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
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