or their centres gone like a ring of keys
where they stalled on the slopes and were covered in.
The blown end of a Lee Enfield
makes the weapon seem a crossbow.
There the isolated spine is curved as a bow
the loose ribs are warped arrows
and the earth has kept them close
in its grip and quiver, only sometimes
losing an arrow in slow and gentle course
out into the daylight.
You begin to mend them. Firstly
you give them back their bodies.
You pick the rosette from a man’s chest
pluck each petal of blood and let it drop into obscurity
(there is no copy of it back at home).
His was the famous rush towards the machine-gun pits
but his medals were put too deep, and by the wrong side.
The stem cannot be seen, nor the bullet that gave seed
passing through sternum, heart, lodging in the vertebrae.
And the uprush of bloom into the khaki.
Bruises, those coloured moulds, lessen and are gone.
Ignore the condition of his arteries, whether the joints
gave trouble — they were too young. Your miracles
are for the body and now its dreams,
for these have lapped the gaunt face
like the midnight waves of evacuation.
But there’s something arcane about the clay
where fierce Turkish sunlight baked it around his body.
The particles became magnetic, but the magnet’s
pulling wrongly: you’ve stripped his oppressors
from him but he sprawls down facing East:
the light jostling his body, its energetic tearing
calling him to fight — this is where he is intense
this harsher light must be Australia.
He sits up, slowly, exactly as machinery into place,
like a fold-out cardboard shape with savage detail,
the machine-gun straightening up, locking its steel legs.
The sudden racket as shots begin, chronic and nervous …
He will not return as one who went to die well,
coming home like a kind of migrant
strange and unaccustomed, to be made a boy again
— city boy to find his streets
or country boy finding the bright train back
as through the eye of a needle
unthreading his name from the obelisk not yet built.
To grind away Mondays at the office
or the callous-breaking afternoons on land,
dreaming of food through the other war of Depression.
Beside the wireless, monument of the everyday,
strong again, voting conservative
as he mostly would, forgetting violence
until the next war, seeing that one through
or dying again. Or being again returnee to a time
where the world view, his slow meccano
would crumple, seem obsolete.
Barbecue of the Primitives
They stand in a roughish circle: a row of backs,
a muddling Stonehenge, half tourist,
half ritual. As the fire is carried out
in boxes, a male and dormant thing, assembled
from clinking cylinders, thin pipes
curling like snakes into the coupling place,
hissing until the match bomps them into flame.
The hot air pouts and silkens,
or crimps like someone beaming down in Star Trek.
The red portable ovens, standing
like UFOs and calling the wilderness
to sit around with its own ether blue as flame.
It pre-empts the liquor, and perhaps the light,
both will fall on the picnickers
like something strong, pre-figuring.
If the city stands fifty dry kilometres
towards the coast, under the radiation
of what it means to be human: this ether of bush
hits them like the weightless falling
of neutrinos, passing through without sensation,
like silent speech. But
only teeth will beam them back
to being primal, and the firejuice of steaks.
It is the only time they give up speech.
They eat, as far above the sky convulses
outward to the tufted body of an eagle
high on ozone and lean entirety of hunger.
Like pets, the cars sit under trees
or curl into their gloss out in the heat.
The insects now seem utterly demented:
each beat a coin in the air’s strict metre.
Something is being counted off, by ones.
Ode to Skin
Knowing that you, my skin, live flakily faster than I do
makes me sad. Is this manic depression?
Under the Mount Fuji thighs of a Sumo wrestler
you mostly sag like bags of dough.
To think: you dry from us like little wings.
You’re eaten into heaven by mites.
After callouses you return, but Saints, sinners, sots
are skin people who may just lose the lot of you.
Tattoos are humming birds mating for life in you.
Like fingerprints, honestly us. Death stays true.
And a tattoo of an octopus between a woman’s legs.
You were all over me, she said. I’ve got you under …
After operations Orlan has worn her famous faces:
beautiful, or pumped fattily into you to spoil you.
Mastectomy’s new skin is a breast by line not mass,
a word to reach not touch. Then touch again.
You contain us, everyday outlive us, are never less.
We leave your limits — to live in the darkness direct.
We Called it The Engine
Nightly like a deeper and steelier sun the diesel
cranked over then thumped out its metal songs
of electricity, 32 volts in the darkroom batteries.
This otherness for darkness, its steady beating
on farms beyond the powerlines, a slow gunnery
on cold nights, a standing rhythm in summers.
You held the crank-handle and heaved it with
a bunned hand: thumb held aside so the diesel’s
chance back-firing wouldn’t break your thumb.
Stopping it was worse: reaching past the heavy
-spinning flywheel to the governor’s lever, pushing
bare fingers against bull-steel massiveness, pushing
till it died. If you let go too soon the black heartbeat
re-started flanking over as it pushed back, resisted
your thin skin your small bones your fear.
Annamaria Weldon (b.1950)
Coracle
Light laid us bare, beyond the familiar
copse of Norfolk Pines down the end of your
street, crossing the sand without you. No place
to lean at the edge of the sea that dawn
at the beach, only salt-splintered wind. No
comfort in recalling shared, early off-
shore hours you’d called cold as a blank page.
Only winter swell, grave skies, tilted planes
of luminescence plunging to misty
shade, grief’s blurred peripheries.
Except for the wreath. Its painful details
held our gaze (unfurled promise of rose buds,
glossy leaves), frail, red-green coracle that
saved us from foundering on time’s broken
rim. Its buoyant bob and bright blooms granted
a few moments reprieve, as though you breathed
still with ocean’s lift and fall above that deep.
Until insistent cross-currents plucked
each petal free
and gently as mothers un-
curling young fingers from treasure, drifts
pried loose those twined stalks, undid the circle.
Kristy Jones (b. c.1950)
The Past Still Lives
You tell us to forget,
to move on and look to the future.
But the past still hurts us, chokes us,
every time we see old pictures,
hear stories from our people
and read the journals of the invaders.
When I close my eyes, I can see the faces of the old people,
the expressions I see will haunt me forever.
Made to wear chains around their necks,
cutting into them, deep.
The horror still lives inside us,
their children’s children,
permanent memories in our hearts.
We won’t forget, can’t forget.
They were proud people,
still deserve to be proud people.
We won’t throw away what they fought for.
I will stand up and be counted
with my people any day,
teach my kids what little I know
and I will never be guilty
of what the invaders were guilty of.
I hope I never hurt anyone
as much as Australia’s history
has hurt our people.
Sally Morgan (b.1951)
I Can Count
I can count
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5
I can spell Annie
A – N – N – I – E
I do jobs
go to school
eat stinky soup
But I’m still not the Annie
they want me to be
They call me Annie
I answer to Annie
But they don’t know
who I really am
They don’t know Janey
Tim
Nancy
Emmy
Dot
Inside
we are all secrets
dreaming secret dreams
of another life
My language name
is still hiding
When I go home
and see Mum
it will spring out
like a seed sprouting
Till then it’s a secret
Me
on the inside
is a secret
to the outside world
Only way to stay safe
from the world of this place
World of school
work
bossing
World of forgetting
World I don’t understand
I am like Janey
I keep my secrets hidden
Janey Told Me
Janey told me
her most secret secret
Her real name
I told her
my most secret secret
My real name
We promised each other
to keep our secret secrets safe
Me and Janey are good
at keeping special things safe
Zan Ross (b.1951)
Absolute Daily Disposable
I
These wide avenues, twenty fathoms deep
the whale hansoms crowd
arcade gaslight like death each shadow tells
Flaneur
we are this depth or surface explored
phrenology, barnacles on the back
sounding, sounding the sperm
blue killer right
whale sliced into, rendered the same as
read us, read us, read ME — disposable
stories: we are all whores for 15 minutes
II
elevated flesh detected, detective
Thar she blows! surface,
beauty skin-deep, and what we have to
sperm blue killer
clues in the by-way, rendered, but
she mustn’t tell, read this:
blood flow arcs the Seine / Rhine /
Thames / Hudson / Mississippi, the Atlantic
sounding, sounding the
Persian / Chinese carpet / brooch / slippers / crystal
menu without price — consumption
III
Nantucket / Albany / Plymouth / Nagasaki —
we fall in military, scientific invest-
igation sounding, sounding
rendered to the largest common numerator
telescope / sextant — the way is clear
right blue sperm
killer out on the avenue, arcade — read
interiors of whale oil lampshine, soft
as your thigh, Flaneur — go on
detect me. All clues provided I am
nothing if not professional.
IV
You are nothing if not professional straight
commodity harpoon out, quill pen
poised gaslight — read the inside of my
thigh, lips and their interiors on the
off-chance, avenue killer
right sperm sounding, sounding
blue and brass the next morning
on the bureau, your keys / my key —
there’s only one door. Clues
detect you in the crowd, Here and not
forgotten — flanerie on every table.
Wendy Jenkins (b.1952)
The Silence of Mussels
Listening posts
we used to call them
river pylons
thick with ears
tapping into
who knows what
At half-tide
they would be tuned
to both worlds
slicing airwaves
above the surface
filtering what passed below
through fleshy lobes.
What they
heard
shut them up
for good
a long time back
or is this silence
even now illusory
their sound
the clap of a castanet
the beat too slow
or fast for human ears.
Dolphin Sightings
1. First time
The first time
we saw them together
was at Deep Water Point
whether they were
four or five
we couldn’t tell
the rhythm
being more akin to music
than mathematics
breath
riding the gaps
like shadow notes
2. You were talking
The second time
they were right in by the shore
at East Fremantle
traversing and doubling
the same stretch of water
and you were talking
about the space
where arrival and departure are
the same thing
about trying to hold
that moment
as vision and tone
about how sweet
and sad it is
unspeakable
unspeakable
you know?
3. Flatlining
At the still point
of the argument
(my silence
now equal to yours)
I saw them break
the surface
at the opposite bank
two of them in unison
and a third
tracking
in a kind of
counterpoint
the man in the kayak
stopped his paddle
at once (ecstatic)
and slid smoothly soundlessly backwards
on the tide flatline still trace
about which
dolphins blipped and jumped
li
ke a fibrillating heart
Rod Moran (b.1952)
A Memoir of Birds
The rainbows of silk threaded
Through the Cape lilacs were lorikeets,
Sulphur bangles on their throats,
Wings tie-dyed with green and purple.
They dined there all day on split berries,
Until night poured black vino and ice
In a deluge through the boughs.
I don’t know when I first noticed birds.
Perhaps it was climbing the jacarandas
Lining the driveway of my childhood home,
The family Chev mottled lilac.
I’d float in an aromatic water
Of bloom clusters fragrant as musk,
Propped like a vane in a smooth fork
And watch cormorants fly to the river.
(I imagine the same mystery of wind
Tugged at Da Vinci’s elbows,
Pondering a luff of gulls in the harbour).
From those trees I also saw pelicans
Spiral slowly down hot afternoons
Of blue and shimmering condensations.
A friend told me the pigeons there
Were flying rats, balloons of vermin.
But what I recall most about them
Was the sun flaring a purple fire
Around the neck of my mate’s homing bird,
Iridescent feathers signed to a glow,
Like the brocade on my mother’s party dress,
As if the bird had swallowed an ember.
I recall finches coloured like confetti,
A palette of kingfishers dappling
The dam near my uncle’s orchard,
Silver-eyes plundering our loquat tree,
Gargling the fruit’s delicate nectar.
Or perhaps the initial bird I saw
Was that cinnamon harrier crucified
On a barbed fence in the wheatbelt.
Its splayed form haunted my entire holiday.
But possibly, the very first one
Was the mynah chick I found
While harvesting peaches in Monbulk,
A fragile windfall panting at the sun.
It was covered with soft amber quills,
Its eyes like two small wells of sky,
Wings tiny boomerangs of gristle,
Matted with a smooth flecked down.
Its tiny body shivered, expectant
With its own enormous existence.
I knew it would die, but climbed the tree,
The fledgling trembling near my heart,
And placed it in a nest, thinking
As only a child could, that perhaps
It would be better if the bird was some way
Towards the sky and the moonlight,
A navigable pattern of stars,