Category Archives: Poems

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Desire Love

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Desire is a huntress

Sleek in full-bodied pursuit

Cold-scaled and sinuous

Striking open-mouthed, lock-jawed

Desperate and bold

A silent background calculation

She follows pleasure like a leaf riding a river

Like a raptor diving for a rabbit

An old horse heading for home

Awake until she tangles in her target

Or drops, throttled by exhaustion or rage

Sleeps, quiet as the dead

With her long-nailed hand on your thigh

She follows you through your dreams

Shape-shifting and duck-diving

Emerges in the quiet fog of pre-caffeinated first light

Matches her footsteps to yours,

Waiting to overtake you in some new game

 

 

 

 

Love is a different woman

No-one really remembers her face

She is simply there. No conditions, no predeterminations

No limit to what she can lift

With her community of hydraulics

No false pretenses, no lists of laws

Just her rolled sleeves and flour-dusted hands

Worn as a sun-warmed rock and wrinkled

With the cares she has taken from your own back

And bakes them into bliss

She watches eternity with her eyes on your face,

Her heart beating in your fist

She waits for you to pause in your terror and lust,

To turn towards her and see

Hold her steady gaze

She breathes in your sorrow and exhales hope

Carries you to your friends and calls you by your true name

Walks through the darkened house with her matches

Starts a fire in the old stove

With wood you thought was too damp to burn.

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fitzroy-falls.jpgA living stream, he said

Will burst forth

Like sap-flow

Blood for you

This resin making clean

Pure-burning, resonating

An ember glow

That will not die

This love I have for you.

 

 

The soft wool sky

Warm honey skin

Smooth-armed encircling

Deep water of eyes

Soul-safe harbour

Kept from trespass

Sweet in step

Known beyond words,

The truth of you

The sound perpetual

Triumph of angel-war and everyday

A great submission

Flee fear,

Unneeded here

The dissolving haze

Our sun-seeking gaze.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Diminishing Returns

Starving for space

The ache opens up

The paths the light takes

Through the grey,

Clothed in white

 

I am ready with my lamp

To rip out the wick and pour oil

Onto your flames

Watch them dining on the dark

 

I starve for silence,

The cacophony of climax

When sun swallows night

 

Watching for cracks on the horizon

My pulse dips

The balance slips

Hunger yawns like a lion declaring territory

But this time I will wear it’s skin

 

Still I am only a silo,

Waiting for the swell when the emptiness ruptures

Praying for good reign.

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Buffalo

 

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Here I am

Striking out for the plains when I hear

Low and lulling from the underground

The call to lay down arms and

Sink into the lavender

 

Nectar of forgetting singing sweet

Earfuls buzzing

Forever can wait

I know that old tune

 

Invisible in the trees,

Currawongs call warnings of never waking

I cannot decipher

if they are addressing me

The ferns are soft underfoot but I am wary

Of the ticks they conceal

Who wait to pierce and pucker my hide

 

In the foothills, I can forget

Myself in thoughts and almost

Overshoot into the slippery slopes

of the lowlands

Where I have been lost for days before

 

What does my map say?

These features are not shown

Where is the sun on a cloudy day?

I only wanted rest,

An easier way down

 

The longest falls are from

Cliffs with the clearest views

So I keep myself from edges

 

But I have dropped backwards into air

A spider on a line,

Moved by only two fingers and a fistful of spun oil

I have tasted abyss

With toe-tips and tingling hips

Lived more through these death-arresting falls

 

Only once safely descended

Unharnessed and relaxed

The call sounds again

The lovely notes pushed from a goat’s horn

Twisting in the air

 

Is it you playing to me?

Or the pretender,

Stealing snatches of your tune?

Is it only the melody that matters,

Or the harmony I am humming?

 

 

I rise, shaking blossoms from my hair

In the hot afternoon sun

The incense of leaves wavers over the hills.

 

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Traverse

Audio version

This sheep is a solitary beast.

She likes to wander the blackthorn thickets,

The mugga woodlands

The fragrant, prickly heath

Over shale foothills and sandstone crests

Into gullies made by downcutting

Living water laps the dreaming of old seas

She worms through wallaby tunnels and borrows the footpads of errant goats

Sniffs out the shaded meadows of sweet weeping grass

She goes out, she comes back to her haunts and finds pasture

Drinks from the river and listens to the news of the birds

She knows some of the others are concerned

Think she will stumble into a ravine and end there,

Tangled pitifully in blackberry

And on the way she will starve,

Or choke dead on poisonwood peach

Or forget herself and think she’s a fox

Or worse, be torn apart by dogs

She knows that some of the others don’t understand

They think she avoids them out of spite

In truth, the flocks just make her tired

In the paddocks the hay is delicious but far too rich,

To simple and too same

She doesn’t want to grow old and lazy

Walking over the same ground until it becomes dust

Blindly trampling the murnong out of the earth

In truth, she wishes she were a better sheep

That she could take up less room and be gentler,

Less excitable

In truth, she fears as much as she loves the shepherd

Down in the gorge she hears his voice

Echoes of melody through the canyon;

The wingbeats of startled ducks herald his coming

She has not forgotten

How he held her to him when she was a lamb

Or the quick pinch of the tag that pierced her ear,

Marking her as his

She knows that all of this land belongs to him,

That she can never wander far enough to leave it

She knows he has not forgotten her

Knows that wandering makes her hardy

She drinks deeply from the secret creeks

And tells other wild sheep

They are of the one flock.

by

Audio version

World of forms

Cease and desist

I am a body of bones and blurred vision

Unsymmetrical and sharp

I cannot assist you

World of forms

Delist me

Or I will obliterate your memory with sensation

I cannot approach your ether

World of forms

I am not an equation

You are on notice.

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Overwinter

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Honey, you are more than sweet but

I have been in conflict over

Your goodness and my evil

Since fairytales died.

Desires make fables of my sleep

You rescue me still

But restlessness is slowly killing

This tree, dying where it stands

 

 

Bees caress Marrai’uo

Tuggerah gunya’marri blows in,

Muttering promises of warmth,

Of impending growth

The gardener’s hand is poised to prune.

Do You ever seek assent

From the languishing vine?

 

 

The winds have not yet passed

But yellow floss of wattles cakes the dirt

And now a new generation of flowers wakes,

Unexpected early blossoms

Tremble in the snow-winds

Shaking, humming with the force that

Splits imbricate fists into stars

Silent five-petaled witnesses

Life is bursting out of frost,

Buds on the old wood

Stubbornly portend the Spring.

 

 

I will wait with you for our harvest,

Not counting the good or the bad

Toes in the chilly earth

Until the wind shifts or I fall.

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Indirect Sowing

I loved a man

Who was more than

I thought I loved

 

I ran

 

back to Onan’s bed

of spilled seeds shallow dying

amongst the rocks and thorns

 

I woke twice

Once to trumpets and a thundering glory

A command:

Sing your way through fear

Once to whispered insistence:

All will be well. Stay on your path

 

I shook to the ground and through hell

became demon.

 

Many moons ago

The curse wore off

A man

Less in the eyes of others

was love, for me

 

Even on the rocks

seeds swell with desert dew

breaking hardpan with their wanting

And weeds will feed us as well as wheat

If all are cast as brothers.

by

Schism

20160515_145010I understand, now, I think

Your view from behind the picket fences

From the shadow of the pew

Your thoughts, swirling as you sat there

Your small slights smarting,

Hidden from view by your skills in torment

Later, in the upthrust and erosion of youth

The faulting and the folding within became bare to you

The hidden landscape of upheavals and storm events

The unconformities,

The inconsistencies you glimpsed

The schism between their continent and yours was made in magma

Your slow drift south

The oceanic gulf yawning in your throat…

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Drafts

Life is

A series of drafts

Sketched from whistling winds of thought

Pushed at, pulled by the Spirit

Into, out of shape; taught

Some new form, devised for Your pleasure

And our endless leisure. A novel rhythm singing

The circle of our mind’s eye

Back to the beginning

Swinging in from brink and margin, making

A pilgrimage of progress,

An ingress of steps sublime

Climbing slowly towards

Fear of delight and longing,

Satiation out of anguish at last;

Languishing no more

You are perfect:

A meet, tripartite symphony

The complete and final score.