PATCHWORK ECONOMY

rip rip thread bare stitch
dirty frayed stitch fringe
overlaid ragged bottom
stitch heavy gold brocade

worn torn ragged sew sew
shiney shiney silver clean
metal button stitch stitch
stressed worn torn mean

thin red desperate patch
sew winter worn cool
sheer pin stripe front
worn torn arse bare ragged

hessian hard paper thin
last thread near stretched
heavy denim dirty stained
sun bleached country worn

black white rough strained
satin soft coarse grade
off cut shredded fabric
ugly pattern mismatch

stitch rip stitch rip slash
heavy grey blanket poor
gaudy whore bright floral
shoddy sad patchwork thing.

MOUNTAIN AND RIVER

Mother broods, dark pieta blue,
and cradles the thin river town;
river runs to a broad sparse night;
south wind brings a rugged storm around.

Upfold country story sings this way:
water rock squeeze tight on narrow ground;
beauty budges loose for river tide;
swift departure plays in water sound.

ON VISITING THE FRED WILLIAMS EXHIBITION

In the gallery, girls with wishbone legs
crack past a brief apostrophe of passion
captured in a thick impasto swirl;
lost in a vast, red nothing landscape.

Everyman squints, bewildered by it all,
can't see what the fuss is all about,
peers close in hope of microscopic truth,
falls loose to the reign of painted space.

A guard wanders, disconsolate, beside
the triptych row of needle waterfalls,
punctured through a cave of abstract black
where ideas try to thick line plant a grasp.

Country falls through finger cracks:
the conquering descent of all that is,
makes desert plains and long coastal lines,
marks dark nights with a signature of flame.

REVELATION

(In memory of Bryon Molloy)

My stonemason ancestor
uncovered reverence in marble;
teased song from granite;
chipped breath from sandstone.

My stonemason ancestor
played tectonic symphonies;
felt presence in density;
worked calloused hands gently.

MYSTIC COLD TURKEY

Hey ancient brother! How's it going? How's tricks?
Are you still creeping in the shadows
waiting for your incandescent deliverance?

Man I can't believe you're still down here
selling your dark night lines:
a little eros ground and cut
and metaphysically inhaled. How divine!

Don't think that I've forgotten that old time buzz
of whispered sweet nothings
and redemption ready, lucky faults;

O sweet to death baby, sweet to death;
O flourishing hook, O slow burn in veins:
O product of a dealer, fronting as a saint.

Sure, sunshine, they'd say
I got you all wrong yet again:
misinterpreting, misappropriating, misdemeanoring.

But baby we both know, beyond that tiresome joke,
it's not about the text play but the long soak,
it's not about awareness but the barely conscious undertow.

You know I went cold turkey when I left.
Remember you and me, down in that deep,
in our no holds barred slugfest.

O shadow, my shadow, my shadowy soul;
we bust each other up
and we bleed each other whole
and we know out misconceptions
when they break
and we take our sordid fragments and we make
a new day's sounding.

DEEP SEA DIVING

Our elemental composition knows
pressure and the memory of stars;
the seductive break from oxygen,
the light chill kiss that lingers up above.

We are part earth, part sea,
a choreography of moments passing;
deep sea diving towards finality,
returning to the surface where the light is.

DISPLACED

I wear Sydney

like an old jumper.
It fits more easily
than I care to admit.

I always wanted
something more or less
than all these crowded bricks
pressed against the harbour.

At night I read books
about Rome and Venice.
I did the same with New York
and when I landed there
I could give locals directions.

My mind is insatiable
for ever new territories.
I've lived a thousand and one
lifestyles, places, situations
yet I envy those
who stayed in their hometown,
deep rooting their lives
into something solid as oak.

One day I will.. what?
Cast off the threads
of this hometown of the homeless,
and make a pilgrim journey
to my place of origin,
or move some place else
and add another shard
to my kaleidescope.

OZ

How long ago

was the hurricane?
How far away
is Kansas now?

I need to find
the right shoes.
There's no place
like home.

AUTISM

Something in me knew

the common ground they walked on
the tilt and shake from overload
the rocking singularity
lost in some transfixing glow
brought home by a steady voice
making patterns in the air
staring into middle space
diamonds polished in the sun
life played to a steady rhythm
no world beyond this now.

SUMMERTIME

Summertime

dissolving rainbows
easy living
lethargy in bones
ocean binds
somersaulting bodies
salt water
sand and wave foam
drifting fine
into deeper water
surface shine
tugging undertow.

REVISITING CLOUDSTREET

The Lambs and the Pickles

thick pressed together
through words fired down
like the hoof strike
of a lucky horse
racing to the finish line.

New breath takes up
the old vernacular
in the style of a yarn
with a question at its heart.

How do you stand
before the hairy hand of god?

Set up shop with a proddy work ethic
despite the agnostic fog in your head,
sell fruit and veg and icecreams
as your Fish boy bubbles and coos
for the water, the water.

Or knock back piss, next door,
and ponder the vast mysteries,
sniffing fortune on the breeze
with your ghost fingers itching
despite their long ago mangling.

And the light, oh that glorious light,
that luminous promised land,
isn't shining in the clear sky above.
It's deep down in the water
and on the other side of a final gasp.

There it all is, side by side,
the melancholic bite of the past
and the making do of the present,
age and light filled promise
and the exotic flourish
of an obstinant talking pig.

There it all is revisited:
strange and familiar and resonant,
the suburban myth called Cloudstreet
that we all want to purchase.

Onya Tim.

MEMORY OF PLACE

These four cradling walls of mine

this geometry of memories
space once filled by birth pains
windows brushed by observations
the wedding cake ceiling above
blotched bare boards underfoot
ocean breeze in the afternoons
the ghosts of long gone neighbours
brief intimacies and long affairs
sanctuary through all seasons
holding the memory of place
carrying the memory of place.

WILL AND TESTAMENT

Ex-catholic me

still imbues
divine expectations
in wafer thin realities;

takes flesh
on my tongue
and tastes
for sacraments;

drops incredulously
as paradise curls
and dissolves
to mere nothing;

and I go falling
into devouring depths,
and I am consumed
by passing days;

this is my body,
well salted now
by everywhere I've been
everyone I've been;

when I curl to nothing
take me up the mountain
and set me drifting
on a fresh sea breeze.

COUNTRY MORNING

Clean cold country morning

and peace in the body land;
muscle soft eased to bone
and everything new as birth
and breath distilled in early light.

Passing through the barely
murmuring riverside town;
casual rhyhms lie true here,
glide on slow currents, slow,
and make a claim like this.

SOUTHERN MEMORY

Staring at familal blooded maps:

Waratah, Leprena, Ida Bay;
breathing in the footfall of ancestors.
Tracing lines, convict chains
Belfast to Van Diemen's Land.
Southern frontier homesteads
and ever pregnant women;
timber dragged by bullocks,
searching for prosperity in rocks.
Mud and strain, oar and axe,
rhythms of a former life.
Three unblinking generations
tell a camera who they are:
Sunday best on a verandah.
Homes now faint remnants
in unconquered wilderness.

HOBART

(to those who made an early departure)

Wandering the streets
in a city south of anywhere
and feeling my toes hanging
over the edge, and feeling
the free fall possibility of escape;
fate and the mad spin of gravity.

There are names down there
long writ on the river surface.
I remember them, do you remember them too?
Memory comes shimmering from the deep,
dark light ribbons, liquid calligraphy.

In every hometown song I try to make
beauty runs with earth bound mortality.

THE FALLING MEN

A crop of leaves
let go their ghost again
and burn surrender
in a thousand shades
then prove to be
a crowd of falling men
melancholic spinning
in descent without shame.

MIGRATION

Migration in a gene strand

stretched to a soaring arc
between two points called home.


Majesty invisibly wrought
in a thin dissolving line of flight
forever going to another place.

PRESENT

So quiet I'm having
a Thomas Merton moment;
a retro monastic event
contained to flourish
inside these garden walls;
inside the quiet, post departure
of my partner and kids.
My house being now all still
in the after glow of the daily
domestic clash of civilizations:
tangential wonder versus
hard wired timetabling.
Now so quiet I can almost
taste the mystic still again:
all things past, still, again;
not needing to cut or break
or reconstruct or mend;
present to the ripple light of trees,
sunlight on my skin.

the long march

And the sad eyed men trudge forth
on their withered and grimacing feet;
trans-substantiating wine to vinegar
with unassailable orthodoxy.

Entrenched, immovably wretched,
child egos in weathered skin,
they march through the dread sludge, heavy,
in the hope it will lead to their end.

CASE 3081

There is a case number and a file
and a history of extractions;
occasional storm fronts looking
to exorcise the tawdry past
have brought these yellowing fragments
to light and plunder.

Attachment points, buckled and calcified,
are testament to a fierce muscled life.
Swift hooved bush flight
is frozen in pressed vertebrae.

Bones, hard silent things,
story breaking, story making things,
shout through wound holes
and the web thread signs of mending.
And we all gather around,
forensically impelled to read
these long hard, age bleached lines
we will become.