Poetry
… although my eyes were open
In ’68 I sported a Panic Button on my blazer –
pushed, it read ‘Things will get worse before
they get worse.’ After the assassinations, I threw
it away. On edge, we were now living on the edge.
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Some day maybe I’ll catch them.
Across the quivering lake they float,
a trio of indistinct shapes,
but they are swans,
that much I know.
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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
The tough and rumble of the schoolyard
is always welcome relief from a room
papered with whispers, where every night
he must taste the salted honey of his pain
or else listen to the chorus of lies
that they hiss at one another in the dark.
Max remembers the first time they made love
when she arrived travel-dusty & sweaty
after complications
getting from Basrah to Baghdad. Much afterwards
while they were lying together very close
she’d told him of a pet she’d had, when small:
had given it its scientific name – Macropanesthia rhinoceros.
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:
I. Claim
Wild birds rise before us, making the noise of a multitude clapping hands.
The men fire, fire again and still they rise, they rise clear out of range and
where they were they leave such wakes of light, they are tearing the blue-black
shadows out of the river; their wing tumult is shadows escaping air. Act
flung back to motives, they arc away from us and scatter till I am fierce
for what I cannot remember and still they rise, the vault is dark with their applause.