Acknowledgments
Poems in this collection were previously published in; Antithesis, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, Bareknuckle Poets Anthology, Bareknuckle Poets Magazine, Best Australian Poems 2017, Bimblebox Art project website, Cordite, 2015 Grieve anthology, 2018 Grieve anthology, foam:e, fourW, Idiom 23, Ipswich City Council- Ipswich Poetry Feast website, Island, Meanjin, 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist e-anthology & Global Poetry anthology, Pastel magazine, Plumwood Mountain, Now You Shall Know: 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Connective Tissue: 2015 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, 2013 Queensland Poetry Festival anthology: Spoken in One Strange Word, Rabbit, Remington Review (US), Southerly, Sotto, Social Alternatives, StylusLit, The Age, Underneath: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize 2015 anthology, Tremble: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize 2016 anthology, The Weekend Australian, Westerly and Writ Poetry Review.
‘Bomb’ was highly commended in the 2013 Ipswich Poetry Feast – Rosewood Green Award, Open Age Local Poetry.
‘Unicorns Cross Here’ was shortlisted in the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize.
‘Kennethland’ was shortlisted in the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
‘Tomato Picking, Bowen’ won the inaugural 2013 457 Prize for Poetry.
Golden Bowerbird’ was shortlisted in the 2014 Manning Clark House National Cultural Awards — Axel Clark Memorial Prize for Poetry.
‘Soldier Parrots’ was longlisted in the 2014 Ron Pretty Poetry Prize.
‘American Love Poem’ was placed second in the 2014 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize
“Forty-Five’was placed second in the 2014 Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry.
‘Eel-tailed catfish’ was longlisted in the 2015 University of Canberra’s Vice Chancellor Award for Poetry.
‘Counter-pastoral at 140kph’ was shortlisted in the 2015 Newcastle Poetry Prize.
‘Stargardt’s Syndrome’ was runner up in the 2015 Grieve Writing Competition– National Association of Grief and Loss Award.
‘Goblin Valley, Utah’ was commended in the 2016 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition.
‘Das Kapital” was commended in the 2016 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition.
“Grindle Road’ won the 2016 Ipswich Poetry Feast, Rosewood Green Award – Open Age Local Poets.
‘The Surface of Last Scattering” was co-runner up in the 2016 Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry.
“Barnacle’ was shortlisted in the 2016 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize.
“Easter Sunday” was shortlisted in the 2016 Grieve Writing Competition.
“War on Terror’ was highly commended in the 2017 Ipswich Poetry Feast, Rosewood Green Award – Open Age Local Poets.
“Night Parrots” was commended in the 2017 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition.
“Guadalcanal’ was shortlisted in the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
“A Japanese Airman Forewarns His Wife’ was a finalist in the 2018 Grieve Writing Competition.
Contents
1. Unicorns Cross Here
2. The Big Bang
3. Kennethland
4. Promise You Won’t Leave Me
5. American Love Poem
6. Zebra Finch
7. Golden Bowerbird
8. Freckled Ducks
9. The Resurrection
10. Mundagatta (Bunyip)
11. Powerful Owl
12. Orange-bellied Parrot
13. Dhaka
14. Bomb
15. Eel-tailed catfish
16. The Shadow Gallery
17. Shoulder-charged by Seamus Heaney
18. Brigalow: an extinct pastoral
19. Asbestos Manor, Hervey Bay
20. Tomato Picking, Bowen
21. Goblin Valley, Utah
22. Great Barrier Reef
23. Review
24. Angstcination
25. Forty-Five
26. Counter-pastoral at 140kph
27. Das Kapital
28. Scarlet-Shouldered Parrot
29. Soldier Parrots
30. Stargardt’s Syndrome
31. Wacol Station Road
32. Grief is a Small Animal That Needs a Home
33. Ornamental Snake
34. Travelling
35. Maureen Cooper’s Quilt (Bimblebox Nature Reserve)
36. Southern Boobook Owls
37. Night Parrots
38. Guadalcanal
39. Chinchilla
40. The Surface of Last Scattering
41. At Play with Grey-Crowned Babblers
42. Brown Booby
43. The Forest in Me
44. Lord Howe Island Phasmid, Land Lobster
45. Grindle Road
46. Stopped the Boats
47. Easter Sunday
48. Bee Fleeting
49. Barnacle
50. Ace
51. Fighting Girlfriend
52. On Not Having Encountered Snow, Aged 46
53. Juvy
54. A Japanese Airman Forewarns His Wife
55. The Shoes
56. The Night Witches
57. War on Terror
58. Snow Geese
(i)
There is true north; there is the far north; then there’s
The deep north. Cook, possibly bemused by this tropic
Irony, his twenty-foot fibreglass effigy fully decked out
In his eighteenth century finest; red coat, white Captain’s
Hair wig & pallid stockings, blue fleet commanders’ hat
Advertising the Tradie’s Bar. Towering over Cairns like
Some erect Gulliver at attention, hands folded behind
Him like a small boy in an expensive gift shop, his crab-
Hard skeleton ridged with finger length spines, as if after
Two centuries his legacy is at last coming to reflect his
Environment. Like the spiky stem of a giant rainforest
Palm, his prickly countenance expansive as his working
Class thirst; ambition slaked by exploration, his origins
Foreign as this new continent of hot & muggy dreams.
(ii)
Exiting Cairns, the white possession’s semantic legacy
Thrives in the historical names of rivers & creeks, as though
The bloody transition of the victor’s language is a fecund badge
Of municipal honour to be worn on the sleeve of the state’s
Cracked bitumen highways. The ancient bureaucracy somehow
Blameless in its generational absence: racist discourse clocked
Off & down at the pub; Chinaman Creek, Blackfellow Creek, quirky
Throwback titles to some ambiguous sense of place; perhaps
Named in honour of their once upon a time cultural presence
Along these mangrovy waterways, now disappeared, the lack
Of context unsettling, as reports of Deep Creek’s beheaded croc.
A contemporary settler payback for a family pet taken, a terrier
That stopped to drink one too many times from a sacred spot.
A gruesome totem to appease the mud-caked, Lord of the Flies.
(iii)
Through the silk thin mist, sugarcane fields stand as Roman armies
At the end of empire. Forlorn, thirsty, they occupy the flat ground,
Blades held stiff as they form up, row upon green row in perfect
Drilled unison. A thousand years of domesticating iron has tamed
The wilderness. Axes bite deeper than words, saw teeth whisper in
Death’s white noise. On the hills behind them, the rainforest seethes
In undisciplined chaos; disordered ranks thrown back in confusion.
Strangler vines criss-cross cedar chests like bandoliers of rope ready
To scale the camp’s irrigation ditches & red earthen walls. By mid-
Morning civilisation’s haze has been burnt off by the sun’s kerosene
Lighter. Magpie geese guard the paddock edges. The crests of Great
Egrets rise like centurions’ horsehair plumes, as they take flight to
Encircle the square formations. In the pitched mêlée between nature
& progress, the battlefield scavengers always wind up the fattest.
(iv)
Naïve warning! The crystal caves of Atherton are not real caverns
Of unique crystalline formations home-grown over a millennia of drip
Drying minerals hung from their hills hoist sediment; filled with black
Crevices where microbats huddle together like a Scotsman’s sporran
Or a witch’s pouch bulging with fangs & wings. Nor is it a proper
Natural landmark on which Dutch tourists can climb up to take
A better photo & perish in their ironic attempts at immortality.
It is a tourist simulacrum of the glittering caves; amethyst crystals
Large as dragon eggs imported from conquered lands like Aztec
Gold adorning a plunging Spanish neckline. Next door they’ve
Opened up a fossil shop fast tracking a new Moroccan industry;
Where Devonian sea floors are spaded up like squares of fine
Grass from a turf farm & polished until they gleam; modern
Vanities that were pre-ordered, half a million years ago.
(v)
Port Douglas’s stinger net is aptly named; for it is tourists who are stung.
A council security smokescreen; box jellyfish hang like toolies on the edges
Of Four Mile Beach’s swimming enclosure, threatening postures barred, their
See-through chests stretch like aerodrome windsocks inflated in a cyclone.
They pulse fear, but are merely the venom vanguard of the holiday season
As nature cracks this problem & employs its latest nano technology; irikanji
To infiltrate the nets, a bio weapon smuggled into summer’s secure terminal.
Orange-footed Scrubfowl scratch up the sand like children, unperturbed by
Their killer reputation, while in palm trees, rainbow lorikeets speak in their
Language of smashed stones. They grate out the story of a woman who,
One day while swimming in the enclosure, went to fish out a log that she
Noticed bobbing inside the net. As she swam over, the trunk submerged.
The locals, smug in their survival knowledge don’t swim here; in these man-
Made aquariums, where scooping out estuarine crocodiles is a weekly menu.
(vi)
The Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher drags its long, white tail feathers
Through Julatten’s sluggish ring of air like a prize-fighter trailing spittle
After a knockout punch. Its twin struts belong to some other era
Of wartime aerodynamic experimentation; a P-38 Lockheed Lightning
On its ground attack run, finishing off Japanese airfields, diving through
The jungle’s camouflage net to avoid detection. It’s a skywriter; the plumes
Of its continuous white dash, a game of hangman across the forest’s page,
As males spell out their need for love. Perched, its tail flick is a courtship
Gear stick shift into fifth; evolution’s smooth mechanism rolls on, oiled
& preened to perfection like military dress. Its red-orange bill bursts like
New Year’s Eve fireworks, as white streamers shoot out over the creek’s
Cobblestone alley, a V- Day celebration for the end of seasonal conflict.
Contrails that split the azure sky in their flypast salute. Bandleaders;
They twirl their feathery batons as spring’s victory parade marches on.
(vii)
Crocodile paranoia inundates the wet tropics every rainy season,
Fogging the tourist mind. It all started in the 80s, one New Year’s Eve.
Thirty years of population recovery. A midnight swim in the Daintree,
Toes brushing against something rocky under the black water; the fleeting
Touch providing little warning. The cool water relieving night’s stickiness,
Caressing her body like falling into freshly washed sheets. Then the violent
Waist grab, the drugged brain trying to justify the burning sensation. First
Thoughts of a male friend’s poorly timed practical joke, his sex-charged
Fingers too eager, pinching into her hip’s soft flesh. The wildfire spreading
Over her skin like the aftermath of an all-day tattoo. Her body flipped over;
The enormous strength pulling her under the dark tow; a father throwing
Their child around in a pool. The frantic half-breath never enough.
The searing of the lungs more painful; the syphoning away of last air
Mocking the agony in her side. Her first & last drink of the new year.
(viii)
The wild horse crossing sign has been graffitied; its black ear extended
Into a unicorn’s horn by some witty local. Neither, do the speed hump
Signs fare any better, the dark half-moons transformed into smiley faces,
Black holes, flying saucers & peace symbols, as though having to slow down
Is somehow made more bearable if changed into the fantastical; like giving
The finger to an impatient P plater barking from behind you on a hundred
Year old, one lane, wooden bridge. The imagined world is shifting; it’s easier
To spot a Southern cassowary behind a wire fence at a jungle zoo, though
The crowds are drawn to reptilian danger & ignore this megapode at their
Peril; the disembowelling clawed toe like a cocked gun at extinction’s head.
Above 850 metres, Golden bowerbirds build stick skyscrapers; the largest
Penthouses in the rainforest. This pattern is recognisably human; to carve
Out territory for yourself & to pass on phoenix genes to your children.
This we all cross: in the true, far, deep north, all life is selfish by nature.
The Big Bang
You wake up in your bedroom or wherever you slept.
In the time it takes for you to focus your drowsy eyes,
& register morning’s heat, the universe has been created.
Your eyelids flutter; tiny quantum fluctuations that hone
All matter like a beam of sunlight under a kid’s magnifying
Glass & give the room its shape. You discern the curvature
Of mushroom coloured curtains at the far edge of space.
On the heavy fabric, the early twentieth century stained-
Glass window projects a pattern; a stylised molecule from
A superhero’s chest or a film’s freeze frame of the erratic
Orbits of young suns around the Milky Way’s galactic core.
In the deep corners of time, up in the pressed tin ceiling,
Just past the strands of a spider’s dusty nebula, a sparky
Has drilled a small black hole. Your atoms begin to stretch.
Kennethland
This is all his now. The front row’s four desks,
habitually rearranged like a swastika throughout
history. They have been annexed for the founding
of Kennethland. He has a pilgrim’s first thrill on
sighting landfall. His anxiety rises from his head
like a tall black hat. Inside its boundaries he raises
a flag of outlandish design legitimising his mind’s
false invasion. He blames others for his border
intrusions. His actions are a grand conspiracy,
dressing up conformity’s corpse in irrationality’s
dun-coloured uniform & dumping it over his
checkpoint. He is fluent in visual propaganda.
He shoots a history of his new world order
in grainy super eight. The assault was sudden.
He keeps a guarded airspace over his meticulous
kingdom. He has measured every perimeter’s inch.
He keeps equal distances apart. There is no other
landscape like this, so worth protecting. He writes
his inaugural constitution in red crayon pictures.
His weapons are literal, his thoughts fire rapidly
like a gun-mounted camera. They hurt. Any breach
to his sovereignty is dealt with fiercely. His left fist
hangs in the air like a bulbous-headed drone. His
neck is rigid undercarriage when he makes a decision.
He draws computer game screenshots to prophesise
what exactly will happen. Like a robot, he doesn’t mix
his words but acts by instruction. Missile-pens launch
from his fingers’ slim silos buried in the cornfields
of his jean pockets & stab at their flesh’s no fly zone.
He is steeped in Armageddon’s instantaneous results.
This land is lost. He has already begun to print his own
currency. The denominations don’t make sense, but
they are as nostalgic as soil & well worth collecting.
He doesn’t want them to open his nation’s tidy box.
There are some inner workings they don’t get to see.
He craves the sensation of a cattle crush pinning him,
but without the iron touch. He patrols. Outside his wire
enclosure everyone has been reclassified as an enemy
combatant. He keeps just one true prisoner of war.
He has no plans to exchange him for the present.
Promise You Won’t Leave Me
I’m some small snippet in a local paper; a fellow dying medium.
The fresh ink of my identity smeared across the world’s face for
just one brief flowering. Like some meat-rotten bud that opens
once every forty-two years, I was last smelt in 1970 & suddenly
petals of interest fall open in offices & cafes: in cool bedrooms.
I’m the off-the-cut news grab some husband wants to share
with his wife, a curio he’s pulled up from his day, but he hesitates,
too schooled in glasshouse reticence, too rooted to his denial.
I could graft on him such muteness. Let the bung of disease gag
his bottle-mouth, like I was stoppered up. Preserved you could
say, a girl-cork at sixteen, when youth should have spilled out.
I could teach him the language of the inner self, the timeless
agony of the inaudible will. A radio with its volume turned low.
White noise is just the stars whispering to each other secretly
like schoolgirls at the back of a class. Curse-struck teenager,
all I could do was postpone; impotent with grace. I rested;
the potency of a Venus flytrap that could not close its jaws
on anything. No electric snap. Fly-time crawled over me;
its minute hairs tickled my face, but it triggered no response
& I could not brush it away. Silence is white as a maggot.
It eats out the brain. The itch was hideous. Something
the body must surrender to one day, when we throw up
our arms & resign ourselves to being entropy’s hostage.
But for a long while, my own consciousness was a coffin;
no need to nail one about me when I’m gone. That’d be
like hitching a golden frame around Guernica, or singing
disco around Morrison’s French tomb. My casket certainly
wasn’t crystal; there was no wine glass whine for my ears
to crack, but my long stasis did become semi-mythical.
They called me something predictable; ‘sleeping snow white’.
I guess I fit their ancient archetype; the girl-child waiting
to be rescued with hair that continues to grow. The wronged
princess who tongueless, weaves her woe into a tapestry
for all the King’s court to see; the aberrant daughter who
is wont to transgress. But cooped up in my mother’s Miami
abode, my domestic Disney existence was hardly the grist
of fairytale. More than any other, I understood forever after
all too well. So, my mother learnt about love’s terrible call.
Promise you won’t leave me, I urged from the hospital bed.
I can imagine your pity; the swell of salt that pools from
The tube of your eyes for the years I never spent, the men
I never had, the children I never smacked. The lost girl I am.
But don’t waste it on me; there are those who talk more who
need your sympathy. Besides, I’ve worked out your milieu.
When I was young, being famous was hard work & it made
you into someone. Now fame is just another product to be
consumed by everyone. Being celebrated for doing nothing,
well, I’m an expert at that. I haven’t moved in four decades
& strangers still come to roll me over like they were rubbing
some prayer limb. Bedsores after all, are a type of stigmata.
Did I hear them? The billions of words poured like water
into a bath. You sponged me down with them; novels, classics
poems, words to walk by; it wasn’t what was said, so much
the act of saying them that was the point. I had the world’s
best litanies read to me, not many can stake a claim to that.
& I wasn’t even dead. No, not even close. Then, where
was I all that time you might ask? If I wasn’t listening,
I was practising my performance skit, Girl on Bed.
Warhol should have put his camera on me & I would’ve
given him decades of a masterpiece; his comatose muse.
Or did you think I was with God? If the white totality
of an eclipse is God in extreme close up, then…yes.
But then, neither of us said anything, like it was our
first date. I was comfortable in our silence; my body,
my non-miraculous figure was already laid out
like a washed saint. Perhaps, I came to mean more
to him than he ever knew; perhaps I showed him a thing
or two about love; coming as it was over forty years,
to know more about suffering, than even his own son.
Finally, there are those of you who would have switched
me off at the wall: she’s technically dead! Tubes feed her,
machines breath for her. Funnily enough, death woke me.
Or rather, broke my eternal stillness at the end. I never
roused, no Prince burst in at the last second. My body
collapsed like a neutron star & the pulse of me poured
through the universe like the contents of a spilled cup.
& for all the strength of the elements that spew forth
from dying red suns, for one second every century &
forge a commonality. For all that mind-boggling guff;
to me, there is nothing stronger than a promise kept.
Edwarda O’Bara (March 27, 1953 – November 21, 2012) was an American woman who spent 42 years
in a diabetic coma starting in January 1970 after contracting pneumonia in December 1969. The last words she said to her mother before she slipped into her coma were, ‘Promise you won’t leave me’.
American Love Poem
You saw your first cardinal, iconic American bird.
Maybe you’d just stepped out the front door of your
1930s depression era bungalow & its redness caught
your eye as you slammed the blue door shut & double
checked the lock, your fingers chirping from the cold.
A discordant winter colour, as if a laser sight ranged
over the dun landscape hunting for a kill & alighted on
that scarecrow’s bleak arm. In that instant, you were
Elizabeth, the pleasure of your breath’s intake loud
as a gunshot in a suburban street or a stuck water pipe
groaning from its heavy winter coat. I can picture her
pausing, stocking up on the bird’s palette, mixing oils
in her head to do the blushing passerine justice.
Coercing her colourists to shade its chromakey jizz
just right. Dawn’s rosy crest as it wings over the horizon.
But that was not hers, but Audubon’s treat, capturing
a mated pair of cardinal grosbeaks in Birds of America.
You would have stood predator still, the house key
dangling from your fingers like a brown grasshopper
from a bill. It would have noticed you too, perhaps
marvelling at your own flaming nest of hair, a birder’s
Mexican stand-off, there would’ve been no retreat.
I know, it would have defaulted first, eager for breakfast
or to hop on with its job of establishing a seed fund
up & down your burnished Lawrence street. Or perhaps
you saw the female & so did Elizabeth; a much tougher
role in the wild – unseen heroines of species’ molecular
distribution. Maybe, you thought about how the past
is preened to make only some glow with satisfaction,
how males are usually displayed in primary positions,
perched at the top of their branches. You still would’ve
seen the red badges pinned to each shoulder of her wing,
as if true courage is facing down historical determinism.
You would’ve watched the cardinal’s departure flight;
noting her unique love affair with gravity’s weakness.
Perhaps, she gifted you standing there on the pavement
with a brief song, a few notes to take down with your
birder’s head. Your heart eventually would’ve glided
to a stop. After all, isn’t this what all lovers want?
To be checked off on somebody else’s life list.
Zebra Finch
He was watching the Watchmen; the scene when they bury
The Comedian to the sounds of the Sounds of Silence, when
The tempo of their birds’ emergency calls fast forwarded.
Pausing; the cage was half-twisted like a hospital tea trolley
Wrenched by a famished patient. The white-socked feline
Slid under the gate & down his wooden stairs like a grey
Silk runner, wearing a zebra finch mask. Its superpowers
Folded its wallet-body in half, as it slipped through the art
Deco iron gate & into night’s back pocket, the passerine
Hanging like a ticket stub from its mouth. Next morning
He tampered with the crime scene; bashed away the tiny
Breast feathers that lay like cigarette ash ground into his
Welcome mat & concocted his children’s cover story.
How their pet curlicued through its cage like smoke.
Golden Bowerbird
For ‘Chook’ Crawford
When the male golden bowerbird finally alighted
On a lichened giant, one thousand metres above sea
Level; he was tricked. He’d responded instinctively,
As though protecting his two metre tall wicker bower
From rivals, was just a rapid eye blink of sexual angst.
‘Chook’ had called him in; bearded like Odin, he held
Loki’s device, an iPod that overflowed with birdsong
Like a chatty Mt Lewis spring. Rigged to the palm-sized
Aviary by its sinuous tongue was a magic amplifier that
Grated out its territorial challenge. When he accepted
The trial, it was if all the sun’s warmth had magnified
Into a single yellow beam that wove through the forest’s
Dark crown, to rest, feather light on the branch’s head.
They witnessed a star’s birth under the canopy of space.
Freckled Ducks
The forty odd freckled ducks lived & died on water.
Like plain country folk dressed in blue-checked shirts
& dark moleskins, they were raised in the same town
& buried too, within its familiar, territorial limits. Or
Like a housewife knifed by a stranger in her kitchen,
Their deaths: some brutal transgression of the home;
A sticky, bloodshot lagoon silted up after three good
Seasons. Their weir consolidated its life-giving asset,
As if it was a colonial outpost counting out its last
Rounds; their reed camouflaged pond transformed
Into an unstable ammo dump. Their billabong; some
Balkan village about to be liquidated. Lead pellets fell
Through their skins’ crust; like how a coin-sized piece
Of neutron star would slip straight through the earth.
When he leaves, the maggots pore over the wheelie bin
Like a reader’s eyes crawling across a favourite passage.
They are the length of a typed word & dust the green
Industrial fabric with arched precision, as though they
Are white stitches pulled tight by their hunger’s needle.
Where the river curves like a sunbather’s tanned elbow,
Mullet spring from the brown water; whether in festivity
Or to escape the Bremer’s failed health report he cannot
Judge. Animals are scatty. A channel-billed cuckoo tears
Over the river as if pursued; he looks, but only the bird’s
Shadow on the coffee still surface keeps pace like some
Skulking doppelganger. Returning, the seal of the bin’s
Cave yawns open. The maggots are gone; picked clean
As lint from a pair of jeans, or dew burnt off by the sun.
Mundagatta (Bunyip)
(i)
The two-metre bull shark bunts its way up the Bremer river
With the incoming tide, as though it is a paper & paddle pop
Stick boat pushed by gravity down a rain swollen gutter. Like
Some aquatic & hairless Rottweiler, the shark snuffles along
The slimy bottom, its eyes useless in the watercourse’s twilight
Zone as it bounds through a thunderstorm of effluent run-off
& agricultural pesticide. Truly a river monster; it has adapted
To both salt and freshwater systems; at ease in this estuarine
DMZ. In its myopic habitat, the shark relies on its sixth sense
To zero in on catfish & turtles, electrical signals dance across
Its snout like sherbet fizzing on a tongue. Fishermen routinely
Pluck pups out of the brown water & bash their heads against
The nearest rock; euthanasing against the future where serrated
Teeth line up like ranks of dominoes waiting to fall into place.
(ii)
The Ugarapul people won’t tell you their true names, but refer
To three types of Mundagatta skulking in the Bremer. One eats
Flesh. One nibbles water lilies. The last is twenty metres long
& hypnotises its victims like Kaa from The Jungle Book. Near-
Fatalities swear that it has a glowing red eye that mesmerises
Like an angler fish’s luminescent worm. They won’t swim in
The river. The Three Mile swim race they knew was suicide.
An inverted Styx. No parent holds their child by the ankle
& dips them into its waters for magical protection. There is
Only mythological deviation. In crossing over to death this is
The kind of river where a ferryman perishes if he falls into it;
Mundagatta capsize boats, no souls of the damned drag these
Captains down, nor is it spiritual intoxication which smothers.
Many are the bunyips that lurk in the billabong of the heart.
(iii)
Here’s a clue then, to how the Broderick sisters, Lawson’s original
Babies of Walloon were doomed. In the lagoon, the plant-eating
Mundagatta gripped the lilies’ roots & gently tugged the greasy
Tendrils, so the green plates moved; a steam train’s cogs gathering
Speed. Their funnel-stems swayed as a tree buffeted by a westerly,
Their lilac blooms flared out like a shuttlecock’s girth. Entranced,
Even hypnotised, by the biggest flowers they’d ever wanted to pick,
The girls entered the coal black water, never noticing how the plants
Were not dancing to a breeze. The bubbles erupting in a long chain
Of breath they thought belonged to turtles; in the nineteenth century
Science back burnt superstitious fear. There was no rationale for the
Jabberwocky of Celtic Britannia, no Scottish red caps slavering after
Children. The Ugarapul didn’t even camp by the water’s edge; told
Their young’uns to avoid lilies or suffer Ophelia’s garlanded fate.
Powerful Owl
The pair of grey butcherbirds assaulting the open flak
Jacket of the paperbark’s fleshy trunk, alerted them to
Blackburn Lake’s violent undercurrent. Their hooked
Beaks flung a warning, woomera-like, extending their
Fear’s range; a hopeless sonic weapon they directed at
The Powerful owl’s seismic hearing. It was unmoved,
As though rendered immobile by the sun’s paralysing
Spell or instinct’s polite etiquette. The owl perched,
Its head rotating like a lighthouse beacon, it’s yellow
Eyes radiating out a beam of destruction. Its body
Fuelling like a rocket on a launch pad. It only waited
For night to cloak it, an executioner’s hood to break
The ennui of its daylight evolutionary prison. In tree
Hollows, night animals assumed the brace position.
This arrangement of their molecules is sliding apart
Like sand dusting down an eggtimer’s crystal throat.
They’ll come to an abrupt halt & form a tiny mound
Of bones to decorate the bitterness of the salt-marsh.
Their heat will radiate out into the night; other forms
Will be taken from them & prosper, as their flight-
Energy is recouped. Impossible to know; those swift
Last thoughts of a dying race; that flare, then watch
As the warmth dies & blackens like a spent match.
They ignite our desire; square up to death, the fear
Of the world living on without us. It will. Our time
Is already burnt. There is no difference between us,
Except how our cells unite. We’re all the same flock.
We’ll all fall out of the sky in death’s grand migration.
Dhaka
On the tables, sewing machines bunch like rows
Of blackened molars; the thrum of five thousand
Dentists’ drills, crowns girls’ gossip into thought.
They romanticise the nineteenth century’s future.
Steampunk’s generic shame; they never describe
The proletariat who stitch their Victorian leather
& fix brass telescopes. Or thread their baby sisters
Through the factory’s needle-thin galvanised door.
Blocked exits spread a bob of panic like an Adam’s
Apple when it swallows. Weakened at its pouring,
A bitter potion of hand-mixed profits is skimmed
From the foundation’s rich slurry. A poor dilution
Of reason’s atomic structure. Over the decades a
Pattern is cut. Concrete decays like a human tooth.
Bomb
(i)
He hands it to me.
His fingers, a pale spider,
the ball, its bloated egg sac.
His hairs brush mine,
vibrations are sent from
the world wide web.
Between our two trunks
string begins to resonate.
Smooth as a river stone,
polished by eons of licks
to the face, dog-nose cold
the ball is dimpled as though
struck by meteors of hate.
My very own genesis rock.
(ii)
My vice puts friction’s
strong law on the golf ball.
My industrial popping candy.
The drill wheedles its way
twirling through hard, white
layers like some seismic rig
breaking through the Arctic’s
frozen crust. Scoops of white
plastic fall like nail clippings
onto the workshop floor.
The drill chews the icing down
to the quick of its rubber core.
Black strings reverse like smoke
up the drill’s steel chimney.
(iii)
He hands me a backpack.
It is asteroid heavy. He says
there are butterflies inside it
& that if I pull the rip cord
it’ll free them; blue & green
wings will fold like hands
at the end of loud applause.
The great sound of god
is in the seashell I hold to
my ear as I climb the fence.
I tip-toe so as not to shake
up my delicate cargo. I don’t
want to kill the insects; he says
the Americans will like me.
(iv)
My very own genesis rock.
He says there’s white powder
inside that will trigger dreams.
I draw the cigarette from behind
my ear like a hunting dart from
my neck’s soft quiver & he grasps
it in one of his pale mandibles.
As he transports it to his mouth
a fang jumps out onto his lip
like a white shark beaching
itself on the red sand of his lips.
As he slides back into the liquid
light, the tooth snags its prey.
He lights it like a fuse.
(v)
Up the drill’s steel chimney
my fingers scour like a huntsman
& flick the last wisps of the golf
ball’s black innards away. I pack
the bearings inside the hollowed
out shell, like a wasp depositing
its eggs into a caterpillar’s gut;
a time bomb’s interminable pause.
I shoot up the baby cannonball
with my violent mixture; an egg
timer fills with soot. Time runs
black. I cap the improvised device
with old chewing gum, like a coin
that seals a dead man’s fate.
(vi)
The Americans will like me &
maybe even decorate my chest
with chocolate when I release
my gift. Whose heart wouldn’t
expand at the thought; the velvet
texture, the eyelash thin antennae
that curl at the ends like a question
mark? The see-through wings that
shift your vision like a kaleidoscope.
I marvel, at how something so small
can bring laughter like a magician’s
trick. As I reach the soldiers, statue
still, their faces lit like new bronze,
I feather the cord & a dog barks.
(vii)
He lights it like a fuse.
The ball is shiny as volcanic glass;
the fused harmony of molecules
melted in the sun surface heat
of a violent pyroclastic eruption.
I up-end it to shake out the white
powder like a salt shaker that has
become damp. Nothing gives.
I bash it on my hand’s dinner table.
He rounds the garage & ducks low
like a demolitions expert. There is
a noise like lightning hitting a power
line. The skin frays from my fingers
like an umbrella that rips in a cyclone.
(viii)
That seals a dead man’s tongue?
What about who takes him down?
The blast is about twenty aerosol cans
of laughter lit up by a fire-eater’s belch.
I lose my balance momentarily like the
bottom step missed when dead drunk.
There’s a whimpering that’s not quite dog.
I sneak a look. He is witchetty-grub bent,
a white blob grounded, curled into himself
like a kick to the balls in a footy scrum.
My smile breaks open like a picked sore.
The inky ghost cordite, possesses my nose.
I’ll never run out of weapons; the internet
is my ammunition dump; I, its cyberpunk.
(ix)
I feather the cord & a dog barks.
I ask him for a grown up cigarette.
He takes one from his shirt pocket.
It slides out like a white torpedo
from its silver tube. He looks
into the face of his afterthought.
Beneath his helmet, his eyes are
half-lit, in shadow’s smudged kohl,
as if they’ve gone behind a cloud.
As I open the backpack’s cocoon,
bright wings flick out like a serpent’s
tongue & the butterflies are gone.
In the sheet lightning sky, helicopters
glow like black kites caught in the sun.
Eel-tailed catfish
for Mitchell Michael
The catfish is a slimy basilisk that evolution has
stitched together from fragments of eel & cat.
Its stone-age arrow shaped tail is laced with spiny
curtains as if a spectacle is always about to open.
Its fine bones are kitten’s claws retracted into its
belly or fingernail clippings found in a bread roll.
The catfish is not aware that it swims in water, like
we don’t rate the experience of walking through air.
Thumbnail-sized eyes opaque as an unpolished lens
glow orange in torchlight. They don’t love full moons.
The two sets of night lights make them cautious, their
bulbous black bodies lie tethered as mines to their fear.
The catfish swims against charged particles that fizz
along its flanks like sherbet erupting on a wet tongue.
Water tries to dampen its movement. It has no scales
to hamper water’s momentum across its eely skin.
The catfish understands that the river’s soft current is
the lining of a birth canal, and just as strong-muscled.
Its eyes should really be on the end of its chin whiskers
like a snail’s; its eight barbels feel around with electricity.
The beach berry seeds that drop in the water are black
as the eye-stalks of crayfish and are eaten mistakenly.
They’ve learnt to react to riverbank erosion. So humans
throw in dirt: where there’s a fallen tree, there’s worms.
They stash themselves under the river’s rooty embankment
in their shadow-skins; bodies that don’t want to be found.
In flood they’ll try to push up creeks to the mountain’s heart
to release their eggs. In this way their young will wash down.
At night the catfish scramble at the water’s edge; the periscope
feelers of crayfish submerge with their vessel as they’re eaten.
There are many catfish that have never felt a human’s electrically
charged heart; we touch them & our fingers snap with static’s kiss.
The Shadow Gallery
for Nathan Shepherdson
It starts with a sun. A cutlass of light
slashes at your head & runs your shadow
up your body’s length; a pirate’s black flag.
When embracing your lover, your shadows
fall in love again & meld into each other
like droplets of dark water pooling.
Shadows are where the old gods took refuge
hiding in plain sight. They are immortal so
long as there is a body of faith. You are not.
Your shadow sticks to you like a pilot fish
or a lamprey. You sustain it & take it for
a ride. Your shadow cannot carry you.
Gravity does not affect your shadow. It is
not a thing as we know it. It does not have
molecules, only the shadows of molecules.
The fundamental laws that govern
the universe, do not govern it. You are
the event horizon to your own black hole.
When you look up at the night sky
the dark bits you see between the
pinpricks of stars are not shadows.
Shadows are not dark matter.
Shadows are not dark energy.
Shadows are their own quanta.
Your shadow is shackled to you by
leg-irons of light. At night your shadow
escapes only to be caught by dawn.
At dawn your shadow lies around
you like the negative of the chalked
outline of a freshly murdered body.
Often other people’s shadows will fall
across yours. There are no sparks as in
the flesh. Only a dark meshing of gears.
Your shadow can walk up walls & cliff-
faces. They are like beetles; electrons are
powerless to keep them from climbing.
In the late afternoon your shadow mutates.
They are dark furred lycanthropes that grow
three times your size & stalk behind you.
Shadows fear total eclipses of the sun;
totality is their version of Armageddon.
They are often black-bagged by the moon.
The sun’s atmosphere, its pink corona
is your shadow’s idea of God. It’s gaseous
core is a searing translation of heaven.
Clouds trick shadows by making them vanish
into the earth’s top hat. Who’s to say where
the magician’s cape ends & its shadow begins?
Your shadow has limbs, a head, a trunk
but no tongue. It is noiseless like Charon’s
black sail that propels him across the river Styx.
Your shadow likes to pose with you in photos.
In old age your shadow will even try to prop you up.
In death, your shadow folds around you like a dark wing.
Shoulder-charged by Seamus Heaney
He had me at those early deaths; croppies
Brother, frogspawn. I was reading his poems
Before I could even breathe. The matchbox
Coffins I buried stuffed full of dead guppies.
When I was about four, I too was liable to fear
The farm’s pot-holed windpipe of broken track.
After thunderstorms, swamps of darkest foam
Globbed the gutters like frothy heads of beer.
The tree frogs were quick-thinking & they bred
As eagerly as my father’s hand flensed my back.
But the hot-plate sun soaked up the black ponds
& the buds of tadpoles choked on air, until dead.
It was a small boy thing, trying to save them all.
The tiny stranded whales were the first to fall.
Brigalow: an extinct pastoral
Acacia harpophylla
It was shaving a giant’s hairy body to reduce friction
& speed things up. Each fracture of a Brigalow trunk,
the taut string of a Jarowair songline snapping; ancient
wires curled into a foetal position as the D9s chewed
through acacias like witchetty grubs weakening a tree’s
hardwood core. Local councils paid up bounties to clear
‘scrub’ into the 80s. They strung a necklace of iron pearls
between two dozers; manacled violence, like nineteenth
century convicts kept under guard. The machines clawed
through six million acres, rubbing against bark, leaving
a scent trail of oil & diesel, as though they were some
type of ancient megafauna revisited; extinct, buttery-
furred Thylacoleo, carnivorous in their vast appetite.
Then their kitchen knife shiny blades scratched out
the jagged stumps that leaked blood-amber & later
hardened into ruby stalactites & froze to the broken
lip of the forest’s open mouth. The rich, alluvial soil
ruptured like a freshly dug mass grave, as the tree-
pushers tossed black wattle bodies into loose piles
& burnt them. Genocide’s sleight of hand perfected
on nature first. Trees as numbers. Dozer drivers
saw straight through their bee-yellow badges, their
earmuffs silenced the forest’s death rattle, made
the weary farmers bomber-pilot resilient to raining
down destruction. The ovens were crude fire pits
that melted down acacia sap like looted gold, so that
it pooled tawny in this open furnace’s charcoal bed.
These chains of being breaking coffee-stained teeth
of white ant hills that housed avian clay diamonds.
The Paradise Parrot, a smashed green, red, & blue
panel in the Darling Downs stained glass window.
The termite mounds rose like a child’s best castle
or miniature gothic cathedrals built of sand & grass,
masticated & stored in the climate-controlled fridge
interior. These insects stowing carbon before there
was a price put on the planet’s bushranger head.
The shotgun entry-wound sized nest holes blasted
into mounds by the birds, as though evolution had
manufactured the perfect cavity for humans to
dynamite these architectural wonders of the insect
world. The cool pyramids sawn off at their bases;
cut down like pseudo-trees or scooped up in the rough
hands of front-end loaders & rolled into tennis courts.
The ignorant paddocks of youth where natural beauty
was witnessed in the solitary survivors of cultivation.
Coolabah trees surrounded by seas of grass, trunks
twisted like the wrenched skin of a ‘Chinese burn’ or
New Holland nymphs caught in a transformative act;
god-frozen as punishment for their greenest pride.
Half of them ringbarked by pink-flared galahs, their
stringy layers hanging off their limbs like a child’s
Band-Aid half picked off an arm or leg, undecided
about its ability to help heal the body’s dying flesh.
The understory broken by iron & fire like a rebellion.
Exotic grasses chewed down to their stubs by sheep
& cattle until even these conquerors were themselves
usurped by cereal crops & water-boarded cotton.
Hoofed animals who sacked the land’s fragile temple,
magnifying a historic benefit to the monocultural god.
Agriculture’s sublime gerrymander; the fascist knowhow
of combines & seed strains & harrows that clear-felled
the Brigalow belt. Soldier settlers of the 40s carrying on
the good fight to the Qld frontier, carving order out
of the dual forces of chaos; heat & drought. Trobuk
tanned, or Kokoda lithe, digging into their prickle farms
like a cattle tick into its host, head down, immovable.
Not the weather, not the banks, not the rising water
table that pulled salt skyward like a crystalline sunrise,
or the earthen heave of an underground atomic test.
Humans pushed the envelope of entropy: remnant
vegetation ensconced on Oakey Creek’s banks,
where wind & animal erosion dusted off eons
of silt from the fossilised skulls of diprotodons.
Fist-sized eye sockets stoppered with black mud.
Brigalow, now quarantined to rocky slopes like
the survivors of a flood catastrophe, or reduced
from its diverse wealth to begging beside highways.
North to Townsville, south to Narrabri, west to Bourke
& Blackall, the silvery-leafed acacias retreated meekly
into history’s hothouse. Their decline & fall predictable
as any overstretched empire’s, barbarians shutting
the gates on revegetation; reserves & hillsides
the last refuge of the disappeared. Ninety-five
percent of the black-trunked forest anchor-chained;
a billion victims of Bjelke-Petersen’s Frankenstein
invention, his iron umbilical bolt that connected
ex-war surplus gun carriers & enfiladed the land.
The Mallee’s murdered twin brother buried west
of the Great Dividing Range & never seen again.
The countless bodies gone missing in the gidgee;
Darling Downs Hopping-mouse, White-footed
Rabbit-rat, Brush-tailed Bettong, Long-nosed
Bandicoot, Greater Bilby, Bridled Nailtail Wallaby,
Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat & Eastern Quoll.
These protein gradients dropping away without
a sound, as though they were regrowth suckers
poisoned by 24D. An extinct pastoral still being
energised as a red-hot column whence fly the sparks.
Black wattle burning on a six million acre farm.
Asbestos Manor, Hervey Bay
They are punishing the neighbourhood with colour.
The 70s seaside villa has been burnished a canary
Yellow; radiant it glows brighter than each sunrise
Over Urangan. The beach house wears a reflector
Vest, it stands out for the tourists as unimaginable
Public art. Perhaps they bought it without a builder
Giving it the once over; now the walls contain a
Reactive poison embedded as a fibre within a lung.
Even the driveway has been sprayed with sunshine.
The rays of frustration radiate out from its living-
Room like the sun in a corner of a child’s picture.
It would have even stopped Warhol on his morning
Walk. It is part protest, part warning, all a mistake.
Yet no one enters the house made of yellowcake.
Tomato Picking, Bowen
On the concrete-grey mounds the tomatoes rose
up symmetrically like stop signs on a median strip.
They were told to pick them greenish-red; as gas
would ripen them more efficiently than the sun.
They were paid $1.80 for a 10 litre bucket of egg-
sized fruit. The tomato’s spiky scent repatriated
their skulls to where peaches & apricots ripened
on bright kilims in their burnt-off youth. The heat
didn’t bother; but humidity desiccated their skin.
The backpackers were lazy, the bikies had a routine.
They defended their sacred rows from the Danes too.
No one back-picked their lanes; there was no meeting
in the middle & clasping hands. Each branch kept to
their own variety. At day’s end, they were chased off
by the crop-duster which misted pesticide over their
red membrane. They left work, just as their itch grew.
Goblin Valley, Utah
Here’s Glen pregnant-sized,a man-mountain
grunting as if in childbirth. Wiggle it just a little bit.
He is a bored Atlas straying from his ancient script.
We have modified goblin valley. For 200 million years
the rain & wind have failed to finish the kneecap
job, now a new goblin valley exists in the scout leaders’
minds with this boulder down here. An exercise in risk
minimalisation like defoliating a rainforest to rob
your enemy of cover. Muscles over here pushed it off.
When the rock topples to the floor they cheer
as if they’ve just watched an explosion take out
some bad guys. That’s crazy…it was held up just by
that little bit of dirt. Their awestruck fingers trace
the plinth where the stone used to rest, as though
they’re fingering bullet holes in a sedan’s door.
Some little kid was about to walk down here and die!
The three men are moved by a greater weight.
Glen saved his life by getting the boulder out of the way.
He is channelling his ‘Smokey Bear’ childhood,
teaching his young charges to put out potential
fires. So, it’s all about saving lives here at goblin valley.
They are an extinction event for Triassic geology.
Saving lives that’s what we’re about they confess as
the death threats solidify into a sediment of hate.
Great Barrier Reef
(i)
They say it’s the length of Japan, if that group
Of home islands was stretched out beside the
Queensland coastline; a great lung of Poseidon’s
Branching from the continent’s spine of white
Beach, exhaling microscopic spores into the sea’s
Vast cavity. Atlantean sunk beneath the Pacific
Ocean’s mythic blue abyss, the living tissue is
Larger than Cook’s England, as legendary as
Arthur’s Albion & as treacherous as Lyonesse.
After all, it conspired to hole the Endeavour.
(ii)
Along the brain-corrugated reef, light harpoons
Into water translucent & smooth as Murano glass.
Photons lobotomise; calm waters protect volcanic
Nibs of mountains we call islands. The reef is a
Front gate; white picket fence that keeps out sharks.
You can make out clam bunkers shut fast against
Riptides that blow subterranean wind in their faces.
Here, the wet metamorphosis of garden caterpillars;
Black & yellow striped nudibranchs, inch over polyps
That house migrants in their hundreds of thousands.
(iii)
It is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon ultramarine.
A billion generations have crowned its hard teeth
Before we came down from the trees. Here, time
Is measured in the millennia that green turtles have
Spent heaving their way up beaches to deposit their
Golf ball-sized capsules. Or how barnacles cling for
The length of the British Empire’s reign upon a rock.
Such perspectives diminish our enterprise; as bulk oil
Carriers slide carefully around the razor-edged reefs;
Like a sapper probing for mines in the Afghan sand.
(iv)
The rich organ now wears Asian funeral white. Its
Cancer the antithesis of black Western mourning.
The technicolour algae depart from their luxury posts
Like passengers on a stricken liner, leaving ghosts in
The shell. The sea is on a slow boil. The coral is dying
Its emphysemic death as parts of the great lung collapse.
It is falling into the shade of bleached whale bones as
Pieces of brain wash up on the beach; a tidal keepsake.
No need for a glass-bottomed boat to sail the future.
It is a scab on the ocean’s leg that is best left to heal.
Review
All suicides know the truth of it. There is no doubt.
They try out the theory first; the universe’s heat death
For themselves. We think of the cosmos as docile &
Urbanised, like a city & can never imagine all the lights
Going out. This is our frailty; we believe that blackouts
Will always come back on. As though God was some
Kind of pot-bellied electrician who always turns up
To reset the safety switch. We misjudge the solemnity
Of death all the time. We find a gecko’s dismembered
Head & think of dying as a cat; its playfulness always
At the very edge of its capacity. Life is a simile that distracts
You. Finally the stars of their eyes burn out. All fuel
Is spent. Their pupil’s core contracts into a dense ball
Of black matter. Even this full stop will break down.
Angstcination
for Nathan Shepherdson
(i)
from below
their white belly
merges with light,
falling electric snow.
penetration slowed
down; a fast bullet
enters & exits a pane
of glass falling with
honey’s spoon grace.
a snowflake melds
with its blizzard
until indivisible from
the surface it melts;
water’s countershade.
(ii)
all quiet under ocean.
sound trapped, insect
in amber. ears useless,
ground down tiny over
millennia, gills not slitting
into bones until a noise’s
speed no longer makes
distance in the blue world.
salt water is not ocean
as is tasted. a fluid
battery sends electrical
pulses. charges fish
until solar panel scales
spark with energy.
(iii)
they can detect auras.
smell the diffused signals
borne by water molecules
that spread, a tarot deck
of hunger sliding across
the sea’s dinner table;
conjure up a red future.
one drop of blood
in a million parts of
water, they will come
if the wet wind blows
in the right direction.
they can find a clear
contact lens on a glacier.
(iv)
their snouts are Franklin’s
perpetual kite experiment.
blows from a cobbler’s
hammer have dented
their heads, they hunt
by electricity, they detect
tiny ball lightning in
a fishes’ berry-sized
muscles. the ocean
a liquefied grid, a
field of nippy particles.
lorenzini’s ampullae;
an apex predator’s
lightning rod.
(v)
industrial strength
candle-coloured bags,
thin bakelite purses
that clutch to the sides
of reefs & shoals; amber
necklaces that decorate
a current’s sinewy neck.
membranous births,
embryonic fluid ruptures
spills into a greater sac.
longlines’ jagged teeth
hook young, a by-catch.
fin’s reverse fontanelle,
the flesh doesn’t heal.
(vi)
times past skin wore teeth
& dorsal fins radar shaped.
devolution; toothed frames
shrink to denticles that spray
on skin, rough plaster walls
disrupt borders between shark
& ocean. they grasp seawater
glove-fast & torpedo bodies
slip through tension breaks.
blademasters skills honed
by sticky shark grips & fine
cut leather boots. ‘shagreen’
sandpaper from dog-fish
polished ships’ best wood.
(vii)
bicycle reflector jammed behind
retina boosts night vision. military
goggles worn by elite frogmen see
colour at depths where none exists.
ten times light collects on apertures;
pollen clings to a bee’s leg. ghosts
rise from midnight zone’s dusky
graveyard. sharks descend coffin
straight; spiracles pump salty water
direct injection into eyes & brain.
oxygen thins in reverse atmosphere.
black space weightlessness, bodies
equalised with gravity share joint
stuff. five gill slits blow curtains.
(viii)
lateral lines sweep seas;
mine detectors beep
when objects grow denser.
surfboard seal cut-outs
mimic flippers & fibreglass
duende. submerge, caudal fins
flex, a giant’s fist pump &
cartilage tuning forks vibrate
through shafts as taste buds
tricked. first bite for info.
next bite for keeps. jaws
realise mistakes, head bang
& tear at war music. third
eyelid shuts in mute defence.
(ix)
abundant blood, dining
room prey, erratic finger
movement wags in their face
during pelagic mealtime.
they take it personally &
mouth opens in warning.
cave stalactites’ cusps, sharp,
pointed; muscles rise to
the threat & predators
face off, frenzied speech
no participant remembers.
brains overload on slight.
flesh liquefaction, then
whirlwind unwinds its passion.
(x)
the roof goes. convertible
fins sheared, corrugated sheds
in cyclone. farmer marked,
long queues slide into salty dip,
tails fall into bloody bucket.
a torp’s dead weight when
engines stall. steerage gone,
sleek fuselage dips, downed
sydney minisubs & pacific
planes sink into an abyss.
production lines hook a
dark future; their broods
human length; kursk sailors
clench rusted wrenches.
(xi)
forty somethings’ fear
spawned seventies celluloid
gore fantasies. knee-high,
parents don’t swim further,
their children human shields
for angstcination. in breakers,
still water, unlucky death roils.
spearfisher, snorkeler, sponge
-diver, pearl-grabber, surfer-dude,
bather. tire-tread scars run over
backs, sand depressions don’t
blow away. nets & baited hooks
map annually the kill count war.
one hundred million jaws close.
Forty-Five
The earth did its best to swallow him as a child once.
In his backyard things went from green to dead; grass
runners petered out like burnt fuses or a satellite map’s
x-ray of dry river beds. A scarred country with veins
of straw-coloured gold that decayed & only made
Dalby’s black soil wealthier. It was a town coming
apart at the seams, as the drought dug in & enfiladed
the farmers with relentless fire. The Barley Board’s
empty concrete silos steamed like a nuclear plant.
Bored boys climbed this highest point & surveyed
their uniform world or played chicken & shot arrows
up into space & waited to see who would run. He
couldn’t be warned. He played with no shirt on.
No hat. In a lab, someone was inventing sun cream
& cells dug out of a nostril bullied weaker ones in
their agar dish. There were gashes in his mother’s lawn,
a carnosaur’s claw print across its prey’s armoured hide;
parallel cuts ran in the same direction, as all moisture
fled the ground. A mass migration of water molecules
that were detained high up in the atmosphere by pressure’s
chokehold. The gaps looked to him like a poison victim’s
plum-stained lips & felt like a mouth’s taut skin stretched
over a rotting skull. The splits yawned black & fit half
of his hand, sucked in by the abyssal jaw, when he was
game enough to play finger-chicken, quell his trapdoor
spider fear & push his arm into the topsoil’s maw;
a lion tamer backing his skill. This is where all of his
working knowledge of the future stopped, as the laws
of physics broke down into particles of shadow.
There were thin fault lines within his father too.
His skin became drum-taut over his cheekbones;
a landmass picked up by a continental plate &
roughed-up into mountains. Corals’ sedimentary
graveyard that over millennia, metastasised into
limestone & matched his father’s chalky face.
Then, not even one second of geological time,
at forty-five he was pixelated behind his home’s
screen door, fragmented into a hundred thousand
tiny squares; the receptor cells of a praying mantis’s
compound eye, as this last scene crawled around
in his son’s head & stalked him. His father was
disembodied as he jumped into his friend’s car;
a loose wire that didn’t connect anymore, memory
losing power over distance, as his sleepover began.
Or, if time was a set of stairs, than his father fell on
the top step. He was diffuse, beekeeper anonymous
behind the door’s muslin veil as his son drove away.
This follicle-thin barrier, its bottom torn, where cats
had tried to force their entrance; sharpened claws
extending like broken shinbone through a foot.
Their flash of separation was only fly-screen thick,
the breadth of a silicon chip. Out in the backyard
the ground refused to shut its trap, where generations
of buried pets pushed through to the other side.
The screen was irreparable, as was his father’s body,
that burned itself out like a giant exhausting its gas.
The coal-dust of his cells creating a new nebula.
Counter-pastoral at 140kph
Moree
The Nankeen kestrel’s wings fold upwards like a
space-conscious clothesline, or a russet umbrella
that surrenders to the westerlies, as it falls onto
the marsupial mouse’s light-weight chassis. The
raptor’s talons blur like a highway mirage & sink
into the paddock’s earth, rending flesh & dirt; an
excavator’s claw that overcorrects on a worksite.
White wheat stubble could be a field of low mist,
but there’s no moisture in a drought-blonde winter.
The Brigalow says The Lord is Near in stencilled letters.
The burnt wreck of a commodore is nearer, at a rest
area just short of Moree. Meteorite-coloured, a legend
would have the bird of prey brush its rusting hulk.
Fire-unique; this oxygen-rich planet is out to kill.
Dubbo
The young white rhino tests its Pliocene
strength against the slope of its mother’s
granite-boulder neck. They are grey lichen
on the evolutionary spur. Long in the horn,
somehow the large beasts survived our Rift
Valley outpouring, the rivulets of flesh-lava
which burnt jungle into blocks of savannah.
Now, the silver-flecked Venetian masks of
Apostlebirds, chatter underfoot, as they sift
through the African mammals’ straw; they
are rock solid. Theirs is the larger test. The
long, species ice-age melts in a poacher’s
microscopic breath. Colour of moon regolith,
the struggle ends in one animal’s dusty retreat.
Waikerie
The broken cliffs bare their fossilised teeth.
An ancient ocean bed dried out, time’s rehab.
Sand particles caught in a molecule snapshot
fused into something stronger with the texture
of a raptor’s bone-encrusted scat. Seashells,
brachiopods, the shallow sea denizens stick out
of the sandstone butte, rows of canines where
locals cut themselves. Way too much fun in Waikerie.
The enduro drivers party until 2am on the bitumen
carpark’s floor. Shirts off, they confront the danger
as one school. Their violence won’t be remembered,
only their form. Beer cartons lopsided as a continental
fault line & wine glass fragmented as mussel shell.
The sound of tyres on wet sand like breakers crashing.
Broken Hill
The wild hops will live out their natural lives.
The hoarhound waits patiently for its next bender.
Nightshade misses the pupil’s full moon dilation.
Obsolescent belladonna slips into a vegetative
fossil state; history is foretold by the weeds left
behind. Salvation Jane is someone’s Patterson’s Curse.
Little men brought these seeds to the saltbush plains,
chasing the silver lodestar that pierced the ridge’s
thumb like a splinter. When the veins ran dry
they drowned in their own blood sitting upright;
they were stone age those Cornish, myah myahs
were pre-fab burial mounds with wattle & daub lids.
We only ever get to see ten percent of the mind’s
workings; the earth remembers every ounce.
Mildura
It took two years for the world’s largest crude
oil tractor to shunt its way into the Mallee scrub,
moving at lava’s cooling black pace; its wheels
shod with broad iron snowshoes so it wouldn’t
sink under its own dinosaur weight. Forty football
fields a day were scythed down for the soldier
settlements around Red Cliffs, by four steel cables
thick as a man’s wrist that bled out from the machine’s
head like the lacquered plaits of a giantess. Hooks
grappled stumps as the metal wire shaved Malleefowls’
heaped mounds neatly, like cream skimmed off raw
milk by hand. ‘Big Lizzie’ was gutted too; her engine
bastardised into a rock crusher’s belly when she
outlived her destructiveness. The birds just withdrew.
Silverton
The stone hamlet hangs by a celluloid thread.
Thirty-five monochrome ghosts are all that are left
of Silverton’s rush; commons bound to their land,
the ethereal tape of local government has frayed
like old wedding lace under the sun. The freemasons
are gone; their superhero costumes adorn frozen
manikins, their powers restrained behind a glass
force-field. There are deeper powers at work here.
Horses share the bar with people, the Greek myths
are close to the surface like an ore-rich lode. The
Mad Max kitsch is rusting. The Feral Kid is a jeweller
in Sydney. The village is a touched up photo – one
of Stalin’s best. Buildings & citizens have been edited
out of the present. Low entropy is sterile as a film lab.
Lake Menindee
The speed of colour is a new parrot species
spied for two seconds out the car window,
but then diminishes like an escaped balloon
from a child’s hand. Without a good look at
its jizz, the little nuances in beak & cere, it goes
unchecked on the life list. Or a grey grasswren
that blurs across the sedan’s bonnet, escaping
death like a stalled vehicle’s engine that sparks
into riotous life on a level crossing. Or the tan
checkerboard of a square-tailed kite’s breast,
lost in the overexposure of its bullish cousins.
Or the strange pied bird that doesn’t fly in dips
like a black honeyeater, but Stuka plummets into
the saltbush & belah; the desert’s pace is red.
Cobar
The earth is crowned with a space-junk diadem.
Every so often, a pearl-bright satellite breaks
from the cluster & falls, shining like a seam
of silver ore in night’s mine. The atmosphere’s
a forge that heats up the super-adventurous alloy.
The planet raises an eyebrow as gravity grabs
the pliable body by its throat. Meteorites
curve downward like a cocktail dress that slips
to the bedroom floor. A sonic boom is speed’s
audible orgasm as pressure waves build then collapse.
Everyone watches the video that night, as dishes
mushroom in the dark farm of the trailer park.
No celestial union is secret anymore, no husbandry
is safe, as the town bathes in this fiery afterglow.
Wilcannia
Ravens judge the distance between oncoming
traffic & road kill with advanced avian math.
Wing & beak calculate lift as the corvids hopscotch
out of death’s way with a child’s grace. The mulga
bears shoe-fruit, every eviscerated roo is UFO evidence;
a hills hoist in the middle of nowhere is a jerry-rigged
emergency beacon. Feral goats are the only witnesses
to close encounters. Bible-old, they instinctively move
to higher ground when objects threaten to pull over.
In Wilcannia everything is locked down, bar children
who play chicken with Winnebagos on the A32,
cutting the national artery’s living tissue. They catch
rides on a campervan’s spare wheel; scooters political.
Horns scatter sparrows; not kids of the third kind.
Brewarrina
The fish traps make Jericho’s pale walls seem
freshly rendered. Two thousand generations
of hands have whispered the stones into river
crop circles. Aliens marvel on the Darling’s banks
at the persistence of mythical endeavour. Sisyphus’s
labour personified in the rock pools sunken at odd
levels to catch flood-prone yellow belly, whatever
the river’s mood. Children crouch & play imaginary
games on the oldest human invention. White-necked
herons patrol the weir’s battlement. The blocked off
Barwon is a springe, as pelicans scoop up fingerlings
in their bills’ pink windsocks. Brewarrina’s shops are
dammed with plywood. Time keeps a tight budget.
Fish were a currency once, scales glinting like coins.
Walgett
It’s an impasse. A cultural stalemate.
The highway’s gutters littered with empties;
an artillery barrage’s spent shell cases or
a no man’s land where glassy-eyed bodies
lie tossed by death’s drunken rage. Liquid
pride is a distant mirage that dries before
you can ever reach it; some Min Min light
that keeps exact pace with your car. Shire
Councils too poor, too bothered by water
politics. A seventy-five kilometre roadside
installation, authentic outback experience.
It’s all your perspective. Not rubbish, but
in a hundred years, part of an antique bottle
display in an octogenarian’s dim fibro-cave.
Lightning Ridge
There’s an invisible margin between a mine
& a tomb. They drill into the earth’s giant
bone to extract bluish-green & blood-red
marrow, existence’s wet & succulent sheen.
Chalk-white middens dot a moon landscape.
There is terraforming; notes from the underground
as jackhammers vibrate with a tuning fork’s rage.
They carve out oubliettes to imprison dreams.
Practice for a lunar existence; first they live in
the ships that brought them here from distant
worlds, then they return to Cro-Magnon fears,
living in craters to keep warm. They follow
ossified water that eons ago took on a new form.
When the seam runs out, the habit stays strong.
Das Kapital
for Thomas Connelly
(17/09/1960 – 13/10/2014)
One day in the nineties, in West End
you gave me a thick blue leather copy
of Marx’s Das Kapital from your personal
collection & said “read it”. A spontaneous
gift of ideology when I was green & had none;
having bludged on the farm I hadn’t considered
myself a worker then. The dole check I lined up
to hand over the counter every fortnight,
was no real strain on the intellect.
I still have your book, & twenty years later
have got no further than feeling its plump skin
cover; the vinyl pinch of an old Holden’s backseat.
The tome sits on the bottom shelf because of
its size I guess, not out of any real insignificance;
the books I admire occupying a higher rung.
Ironic then, that I’ve slotted it into an artificial
hierarchy without even getting to know it.
A value judgment on its relative wealth.
But if my fingers could read psychically & soak
up its famous argument, it would be your Rhode
Island accent that I would hear in my head, a drawl
that once said you’d never been mugged in New York,
only in Brisbane. That was when you lived in Torbreck
the Sunshine State capital’s first high rise apartment.
Built in the fifties, but now the suburb was sloughing
off its low-rent accommodation to make way for
the rise of the new inner-city aristocracy.
Your hair was black, rakishly long, though white caps
had begun to break over your brow’s dark sea chop.
Your broad-rimmed glasses are fashionable now;
there was a longish John Lennon cast to your face.
You were into historical war gaming; said Australians
were WW2’s finest shock troops; all volunteers,
we were feared the most. Some deep conviction
dragged you over here; when we met, you were
thriving in the dead letter office of Australia Post.
So many gone now from Café Bohemia’s set.
First Mira who owned our means of production,
now you. Fifty-four years is a philosophers’ burst
of Greek fire; so volatile. You underlined phrases
from chapter one’s first two pages in black biro,
but for this one you used blue; To discover the various
uses of things is the work of history. You ended up looking
like Marx’s embossed portrait on the book’s cover;
your full white beard defending our future value.
Scarlet-Shouldered Parrot
Extinction is a kind of bizarre stocktake.
Units low in number are not reordered,
but with doomsday quickness hoarders
buy up, until the very last items sell out.
Every species has its shelf life. The bird’s
use by date was 1927; it has been expired
for eighty-seven years, a rotten end to a
popular product. Collectors kept the empty
bottles, stuffed them with sawdust & tied
them all up like sticks of dynamite rigged
to a rail bridge. Taxidermy is a 3D photo
of the dead. They’ll perch for eternity; wear
beads for eyes, medal ribbon on their chest
& on their shoulder, a scarlet epaulette.
Soldier Parrots
Science lessons spied on them for eighty years
without actually seeing them. Classes of short-
lived students studied biology under immoveable
beaks. Sixteen birds in a square Victorian case;
walled up behind old-style glass, globed with air
pockets like insects trapped in an amber dome.
The vanguard of the forces of mass extinction;
a light cavalry brigade’s reckless charge against
a Russian position, or captured weapons laid
at a dead King’s feet. Twelve are common as
disciples. Four are holy relics of biodiversity’s
religious heights. Two breeding pairs, bonded
to the box’s midriff on branches of tied green
wire. An ornithological trellis, where gentry
adorned their curious wealth, or a Christmas tree
decorated with baubles of gaudy parrot-life.
A steampunk trophy when taxidermy was popular
as scrapbooking, the birds eternity persevered
in real-life poses. Snap-frozen by a romantic age
that hastened an island feathered apocalypse.
The graziers knew them as Soldier parrots, these
war veterans who took in their military jizz,
perched atop dozers that snapped off Brigalow
at the ankles. Sentries stood to attention on termite
mounds guarding eggs mined into ant nest hearts.
They mimicked parade ground drills, chests out, they
puffed & swaggered their way into oblivion. Farmers
were bullies – kids kicking over sandcastles, not
realising their strength hurt others. Palaeontologists
guffaw; 99.9% of all known species have gone dead.
Stargardt’s Syndrome
for Sylvie
She says where our faces used to be
is a great skein of sparkles, as though
the Milky Way’s white wisp of cloud
is a rubbing taken from a country night
sky & stencilled onto our lined features.
As though a black hole has formed
where her future used to rest in the
dream job of her distracted globe.
It’s as if a wad of fairy floss passes
constantly over her eyes, a childish
prank from which she’ll never escape.
She grieves for her driver’s licence.
We say that when she is old enough
to drive, that cars will drive themselves
by voice control; we’ll all be passengers
of technology then. The young & old
will be one diminished machine, the
analogue tape of our lives will spool
out over the wind-up trees. But for
now, she no longer reads books, they
have blurred into artefacts from some
lost culture, Atlantean perhaps, their
words in a tense pictogram that she can’t
decipher. Her bookshelf; an ossuary
for printed matter, her full stops jumbled
together like skulls in a dim crypt. If only
tears could heal the eyes; if only her saboteur
could be flushed from her cells like a speck
of dust, the genes that betrayed her, washed
out. She walks on fault lines, every step
is a miscommunication between her feet
& her brain. New places are haunted houses.
She is only comfortable with routine spaces,
& reacts as though possessed or spell cast.
If ancient Greek, she would have been an
Oracle, the future clouded for all but her.
Wacol Station Road
His son said animals have emotions. That elephants
mourn for their dead like we do. Each morning they’d
survey for roadkill; a counting game of dead eastern greys
& swamp wallabies that overnight crashed to the ground
like rotten branches downed by a thunderstorm. Often,
they’d be sprayed with a single, pink, paint stripe; some
cartoon mammal, marsupial-skunks, their wedge-shaped
snouts caught in a cup of stillness. As though death
was a graffiti artist who needed to reaffirm their existence
by tagging the dead’s unadorned carriage. Brightening
the boomers’ grey faces for the carnival of decay.
Or mortality as a kind of male penal shaming, sporting
this genteel colour to emasculate those imprisoned
in the underworld. At times, in the fog-blinkered
mornings their dozy eyes would betray them; a dirt
mound mistaken for a body would leap out, a trap
to capture their imaginations; middens left by Fire Ant
patrols bent on their own miniscule extermination.
By then it would be too late, the real carcasses would
be gone; a miraculous ascension missed by all. Evidence
of an even closer surveillance than the job they’d been
contracted for. Some black bagger at the very top of their
secret game. Where one day there’d been a furred lump,
airbed bloated, now they passed only teams of crows
in their immaculate dark suits who searched the ground
for clues, tweezer breaks probing the long grass for
bloodstains, crying in frustration over the lack of stink,
tampered evidence & a lead gone cold. & one morning
in front of them, two skippies bounded down a dewy
easement, paws slipping on the bitumen, claws frantic
for purchase, until gravity spilled the roos across the dark
blue tarmac, their black nails obsidian bright. An obstacle
evolution hadn’t thought through yet.
All of this drama occurred along Wacol Station Road.
On one side, ‘Pooh Corner’ a 140 hectare red gum forest
fit for a philosophising bear, celebrating a decade of near
obliteration by developers who wanted to clear fell & erect
more concrete hangers. A small army of activists opposed
the state government; making a stand against corporate
warfare & won. A rear-guard action, buying time for
these last inner-city habitats in the great western corridor
clearance sale of woodland for industry. This forest, one
of the last remnant eucalypt biomes in Brisbane, ex-DOD
land, that once saw a million US servicemen call its paperbarks
home. ‘Camp Columbia’ that stockpiled boys from the mid-west,
Brooklyn, all corners of that wide brown land. Triple the war-time
population of Brisbane, GIs put down sewer roots; water
treatment plants more advanced than the carts of nightsoil
that local residents still lugged away. A war-brokered
modernism, that spread as a great convulsion throughout
the Pacific, like a series of depth charges bucketing the sea
out of their explosive blow-holes. A spawning of new tech
that secretly housed ‘Colossus’, a Turing machine in Qld’s
capital, when you could count all the computers in the world
on one hand; which broke Japanese naval & army codes, folding
billions of numbers over & over to spit out a true sentence,
like a samurai sword bent a thousand times in a forge to give
it the power to cut a human hair in two, the first thinking
machine only conceptualised positions & troop strength;
sending countless men to their deaths in the tropics,
where crab feasts went on for weeks, months, years.
Who’d have thought he & his son would live in an age
where robots killed people remotely. When he was his
son’s age it had only been prophesised in books about
the future. Now ‘Christopher’s’ great grandchildren had
all grown wings & learnt to fly for hundreds of kilometres,
their blunt heads loaded with combat computers, cameras
that moved in unison with the rapid flick of human eyes.
Undetected, for twenty-four hours at a time, a new kind
of whispering death where joysticks & triggers guided
missiles to the everyman’s manure-daubed compound.
& on the roads’ other side, Wacol prison, its razor-wire
strands twisted like oversized DNA molecules, blades
alternating along the filaments like chains of protein cells.
The buildings stretching an aircraft carrier’s length, everything
dull-steel, dour as a wartime-painted ship, grey as the fur
of the roos, that belly flopped on the jail’s crewcut grass.
Grey besser block outbuildings, triangular aluminium roofs,
so no one could land a chopper, a monotone of colour,
a depressed cohort of prisoners kept on a perpetual war
footing, nerves shot, numbed to the Alsatian’s guttural bark.
Here, the eucalypts cleared around the institution’s immediate
vicinity, a killing ground’s clear sight where wardens might
enfilade a mass breakout, trees providing no cover.
His son asking why the people in the row of 1970s double
-story fibro orange houses, would live so close to the jail.
& why the a large fence around them & the ‘Keep Out’
signs. Was this to keep the prisoners out? How could he
explain these half-way houses for released paedophiles
easing them back into the community, like a swimmer
dipping one foot into freezing water to test their conviction.
These men who slouched up Wacol Station Road to the 7-11
to buy their ordinary treats. These ordinary looking men,
who you couldn’t pick, unremarkable, living with their own
mob, behind 10ft fences, penned in by fear, the trees partly
obscuring their presence from the road, a camouflaged life.
His son’s emotional commentary from the front seat.
His futile effort to respond to unanswerable questions.
His foot tensed to hit the brakes at a hint of greyness.
His fear of hitting something on this short-cut street.
Grief is a Small Animal That Needs a Home
Grief finds him again after thirty years
like a lost dog tracking its way back home.
It’s a miraculous story of a pet abandoned
by its owners or accidentally trapped inside
a truck, stalking their scent; the automatic
pull of being that leads the beast headlong.
Thousands of miles are crossed. Seasons
pass, but still the small animal scavenges.
When it reappears after so long, he is not
ready. It has grown, though the journey
has wasted its hindquarters. It can hardly
walk on its back legs anymore, which drag
along the ground like the keel of a land-
locked boat. Its ribs stick out like oars.
With its last bit of strength it jumps
the fence, for this, this was its territory.
Its nose is wet as tears. The holes of its
nostrils blow warm air onto his fingers.
His is the right scent. There is recognition
in the eyes. There is a breeze of whimper.
It nestles on his chest, pawing at his skin
trying to dig up the hard bone heart that
let it go. Its ears are flat to its skull as
if it cringes from an expectant blow.
There is a low growl. Grief starts in its
throat, it is a machine with a throttle.
He got it when he was a child. His mother
kept half tame half feral cats around the place
but they were always cautious of children.
He chased them, but could never pet them.
One grey & white thing he chased under the
stumps of the house until it wet itself in fear.
Once in a one in a century flood, they locked
grief inside the house, where it shat on the lino.
Another time, grief took on a black snake
hopping sideways with each leather belt strike.
He remembers why he let it go years before.
It had once belonged to his father, a familiar
that followed his dad until it was handed down.
An unwanted thing that found a new friend.
He’d grown up trying to catch the wild things,
Bearded dragons & Apostlebirds, he picked
up their chatter, once a lousy jack got caught
in a cage; its noisy family never left its side.
When grief visited the small animals, he put
their bodies inside matchboxes or shoeboxes
with tissues for shrouds & buried them in the
black loam. He was curious then & afterwards
dug them back up to look at their deceased state.
Grief was all mucous & the smell of Myall Creek.
This time, his daughters take up the tiny beast.
It lies in bed with them, curled up, soaking up
their warmth as a green shoot stretches for sun.
For many years it had no name, the girls even hid
it from him. He thought that grief was an old thing,
that no one wanted, but sorrow attracts the young.
They are growing up with it. Getting used
to its new routines, the constant demands.
Often it trips them up. The leash snagging
their feet; the trick is getting them to feed it.
At night the youngest daughter will pluck it
from the top of the couch & take it to her
room. Next morning he will come in & find
them asleep together, their breathing synced.
When they walk to the park it follows them,
& has to be scared back home. Throwing his
arms up into the air is a sign that he doesn’t
want grief to follow them anymore. But,
even after all these years of abandonment,
the small animal remains so terribly loyal.
Ornamental Snake
Denisonia maculata
They have carved up the Brigalow forest, etched
out strange designs in the dark leather of its belt.
We sense in the burnt bottom of the pan; gidgee
scrub encircled by roads, railways & stock routes
that pick off mobs of trees like a shooter’s quota
of roos. At night, giant mines blend with the sky
into one wide, black ocean. We emerge in the cool
as the young frogs bubble up from groundwater;
toads we bite, turn the armoured hulks into sacks
of fluid, but the froglets hop into our jaws & rest.
We taste your red. Your engines radiate in waves
of heat, but our fangs do not hurt them. So we hide
by day in the tunnels of deep soil cracks, under the
tip trays of fallen logs. We slither out of your holes.
Travelling
(i)
He sees concrete pylons set like giants’ bones
in Wagners’ yard as the train glides forward.
These carboniferous fossils will be transplanted
into flyovers and urban bypasses, strengthening
the new body’s industrial backbone. Perhaps a
coal port terminal to cough up the country’s lungs.
Peeling paint bulges, green cysts dot sound
barriers where teenage identity has been deleted.
Where there should be striped marsh frogs
are megafauna effigies of striped marsh frogs
clinging to a bus shelter’s wet mass. The tips
of their fingers magnified as defibrillator pads.
Orangemen repair railway bridges, their hands
explain how this is done in a secret sign language
reserved for the hard hat tribe. Flattened,
nineteenth century brickwork is smothered
by cement’s grey butter. Iron will outlive most
of us. Stenciled honeyeaters perch on a rock cutting.
(ii)
At Central, there is a jungle growing all
over a twentysomething man. The sinuous
vines have circumnavigated his muscular
calves, thighs, arms and neck. For a brief
moment it looks like he is losing the battle
as the lianas strangle his flesh.
He is on his mobile calling the experts. A skin
gardener, he has trained the stalks, tied them off
with twists of sap-ink. His bark has healed.
Strange animals are trapped his artwork’s amber.
Ossified for only his eternity. If his skin was rolled
into a globe, it would form its own landmasses.
New continents rising up from his body’s seabed.
He watches until a train obliterates his vision.
(iii)
He did not eat this morning. His hunger is
a belly’s tunnel that echoes with boiler noise.
The train seats stink like the after smell
of a wheelie bin’s breath. Grime is entropy’s
artistic genius, the floor carpet is dotted
with age spots like Bishop’s poor old fish.
There are frayed whiskers too, where the cushions
have been bearded by vandalism. Out the window,
Steve McQueen is still selling watches thirty years
after his death. Advertising’s golem doesn’t rest.
His engine has cooled,
his racing strip hangs in a car museum.
(iv)
He is recognized and asked what is happening
in Newcastle’s revival. He doesn’t give it away.
The memoirist cum poet is flying to Melbourne
for Writers’ Week. She has a parallelogram
of blue hair, relives Marge Simpson’s punk days.
Her poetry has angles of grieving. In a week
she’ll be stark naked reading verse, her body
of work on display. He can’t decide between
joining her or hissing
the portly poet-billionaire.
(v)
There is a mole on the neck of the stewardess,
an arctic hare caught out by winter’s quick change.
She is stuck in her promethean performance.
The life vest’s liver-coloured rubber weighs
her down with repetition. He looks at her
out of respect for her ritual. The safety demo
is a strange custom that will be debated about in
a thousand years, its meaning quaint like fossil fuel.
This plane is an act of creation; yet he only
believes in engineers’ intelligent design.
(vi)
The blonde traveler’s face is tight as a greyhound’s.
The wrinkles parenthesizing her eyes, racing rails
that guide middle age to its inglorious finish line.
She muzzles her fear of flying, checking Facebook.
Her last post? His phone is turned off. If anything
happens there will be no ghostly messages left.
The pilot chats casually about ‘bumps’ on descent;
the take-off is delayed by a storm front that agitates
landings. He loves the rush of engines, fatherly inertia
that pins him like a nuisance child, but overthinks their
ascent. As a boy he read that the greatest airline disaster
happened on the ground; two 747’s in the Canary Islands
that clashed shells on the tarmac like giant tortoises mating,
that most accidents occur in the first minutes after take-off.
An O-ring or bolt shearing from a production fault missed
ten years earlier, thin metal tearing at a million parts per plane.
(vii)
Once in 1986 his mother woke him from a wet dream
when Challenger became the world’s greatest firework.
The giant plumes of white smoke like a jester’s three
cornered hat. Bells of flame jangling on their ends
in the sky’s royal blue court. There were schoolyard
rumours of blackened gloves found with hands still
in them, soft white meat in a cooked crab shell.
She woke him because she knew that he loved space.
He’d watched Columbia five years earlier, sit like a
giant alabaster idol on her launch pad altar, adored
by millions, until the worship of firegods fell into
routine, so TV sets switched channels. He marveled
at the shuttles’ genesis, using the oldest, fire resistant,
baked clay tiles that absorbed reentry’s nuclear heat.
Those pilots who only had one shot at landing
on the dry lakebed of Edwards Airforce Base,
parachutes opening like sunflower heads
tracking the long, white, salty strip’s heat.
(viii)
The passenger’s nails are blood red like the warning
pinstripe sprayed on the SR-71 Blackbird’s fuselage,
that commanded where mechanics could place their
masked feet when walking on the delicate American
spy plane’s black anti-radar paint. Her rings titanium,
like 85% of the supersonic jet that could outrun any
Soviet missile; strong, lightweight like metallic
keratin, the manicured surface unassailable.
(ix)
Runway taxiing is akin to speeding in a golf cart
over sand traps, driven by a drunk. He only fears
tyre blowouts on landing. He finds in middle age
his paranoia has also moved on to mental instability
in pilots, the human error that no one can control.
Suicide pacts formed from broken families and
Outstanding gambling debts. He remembers with
some relief that the copilot sounded chirpy enough.
He looks at her pre-takeoff habits. The fidget of
those ready to run. He only exists in her peripheral
vision, a blur of predator, a supernatural spectre
that sits in someone else’s backseat. Death has a
punishing g force when it strikes. The need for new
speed; he rides in an ad for New Balance sports gear.
His belly is soft dough rolled out. Fifty million lives
sacrificed so he could have these two engines cupped
like silver eggs under the jetliner’s fat abdomen.
War music roars out in a fiery tempest; the screams
of all the war dead collected in a single black note.
The plane razors through layers of cumulous cloud.
There are drops of rain on the portholes like quavers
on a music sheet. He cannot read the weather’s
discordant sound, that forces the jet to drop octaves
from its steady voice. The pilot no longer conducts,
engines whine through the wild symphony;
champagne glasses rubbed by a goliath’s fingers.
(x)
She must be a psychologist, he thinks as he spies
on her reports from the University of Newcastle.
So calm. Do you have an inkling of how you will die?
he wants to ask her. A question that breeds intimacy
between strangers, that can make the vulnerable fall
in love with you in less than fifteen minutes it is said.
He doesn’t have an answer either. Just hopes it’ll be
candle-quick, a flame’s hiss, then silent smoke plume.
He has still not eaten. The food trolley is pushed
with reverence up the cattle-crush aisle like a war
veteran leaving hospital. He is winged in the shoulder
by a curved hip that knocks his arm off course;
a satellite bouncing across the planet’s thin atmosphere.
His mind misses reentry. He is burnt up by self-doubt.
The miniature milk spurts out of its little blue
pail like venom from a brightly lit poison frog.
It paralyses the white coffee in his paper cup as the jet
bucks with a dodgem car’s impact on its descent.
(xi)
The whitecaps breaking along the coastline are
neurons spreading throughout the beach’s brain.
The jet is about to make a new connection with
the earth. He is not worried. The more they drop
to ground the safer he feels. If a tyre blows, he
imagines enjoying the terrible skid, the grinding
of stainless steel as it dies on bitumen. The pop and
hiss of the children’s yellow inflatable castle slide.
He fantasizes about saving lives, this sacrifice is
all in his head. He will not turn on his phone yet.
He’s left it to sleep, a fear of breaking radio contact,
or shorting out a wire, creating an aneurism in the
plane’s instrument-packed head. Touchdown is
slamming his son down on the bed, mock wrestling
that ends with a kick to the groin. The airbrakes
expose the jet’s tendons that humans have built.
The tyres big as colossal squid eyes, hold. Some
company has done its job. He lets her get off before
him. There is no question between them to be answered.
Their vulnerability cools down. Stepping onto the tarmac
he’s ecstatic as Armstrong’s first footprint; there’s
a crumpled flag planted on the surface of his face.
He drags his feet towards the terminal through
the tricky regolith of his travelling space.
Maureen Cooper’s Quilt (Bimblebox Nature Reserve)
The coal temple’s curtain has been ripped asunder.
A deposit the size of Germany lies dormant, a fallow
dragon that on awakening will fire up its hot breath,
its stench wilting barbed wire grass like an incendiary
bomb melting the stalks of men’s eyes on the Western
front. Embroidered birds & marsupials are a truce flag.
A royal sigil, as if the nature reserve had a divine right
to exist. A pennant that signals either advance or retreat.
A blanket to wrap the wounded in, a hoisted sail that
catches the nearest drift, if favourable winds pick up.
In Mackay the quilt is taken down like a crushed enemy’s
insignia; a toppled golden eagle in a black & white film.
Machines dig, machines stitch too; humans appliqué
tininess to the bigger picture. The future wins a raffle.
Southern Boobook Owls
His book book cry was so close it could
have pealed inside our kitchen; as if some
poltergeist had tapped twice beside our ears
on an enamel mug, or a doomed sailor struck
his wrench on a bulkhead. Torch-lit, I bungled
the kids onto the back lawn, where we shone
our dull yellow beams up into the fig tree’s
submarine darkness, first picking out the male,
then a metre along the branch, his female lead.
He repeated his deep notes, a lusty bugler whose
clarion call was greeted with a growl of approval.
He moved then at the speed of night, the flurry
of wings more a scuffle, than a feathered union.
Extinguished, the owls fled from our light.
Night Parrots
The ecologist’s hands seal firmly like an elevator’s doors
as he grips the night parrot in his fleshy clamp. His fingers,
twigs woven into a brown screen, a tight spinifex bunch
where the bird is insubstantial as trying to hold water.
Two of his digits form a tiny ox collar as they ring
the bird’s cotton ball head, another grips its belly
like a weight belt. For a hundred years the parrot has
drained out between extinction’s fist, an unstoppable
slow leak. He clutches it gingerly, a live grenade, or
how a fast bowler splits a cricket ball’s seam, the leather
of the bird’s claws resting lightly on his fingertips.
Sport for poachers, its location is another lost body
in the desert. He fixes a tracking device. For twenty-
one hours the signal chatters in night’s lone flock.
Guadalcanal
(i)
Neat as an Olympic diver, the moustached kingfisher
splits the brackish water, feathers luminescent tracer.
Akira watches the bird resurface, a fingerling in
its beak, long & silver as a newly crafted sword.
On a branch overhanging the creek, it is devoured
in two quick moves like a rifle bolt being cocked.
The bird scrapes both sides of its bill on tree bark;
a soldier cleaning his bayonet on a bit of canvas.
His splash is small too. Like Mbarikuku, he is holed
up in the mountains, forced ever upwards by the jungle
& the Americans who swarm over the island, killing,
overrunning Henderson airfield like an invasive species.
Akira digs in, an endangered species, conceals
his pillbox to look like a fallen tree trunk or nest.
(ii)
The Corsairs make matchwood out of his gun pit.
He alone survives the bombardment. There is no
fire. The rainforest smothers any flame with its wet
blanket. Bones split like the trunks of downed canopy
giants that have collapsed under their dead weight.
Greasy sunlight patterns over him like camouflage.
Akira cannot hear the kingfisher’s call. His god
is ringing a Shinto bell in his head. It rains.
Purple berries rest by shell casings.
The bird’s perch is a charred hand.
The only blue streak he sees
is the red dawn surrendering to day.
The marines are coming for him.
Akira lets the leeches drink their fill.
(iii)
At two thousand feet above sea level
the zoologist stumbles over a mystery.
He estimates that it is coffin deep,
tooled by human hands. At the bottom
are bits of rusting metal brittle as feather
bones. The trench is a good observation
post to look for the bird. On a stump
overhanging a creek, he spies a male
preening his molten medal head,
blue wings like a Pacific island ad.
The kingfisher has telescopic sight,
but the mist net floats like gun smoke.
He thinks of DDT & thin eggshells as
he hears; ko-ko-ko-kokokokokokokoko-kiew.
Chinchilla
For George Bender
(i)
You will only ever own the top six inches,
if you can call it ownership; to some it’s more
a stewardship, a steering of all the elements that
you need to get right; the weather, enough rain
to plant or grow grass for cattle, bores that won’t
run dry when the season does, firebreaks that will
halt a bushfire like a brick under a wheel, soil that
is rotated to perfection, salinity that can take its time
choking a paddock with its briny hands. Silage pits
that double as emergency funds, molasses and straw
mass graves that keep underground for years
like an inverse cicada, waiting for the poorest
conditions, drought-death, to be reborn as feed.
Mice and locusts that plague the rare fat seasons.
(ii)
Chinchilla gets the geographical kudos, but this is
more Wandoan, a little more north, a little less known.
A sacred six inches, something knife-blade deep that
barricades a grazier’s mind into a Eureka Stockade
of bullish resistance. Six inches that make a farmer
refuse to leave the land and die there; than break
like a joint in a rock along the thin sandstone coast.
The earth is a tenement block; you own the top unit,
the government rents out the flats beneath. Bad risks,
they destroy the furniture, put holes in plaster walls,
and leave in the middle of the night. They even strip
out copper wire, such is their addiction. Leftovers by
the bin swell and stink like cattle carcasses in a dam.
You can light the kitchen water up like an oxy torch.
The Surface of Last Scattering
(i) Spacetime
The rate of decay of his cells was a clock.
A sub-atomic timepiece that measured his
lifespan & how fast his body was dying. People
are so many small mechanisms all ticking away.
His heart was a carriage clock & had the loudest
chime. His thoughts were Roman numerals that
gave time its logic. His tongue was a pendulum
that beat out the rhythm of his hours. A tumour
grew on his father’s bowel & accelerated his cells
past his body’s limit, slowing the aging process by
entropy. Death was a grandfather clock that fell
over & could not climb back up. In that moment,
the light-clock he carried in his head stopped.
In dying he travelled faster than light.
(ii) Subtopia
If she feared for his future, she didn’t show it.
She spoke in platitudes when she heard the news
of his separation; what will happen will happen. Their
relationship stalled by cliché’s ubiquitous codex.
His mother had become fatalistic in her old age,
as the ten year old curtains shredded in the washing
machine. She blamed the sun. Her coastal woodland
was being chopped back, but she didn’t comment on
the loss of the delicate balance. Palm trees used their
physicality to intimidate. There wasn’t a weed anywhere.
That night, the front door’s automatic light triggered.
Dogs? Roos? Only his mother checking the locks again.
As he pulled up, a fresh lace drape fell back into place.
Oddly she said to him, her door was always open.
(iii) Subtopia 2
The dogs disturbed the early morning air molecules
with their fear. A muzzle combed under a wooden
fence sensing him for threats; a mirror under a car.
The American Staffordshire kept on looking back
as if he was out of place here. His owners had spray-
painted a gothic crypt scene on their shed wall; a
Vampira to frighten off the self-funded retirees.
Coiled dragons guarded their front steps. Street
names mocked the demolished bush. On Heathland
Avenue a concrete slab, Dead Sea flat, waited to be
raised. It was Christmas. Cicadas simmered on frayed
tea-trees as the sun’s pan heated up. They wanted sex
before their paperbark bordello was torn down. The
staffy licked its crotch; indicated it would be alright.
(iv) Cosmic Speed Limit
It’s a waste of time, the middle-aged man bawled
squeezing water particles over his parched lawn.
There’s a natural poetry to mathematics. He was
ruled by equations he would never solve. Choice,
theoretical until he experimented with it. Weeds
relative to the distance from his grass. He saw an
absolute universe of green matter beset by chaos.
A teacher orbited his daughter with a blow up Earth.
Four seasons were punctuated by raised arms, every
calendar month radiated from a classmate’s mouth.
Then her teacher spun the planet on a fingertip like
a basketball trick, turning night into day; the future
fast forwarded like pages in a mutoscope. After school,
she cartwheeled across her father’s dying turf.
(v) Higgs Boson
There was a particle so small that it was
unaware of its own existence. It was a sleeper
cell in his marriage’s back country. It awaited
activation. Its awakening needed an equation
that would give it instructions, then disappear.
It had a cold war operation that required the
passports of several powerful emotions. It was
a parasitic wasp’s egg that hatches in a tarantula’s
back & devours the body of scientific knowledge.
His flesh was its exoskeleton. It was the cause of
his fall, insubstantial in its substance. It was born
nanoseconds after the Big Bang, erupting like snot
thrown out from a sneeze. It didn’t have a name
until he came along. It succeeded in its mission.
(vi) Hydrogen Cell
She revealed she created one in her spare time,
this female variant of Tesla, in her garage, in
a titanium case filled with water, inside another
titanium case filled with sand. EBay is great for
resources she said. All of her friends had built
their own using CNC machines; she didn’t want
to be left out. She wanted to be off the grid. To
be self-sufficient in her needs, no longer rely on
any man. This was just her hobby after all. She
dealt with cells that no longer supplied energy to
their bodies. These she eased gently into the sand
inside their wooden boxes, to be the fuel for new
revenant colonies. It’s so simple she texted:
Energy goes in, energy goes out & we are between.
(vii) The Surface of Last Scattering
She was a beautiful theory that had to be discounted.
What was translucent had returned to being opaque.
The signals in their faces were too strong for the receiver.
Now she was coming in faint, a pulse from a far galaxy.
He strained to detect what was left of their violent birth.
As the gases cooled, their cheeks grew hot with plasma.
There was an old light in their background that radiated.
There was no darkness between their points, only haze.
They were subject to new feelings of forgotten gravity.
One of them would slow, the other would bounce along.
He failed to think in four dimensions, that much was true.
And he only acted in two. He was pierced by time’s arrow.
After years of looking, they were their greatest discovery.
Yet distances were too far from the surface of last scattering.
At Play with Grey-Crowned Babblers
The grey-crowned babblers pry secrets from the trees.
Their scimitar beaks carve grooves in the scaly bark’s
trunk, like finger holes in a wooden instrument. They
tap out a note & listen as white grubs vibrate in their
dark cases. The crescendo is a larvae drawn out of its
wings to raucous applause. Nature has thought it best
not to make them empty nesters; keeping the kids close
to home rather than cutting them free, cooperation is
survival’s tenor. Around the Titan shed, the eight birds
play follow the leader, chasing the maggot that squirms
in a parent’s bill. It is a jovial community, one that you
could be lost in; but you dare not look or turn around,
for fear your movement will end it. The chirrups that
crawl up your back & infest your head like happiness.
Brown Booby
For the Brown Booby, wind is solid as ground.
Fast air molecules hold them in place; an invisible
plinth rewards the seabirds with an advantageous
vista of high tide. They are juvenile delinquents
testing gravity’s authority. They want to steal.
These hunters are sailors’ souls cruising Urangan’s
wooden pier, coveting the bream that bend light
like lipstick mirrors of a morning. The shorebirds
wear a yellow gloss around their bills. Undersides
are mottled cream & brown like a light fixture
where moths have died & form a shadowy base.
One folds its wings back like an umbrella closing
& punctures the sea in a neat dive. They conquer
the ocean too; scaling this liquid mountain.
The Forest in Me
for Agafia Lykova
The snow was firm as my father’s hand
when he pulled me up the mountains; he
said it wasn’t him, but God doing the heavy
lifting. I saw my first star move at seventeen,
this glow worm that shimmied across night’s
cave. We fled Stalin & never saw him again.
I buried all those Old Believers: father, mother,
brothers, sister. I am the last custodian of river,
cedar trees, space junk & Russia’s most private
cemetery. We ran away from hatred; I should
have never re-entered this poisonous atmosphere.
There was a big war once; they said things were
in ruin, but it ended in victory. I met modernity.
I ask you, who will light the pine cones in winter?
Lord Howe Island Phasmid, Land Lobster
We fled from terror. Black rats migrated onto
Lord Howe from shipwrecks & we fed their
ravaging colonial instincts. Without contradiction
there can be no life, so a thicket of us hitched
a ride on driftwood & by the mercy of the moon
we managed to find landfall; refugees who had
turned themselves into sticks. This sheer peak
was almost barren, but for a scraggly melaleuca
shrub which had like us, held the gate against
the fittest surviving. We were rescued again;
years later, still a small outpost on the edge of
civilisation, our shit led you to us. Surely our
near miss is a cautionary tale? Don’t you see?
There’s no captive breeding program for you.
Grindle Road
A bull bar is a ute’s clenched fist. There
is no prestige left in its silver colour. There
is no classic style to death. The killing floor
was outside, late at night between the men’s
& women’s prisons. He could imagine the
inmates asleep in their cots, whimpering as
he drove off the road & into the grassy gutter
blasting into the radiant mob like a steel bolt
into a cow’s forehead. The force felt inside
the cab was equivalent to smacking a face.
The high humidity suspended particles of
roo, clotting night’s air with smell of fresh
blood, like a stained tinted window. Death
was not instant. Seventeen times he floored it.
Stopped the Boats
The Persians rose in their millions. What’s an empire to do hereafter?
Shield & sword would not hold, but a wooden wall stopped the boats.
There was only one good book that the righteous read; its author
Employed a simple fisherman, who, sold his nets & stopped the boats.
There was a dandy bowling, when up sailed the Spanish armada.
For his Queen he would lose his head, but first he stopped the boats.
In his dream the ship was called the ‘Titan’. It was the largest ever.
It was full speed ahead as ice had never before stopped the boats.
A liner was bounced around the oceans looking for a safe harbour.
The passengers were David’s People, but bigotry stopped the boats.
The common people heeded the Admiralty’s call and sailed over.
Even the Luftwaffe’s dive bombing might, never stopped the boats.
There were images on the news, after a tsunami smashed Fukashima.
Freighters picked up like toys & thrown; as Nature stopped the boats.
The Great Pacific garbage patch, or Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre
Of human rubbish that if left, will, in the future, have stopped the boats.
Oil slicks are spreading; crown of thorns starfish inch over this wonder.
For thousands of years the Great Barrier Reef has stopped the boats.
There was a wet leader of a desert country, who had a drier interior.
He threw a curtain over the media’s empire, as he stopped the boats.
Dionysius took a ferry to Crete. On another, the crew watched soccer.
The rock launched itself like a world cup goalie & stopped the boats.
Easter Sunday
The sun’s orange fingertips still pawed the horizon
as day clung to night’s precipice; it was a race, but the
darkness beat them both & they let go. The light fell
into a deep crevasse as he gunned through the town’s
industrial outskirts where childhood clusters of trees
stood taller but were charcoal outlines on dusk’s wall.
He passed the hospital, nursing home, but missed the
triumvirate’s turnoff; the lawn cemetery where his father
was watered by time’s droplets. He’d driven two hours
on impulse; his only plan to lie down next to his father’s
bronze square. He didn’t succeed. In the dark he used his
phone’s sad blue face to search, but startled the embossed
names of other fallen. Stretched on their wet chains, the
automatic sprinklers chased him away like guard dogs.
Bee Fleeting
the pain has remained constant
when everything else has diminished
honey mailboxes sat out in wooded paddocks
little stuccoed apartments or mental institutions
where crazy dancing was welcomed
men in white suits & fencing facemask mesh
carried lamps that spewed out smoky magic
visible grey carbon cast spells of calmness on
legions of erratic antennae. insect dopamine
receptors blocked by the elemental drug
dying bees watched by tomorrow’s scientists
grounded flight crew crawled in undignified gait
the opposite imagined for us; soul if it exists
whisked up into the air, some gas released from
a yellowed body mimicking a bee’s end
they are absconding from the planet’s giant hive
one day the lazy buzz in the tops of eucalypts will
only be heard on recordings; children will imitate
their noise like they do for dinosaurs, not really
knowing what made that sound, sound so real
the bee yards are going the way of their ship cousins
numbers are down, no more virgin queens are ready
for the role of royal abdomens elongated as the English
coast. a province the insect empire loses to barbarity
the workers have closed in & are balling her
the afterswarm of onlookers at the playground
where a bee sting choked the life out of some poor
kid. there was always one story of this happening
growing up. we saw more dead bees than children
they are as gifted & as dangerous as cells.
a beard of humanity hangs from the earth’s
face; the hive is heating up. there is a dearth
of sweet stuff, so robbing frenzies wrack
the third world, steal all their honey stores;
weren’t we all africanised before
if there is brood in us we will not leave
native bees outnumber them but do not sting
fly-size & black, they were here before the
european bees were introduced, domestic stock
bought over to cut songline chemical trails
an exoskeleton of greed grows over some
their faces are made of chitin; they are drones
they use drones to control the queens, mating
with hornets; crossbreeding raiders that pillage
mandibles snipping worker’s wages in half.
when you kiss someone your lips are a bee-space
apart in the frame of your entwined combs
first comes the nectar, then comes the honey
then comes regent hand fed on royal jelly
even humans like insects, started small
there is the great pacific slumgum, the
galilee basin slumgum, hiroshima slumgum
nagasaki slumgum, chernobyl slumgum,
fukashima slumgum, ok tedi slumgum
bophal slumgum, great barrier reef
bees were the first flash mob, washboarding
out the front of their homes spontaneously
& in unison, the choreography of a hundred
million years of cryptic insect line dancing
a ritual of the home all creatures praise
everything should be queenright, but it is not
they are never satisfied in their mind’s colony
they swarm over the new years’ sales like guard-
bees over an intruder who doesn’t smell right
sheer weight of numbers cooks the wasp
when the bees leave, we shall also go
only our fossilised forms will remain
dead grey cities, the pressures of our
own swarm will turn our sappy lives
into history’s unbreakable amber
pollengoing
pollengoing
pollengoing
pollengoing
pollengone
Barnacle
I cut myself on a four hundred
year old barnacle. It was my fault.
I strayed into its seaside territory
by mistake. The ocean ambushed
me in the beach’s narrowed alley.
Cursed in a language before blue.
Its wine-dark, shoulder-charge
knocked me onto its cobblestoned
street; my hand parachuted open,
launching like a grappling hook, but
gravity hid behind my legs & pulled.
Its edge opened up my palm neat
as a pay envelope’s promise. It
was part of a razor gang after all,
its cutthroat mates flashed shivs too.
Hard to imagine their cave hideout,
a distant cousin to the Himalayas was
once a mass of lifeless sea creatures;
fishbones, bleached coral, mother
of pearl, shell, grit rasped into smooth
particles by the tide’s kinetic sawmill
& risen as mountainous tomb.
Darwin studied them. Rubbed his
stiff fingers over their stars, old as an
Elizabethan dirk. He knew an organism
that lived so long, must know something
about morphology, longevity. Measured
their jagged coastlines, counted bubbles
that escaped from their miniature craters.
He cut himself too, proffering his own
blood for science’s spell. His revelation.
The simplest live longest, the complex
die sooner from too many moving parts.
Anyhow, my hand opened its red smile,
& rebirthed its salt back into the mother
country’s briny womb. My blood oozed
in hot waves, as the flap of skin undulated
like a polyp helpless in a strong undersea
current. This stigmata; blessed ultramarine
pain as though light itself filleted my flesh,
each beam a butcher’s knife. That was then.
The scar is bone white as the string of dead
coral & cuttlefish backbone left by a high tide.
My children’s children’s children, will see it die.
Ace
for Kurt Knispel
Kurt, I doubt that anyone
has ever written a poem about you
because of your best record
in the world’s shittiest comp.
I wonder how you recorded your wins?
A bayonet’s scratch on the paintwork
inside your commander’s cupola?
Or precise pencil lines in a calfskin notepad;
a clichéd prisoner counting off the days
left in their iron cell confinement.
You were humble for a killer.
You let others stake their claim for trophies.
Not interested in numbers or disputes
you used your kinaesthetic intelligence
to smash enemies’ turrets, to finish
off the fresh factory models that still
glinted with newness, like glass baubles
on a dying Christmas tree.
You were not strictly German, but German
speaking Czech. Sudetenland raised, your
voice was annexed, your father’s love
of engines won you a production line job.
But the long hours of fixing nuts onto
bolts bored you, you could never stand
still for long & enlisted in tanks, having
passed your initiation with diesels, you
had an insider’s track.
I bet you were a pain in the ass
for your clean-shaven superiors
their skin, shiny as a freshly won Iron Cross.
You remind me of Donald Sutherland’s
character – ‘Oddball’ from Kelly’s Heroes.
who established a hippy commune
after D-Day, chilling behind the front.
His Shermans’ turrets turned into clotheslines.
Your promotions were slow
compared to your victories.
Nothing beyond a sergeant’s stripes.
Bearded, long hair, neck tattoo,
you were an oddity even for
your polished high command.
Regulations were the antithesis
of your being; so long as you
could load & aim & shoot T-34’s
from 3000 metres away; you
refused to shoot at civilians.
Orders were burned for fuel
in winter’s machine.
One Captain’s long, black, leather
coat you screwed up like tarpaulin
caught in a tank track; broke his gun
when he belted some poor soviet boy,
busy pissing in his pants.
Life & death was a fluke.
You learnt this early on, your
strange code manifested itself
in your reluctance to leave anyone
stranded on a battlefield.
You fought on all fronts
Eastern, Western, Human your
King Tiger took twenty-fours hits
in one battle, a heavyweight feigning
on the ropes, absorbing punishment
before he let loose.
Your punches totalled 168 confirmed
body blows, unconfirmed, the figure rises
to 195. That’s at least 672 souls you
ended, your high explosive rounds
burning men to death like crustaceans
boiled alive in metal drums.
You never left anyone in a situation.
A jockey on his iron mount, you rode
into the hairiest stuff, fouled on the rails
of combat, others took advantage of your
honour and fled the scene in panic.
You didn’t die in a glorious battle.
You survived Kursk and Caen,
the worst the war could throw at you,
only to be felled in the middle
of nowhere, in a meaningless entangle
some 100 miles from home. No honourable
duel to the death, you were not the poster
boy for the Nazis like Wittman was,
so the Knight’s Cross alluded you like
the love of a woman, or a hot meal
in Stalingrad’s frozen heart.
You weren’t made into an impromptu
street sign after death, but were honoured
with an unmarked grave, itself an oddity late
in the war of attrition, where bodies were left
to lie where they fell like empty shell cases,
their purpose done. Ten days later the war
ended for your comrades too.
You were interred beside a church wall,
the tired labour of digging your resting
place was done by volunteers, some crew
who wondered when they’d be next?
Your dog tags confirmed your presence
in death’s roll of honour. You’d slumbered
for sixty-eight years, in those dreams that
came & called you home. A niche hero,
not many know your score, or care, the
wars these days fought on video screen.
You’re a war historian’s secret affair;
I doubt there’s a statue even; we can’t
celebrate what’s not deemed right anymore.
Your goals are somehow illegitimate,
as though you’d taken growth hormone
to win at some grotesque Olympics.
You would’ve heard the bullet or shell
that killed you, some microseconds before
it landed its counter; its whistle distinctive
as a coach’s blow up, a language of violence
that you were fluent in for five short years.
Fighting Girlfriend
for Mariya Oktyabrskaya
the blue-black news
stains your fingers
with death’s ink
two years later.
tears, a spring thaw
for your husband
dead as machinery
shut down in
a kiev factory.
you convert grief
to anger, siberia
is warmed by your
winter fury.
you sell everything.
raise strange capital
to buy a tank off
the motherland.
you pen your widow’s
plea to stalin, nazis
you shit of a thing.
he is moved by your
eloquently worded rage.
he signs off on
a t-34 that glistens
like a new kettle.
you are done with
the domestic.
you train harder
than young men
half your age,
who have lost
nothing.
you are thirty-eight.
you name your tank
‘fighting girlfriend’
decorating its turret
in messy cyrillic letters;
revenge’s scrawl.
men think you’re
a joke, a publicity
stunt who should
be on a poster not
in the driver’s seat.
they lose their swagger
after your first battle.
your tank is the
child you never had
together. every german
you kill you mouth
your husband’s name
repeating your
wedding vow.
you get out under fire
to fix a broken track.
the steel tread limp
& heavy in your arms
as your husband
after he has come.
they make you a sergeant
for honouring your love.
two more times you risk
everything to repair
your wife’s wrath
that artillery shreds
from Girlfriend’s wheels.
shrapnel takes you
in the head like a slap.
stalin reads of your
two month tryst
with death & signs
off on your loyalty.
you keep your oath
& join your husband
throwing yourself on
war’s funeral pyre.
On Not Having Encountered Snow, Aged 46
for Sylvie
She will see it before him, in Canberra; then it’ll fade.
Her vision falling into a gloomy afternoon that won’t
let up; curtains drawn to salute more war time dead.
Quicker now, as the disorder heats up; a snowflake
that lands on a warm hand & rolls like a coin down
a drain. She’ll taste those crystalline satellites, each
unique as a daughter’s face; that sense growing in
power as her other skates away on thin ice. Thirty-
five years younger, having encountered snow at 11.
He is on hate’s payroll. He would melt Antarctica if
it would mean stealing it back. A super-villain, he is
hit with pepper spray & snow blindness takes him.
They will grow back someday when crystals freeze;
& visualise their spring melt, their anger’s thaw.
Juvy
We were so busy looking at other children:
rags of bodies, antique Persian dolls missing
glass eyes, faded paint on their torn clothes,
torsos chipped & cracked, one shoe gone,
that we let ours fall; a besser block from
a highway overpass smashing a windscreen.
Sealed bags leak air, water seeps in under
the steel door, gas keeps low as a fire drill.
A letter escapes. They can’t help themselves
& film it. Point of view pornographers who
ad lib their tired dialogue, who think more
about framing their sickness & how many
mates will think it sick as. It is torture they
produce; barbarous as a national dream.
A Japanese Airman Forewarns His Wife
for Tetsuo & Asako Tanifuji
Do you desire earnestly/wish/do not wish
to be involved in kamikaze attacks?
We are the last divine wind exhaled
from the Emperor’s bleeding mouth.
Human instrumentality; my wife perches
behind me in the cockpit, her hair in a bun.
The engine whines like a dog that’s missed
its master for some months, lost then found.
Aluminium coffined; we are together again.
I bring my mother no joy; we married young.
The clubs are finished bruising my face. I
have my fighting spirit, Asako has my back.
There are ten of the squadron left; we took
an oath under orders that there will be none.
Asako’s voice gibbers like a ghost, she is scared.
I tell her how proud she makes her husband, 22.
In the event of poor weather conditions when
you cannot locate the target, or under other adverse
circumstances, you may decide to return to base.
Don’t be discouraged. Do not waste your life lightly.
The T-34s are factory fresh & glint in
the bloodshot light. They stretch for eons.
Our pledge is stronger than a star’s gravity,
just one piece would fall through the centre
of the earth. It is time to dive. The sun &
my wife urge me on. We all bank as one.
We lived by a few days to see the atomic dawn.
Nothing we do is futile, everything has an end.
Our plane is obsolete. The tank rises like a steel glove.
Asako’s chin rests on my neck, as we burn with love.
for Wayne Allston
I was fatherless, but so I think were you.
If I could somehow lace the past back up,
I would have let you keep my black school
shoes you flogged in PE. I didn’t realise you
were wintering barefoot, trudging to school
for you daily dose of being frozen out. Pencils
borrowed never returned. Pigsey told me this.
How I resisted my meekness & tackled you,
stripping my shoes off your feet as though your
clothes were burning. Only shame ignites now,
thirty-four years later, the heat you must have felt
when I ripped them off. My nikoed name fading.
In Turvey’s system we were equally maths dumb.
Out of all the class, we were always left standing.
The Night Witches
Flimsy as broomsticks, we climbed aboard
for one last superstitious sortie. Night Witches
the Germans named us – canvas stretched
over our wooden frames, dried like caribou
hides on an antler rack. Biplanes, obsolete
as witch hunts; as ever night was our only
protection. Winter wind sharp as a propeller
blade cut through our leather cloaks, the open
coffins of our canopies where our bodies were
already bestowed. Flak bit at our craft like guard
dogs gunning for prisoners. We dropped our
bombs & lighter than barrage balloons limped
home, horses gone lame. We gave our planes
their noses as Arctic gales garrotted our words.
War on Terror
They have lived through America’s longest war.
We analyse Wilfred Owen. Obscene as cancer they
mumble checking Facebook. Aleppo is on their
feed, a dead mother sitting upright holding her
dead baby next to her dead toddler: all dusted in
concrete flour. Grey ash faces as if in mourning.
They do not cry at the end of Gallipoli anymore.
They do not understand that rape is a war crime.
Teaching English is mostly just teaching history.
The Vietnam War is as abstract as disease before
vaccinations. They lack context like some bones
lack calcium. They form opinions haphazardly.
Acne breaks out like a bitter conflict over oil.
The Muslim students pray quietly out of sight.
Snow Geese
The snow geese are landing as lightly as flakes.
Their pink webbed feet dissolve perfectly as jelly
crystals into Butte Lake’s reddish bowl. Their legs
drive down like cocktail stirrers energising atoms.
The water tingles as ten thousand tired birds swirl
from the snowstorm’s playful wrestle. The point
bird is the first to quench; the long white glove of
its neck bends like a Queen’s wave as its rosy bill
scoops up Berkeley Pit’s unique terroir of arsenic,
cadmium, cobalt, copper, iron & zinc; enough zest
to liquefy steel. Death is not instantaneous like lethal
injection. The flock’s punishment is a liquid lunch of
burnt throats & festering gizzards, graphic as Owen.
White bodies float like foam on top of a hot drink.
Bitter as the cud 