
children raised with the love of cereal cash crops.
On occasions though, he was caught in the whirlpool
of his bloodline. Neurotic as Nemo; he looked down
upon his son; intent hidden in the eye of his crow.
There was the slow decline of his bones to contend
with. He was the captain of his fate. He, the land
locked siren whose voice was broken; a falcon, its
cheap leather hood hiding the plaited, trademark
violence. He returned from the hunt; little bits of
meat clung to the sides of his mouth like lampreys.
His memory was a drowned empire; ironbarks sat
with their backs to the brick wall, trying to
hold in their guts as his Atlantis sank into
sap. Was it a sudden quake that got him? Before
he could rise out of himself; throw off the covers
of his masculinity. Was his body ringed with fire?
Did he even know what hit him? The white pointer
pain nudged at the bloodwaters of his oceanscream;
its blunt nose smelled aratarataratarataratarat.
His great but mean-spirited civilisation rained
down around his ears like motherlode words flung
into the metallurgical core of his granite being.
His mould cracked for good. Used farm equipment
surrounded his final resting place; his ceremonial
guard glinted with the chrome teeth of New Holland.
Roots now held his world together. Boulder-tears
shed with the Titans, in the long defeat of livers.
His, now a history of subtle vibrations.
Back.
Even if he wanted to. He left him & cannot go
back, until the man is history.
Atomic Shadow
His was the great & secret show
of hero & anti-hero. Of magenta
thin fathers & cyan thick sons.
His was the way of the coward,
not the warrior. Of stock-whip
& alpha spirit. A bushidõ-man
whose divine wind smashed
his wolfpack to pieces?.
The son had a recurring night-
mare of being sucked through an
hourglass over & over again; being
swamped by waves of death-nausea.
Particles of him were dying too.
He was the seppuku of memory the
son cut open as a child; crocodile
tears salted their blood.
Sometimes, the cracks widened
in the walls of the son’s psyche
& he crawled softly through.
His tongue, snaked from the son’s
mouth; a velvet gecko snapping
at things smaller than itself
in a monoculture of light
& ground zero violence.
He is something of a 70’s
hologram now; a 3-D whisper
of a train steaming out of
its tunnel; a ghost-face cut
through with a laser, mouthing
off; an atomic shadow ashing
the rubble of his days with
its faint, powdery outline.
* Seppuku or hara-kiri was the traditional Samurai practice of ritual suicide through disembowelment.
* Bushidõ or the way of the bushi (an alternate term for samurai) was the belief that the samurai owed absolute devotion to their feudal overlord.
The Wheels Turn Slowly
He tries to piece him together
with the other jigsaw bits lost
between the floorboards of memory.
Word-puzzles are released years
later by the Department of Defence.
He studies his CMF/National Service
records; model airplane eyes glued
for detail. He looptheloops the
information; strings a thought-stuka
from the ceiling of his mind.
‘The wheels turn slowly’ whispers
his uncle. On Armistice Day 1995
they attend the rededication of
an Anglican church to the men who
waited for a war that never came.
They wander around Wacol Barracks
where he & his brother shouldered
303’s like wheat bags or new calves,
sunk into the hips of the earth.
His Uncle passes down his earliest
recollection, a young Heracles bitten
by a brown snake in the crib of the
South Burnett. His nephew can only
remember the colostomy bags opaque
scales; specialists milking bronze
venom from his father’s body.
His jaw hooked into the side
of a disposable plastic cup.
The steady drip of time,
swallowing its own tail.
His Father’s Grave
‘A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than an animal’.
Chief Joseph
Metal does not welcome strangers
but ushers them on past the duckpond
blanketed by hubcaps of lilypads
& ironbarks petrifying in the heat
of a midday sun cast in bronze.
Metal enjoys the sprinklers &
the plastic flowers which project
their perfect blooms all year round.
Metal is sown beside the Ag college’s
harvest & the seasons that dull
its lustre. They can do nothing
to prevent this black cultivation.
Metal is tended by lawn grubs & by
green ant civilisations that compete
with the living. Near the 1970’s
brick gate, ebony angels crow
with delight. Metal is the seal
of finality, the very last trophy
displayed in the earth’s cabinet.
Metal is the heavy, black coin
wedged between the front teeth
of the ferryman.
Metal waits patiently for you
to shave its beard of kikuyu,
to graft new leaf stained vases,
to run your fingers over
its oven-warm hieroglyph.
I suppose its true then, metal.
A man who would not love
his father’s grave
is worse than an animal.
My Father, the King
Father, I cannot remember when you spat
acid into my face at the kitchen table,
or when your fists drummed on my brothers
& sisters; a rhythmic beating like the blood
of the steers you crash-tackled & slaughtered.
Mother absorbed most of your mortal frustration.
You were only a young god then, newly arrived
at your power. You were our god of the hunt.
Your lycanthropic tongue; a pack of wolves
that ripped your family to pieces when there
was nothing else left. Father. King man.
Did we sacrifice you too soon to the old ones?
When we pulled your heart out of your chest why
were you smiling at us; your incisors bared?
We were without you, long before you died. Your
mind left for dead in the solicitor’s office.
After a while it seemed your body was only
going through the motions of fatherhood.
Father. You would not let me nail your
skins to the skull-cap of our backyard.
Only when they had dried & the ants
scissored the last stringy flesh away
would you let me try to pull the four-inch
nails free with your pliers. You drooled
as they fell to the ground like spent
cartridges. The roos fed us for a month.
Why so silent now Father? Have the worms
got your canine tongue? Did the battery
acid of your words dissolve your throat?
Did the strength in your hands erode away
grain by grain like a riverbank? Father,
you were my sun-god. Your star was bright
in my heaven for eight years. You were my
wicker-man. The earth demanded your life
so that we could live. So that I could
drive home the nails myself. Father.
King man. I am so sorry that I buried
you alive. I am so sorry that I only
split the wood of your memory. I am
so sorry that I had to skin you.
These Are the Days
These are the days of self-destruction.
When he followed his father’s King Gees’
through punji-stick paddocks of wheat
stubble. When he stumbled on bright
clods of black hearted earth. When
the wheels of civilisation fell off
at the cast iron foot of his father’s
deathbed.
These are the seeds of self-destruction.
When the temperature of the brain reaches
boiling point. When his blood thickened
& curdled inside of his skull. When the
membrane of his childhood was stretched
thin across the years as a cobweb across
his face.
These are the remains of self-destruction.
A mummified, middle-aged man preserved by
Kodak. A dozen photos sinking irreversibly
into sepia. A silver, Sekio watch that
stopped in 1978. Some soft porn novels
locked away in a suitcase. One moth-eaten
maroon bathrobe. One 1950’s, National Service
overcoat stained with discipline. One
bronze plaque ringed by kikuyu.
These are the days.
Not to be a Poet
Father, let me rewrite our story.
The summer of 1978 never happened.
I helped you down from the rock,
a sore & shaken Prometheus.
Given a second chance, you
stopped smoking & drinking.
Your cloud thin anger vanished.
You taught me how to drive.
How to pump grain into a silo
& string a barbed-wire fence.
You initiated me into the secret
men’s business of spanners & scopes;
Showed me how to fix my dragster
thread a hook through a worm
& shoot a .22, .243 & .303.
You lips cracked open when I blew
the head clean off my first kangaroo.
You taught me how to skin a carcass
delicately as tearing a mintie
wrapper into one fly-sweet strip.
Eventually our family scraped enough
together to buy our own bit of land.
On your 50th birthday we all drove
to your favourite spot on Frazer
& caught fish by the moonfull.
Father, in this story
you have not been dead
for the last twenty years.
In this story, we fought
too as much as we talked
& you lent me the extra cash
I needed to buy my first set of wheels.
A black, EH Holden sedan I wrapped
around a power-pole three weeks
after my 18th birthday.
Father, in this story
you gave me all the confidence
in the world, not to be a poet.
The Day the Earth Ate Him
I should have murdered this, that murders me.
Sylvia Plath
(i)
I was hiding inside of myself
The day the earth ate him. Devoured him.
I was hiding in the smallest
Blackest little hole in my head
The day the earth ate him. Drank him.
The pores of the earth opened up
& swallowed him the day I was
Hiding inside of my head. Choked him.
They poured black earth down his throat
& I was hiding from him in the hole in my head.
Poisoned him. They blindfolded & led him
Into the pit of night & I was left to fend off
The demons that came for him.
That were hunting him.
(ii)
Only by hiding could I defeat them. Murder them.
& every night after that I hid, tried to forget
Him as the earth gnawed on the bones of his memory
& sent emissaries through his eye sockets
again&again&again&again.
Sleep would not come to the dead.
(iii)
I mapped his slow digestion
On the chart inside of my head.
The parasites that took him apart
Grew&grew&grew&grew.
(iv)
I think I murdered his memory.
His voice was the first to go.
A bad echo the died shortly
After it had begun. Blinded him.
The incubi grew fat off my fears
While the earth separated him further
& further from the living. Hung him.
I was hiding inside of myself
The day the earth ate him. Gutted him.
I was hiding in the smallest, blackest little hole
In my head the day the earth ate him. Castrated him.
I hid as the black dust settled over him.
(v)
I should have murdered this, that murders me.
The day the earth ate him.
The Cold Work of Stones
Now father cut me down with tears
Plant me far in my mother’s image
To do the cold work of books and stones.
John Ashbery, Eclogue
We skimmed only the flattest rocks
across the face of the freshwater lake
deftly as the steel-grey hubcaps
we frisbeed into the deep
blue belly of night.
We often wondered what he saw when
he turned the new moons of his eyes
toward the ripples that licked his boots
in anticipation of the next stoning.
We thought that maybe he was divining
for some secret purpose to his life.
Something beyond the black, blue & blonde
triad that left him transparent
as an ice sculpture.
He did not even make a splash
when the white-water of his century
pummelled him into the crab infested
beach-head littered with the flotsam
& jetsam of his dreams.
He sank completely out of sight.
The weight of the world dragging him
down to the tea-stained bottom
where the cold work of stones
filed away his pebble teeth
& his mossy tongue.
His ripples ending
as quickly as they
had begun.
Black Snag
(i)
I have kept you frozen within me
beside the flathead & whiting
you caught on your trips to Fraser
& kept in the bottom of the freezer.
My thoughts of you are only now
beginning to thaw. Your best
surf rod hung for years from
the ceiling of our garden shed.
Fishing line wormed around its
artificial limb; sometimes
I skewered my fingers
through your hooks.
(ii)
I used to enter this hot, tin box;
this galvanised tomb to your memory.
Your prawn lures sat there feeding
on filaments of dust/plankton
trapped by the meniscus of sunlight
& salt encrusted stories.
(iii)
Their passionfruit seed/eyes
stared dead blank into oblivion.
They were always anxious for your
return & their next chance to
use their rabbit-trap mouths.
The sandworms you lured away
with rotting fish-heads have
avenged themselves on your bones
& will lend you their sinewy tissue,
their ribbed throats.
(iv)
I have still not made it to Double Island
Point to search for your footprints.
My lips blister when I taste you
in the salt air; I feel you
in every grain of sand the wind
deposits into my face.
(v)
It is time to throw back the past
that died choking at my feet.
You were my Man from Atlantis;
a Jules Verne, luminescence hid
the coral dagger of your tongue.
Later, I saw you try to dodge
the harpoons that hunted your whale-meat.
One day, a grenade-tipped spear pinned
you to a Brisbane hospital bed.
All I could do was watch the flensing
knives strip the blubber from you;
On the street below, taxis bleated
like dying dolphins.
(vi)
I know now, you would have released
these things given half the chance,
but the sea swallowed your pink
fish-gill face, as your body
dissolved with soldier-crab cancer;
your hopes taken by a grey undertow.
Now your face has the distorted
edge of a fish-eye lens.
Your hooks rusted away.
Your lead sinkers
we substituted for marbles
at school & lost.
(vii)
Once, when I held your scaling knife
in the smooth, shark skin of my palm
I tried to grind away your memory-scales,
but there was always something
that stopped me from gutting you;
some unfathomable, mystery.
(viii)
I am frozen now
in your black snag.
Stars in His Pockets Like Grains of Sand
That night her face was framed by stars.
Her right shoulder nudged the Hunter, Orion,
into action. Withdrew a barbed rib or two
from the ice-quiver of his constellation.
On her left, the Southern Cross relaxed
in the milk white, sand-trap of her clavicle.
A few red giants could not contain
themselves though, & fell of their own accord.
Others he brushed absent-mindedly
from the raw singularity
of his skinned knee.
At midnight, when enough merlot
had flowed down the wormholes
of their throats he asked the question.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought
something flared from her mouth,
just before the reply came.
A wavelength perhaps, that white-watered
on the acceleration of her breath.
In the morning, as he fumbled
in the tent for his wristwatch
he found stars in his pockets
like grains of sand.
He didn’t tell her about them.
Hid them beneath his firework tongue
when she was taking a shower.
As they left the caravan park
he reached over & placed
a lapis-lazuli dwarf star
on her lips.
Pink Crocus Flowers
for Melissa
When you were not here
the crocus flowers erupted
in the backyard (again);
a metamorphosis of pink, streaming
into the blue heart of our December.
It was not their fault. I did it.
It was Tuesday.
I was emptying Rhiannon’s pool
& opened the plugholes at either end.
I stood, watching the water
drain out rhythmically when I thought:
This is not how we are at all.
In a fit of gusto I upended it
sending a tidal wave of butts
& twist-tops (from the Xmas party)
over the blue couch lawn, cratered
where I had begun to dig out nut-grass
(construction halted by your order)
swamping the dormant flower beds
still confused by the coldest
November on record.
The next morning they were there.
Petals, soft as neck feathers.
Their shade tender as new sunburn.
Their stance, elegant as a heron’s.
And what did I think when I saw them?
Of how, when you got home I would
resume my life’s work mapping
the new constellations of freckles
across your face;
& how I would take you down
to look at our crocus flowers;
heavy with the pink heat of love.
Stung
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.
Sylvia Plath, The Bee Meeting
When he was a young man
& the flower of his mind
opened wide as a birth canal,
a single bumblebee, pregnant
with pollen landed a quick
kiss on his cheek, laced
with a fine golden down
sticky as honey.
When he was a bit older
a second bumblebee descended
onto the stem of his thorn
sharp nose, locked feelers
with the first bee & began
an elegant waltz. His legs
moved like an insect’s.
When he was older still
a third bumblebee alighted
on his forehead, crawled down
the cleft of his eye & joined
its two brethren, pirouetting
along his jaw-line.
When he was older still again
a flotilla of bees covered
his chin like a living veil.
Their wings interlocked;
a phalanx of shields
protecting him from the wasps
that fled their nests of mud
& were out to get him.
When he was in his prime
a honeybee, blown far off course
set down on the hive of his heart.
She never flew away. Just gave
order to the bees that streamed
down his throat like a black
& yellow waterfall.
When he was an old man,
a thick beard of drones
hung down to his knees.
He tucked them into the
belt serpenting his waist,
constricting time into nectar.
Not a single bee ever stung him.
When eventually he died
a hundred thousand bees danced
alongside the funeral procession.
All the way to the gravesite, where
they flung themselves like dervishes
in after his Baltic amber coffin.
When he was honeycombed with mud
tiny pairs of frosted glass wings
littered the grave’s edge. When dusk
fell they twinkled like mirrored
wall-tiles, illuminating
the blood red roses that died
with the light of the day.
Bitter as the cud 