The Mowed Hollow
When yellow leaves the sky They pipe it to the houses To go on making red And warm and floral and brown But gradually people tire of it, Return it inside metal, and go
The Harleys
Blats booted to blatant Dubbing the avenue dire With rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard Leading a black squall of Harleys With Moe Snow-Whitebeard and Possum Brushbeard and their ladies And, sphincter-lipped, gunning, Massed in leather
The Sleepout
Childhood sleeps in a verandah room In an iron bed close to the wall Where the winter over the railing Swelled the blind on its timber boom And splinters picked lint off warm linen
Shower
From the metal poppy This good blast of trance Arriving as shock, private cloudburst blazing down, Worst in a boarding-house greased tub, or a barrack with competitions, Best in a stall, this enveloping passion
The Images Alone
Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword, White as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia, Old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin; A ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons,
Predawn In Health
The stars are filtering through a tree Outside in the moon’s silent era. Reality is moving layer over layer Like crystal spheres now called laws. The future is right behind your head; Just over
The New Hieroglyphics
In the World language, sometimes called Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola Under it is a symbol for speculation. Thumbs down to ear and tongue: World can be written and read, even
Amanda's Painting
In the painting, I’m seated in a shield, Coming home in it up a shadowy river. It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell And my hands grip the gunwale rims. I’m A
Comete
Uphill in Melbourne on a beautiful day A woman is walking ahead of her hair. Like teak oiled soft to fracture and sway It hung to her heels and seconded her As a pencilled
The Butter Factory
It was built of things that must not mix: Paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil. You heard the water dreaming in its large Kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The word goes round Repins, The murmur goes round Lorenzinis, At Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers, The Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands And men with bread in
Music To Me Is Like Days
Once played to attentive faces Music has broken its frame Its bodice of always-weak laces The entirely promiscuous art Pours out in public spaces Accompanying everything, the selections Of sex and war, the rejections.
Late Summer Fires
The paddocks shave black With a foam of smoke that stays, Welling out of red-black wounds. In the white of a drought This happens. The hardcourt game. Logs that fume are mostly cattle, Inverted,
Poetry And Religion
Religions are poems. They concert Our daylight and dreaming mind, our Emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture Into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words And nothing’s true
Cockspur Bush
I am lived. I am died. I was two-leafed three times, and grazed, But then I was stemmed and multiplied, Sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised, Earth-salt by sun-sugar. I was innerly sung By