Poems
The kitchen vessels that sustained
Your printed books, my poems, our life,
Are fallen away. The words remain –
Not all – but those of style and worth.
Imagine the moment of hesitation:
the catch in his voice,
knowing
he could not turn back: after years
up and down the river, a request
... (read more)What works you did will be yourself when you
Have left the present, just as everything
The past passed to the present must become
A terrible unstoppable one blend
Of being there (the world) and not to be
(The Self). Grow old along with me, the best
Is bet to be – the worst (of course) lack(s) all
Conviction, as the poet mistranscribed,
Storming a grave to satisfy his pride.
They love me, all my words, despite how often
I made fools of them, betrayed them, begged
Forgiveness of them. They are like the million grubs
Which swarm around their Queen. I file them in
Wide boxes where they wait their Master’s Voice,
Accusing and defending. A letter plans
To burst in sullen flame, its heat conserved
By what was written once – but chiefly silence
Triumphs under missing banners – death
Will be the one unmentionable
Impossibility. What happened lives
Parenthetically and privately.
It’s before I got the wandering eye.
I daydream I’ve already left:
without her each morning I’d be able to wake,
stretch in bed-warmth, blink used to light, not lie
feigning sleep in case she cradles my back,
her lap flexing for my elbow to lift
to take her arm onto my chest. I keep still
until she shadow-dresses upon the wall.
(Italian, c.17th; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
Life breathes in this painting like a child
pretending not to be awake,
or a skink metamorphosed to a stone
but for the flutter in its flank.
You have to lean and listen for the heart
behind the shining paint,
the lips half-open, and the glittering eye.
Velvet of the night. A ba ...
I stare from my study window into trees.
Considering all things, I watch the first snow spill
White seeds across the rubble where the barn
Towered over us with its cracked spire
For almost half a century until
Some feckless pot-head changed
The whole thing into fire.
canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line
Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead
wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata
where the bitumen gives way to gravel
taking you deeper into shadows, ditches
tinder undergrowth of a bush block
It wounds, this shift of scale.
As I stand on the balls of my feet
back on my heels only once
to keep even for the painting
and myself clear from excess
of feeling: balanced to look
and half hearing her sleepily say:
