writings
Morisset
Staring through blue-leaved gums,
a gathering of twisting trunks and stooping limbs,
your eyes rest on the gentle corrugated lake.
Only briefly, though – the endlessly travelling water
unsettles them into nervy saccadic confusion.
Following instead the slow trail of a faraway and
noiseless powerboat, you fall to musing
on how slothful such energy appears at a distance.
Returning to the water, they watch now
as the path of the passing boat is written in writhing froth,
an echoing wake which disappears into the continuum
migrating towards the shore below your window.
And as you follow the waves, stacked tight in the distance
but slowly separating as they descend to the beach,
it seems that they somehow reflect the order of things…
pieces of life arriving like an advancing army.
1997
home is…
Our house is OK, I suppose—
green-fenced cream-bricked semi,
part of one of those old rows
they built last century.
But that’s not my home,
for all its messy familyness,
kid’s shit all over, phone
knocked off its holder,
shag pile full of unmentionable
crap, a fragmented schedule
getting us all a bit older
while pondering less.
They’re all asleep now,
my wife and girls.
But I’m out here, looking up
and knowing that my home
is what I’m standing in,
a place whose decor sucks,
feng shui reeking of death—
I’d not invite anyone over
sober. I’m constantly amazed
by people whose homes are
emblems of contentment, or pride.
They must be utter shits.
1998
Hobart poems
1. St David’s Park
Every year the names here are less distinct,
suffering quietly during the harsher months
the pocked sandstone in less and less relief
seeming to forget its lapsing earthen tenants,
those deep uncertain memories below.
Just up the hill a photographer is grabbing his gear,
hurrying after the wedding group into the rotunda,
some glad shelter from an untimely squall
which passes as it comes, taking with it
yet more filmy atoms of delicate stone.
Streets away, people are sitting in cars with fish and chips,
windscreens steaming and radios on triple-t. Up the valleys,
gardeners welcome another windy sneeze of southern rain,
coursing up the river to sprinkle cropped lawns in Newtown.
Behind the washing windows, faces are gently dismantling.
And when the swarming winds of Hobart
are blowing pedestrians across Davey Street
and umbrella spines are collapsing in doorways,
look out to sea and try to convince me
not to love the suddenness of it all.
28/7/97
2. A walk to the Japanese garden
Up the sharp elbowing path
—your angled glance
Past fields of obedient dogs
—your tender hand
Through an empty tourist hut
—your passing grief
Down the tussocky dry creek bed
—your absence
Between latticed iron gates
—your hinged heart
Onto spreading rose lawns
—your petalled garden
The shishi odoshi
—you look back, startled
Cornelian Bay
—your deep journey to ocean
I passed through,
—I didn’t stay.
shishi odoshi: a traditional japanese deer-scare
29/7/97
3. Under the Tasman bridge at dawn
Beneath the tilting concrete span,
among stinking starfish thorns,
a sandstone off-cut, less than
a handspan, set in river mud—
and another, further along—forms
part of some lost colonial cornice,
weathering like headstones, the thud
of water against bridge-supports (this
civic construct of hope and pride,
collecting bric-a-brac like an old lady),
the trash of weekend sailors on the tide:
a wind-blown cap, a creviced hankie…
How might this place have seemed to John Hangan,
looking up from his sloping market garden
to watch a fishing-boat, perhaps, round the elbow,
still wooded with ancient blue-gums and, below,
the unfettered river carrying no man-made
cargo, no prickly starfish corpses draping
shellfish middens on the shore? With my hand-spade
I quarry deeper-flung jetsam, recovering
bottle-smashes of ghostly green, thrown
overboard by some long-dead hand, litter
scattering like seeds being sown.
So what do we reap? Who hasn’t known
what it is to lose or to cast off, bitter
moments of taking leave? No-one?
I re-cross the railway line, a glitter
appearing across the waking water.
John Hangan established the first market-garden in Hobart in 1806 on the site of the present Botanical Gardens
8/10/97
4. Brooker Highway
How sad, when that hundred year-old pane broke,
my cataracted view across the highway corrected,
like a visit to the optometrist—this better?—or this?
Those buffeting petrol-cistern air-vents,
moaning like organ-pipes, used to wriggle upward
like leaves of seaweed caught in an updraught;
those trees standing patiently over the road,
above the service-station forecourt, blowing
in formation like line-dancers, used to shimmer
Streeton-like against the hill, before the giving-up
of that elderly sheet of brittle liquid, drifting down,
impossibly slow and eccentric with the years.
The new glass doesn’t acknowledge these foibles, in
its corneal youth and clarity—a harsher, simpler vision
of a landscape swaying with old, opaque troubles.
13/11/97
fallen
It fell, the big-boned oak,
and I imagined its falling
as an act of volition,
clench-eyed vertigo.
Or maybe
she didn’t choose to go
but was pushed instead
by a hard March gale,
making her mighty
lungs rather exhale
at the last with a tree’s grace
and not a whispered word…
Still, her elephant carcass
lies as if freshly murdered,
shocking in its naturalness,
and I am disturbed.
17/3/98
Bach flower remedies
clematis
Old Man’s Beard, slim-tendrilled climber,
crazy mist of stamens and peeling calyx
reaching haphazardly up, vaguely moonwards.
Some would infuse your daydreams in water,
spilling them then like tears, pipette drips onto the
meek needy tongues of the unworldly
and glassy-eyed… (alternatively, they might
brew you up to a delicate liquor and drink as tea)
crab apple
Dread God—Munro motto
She was right—
he did surround the old house with you
and your clan: half a dozen varieties jellied,
jarred in their season, knived onto buttered toast at breakfast.
Contracting rhythmically down the gulping gut,
antivenine to that poisonous indulgent spleen,
apt dread punishment for inbred bitter coveting
(and your sugarless fruit is puckering tart).
New Zealand sextet
Dunedin
Hacking into the dark hills
and wheezing like a tin whistle,
among straggling faithful,
unchurching as the light fails—
tacking back along Dunedin
and its coal-fed chamber-pot rooms,
a dark railway cathedral looms.
An empty train disappears in.
Palmerston North
To the left of the mossy footbridge
riding an imagined stream,
cedars move like warnings in a dream.
Stands of gentle ash below far-off Tararua Range
enclose the brown Manawata river,
clanking westward as hunched storms press
in from the north. Amid the clatter of birds,
I come to think again of my father.
Christchurch
Across deep and empty rugby fields,
the sedimentary settling of the sun.
A hundred joggers wend in
ragged ones and twos. It feels
like there’s a zoo of trees here—
lion-footed poplars, willows
swan-like in mute obeisance,
loping pines, giraffe on savannah.
I pass a bored schoolgirl, leaning
against a leprous elm trunk,
before catching a tram back
to the hotel, slewing
under a curlicued overhead,
past the squat layer-cake Art Society,
a vacant lot slung with debris,
and collapse felled on the bed.
Wellington
Rounding a corner of the black bay,
the track becomes a trestle and narrows.
In a cave of night gusting with stars
a constant fine rain picks its way
underneath layers of running gear.
I think, as I follow the low sea wall
past flocking sloops and dinghies, of all
the music, like yesterday’s, that is over.
Napier
Out of town along the windy north road
points chunk home at the sea port
where fruit and sand are shunting in as freight.
The Indian Reefer, lit up, accepts her load.
I’m running on now between gritted rails,
drawn yet again by work and water,
watching the lowering sun from the shore
as it dips and turns sleeping clouds into snails.
Invercargill
South of glaciers and scribbling grey rivers,
flat huddled town crouches under the pale moon.
A few briquettes burning in early afternoon
lay a silt over the dog-ends of suburbs.
