States of Poetry Poems
some trees
spotted gum
tall classy lady
cradling a listing turpentine
(shaggy old top-heavy
barrel-chested nuisance)
she props him
takes the strain
holds her own line almost true
that’s what you get
when you get
married in a windstorm
but the wind always changes
strands you in strange attitudes
let him slid ...
The colour of eyes
For Banduk Marika, Aboriginal artist
1. After your story of the funeral, August 1991
Black, Banduk, is the colour of eyes
like night shrunk
when grandma tidies after grief.
Perhaps she could not spill
to stain the room.
Black, Banduk,
this quaver fisted
in her throat –
it has no moon,
it ache ...
After the Grand Canyon
18 October 2014
It’s an accident
of composition: sun, sky, bird.
White orb on storm grey
punctuated by a raven –
but which composes which,
and which is accidental?
Is it the sun
a hole
sucking in a bird,
or Icarus about
to singe the sun?
Against the grey
both soft and ...
Flower
(Montignac)
She sees the flowers are red flags
like pennants hauled up, heralding danger,
hailing the world and its lovers
with admonitions:
watch out, watch out.
On long stalks they wobble
and wave, handkerchiefs flaring
long after the ship has left port,
their scarlet hue a constancy, ...
Voyaging
I Marie Antoinette, imprisoned in Paris in 1791,
to Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin,
departing from Brest on d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition
Your breasts, small ...
The insistence of now
An almost-noir chill day in the cemetery.
A service just finishing, no one I knew.
I walk the line - observer/interloper,
drawn to incongruities, ambiguities.
The way graveside life teems - regardless,
causal. A priest walks by swinging
his thurible, black robes, black puffer jacket.
A child forages tidbi ...
Woman in Bath
after Brett Whiteley’s Woman in Bath (1964)
There was fog on the windows,
inside and out.
She wound her hair into a bun
and eased into the shallow water.
I stood in the doorway, squinting.
&n ...
Green Mountain (Fiji)
after Brett Whiteley’s The Green Mountain (Fiji) (1969)
The skyward pitch of the hill in its green glory
rising heavy and indolent as the knee of a woman
sunbathing in a sarong,
and the thigh that leads from this knee,
an emerald downswelling syncline,
end where the womb’s elasti ...
Attack
And it is the act, the will
channeled through fibre to impact;
this is history as king hit.
Imagine your own bedroom as nullius,
adding extra dizziness to any fall.
If pain, as is said, cannot be remembered,
only the having been hurt,
then where does the pain belong
that comes out of the blue ocean
into a v ...
Grammar Lesson
There should be a name for the special case
in which we say ‘the crowd marvelled’,
if the roar that rose
over the back of the stadium walls
over the rain-shingled streets
conveys the sense that what mattered
on the pitch, or the court, happened
in the eyes that watched it;
that indicates a place has changed
fo ...