Archive
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.
The Felton Illuminated Manuscripts in the National Gallery of Victoria by Margaret M. Manion
The Big Picture: Diary of a nation edited by Max Prisk, Tony Stephens, and Michael Bowers
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: