from Divinations

I listened for you in the throat of summer, in the fanfare
of trees I lingered and spelt their shadows

you rose out of my darkest soundings, inaudible fish
eyelessly twirling in warm currents

autumn cauled your arrival, tracking my veins with weariness
and floated you out on sad leaves of blood

down to the icy waters where my fingers
will never prise into life your voiceless promise

and my kisses will never spark your hair
joyously into brief unknowable beauty

nor will the eager petals of your skin
char to brutal seed

Orpheus and Eurydice

The road wound white
Through the darkness
Running before me
Running behind me
A silver thread
Leading me home
Life before me
Death behind me

On either side
Cliffs of stone
Hung like clouds
Veined with blood
Lakes of tears
Glimmered softly
Huge and old
As human sorrow

And she walked behind me, her steps as light as rain
Her grave clothes crumbling around her
Stumbling on the path like a woman in a dream
And sometimes the blood waking in her bruised flesh
Hurt her, and she moaned, and I heard her
Crying

I fixed my gaze
Forward always
As my longing
Reached behind me
How I longed
To comfort her
How I longed
To hold her close

At last I saw
The dayworld light
Bright before me
Like a blessing
And in my joy
I turned to speak
In my joy
I looked behind me
 
For one moment I saw her face, her eyes as dark as rain
Her grave clothes crumbling around her
Standing on the path like a woman in a dream
And then the blood cooled in her bruised flesh
And I stood alone on the lip of the world
Crying

My song after that was a world of mourning
They said that the trees woke to listen
And that all living things ran to hear my voice
But I was playing only for the dead to hear me
And the dead were deaf, alone in their shadows, 
Crying

From Night Songs, a music theatre work commissioned by Bell Shakespeare's Mind's Eye.

Euterpe

The lamp broods on the table
In its predatory circle of light
Dust rains down on an open book

The suburbs ebb into darkness
Hungry and desolate under antennae
Rats hunt in the weeds

You thought it was beauty
That shocked you to a husk
All your life a collusion with dying

Even the air tastes bitter
Her skeletal wings slice the walls
She lands and opens her eyes

Published in The Australian, July 1 2012

Poetry on tv

yesterday I was sick as a dog
           so I took all my drugs and turned on the tv 
I don't usually watch tv because I find it too depressing
                      all this stuff I am supposed to buy
and those botoxed commentators ratcheting up the fear meter
           cancer scares life threatening elevators terrorists &c
                      but anyway there I was pasted to the sofa 
and I saw two programs with poets in them!
                                 one was all about counter-terrorism in Yemen
a handsome poet whose name I didn't write down went out
           to tribal villages with his ceremonial knife in his belt
and in a long room would speak his poems to about forty men
                      who would chew mildly narcotic leaves
while listening to the true way of Islam 
           how it is a religion of peace and tolerance
                      and how killing people is not Islamic
this poet was a former army officer but was now a man of peace
            and he was greatly honoured among the villagers
then I got embarrassed because the Australian journalist
                      was interviewing some boys in an Islamic school in Yemen
                                 and all he would talk about was Al Qaeda
           so I switched and there was a program about The Last Poets
and how poetry was about Revolution
                      and Black Power and how poetry
                                            saved at least one person's life
because it stopped this guy when he was about to drive a knife
           into another person's heart because he was a gangster
then they talked about rap and money
                      and how the whole thing had got corrupt
                                 and I began to feel depressed again
because in both of these programs there was not one woman
           mentioned or spoken to
                      and nobody seemed to think this was strange
                                 or worth talking about

It is easy to forget me

it is easy to forget me
I am a cloud in the corner of your eye
that vanishes in your direct gaze
when the rain comes

I would like to be
the whole of your sky
when the night falls over you
and hunger begins

I will never be the whole of anything
I am the air’s inconsolable heaviness
and the stars glowing
in a dark well

I will never be whole
bits of me have fallen everywhere
my hands vanish in my dreams
like the smoke of a flower

I am here like summer
in the voices of crickets
that fall silent at the sound
of your footstep  

Homage to Mr Pound

victory sweetened not your crimes
                                             you lived enough lives to witness 
                                 the betrayal of beauty
which was difficult
                                                                   as you said


it was a young blood that flowed in you
                                                         quick hot and generous
daring the god to flare in the laurel tree
                                   bitten by barbed wire

or perpetually astonished
                                             a young girl in a white dress
                                  alighting on a platform
             between the hiss and groan of trains –

you were anything but Roman
                                             unparalleled despiser of your sex
lumpen devourer of divinities
                       with an ear tuned to vaporous divisions
sadness and losses turning in the pyre 
            to the ash of words                                            no wonder
your prophecies twisted  - you understood 
                        money better than souls - still
your myth staggers on without you
                                                                   curling over your ears
            at the jewelled tables where you whet
                                  your fabulous appetites
or limp and dark in a filthy battlefield
            unyielding as a woman
                                              hefting her mangled boy in her arms 
             and the answer sticks its tail into its mouth
                                    and rolls towards you like a tank on fire
                        and behind it billow scorched acres of wheat
                        and the roasted nightingale
                                              silenced at last
                        and the blackened husks of men
                        and the broken pillars................................................

     
master of play!
                       incorrigible wastrel!
                                             your hatreds were magnificent
              still they steam rankly
over the meek ordure of your milk-livered sons
                      and your kisses blossom like weeds
                                  delivering lips out of their lips and so on
where only the strays now graze
                                 (their eyes flooded and blind with love)  
 
                                                       the sundry despairs of civilisation 
printing your forehead
            xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
                                    a poem's insistent monotone
beating your ears like a huge sad moth
                       wonkily eyeing the moon

                                                                                 obscene errata
                      downfallen like a mule in a well
                                            a true poet’s death

as you said

        

In the hour of dogs

in the hour of dogs
every human voice
is hushed 

night is our scavenge 
us and the watchboots
no stranger dares

we prowl as kings
we are the claws and noses
we are the grip

that stalks on stiff legs
rotting ribs and vertebrae
and hostile ankles

the steam of our piss
rises past the towers
and dims stars