Classic Poem

Take this day, lonely as a man in
an empty house, at his window, the wintry yard
below.


Sea calm. The moon scatters its
coinage. A rubber dinghy bucks an orectic
surf. Pebble beach. The conning-tower signals:


which came first, meaning or memory?


One flashlight winks hungrily under seacliffs,
and then the flare. This setting becomes
an habitual space, chosen era for commando or
smuggler.


We make our choice, learn that grief comes
regular as sunset.


The bow-wave
turned in chrome coils as the coastline dropped
from view.


Once in a metal-etched hour, people
ran away to America to buildings the colour of
gun-metal, to a sidewalk venting steam
about the ankles of sable-stockinged girls.


How many of us cannot begin the adventure of the
day upon its arrival? The ablutions of the night done
with, the half-bad dreams wiped away, the tensions
of the muscles adjusted in preparation for the


perpendicular, the carpet rolled back, the masks
hung up once more upon the wall at the ready. Each
waking is a starting out from the old country.


The responsibility
of light beckons, unclothes the familiar objects and not
so familiar ones.


Lightning leaves the expression surprised
and the lone tree in the paddock startled with
cinematic glare, unharmed and lovely.


In a homely way,
the headlights sweep the back yard hovering over the
roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood
of cat & dog. This tells you that the family


is in deep trouble to be called into account in
afteryears while the shutters slap wettish to little
effect.


Shaped as an emu neck, steam extends
over the factory stack from the industrial sector
in this small, southern city. A yellow band
of horizon suggests sunset. The steam dissolves out.


Now runs at 4:15 the see-through veins of rain from
window to sill. A splashed up forest of drops tap out what
is left of this late, ruined day in July.


Here there is no history, if by history you mean
the soul fired in the kiln of time. Here there is only
the compilation of event in a scrap-yard of days
& kicked aside incident.


You can still hear the
settlers squeeze box & fiddle in suburban settlements &
tavern, the landscape-flat accents, the Sky Channel
applause and throat-clearing of smoke exhaust.


We remember the po-faced poets who went away never to
return from the Ambition Wars & Success Sorties.


As always, cars chittering in long queues in the
persimmon light of dusk, on freeways dreary with drizzle
and distance, at the encoded city-bound intersections.


He makes his heroine his addiction and vice versa,
becomes the object of obsession into which safe-zone he
precipitates himself, unmanned.


Away now from that well worn cliche,
the crazy party hat of Sydneys Opera House / the bat-eared
shells

& clouds that muscle reflective buildings


to the O so cloacal coil of green hills round the
rectangular cattle, prominent as so many out-of-town acts
in provincial centres.


You pass smoothly in your car the valley below & there -
an intimate scene: a family gathered shock still: the
overhanging forest imaged on the coffin-lid,


momentarily,
then lowered into shadow. The town lies behind you.


The world will change to that which forgets you
and your enthusiasms will be as a passing fashion. In this
you come to understand the nature of illusion

and the hoped for
expectations of youth, a too well-travelled dream. Here
where life recedes further into distance


you will know yourself as unmanned.



Braidwood

for Judith Wright


Granite & quartz country, once
gold rush, now cattle tread amongst


the white hawthorn and yellow broom;
from Captains Flat to Majors Creek


the creek-beds cut the empty vein.


Hail or heat, the hanged ghost
of Thomas Braidwood rolls out his


oaths big as boulders upon the town:
dust, poverty, despair, drunkenness


before he choked his rage at the
end of a rope, phlegm thick as gossip.