A smouldering grid on a cypress stand
The local cakeshops were not ethnic enough for us
A smouldering grid on a cypress stand
I suppose my mother’s gesticulations from the women’s gallery
Well, why leave it there? I say, let’s go the whole hog
Now with all seasons damaged under our savage dominion
She has signed the forms in her diffident hand
In the morning, I went out with the officials.
Here's how I first saw it.
A sort of colonisation took place here
Unfazed by the coast road, we welcomed the challenge.
A B-grade movie drumbeat of doors and panes,
Dropping jokes like shelled nuts along a path
A busload of adolescents and bureaucrats trade frisbees
Canberrans congregate in all seasons but especially this one
The abbot’s insistent: so much to do before
The weatherboards built years earlier across the street were ex-Army:
From the yard’s galvanised subconscious, I watch
Because it was wet and neither of us felt like working
Not that hard to remember, or even to place
The paddocks present blind flanks to the sun
Only a currawong dialing the neighbourhood
If from the emptiness of space we’re surprised to hear
Your grandfather steps lightly over the cold kitchen floor
It begins with an aleph, the diminutive
There should be a name for the special case
I had forgotten rain’s mechanism: how it doesn’t fall
The car’s dorsal wave carves off
The picture shows a man leaping from a second-floor window.
As if to evoke the artifice of location
of its bearing on the land
But no-one these days goes in much for constructing religions:
Can we not take all these prizes as given?
As always, time’s sieve selects a myth from the facts
The line between white sky and white sea is smeared
How well I know that photograph from childhood’s mantelpiece
As if you had never known this light: saints, tunics
‘Forgive me, sister, if my handwriting seems
Cloudshadow snags tussocks and scree
Our sun-cankered, frost-lacerated old bomb
Mothers never fare well in these stories:
Look at these hands: how scarred they are, how ugly.
I know that there will be a night when we
She comes to his office in such despair at the end
Some took with them amulets, propped parasols, jade slaves,
Did it (as she reported in that flap of a note
After the clamour of choosing a captain
Bowler-hatted, unsmiling, moustachioed,
How you dazzled us, old chum, with the colour of that tree!
So there we were, jammed together/
on the back seat,
As if all the world’s ravelled, bright course
At first you hardly recognise them for what they are
In the warm dusk, pink and purple arcs
A filament lights a dark bulb of shops
Heat arrives from over the Brindabellas
​
Tonight, America, the stars above you have been blotted out
Just there on the rise, before the road descends
is because they yearn to go back
​
They are the harbingers of hard times for a business…
To be quiet and not crush
That you were conceived before the Afterwards of uncommon times
A roof away
Oh, but it’s a race all right, trust me, kid, that
Vessels shaped by the light they hold