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from 'Life, Death & some Words about them', Makar Press, 1978 (highly commended in the Anne Elder Poetry Award, 1979).
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Poems against responsibility .1.What are these quiet voices, telling jealous lies? because the sun spoke to me then; child with engulfing eyes. Now I don't even know my own face. And so we speak of tears, right and wrong, responsibility. Questions I have not made. But I do talk of birds: hawk hovering in the sun, seagull settling into the wind. I put down the printed word and turn to my own face; its mystery. .2. I draw out the soft coils webbing my skull. Cerebral cortex. Knowledge. Exquisite eyeballs, turning on delicate muscles. Concrete, earth, flower. Turning... I twist the uncrushed blossom with blunt, awkward fingers, in an eccentric axis. Revolve the Shasta Daisy: stamen or pistil - the quick bee knows. Unseen light flicking off many-faceted eyes, flooding its brain. .3. Placenta, webbed with veins, blood red and vulnerable. The projector show an image - not soft, yielding to the touch. Only the sharp etched foetus, coiled to safety. Not knowing the womb, I evade answers. Speak instead of flowers; stamen and pistil, soft curled and shaking in the wind. |
At Wentworth Falls
Lookout for Paul McGillick Nobody now offers answers, only questions. But urgent sonorities of our blood continue; cathedrals build on its rhythmic pulse. Above Megalong Valley, a tenacious hawk spires slowly, rising on the translucent valley mist above vision-clubbed trees. Small, furtive scuttlings by the creek: this search for safety. Ogled. Coup d'oeil . If we stand here, vantaged, and imagine floating softly down to that svelte cope, it is because we still make some replies; knowing mouth, bowel, eye, and flexed fingers. Celebrating another Spring I scrape flaking paint from the boat; stripped to the waist, pallid skin soaking in the sun. The cat, too, luxuriates on the hot cement. It's been a hard winter. Birds I cannot name dive and skirl in the still air. I tell myself that this year I will name birds, flowers, trees - know their different textures with new eyes - squeeze the real world for it humble truths; a chastened man. Eschewing artifice, I remove dead paint, sometimes gouging the cedar planks and releasing subtle odours to my rank, honest sweat. . |
| Coming Home
The roads cleave straight lines beyond the horizon; white, thin lines against pervading brown and dull greens of the land: seen from twenty thousand feet, the Simpson Desert. I sip whisky, gazing through double-glazed windows: DC10, pressurised cabin, homogeonised air, the smiling hostesses Oh! sweet silver arrow through the air! cleaving rarefied atmosphere; that outside killing cold Comforting breast, rampant phallus, known contingencies foreseen, jet stream surging precisely as calculated Burke & Wills, this landscape is something to be encompassed with speed, dexterity, sans suffering, to be overcome deep valleys and rearing ridges stacking beyond the distance become an aesthetic experience, now, circa 1976 twenty thousand feet high, above it, at 560 mph. Clean and pure this metal encompassed flight! Beyond/to reality, now, today I engorge the tiny townships, boxed on flat plains, their precision our precision, grids laid out - the unyielding ground flight paths dissecting heat, cold, wet - with indifference until the city rears concrete, steel and glass known and loved, this constant decay and renewal. Fearlessness Encompassing pain to the precisely experienced, what can be recalled. Burke & Wills your pain I do not know flying and comfort and the cities Now There'll always be Thick clouds web the low hills, drooping to engulf fallow fields. The stone walls are hand-laid. The farmer steps from the tractor wiping grimy hands on bleached overalls. And his generation did not raise those walls against dingoes, or rabbits imported to give a tangible touch of England. Hawthorn hedges define the landscape, and willows do their standard weeping over the slow creek. The horizon lours its strange blue eucalypt haze. I accept begged water for the radiator, and turn the car towards the known city. |
from In Imitation of Catallus .1. Okay, Gaius Valerius Catullus, we won't talk about the divinity of the gods, or our own reflected kind of something-like-glory. Look, this ruby-red wine suffuses my brain, distends my aging veins with its soft, impetuous murmurs. Lesbia. Ah, yes, Lesbia discerns my somnolent state and decides to drive home. I slump on the back seat, knowing an erection of any kind is questionable beyond question. No swan for any Leda: my squat neck, you understand, and the fact that I am not a god. Her murmuring lips invoke the impossible. Transubstantiation for Paul McGillick Wincing, I shoulder the heavy waterfall. Icy slivers of water flay our skin. I watch your shudders of pure pleasure. 'That the Host was a symbol,' you say, 'both Zwingli and Luther conceded.' Only the becoming of the body and blood of Christ divided them, and us. Silently, we watch the water bugs imprint their feet on the still pool. Walking on water, they flee our gaze. 'The Transmutation is an act of Faith.' I fondle delicate maidenhair ferns, my face pressed into the rich decay of eucalypt leaves. Your mouth exudes soft mist and words, which flow over the stream, the indifferent insects. |
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In the epistolary
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An Australia Day Holiday Discourse for Tom Kelly These are the times when we forget how to speak. In the day-to-day minutiae of merely living - overwhelmed by the needs of career, children - the discourse is lost.... We drive the south coast from Stanwell Park to Wombarra, where the solid fog of Sydney and Wollongong civilisation wreath those towering, intransigent bluffs piercing to the ocean's clarity. Overpowered in those few, dying summer days by the all-pervasive smell of eucalypts - salt water and sun saturating our skin - we indulge our nights in good food, fine wine, and subtle argument. Returning home now, car radio sotto voce on contemporary rock-n-roll, is time to reckon the weekend's talk of our Society and the Law, and of Lionel Murphy, dead. Our hair grows thinner, and our speech more dense; thick with the knowledge of implications, innuendo: harder still to make it simple, incisive; cut through the cant. Experiencing the particular, we eschew ideologies, grow dumb on a welter of words; trying to avoid comfortable cliches, trying to discover truth behind our elders' elusive answers. |
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from The Perth Poems
Section: Indian Ocean always the dominant ocean the breath and sound of it the elemental fear of it. Learn that ocean waves have shape: crest and a shoulder to plane with chest or board to find pleasure in slightly mastering this surging power for no purpose but pure pleasure. Waves come in sets, with intervening calms, to a peculiar rhythm that depends on tide, shifting sandbanks, prevailing winds; yet discreetly repetitive: a chant, a mantra. Offshore winds shape today's swells and the last wave of this set of three is the largest, looming high above you, kneeling on the surfboard. Go! Because your position is right: the wave cresting to a perfect shoulder. Stand and drop, turn back to engage, turn again and surge. "What a blast!" sixteen years old and learning to attempt to master rhythms in nature is to make a start. Homilies 1/ I tell my son: with blues guitar, the notes not played are as important as those that are. 2/ Two toothbrushes together in an old jam jar is the initial indication of real intimacy. |
Gothic
Cathedrals
for Tony McGillick (on his 50th Birthday) .1. The images we make with our hands and minds To glorify god, they made masses of solid stone float. Those unknown men who solved the mechanics of how stone fits to stone, but not for that purpose. Famines and plagues and terrible wars have come and gone, yet still we walk the cathedrals of eight hundred years ago and can caress their hand-hewn stones; see still those soaring and over-vaulting arches, watch the rising sun throw the stain of the blood of Christ from artful glass on the altar, on the supplicants. The colours fall on their faces, hands, clothes. The colours contact and modulate hue to texture, intensity of light: bright shaft, shadow and penumbra. The choir's chant echoes off stone walls; rising, falling, changing pitch and key. And every passing inflection reflects on all that has gone before. Making with our hands and minds things of temporal beauty we pay obeisance to god or reason, and attempt to transcend what we can readily know. .2. The grace of form in a Gothic Arch Eery to see cold fire flare high above the earth. Acres of glass explode in molten incandescence as the city's priapic towers take the broad glare of the late Spring setting sun, spearing gold and orange towards the city and falling full on Blackwattle Bay's supple surface. Boxed, the buildings' sheer images slowly undulate in the khaki waters' flowing, oily facets. I touch here at a single life's constants: a generation spent observing the constantly changing feel and physiognomy of the Bay. And so what strikes today is a summation, rather than a revelation. It's time to free the line! Express again the flow of the individual hand, where feeling has rough edges, indications of imperfection. Breathless is the beauty conjured by the mind's eye; surpassing the imposed patterns of the ruler's precise edge. |