and no one
has the means
or guts
to move them.
I think of slaughtered
Mycenean kings
entombed in their brick
hive
glittering as they lie
golder than honey
in the old blood
dark.
Entranced
my bare hand
wants to plunge
through a hole –
now a buzzing lethal
highway –
in the shed wall.
I love the bee hut
on my friend Robert’s farm.
I love the invisible mystery
of its delicious industry.
But do I love the lesson
of my thralldom
to the sweet dark things
that can do me harm?
SMELLING TIGERS
THE SNOW LINE
I could smell
the snow line
but I just kept
talking
talking
and climbing
with this
glimmering
young man
who was talking to me
about death
how
a good dose of death
if you truly drink it
is a gift
a gift
a fresh cold
slap
a fresh dark
creek
you’ll never sleep-walk
through your life
again
again
I wonder now
as I wondered then
in the seeping ambrosia
of pine trees
if I was climbing
effortlessly climbing
if I was talking
effortlessly talking
with a god
a god
who never touched me
or told me
his name
a god
of sweet chill
mountain air
sense
a comradely god
of wing-booted
presence.
SMELLING TIGERS
Waiting.
Starched hospital gown.
Frozen present tense.
Why am I smelling
tigers?
Muffled white noise.
Bleached magazines.
Why am I sniffing
the steaming black scat
of tigers?
When I get my life back
When I am clear of here
I will go
like a blind blessed arrow
where I can wallow
in the elixir
of tiger.
NOT THE SAME
When you climb
out a black well
you are not the same
you come to
in the blue air
with a long sore scar
circling your chest
like the shoreline
of a deep new sea
your hands are webbed
inviting you
to trust yourself
in water stranger
and wilder
than you’ve ever known
your heart has a kick
your eyes have
a different bite
you have emerged
from some dark wonder
you can’t explain
you are not the same
THE SEA HARE
Don’t bargain
I tell myself
as I scoop up the stranded sea hare
gasping on the hot dry rock.
Can it hurt me?
I know nothing about sea hares.
Do they too make desperate deals
with their deathless invertebrate gods?
Eerie to carry
like an extraterrestrial
yellow-green marooned jelly snail
heavy in my towel.
Can it hurt me?
Just bless and release it
and fight the urge to count
your sticky Karma beads.
Don’t bargain.
Just grab the swishing tail
of your nerve’s latest adventure
and go with the inevitable tide.
You know nothing
about sea hares
but you know the prayer
of your own shivering gut.
And it’s bargaining bargaining
for the sea hare for the sea hare
and the future of both
our unknowable lives.
ON NORFOLK ISLAND WITH BRUCE
This time last year I was on chemo
And bald in a week
Then another shock came out of the blue
To tell me you’d died in your sleep.
Too sick and groggy to go
Stunned to your funeral
Instead I raked the sky for your soul’s bird
From the walls of my fumarole.
Now I’m here and healthy
Among the huge Norfolk pines
That wander like friendly free-range cattle
Through so many of your Manly lines.
I’m carrying your last book
Everywhere like a love affaire
A potent amulet against all my ghosts
That fret my gut with dead cold air.
Suddenly a local kingfisher flashes
Like a blue lightning crack
Through the salt-scoured stones of this cemetery –
I know it’s you, Bruce, electrically back.
And I stand with my new hair
On unearthly fire
Under the tail of your azure comet
Watching you burnish this transient sky.
SPEARS
For F.H.P.
I know what I want
as I walk
through this valley
of Unknowing
I want my spears
my lost my burnt
spears
these bright birds know
these strange trees
must hear me
I want my spears
I cannot conquer
the past –
the bonfire. the sealed shed.
Too late to strangle
dead bigots.
But
never again
if my spears return
will a filthy fire touch them
never again
will their sanctuary
be ransacked.
Yes I am a man
without cover
but now ready
with my old
young man’s
glory
I will have my life
ceremonial
sacred
I want my spears.
NIGHT RAIN
You have never slept
under night rain
spiritually tip-tapping
on a monastery roof.
Chinese Sung poets
wisely
would save
this kind of saturating
tranquillity
for withdrawn old age.
Night rain
for the unwithered
isn’t always
a muffling lullaby.
Remember
that night the black sky
came roaring for you.
Ravaged awake
you lay quivering
under rain
like a bestial meteor shower
bloodying the roof.
It was astral
shock.
Your heart nearly
stopped.
Some night rain isn’t meant
for enlightening
pensioners.
FOGGY WINDOWS
You can’t preserve love
behind foggy windows
believe me
when your back is finally
turned
she steps out
shakes herself down
does her lipstick
and walks away
perhaps with an insouciant
swing to the hips
that would hurt
if you insisted
on looking back
if you regretted
not shackling her
but you don’t want to spend
the rest of your life
blubbering in torn pieces
like Orpheus
or tasting a toxic dollop
of Lot’s wife
on congealing cold eggs
so you don’t fight it
you don’t fight
love’s right
to wind down
your precious
foggy windows.
RIMBAUD
For Michael Brennan
O saisons, o châteaux!
why did I stop
reading Rimbaud?
At twenty I was
convinced
I could read
to the rippling
roof
of seerdom
and jump.
There were so many things
I didn’t yet know
about life, about Rimbaud.
I didn’t know
you can grow
a grey immunity
to the most ardently
poisonous magic.
And that an older
even reliably dissolute
seducer
like Verlaine
so easily becomes
more foolish leech
than infernal lover.
Instead I ate caramel
ice cream
with those
as bullet-proofed
safe
as I was.
There are some things
reading poetry
can’t deliver
or fix.
O saisons, o châteaux!
what illuminating
what absolutely necessary
Season in Hell
did I miss?
THE HORSEHEAD NEBULA
I was in Barcelona
late one Spring
when an insistent twilight
smoked me out
of my monastic hotel room
into the street.
I found myself
snared by the feral smell
of some amazing strange music
pulsing like a bull-ring
with singing and stamping.
My shy feet
were their usual lead
but I felt each rap
from the dancing crowd
reverberate in my breast
as if my own heart
were breaking into sparks
on a white-hot anvil.
There was only one dancer
who truly mesmerised me –
an aristocratically pale
young girl
caught in the rip of the music
as she dragged one foot behind her
in a misshapen boot.
I stayed
until dark
when the music stopped
and the dancers
slipped away.
I live my life
to live these moments
like living in waiting
for the smell
the uncanny smell
of the star-scorched flank
of the horsehead nebula
as she rises
in a stampede of hot music
from my boot-dragging dark.
WATERVIEW STREET
In the street
of my childhood
nothing is reliable.
My parents’ friends are dead.
Their children gone.
Familiar houses
are dissolving.
I’d welcome the macabre
solid comfort
of cemeteries and weeds
but instead
there is a tropical
rotting splendour
that disturbs and distracts
like an invisible cockatoo
shrieking from a tree.
Time is melting
everything I remember
into a soft silt
shifting under the mud-mangrove
smell of the bay.
While I wait
for the eternally salty water
to unanchor all my memories
and sweep my old self away.
NEANDERTHALS
inside of us
where a last remnant
of Neanderthals
still lives
this is not an elegy
nor has deluded nostalgia
won another day
they were always repulsive
to us
and we were poison
to them
but we never wanted them
utterly gone
not before they told us
who they were
and why they knew
the dead must be blessed
we disturbed them
with their hands red
not from a bloody run-in
with a giant bear or each other
we disturbed them
with their hands ochre-red
preparing their dead
bigger and shiny-skinned
we yowled, threw smart stones
and gnawed their marrow-rich
inferior bones
we did dreadful things
we learnt nothing from them.
* * *
What was I trying to learn
whose bones was I gnawing
as I sat last week
on the bottom steps
of my old friend’s
empty rotting mourning
house
crumbling down into the water
of my childhood’s ancient mangroves?
I rocked on the salty tide
of the oyster-rimmed bay
alive and ageing and sad.
And I waited
for one of the Old Hairies
to brave the long hard climb
out
and teach me how
to rest my dead
and keep burning.
VAMPIRE
Each new ghost in my life
living and dead
smells of mulch
a compost growing
rich and strange
sometimes attracting
a lyrebird
that rifles through it
singing like a chainsaw
through its punctured neck
THE WATTLE BIRD
Until this morning
I’ve been woken up
by a red wattle bird
flinging himself
at the glass
of my half-open window
calling throatily
with raucous cheek
as he prances the wood
of my balcony rail
I’m old enough
to be flattered
and take no courting attention
for granted
this grey morning
I fumble awake
groggily trailing
cobwebs of a dream
about my long dead
still adored Siamese
clutching her to my frantic
dream self
as if she were, miracle,
still alive
this dry morning
of a slippery rainless winter
I sip my strong coffee
and listlessly watch
the window
longing for the joyous noise
of my new, if just
rattling through,
boyfriend.
EARLY MORNING BALLOONS OVER MELBOURNE
Unearthly in the chill blue
they hang silent, coldly lovely
until there’s that lurching
belch of gas fire
and suddenly
they’re everything I’m afraid of –
heights, ice, other people in rocking space,
my own helpless helpless
fragility.
Why, when I dream of danger,
can I never just reach out
and grab
the rising feet
of a phoenix?
THE FOREIGN FOREST
You burn your bridges
going into a foreign forest
like a gleaming cruel
new school
where you don’t know
the bluffing bullies
from the silent cougars.
You learn from experience
going into a foreign forest
where cold pine needles