Poem

Who exactly is available to tell us the story of our minds?
If I dream of an estuary called ‘Ephemeral Waters,’ an optimum of spectral love
anyone might allude to their misgivings. Or it’s interpersonal, the tide finds
its way round the three islands, flowing away from negative emotions, some remove
their shoes at the door, others talk of auras, or the portals of youth, the mark

This is a song of the white.
The multitude or the pattern.
The rose or the wind.
A woman who begins,
a woman who disappears.
a woman drinking blossom’s shadow.

Seen from that famous ray of light
Discharging from the town hall tower
On the last stroke of noon,
The hands would stand forever at that hour
As though the holocaust of blinding white
That set it all in train,
When present, past and future were triune,
Were come again,
The endless now on which the blessed take flight.

I won’t this time. Silent at last and shunted
Into its siding in the Victorian Arts Centre
The container train started its journey in Yugoslavia
Two years before it arrived in Gippsland
Among trees that echo Albert Namatjira.

sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’,
from Ploughshares, Winter 2006–07

Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud
with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps,

was all it said

just a tiny message

to let me know

that all the way over there

where she was

I was given to this body as haphazardly
As the monster of Frankenstein.

Lightning is a man’s metaphor,
But like fire it provides

A force alien to question.
Perhaps I am only this, this flesh,

The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, and a lyrebird was opening the day,
volunteering to be a bell. We were watching an egret

1 preface
I could, if you prefer, create a list
like a birdwatcher, concealed
in a reedy hide, with binoculars,
field guide and record book, a mnemonic
of migration lines, our lines of sight,
a cladogram of our evolving past.