Poems

Seen from that famous ray of light
Discharging from the town hall tower
On the last stroke of noon,
The hands would stand forever at that hour
As though the holocaust of blinding white
That set it all in train,
When present, past and future were triune,
Were come again,
The endless now on which the blessed take flight.

I won’t this time. Silent at last and shunted
Into its siding in the Victorian Arts Centre
The container train started its journey in Yugoslavia
Two years before it arrived in Gippsland
Among trees that echo Albert Namatjira.

sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’,
from Ploughshares, Winter 2006–07

Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud
with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps,

was all it said

just a tiny message

to let me know

that all the way over there

where she was

I was given to this body as haphazardly
As the monster of Frankenstein.

Lightning is a man’s metaphor,
But like fire it provides

A force alien to question.
Perhaps I am only this, this flesh,

The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, and a lyrebird was opening the day,
volunteering to be a bell. We were watching an egret

1 preface
I could, if you prefer, create a list
like a birdwatcher, concealed
in a reedy hide, with binoculars,
field guide and record book, a mnemonic
of migration lines, our lines of sight,
a cladogram of our evolving past.

They change colour

before your eyes,

i.m. Bettina Gorton

i.

When I drive through freeway towns I look for you
in the sealed front doors of houses, turned away.

I look for you on the couch-grass lawns of February suburbs
between the privet hedge and standard roses with your back to the street.

When I come home from winter holidays I can tell you have been there
drinking window after window of light till it is emptied and grey.

I think once I saw you walking the curve of a disused rail line
where the track shrugged off its sleepers and climbed into the heat.