Defection

In the lift shaft

lives a cricket
entirely committed
to singing between floors.
On a mid-city sidewalk
a pinto plane tree
sows its false future
in a velvety drain -

see how the green heads
of hungry seedlings
poke up through the rusted grill.
And look at you!
Your grey theories
are turning blue
and all along the marbled reefs of sky
your eye is working
like a chisel.

The Slender Man

I see him now, that shape in the half-distance
like an upper case letter of the alphabet
that they would not teach you -

though children, I struggle to comprehend
all your fear and fuss,
since Slender Man follows some of us
all day: he's there when we ride the bus,
or when when we walk the long way through the park,
and even when we get the window seat
at the cafe. Certainly, I concede
that there isn't very much for him to do
when the scenery is real
and there's no live feed
for him to fade to fizzy static grey,
and that it is possible for you
to spend your whole life reminding yourself
to look away; but then again,
what a world there is to look away at:

that grey uneven mountain,
that slender cat,
that sleeping stone,
that crooked fountain,
that baby's splotchy cheeks,
those dancers walking home,
that fat man who flicks his right hand
as he speaks.

Face on the Wall

A shag
marooned above eye-level
for centuries.

The immoveable supervisor
of a disused door.

Face of stone
whose cheeks are a slow ripple,

whose mumbling lips
might be mistaken
for the lips of prayer.

Stone face,
whose mazy shadows
of Promethean beard
and sundial nose
shift
in perfect obedience
to remoteness.

Stoneface,
so true to your code,
so married to the breeze
                          whose skirts
                of leaf-and-elmseed
        gather and flutter
across your feet.

The First Post

You can sandbag your eyes,
but that first bird
who doesn't need a wink of light
to start his pipes

will follow you,
you walloping rat,
all of your suburban life,

faithful
and sound in hope,
just in case
you cannot find your way

into the morning,

where the news
has changed,

where the water
is colder,

where your can of fresh heart
takes a lot of opening.

The Education Ministry's Abecedary

A is for Apple,

Professor Michael Apple,

but they would not let him speak

because A was already taken,

and so it goes:

A is for accountability initiatives,

proliferate 

and ever more complete

in education, 

where sham scientists

man the bridges

and claim to understand 

the life of children

as one long performance

on someone else's stage.

C is for complex demand,

for which there are a limited number

of clinical solutions.

C is also for competition,

and counterpart

(classroom, school, inter-school, 

state, national, international, etc.).

C is also for Callicles.

K is for key performance indicators,

essential for leaders

whose eagle eyes

are 

for the most part 

inattentive.

L is for learning jurisdiction.

M is for Mao.

N is for national averages,

as well as appearing twice

in the word inane.

P is for platform,

an alternative to a stage -

if you prefer to watch children fall

when they fail,

or when they disengage.

P is also for powerful pictures

of performance

for people who pretend

to be Charlemagne.

P is also for PISA,

that great empire 

that spreads like Esperanto

into the honeycomb world of education,

including the industrial cities of China.

R is for rich experience,

and rich is another word for good.

S is for specialised learning experiences,

and surveillance,

and system,

and snake.

T is for talk of trusting teachers

once they have been 

reformed

into accountability frameworks.

And that completes 

the improved, more efficient version 

of the alphabet.

You are welcome to leave the room

if you disagree with it.

Swamp Sonnet

The day was swampy. It rained the crimson heads
right off the azaleas. Every minute we were together
things were about to be said, but then they would slip away
and something odd would fall out of the sky, as it were:
a weather-beaten shoe caught up in a cranky tree,
a boat not cut to tackle the arrogant waves.
You said you liked my coat, and I happened to like yours
but couldn't say it. We smelt the smoke of a passing Cortina
whose dingy engine was dying for a service,
and when it rained again, for the seventh time, we fled
into the cut-out world of a pancake parlour
where we sat on pew-hard benches, beneath a stained glass window
that was tacky and beer-amber, and bore a hairline crack.
It seems such a shame to have to drag it all up now.

Cuckold

I dreamed last night that we got married again,
this time, in a mountain village, mucho and foreign,
where salt was scarce, and snow was deemed unsound,
and bootlicking pack-mules could read a human mind.

I turned up tieless, with no one at my side,
unshaven, with dirty hands I could not hide.
I carried an ornate rifle, which seemed to be the rage,
and I could not speak your tongue - the wild tongue of the village.

In a dark room, at a darker table, things followed your family’s plan,
and so I was somehow tricked into signing away
something more, and I knew that you were sleeping with another man,
one of the guests no doubt, but I married you anyway -

You, from under whose skirt butterflies were streaming, ever more
butterflies; and while this fact caught everyone's attention,
no one said a thing, even when there were butterflies galore -
in the circumstances, it seemed unmannerly to mention.

Quartz at Cradle Mountain

For a billion years
incomprehensible quartz,
brilliant white matter,
brilliant grey matter,
lost in thought
in the mountain's head,

until the matter
begins to be broken
down by a clutching root,
by the drizzle
of sorrow,
by the melted snow,
by heat.

Here is a certain fate,
a surfacing of the truth
in dolerite,

a grand idea
giving way to a frog-pond,

a making of room
for a luminous fungus,

a bared breast
adorned with lichen,

a chronic enterprise
grappled
apart
by a dawdling echidna.

The apple tree is humming

The apple tree is humming
like a dynamo.

From its left-for-dead
branches,
from its perishing frame,

a white costume
worthy of a caliph
or a dancer,
has bloomed and settled.

Manoeuvring, 

sedulous,

engrossed, 

the bees

have proven yet again 

to be

experts in the field.

They plug away

like tailors at a dress rehearsal.

The apple tree is humming
around my head,

a network fashioned
for mollification,

a crown of sound.

Prelude

And this mineral treat
is crystal of gypsum
in evaporite form,
like a foot
of bright snow
cast onto a crust
of fleshy stone,
ready to crumble
at a touch
to powder,
telling the world
for now
of the miracle
that it remains
sitting
uncrumbled
on the piano
where the player
practices
the same piece,
layer by layer,
atom by atom
phrase by phrase,
lattice by lattice,
until he and his troupe
of pliant fingers
are rock sure
of their work.

Misunderstanding

Standing over me
like some
heavy,
like some stone
eye,
like some common
sense,
is the question
of understanding.

I recall something -
or rather
do I call something?
After all,
I can't be certain
that I understand it
anymore
or ever understood it

in the first place -
that place
below it,
where I could be
the one
who held it aloft,
from a pit,
or could look up
into the belly
of it,
like some sage mechanic
of stone.

What exactly
I recall
is the dusty Paz
writing something
about how
poetry
says what language
refuses to say.

What sense
he was making
I can't exactly say.

Perhaps
he did not say it
after all - and
he said
all
there was for him
not to say -
but what I do recall

is having a sense,
of understanding it,
that day,
when a tear
imagined
itself
in my stone eye,
all because
I understood
someone else's
something
that made no sense to say.

Dining With The Dead

As cryptic as an undertaker,
a blue-tongued lizard
makes his way along sun-filled alleys
between older graves.

He is the sleeper that awoke.

He is the afterthought
of a boundless star, emerging,
burnished and slow,
when even death has moved away.

He reaches a clearing -
the beginning of palomino clay
dotted with the frosted shards
of pulverized vases -

but he turns away,
thinking it better
to work undercover

in tilted tombs
where esculent snails
hide their planets
from the makers of big religions.

Canary

Uniquely shaded
in standard yellow,

the pet canary mounts a fine case
for the existence of a Macaronesian
world-beyond-cage.

Unable to stick to the point,

he skips from perch to perch

performing a brilliant routine

of Baroque insanity.

When singing, the entire bird
becomes a throat

whose post-water canticles
range in genre
from alarm to charm,

from staccato accusation
to theremin,

from vigilant warm-up,
to Thumbelina diva cantata-cantata-cantata.

Safety in Numbers

You know who we are.

We share the same yellow bandages.
We hold each other's hand.

We drink from the same cloudy cup.
We piss, bright as a sunset, into the same tin.

We each take a greying shoe,
one the right, the other the left.

A long time ago, in a distant galaxy
we were the same person,

neat hair parted down the middle,
unafraid of the others,

as happy as a blackbird on a spire.

But people split up
and now we are two,

certain of both sides,
watching both doors,

keeping the chair warm for each other,
never alone,

taking turns to check the weather,
sharing envelops,

accepting the apology of the other,
fighting over the same heart,

splitting the bill,
finishing each other's sentences,

watching both doors.

Grain of Truth

Wood sings in a candid language.

It sings to the furnace of the eye,
revealing its orphic folds:

out of a chair, a table, a robe,
the veritable layers emerge,
sartorial, scrupulous,

a kind of cambium diary
formed in the limbs or the bole of the tree,

a lowdown told in ballads
of rift and burr,

told in far-off galaxies,
in auburn and honeycomb,

told in the work of a frost crack
or a sun scold,

told in a carbon fabric
that flies, chatoyant,
from the spool of time,

told in the dark, tempting feathers
of partridge wood,

told in the dance of maple flame,

told in cloud,

told in bird's eye,

told in the caricature faces
that arrive in a play of knots,

told around mirrors,
in lost walking sticks,
on doors that never open,

told in the singing timber
of broken violins,

as generous to the spirit
as quinine, cinnamon, or aspirin.

Tribute to Felix Baumgartner

When a man is falling to Earth
from the heavens,
he does not pose
as the shadow of his future self.
He begins to spin.

He becomes his former self complete.

At the top
he is a top,

standing only
because his life
was secretly revolving
his entire life,
over and over,

too quick to notice,

quick enough to stand.

But when he is falling,
his life says to him:
now it is your turn to spin –

and, as if to prove
that satire and love
are one and the same
thing,
not just a spin,

it says it over and over.

The New Neighbour

So when a man's numbers are shaken out
of a lotto machine, he buys a handful of lush
and undulating acres of Tasmanian park
in the north-west; and then, as if to make his mark,
he takes to the bark of the Noachian tree
at the end of his paddock with a can of kerosene.

Do you remember that tree, the one he burned?
Although broken at the crown from having caught
a thunderbolt for sport, it's hulking neck
remained as thick as a tree is at its base
when it hits a hundred feet, and still
it sprouted whole trees from its hoary face.

Did he think it was Ozymandias, with a sneering brow?
I wonder, did a kookaburra, from a kingly height
drive him mad with its burlesque laughter,
while far below he enslaved himself to his cow?
Did he think the birds had built a Tower of Babel?
Or was it just a simple act of spite?

Stuff it all! What do intentions matter
when stacked beside that hallowed and hollowed frame.
You know, it smouldered away like Troy for a week,
then held to the reef of the sky, a faraway wreck
that took a shake of years to finally shatter,
and many more to hand Van Diemen his claim.

Two Different Deaths

Him that dieth in the city shall the dogs eat,
and him that dieth in the field shall the fowls of the air eat,
but in the city, before he dieth, he shall be kept awake
by the classless barking of neurotic dogs
all through the deadlocked, bourbon-coloured night,
whereas in the field,
he shall sleep soundly until the day he dieth,
or, on the few occasions when he can't sleep,
he shall marvel at the scale of the howling wind
or the rain that presses the full span of its body,
its head and shoulders too,
against his melted, lightless cottage window,
having bothered to come all the way up from the coast
just to visit him, and without being called,
like a dog that never knew of city patios,
and he shall wonder where in the gorgeous hell of it all
the parliament of fowls that govern the air,
those same birds that will one day eat out his sides,
have gone to hide their cranky little heads.

The Wall of Words

Two philosophers
making a wall of words between them,

a wall so hard
that it would stop a train of thought
travelling at high speed,

a wall, the completion of which
provides them both
with serious relief,

a wall, thank god, that is always beyond
the perception of a dog,

a wall to which they can press
a Buddha-sized ear
and listen . . .

listen for the lament of the other,

listen for an argument with a spouse,

listen for a joke which they, too, can understand,

listen for a rasp.


Two philosophers
making a wall of words between them,

a wall of words
through which certain other words
will always pass.

Happiness is the Glass Juicer

Happiness
is the glass juicer
we bought at the tip shop.

Its glass is so thick
and heavy
that it does not slip
when in use.

Its lip is so big
that it can hold
a full cup of juice.

It takes in the light,
wan or bright,
and turns it
into
mathematics.

It doesn't want to leave us.

It likes its dark corner
of the bottom shelf
under the sink.

It is equally content
to wait upside down
on the rack.

It reminds me of
my grandmother -

the only person
I ever met
who graduated
from a retirement village
and moved back home.

Happiness

is the glass juicer

we bought at the tip shop.

The oranges on my tree
now grow in bunches

and the limes,
well,
they all wrestle
for a place on the branch.

Frankenstein

You sit through a loveless day,
watching your garden
through a streaky window.

You see your bone-white
wheelbarrow
leaning against a tree,
upright on its two handles:

a mule performing
a circus trick.

That night, you find yourself
on top of a moonlit hill,
gathering black rocks
for your endless wall.

Plovers laugh.

The barrow is full.

You heave your load,
and Crack!

one of the barrow's wooden arms
snaps clean off

and over she goes.

Rocks leap out like rabbits
and dash for the dark grass.

(Did they spend an eternity
planning their escape?)

And so
you head downhill
for home,

nursing the broken arm of the barrow
like it is your own.

Out and About

The morning after
the first scortcher
we go to the park for a kick.

In the shade, baby oaks
are climbing out
of black acorns -
little green cocktail umbrellas.

Five or six kicks in
the rain arrives -
big icy drops
that get to the skin
through two layers of shirt.

For the rest of the day
my shoulders
are a wire coat hanger
hanging from a bare birch
in Siberian winds.

My icicle shins
snap and refreeze
each time I take
a step.

We go to the local Lego show
at the old
convent
where my inspired
sons
build a Caribbean scene.

There I spot
the skinny Lego pro
guarding his replica
of the Hindenburg.

He is in short sleeves.

He sips from a chilled can
of diet cola.

- Let's go, lads!
- Where to, Dad?
- How about the indoor pool
at the rec centre?