spring

Darling ! 2

death row 3

prcis 3

The Netball Coach 4

to absent friends 5
spring

See, see where Christs blood streames in the firmament:

It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree1

as the chilly wheel buckles

from the rock, banded by iron drought

from the dry rot of winter
from the hard enclosing garden walls

of stunted ranges
each peak a balletic point of morning dream
of distant mandolins of mist, fleeting as a bird in a mirror,
pirouetting on the surface of a fingerling stream
as you open your eyes, throat tinder dry, and lost

a mast, the sky sways,

a vein, the sky swells,
the dark park branches
blossom with dawn
over the jagged benches
transitory
with the sigh of a brassy blast

it comes

water is sweet
once more,
and the rain is not vinegar
the sun rolls too quickly
along the ecliptic

Darling !

youve won the __________ Poetry Prize?

oh, Im so-o-o-o happy for you!
its so-o-o-o richly deserved, and
I hope you rot in hell, your work is
like a drunken bowerbirds
images a-glitter like ancient dog-turds
and I know you know everyone in the inner
clique who runs that thing
(slept with some of them I dare say)
so all I can say is fuck you and I hope

1 Edith Sitwell, Still Falls the Rain.

youll be very happy with your H-U-G-E
payout, which schmucks like us who can really write
have had to fund.

death row
we have seen water come out of a rock
and children disappear into it
nothing removes the stain
I smell ozone from the blood-brown trains of my youth,
progress buffeted, like a sad nosewheel turning on a remote runway
here, where even plumb-bobs and sundials fail
and water runs like blood down glacial walls,

nothing removes the stain, the streak, the shriek

shadows without sun sprout in my windowbox

overlooking a windblown town of squat ungreened towers
sheltering long-shadowed figures with tricycle prams as
sweltering trams clatter past and stained freeways hover in old fog
and in this unthinking city of the eye open seven days
I drift off the edge, bleeding fast
into unruffleable feathers of finger-laid stone, archipelagos of misfit moments

unassuming as a bent row of thin, unlined coffins

nothing, no atom of shadow, ever removes the stain
as we are snuffed out by heaving ingots of sunshower
rearranging the draped furniture hopefully in our cells
dreaming bleeding dreams, that cut-price laundry of the soul
nothing

yet

removes the stain

the praeternatural shame
of the
execution.

prcis

1.
prcis my soul
how can I wander,
finding under my own
stones frogs I never spawned?

2.
the higher the wind
the sharper the eye

3.
cloistered wind

4.
move into the suburbs of a hair
and forget the razor

5.
even a duck can run on water

6.
only a globule in space
coheres till it shatters

7.
being exact is endless catching up
perfection sleeps

8.
creeping under the circus tent of significance
pepper on a plate, more beautiful than asphalt

9.
knit with light
the clocks put forward to eternity.

The Netball Coach

The netball coach

Parading about, clipboard in iron hand
Pulling her girls into shape
At 6:51 on a Sapphire Coast morning
Those girls
Heaving dark spheres against the blue-green H.Q.
Of the Merimbula District Netball Association,
Loping round the adjacent oval, some barely managing it;
One sent off to be sick but coming back for more.
Indolent, I watch from our Beach House
Then gaze deep into the colouring Tasman
As the sun glints off a 4x4, hers
 You could iron a gym-slip on that horizon.

to absent friends
rubicund eraser
in red light

it is the tumbling year

fogbound wheels turn

on the verge of a distant bend

the candle shimmers through itself

its horizon melting as I work, head bent, beside lukewarm coffee,
writing in pencil
a closed letter to absent friends

like everything I write, some have

never existed, harpsichord echoes,
flames sunk in amber

I write, pointlessly,
losing my way,
complaining that
my mistakes have been made indelible, and follow me round
like a torturers bill for the electricity,

that my imagination lost the taste for power decades ago,

that the little city is growing sharper,

drive-by shootings held back only by the mountain,
and I am only glad I need not scour garbage pyres for a living,
tottering up to tumble down, and

finally,
hope you are well,
that I write on a rainy night, a rain through fog,
while the chair creaks, traffic thins, a cat cries far away at midnight,
and I know it is time to go to bed or check my email or do a thousand
inconsequential things to fill in the time between now and the pewter day I die;

the gravel clouds pile up above the ceiling, life gutters,

lone cars drip through night intersections,
traffic lights flicker in the soul, the red glow is almost gone now,
erased in a maze of tumbling days

my coffee is cold,
I am old,
a bloodstain of light
at the edge of the curtain

is tomorrow,
that phoenix,
absent too?