or the eaves of crayfishers’ huts with their stripped windows.
Centuries these birds have nested where, for a few moons,
history broke open this piece of rock, oceans away from
anywhere. Cement floors hold down some bones.
The Predicant’s Beach is a pile of clattering shells, cuttlefish,
coral covering what the sea brings in, with a view of Morning
Reef’s thin spray. Out on a scarf of land
on this three-cornered hat of an island, the black-crested terns
survey with loud beaks the remains of something dug into the
sand, four-walled, flat-stoned.
There’s nothing inside what we call Cornelius’ prison
but among this sky full of birds is one voice. Unfinished
business. Tonight a man
who prefers not to look inward will unroll
his swag, sleep without fear on Batavia’s Graveyard.
Shape-Shifter
Finding his work glove outside their bedroom window
she notes how like a bear’s paw it is.
Beside the cave shed where he is unreachable
through the noise of the grinder, she asks her shadow,
‘What does he do in there?’ He emerges,
removes head rag, ear muffs, goggles, dust mask
and becomes again her husband, slightly blackened.
Who is he, this beast once tamed
who shares certain hours with her
but whose work territory is mysterious?
She watches his face, clear with sleep, and wonders.
Surely he has left part of himself outside.
Nicholas Hasluck (b.1942)
Bikini Atoll
i
Marksman with shaded eyes
and heavy field glasses slung
from each horizon
turning his back on the blast
at the final moment — the flash,
the angry bubble rising
in the mind’s eye
the Gorgon writhing
in the overgrowth of cloud —
headless.
ii
insulated cameras
and listening devices
attentive to the ruined target
these photographs (enlargements)
show battleships standing on end;
weightless lances raised
uplifted by the brutal magnet
on tape and microfilm,
twisted shapes and things obsolete —
animals, experimental flesh, brought
to these crossroads …
underwater, stricken fish moving
sluggishly through wreckage
‘The more elemental
the form of life, the less
it was affected.’
iii
Time pecks at the empty crab-shell.
The shell bursts, splinters.
In the sand, the sun …
regeneration. The first feather.
And undergrowth to the water’s edge.
Islanders walk through driftwood
out of exile. Vines embrace
the goat pens, devastated bunkers.
mis-shapen vehicles.
Palm fronds sway in the wind.
The reefs glitter again
at Bikini.
Yilgarn
Bought petrol at a roadhouse.
The only bowser in the street.
A school-bus standing under
the eucalypts.
The owner wanted out.
He said so and the way he
said it — speaking awkwardly
of a down payment —
told me it was true.
The best way back?
By Peter Dawkins’ tractor.
That’s the best turning.
Flickerings of roadside scrub.
Splinters of dead timber.
Fence-posts stumbling into salt flats.
A tractor, an iron shell, lop-sided,
one axle deep in the mire.
Peter Dawkins’ tractor —
left to rust.
He went to the wall.
After his wife cleared out.
Though what went wrong between them
is anybody’s guess.
No other landmarks.
And not much to see.
Not on this road.
A rabbit sometimes …
a windmill.
Brian Dibble (b.1943)
A Poet Remembers the Farm
For William Hart-Smith (1911−1990)
‘Feel — the earth
is warm where cattle slept.’
A mist hangs there;
he, at the centre,
remembers, ‘Mother once,
circled by cows, and nude,
but for her mandolin.
‘She played, and cows then turned
to face her, petal-like,
some singing insect at the centre.
‘Feel,’ he says, ‘the earth is warm
where they have lain.
‘When they rose,
the mist would form a cloud.’
Before the war,
with mother there,
and insects, flowers, cows,
he walks, remembering.
Insects sing, cattle low,
mist rises from the ground.
Andrew Burke (b.1944)
The Present Depression
You’re leaving your run
a bit late, he said,
looking at my birthdate
on the form. These
formulated questions
presume so much
that life is neat,
that events come in
tidy packages like
numbers on a clock
the way a bank statement
tells you everything
and nothing about
your money, how
you spent your life
working for enough
to eat and sleep
out of the rain,
how you came to
this, a young man
secure at his desk
handing you more forms,
telling you about
how late it is.
The Old Tambourine
Job interview over, I change
into old jeans, a T-shirt that says
‘Happy Dad’s Day’ in my daughter’s
young hand, and pull on gloves I have
borrowed from my eldest son. A bin
from Pete’s Gold Bins waits out the front
of Number 3, two cubic metres to hold
ten years’ detritus at this address. We
have told the children, and now
we’re trying to accept the fact ourselves.
I walk to our back corner. Between shed
and fence lies a fetid mess of limbs,
broken cement slabs, old pots and … I
start at the top. An hour and I’m
dripping. I have excavated through
tree limbs and broken garden pots to
pockets of worm-holed business ledgers,
shattered hand mirrors, and bright
plastic toys from childhoods now closed.
My hand frees an old tambourine,
skin gone, cymbals rusted and wood stained with the sap of severed limbs. I slap it against my elbow, and it crumbles. Sweat stings my neck where I shaved this morning as I throw the pieces into the bin. A half-burnt train. Red lego. A stuffed skyblue unicorn, misshapen now like a dead mouse. Tonight I’ll retire early, tired, avoiding talk. We grow back our skins, every seven years we re-upholster. Pete’s Gold Bin is overflowing, so I step in in my old gardening boots to stomp, to jump up and down, to compress the rubbish into its fit space.
Caroline Caddy (b.1944)
Lake Grace
I hear myself explaining
how some are salt and some are fresh
but all are shallow
and it sounds as if I’m excusing them.
I feel it foremost in your mind
as it was in mine when I first saw them
wind edged with foam and salt
stilled each evening
spreading their margins a little
to accommodate whole sunsets.
Just now under cloud they recede
thin strips of white and silver
to the horizon.
And then there’s the town
the roadhouse with its take or leave it
fly-specked windows
a few old shops newly painted
one skateboard in the distance of the long main street
but of course
as the girl at the counter rolling her eyes tells us
everybody’s at the footy but her!
and I have to take you there
where the ladies at the gate let us in ‘gratis’
though it feels more like being given
a cup of tea.
We park with the rest of the town facing the wide oval
and there are the teams
the skinny the muscly the hairy the lumpy
ranging over the ground
scuffling at the limits of rules
then using those same rules to work back through each other
touching base
and as the clouds part goalposts cars trees
everything stands out
with an even greater clarity young and urgent.
driving out past the lakes
close and blue now
surrounding us including us
for a few kilometres
in their deep and solid union with the sky.
Pelican
Aloof long nosed conjurer
impeccably out of style watch him
he will show you the neat trick
of eating.
Dip and glide another fish pocketed
in the deep box of his bill.
He lifts extendable wings
They are empty.
He points with a cold eye
summons his mate. They preen
practise sawing each other
in half.
Wheatbelt
Trees slipstreamed twist
once twice into the ground.
It’s like flying. Black suction out there
and the moon gauge etched through on its lower rim.
But the needle’s dropped out!
So this is the speed of light.
Hours away we begin our descent toward that town
bunching stretching in one dimension
like flat astrologies
and dawn —
‘so the moon-man and the star-girl
pressed a button
and the collapsible house of the sun sprang up …’
glide path
through Lorentz transformations —
grey gros-grain ribbon
emu feathers
mallee scrub.
Touchdown in the country of the fifth element —
earth air fire water salt
A woman steps out
Bends to the window
g’day …
She hands us a map
but no matter how we fold it where we want to be is
on the other side —
so much space between the lines.
Did the old surveyors tethered to horse and camel
Know they were making these flight plans?
sligshot from an unploughed crease
to a patch of scrub no higher than a man’s arm
raised above his head —
it is a man!
And what he’s waving pay-day at the gangers’
givus a lift?
On the move we learn oaths of naturalisation —
hands held apart in the static clap
of track alignment
measure of camaraderie and keep the Croats
from the throats of the Serbs.
Signalman! Dialect of pure action.
We must have tripped a set of points —
a town pops up
where the mechanism of sight seems to be
a broken windscreen
that cockpit feel
main street like a run-way
control tower pub with its white bionic ear.
We taxi to the meeting place of roses and gum trees —
shade of crossed arms crossed legs
They disconcert by liberties their limbs take
on dry earth
we only allow ourselves by water.
Sinews of movement tied to bone make them
distance eaters
with nowhere to go —
rights wound down to privilege
and that stele over there totting up wars
it moves!
so slowly we can’t follow.
A micro-shift of universe
and someone’s hand brailles —
‘and after he saved the village
he put this stone here …’
At the hangar
yellow bellies of wheat wagons
shine in long emissions from the mother lode —
engine they are moved by.
She pulls the horizon up over her face
but keeps her finger on the pulse —
one shunt and they roll all the way to the sea
Esperance Geraldton Port Beach
where green glass bars lift the swimmers
by their chins.
One inland surfer waits by his board.
It’s a Holden ute white
it’s got to be white
that special additive that lets him ‘appear’
win the maiden find the grail without a word.
And for a moment he does
one hand on the swell of the hood
the other pistol-gripped at his thigh.
In the dark behind him or is it ahead
someone shoulders a door —
Then quiet almost to the point of believing
still cores exist
but for softly vast from between parked cars —
‘please please we’ve got to talk’ …
Vega the weaver girl and Altair the herd boy
found their way across the heavenly River
last month.
But sleep sleep
till the sun pulls white sheets
and airbrakes add hectapascals to the morning’s
blue expansion
lifting walls trampled rugs of grass
a man at the co-op with a heavy drum angled to him
steering
out past the depot
where mighty grasshoppers with blades in their guts
push air.
Past dip-stick lakes on-line one lane
gathering speed
the bitumen thinning thinning
till it has to distort to let us through
welling out at the last minute
and we’re there again —
no word no incantation necesssary
not even wish —
just pull the sprung pin hardback
watch the steel ball
and let go …
the land of no geography
tables out from our hips.
Michael Youlin Birch (b.1944 d.1968)
2516349, Jones, Private W.
The last day,
Last day of leave in the foetid city,
Last day to live.
Last day to watch the rain
Darkling the asphalt,
And walk alone in the
Clear, bright neon cave of night.
Tomorrow I go back to war;
And tomorrow
I will die. It is there
In the smell of the city,
Its wild and painted face.
The pulsing city knows.
Tonight the city’s empty soul is mine.
The rain in my eyes
Has the warmth of blood.
Unheeded, reality slaps my face.
Tonight I will drink
To oblivion,
Forget, in memories
My twenty tiny years.
I will wake in a tangled bed,
With a brown face
Damp on my chest, and bruises
Teeth-sharp,
Scattered like dark roses
At a funeral.
Vietnam, 1968.
Hal Colebatch (b.1945)
Autumn Morning
The jetty is deserted in the sun. Warm light
streams to the river bed, catching
the lines of feeding fish, bright
on the warm sand, seen clearly through
unruffled water, their movements matching
the slow currents, threading the new
growth over tyres, cables, cans, all shown
lying still in growing weed, changing fast
into the stuff of the river. Bars of gold sun
fall on them, holding the shrimps, the mussel shells,
the lives all overlooked. Swallows dart past
to their nests under the jetty. The morning smells
of sea air, and new-mown grass, as ripples run
on this calm day. Even those cans and tyres
are full of life, each harbours its own crew
of living things. Ripples like cool fires
wander the sunlit surface, lines blown
by some unfelt wind. At the shore a few
people are wading. A few dogs and children run
on nearby grass. Over its little commonwealth of lives
of the hardly interesting, the marginal, the small,
the hardly beautiful, itself part of them all,
and happily ignored, where so much thrives,
the jetty stands deserted in the sun.
The Romantic Poet Goes On a Little Journey
I have turned back to Cactus Land.
No knights, no elves or silken thighs,
or starlight. This is dun sand,
dried water-courses. One bird flies
distantly alone. Poison lies in wells
of stone about the salt-pans. No soft lips
or secrets, no live flesh that swells,
no cavities of love, no sunset ships.
These are the dry wrinkles of the brain,
deserts of codings and files.
Uphill, sandy uphill. My track persists
on paper. Now defences against pain
are paper and dust. I must for miles
climb into Cactus Land, above the mists.