A River in the Dark
'A courageous and ambitious writer' - Jean Kent
'......every turn in his river's course is unexpected, imbued with the intensity of genuine poetry' - John Foulcher
'......every turn in his river's course is unexpected, imbued with the intensity of genuine poetry' - John Foulcher
Poems from 'A River in the Dark'
Cooktown 600hrs
Cooktown 600 hrs
The timing of eels
The Immigrant in Greek country
The Going from the valley
Violet
The Woman on the island.
The Cross at her neck
Light coming in to Furneaux Street…
And a thousand years away, up-Cape
a cyclone is turning an ocean over:
it is blowing down the rude fruit at the airport
it is blowing down the black flowers in the mangroves
Coral trees are falling on the clansmen
drunk with nicotine and alcohol and diesel
flooding in from the tropics, bringing the news
of cobbled mountains, dark with air
And here the sea-wash, gravel spumed
fleshes as the compass goes down under
a slattern continent of rubbed water:
a reef slashed in lubra colours
Salt graves, green fires
clubbed names springing from the ironwood
a river gaped and spreading
Cook, cursing on the wind.
The Timing of eels
Sweet seagrass
Tides grip:
mermaids dream
of men’s songs,
light’s drowning
spears
A mere few
thousand soundings
it lasted:-
the loom
stroking
the island, flickering,
blinking out
The taste of stars
speak again:
coral rain
and moons swallow
the salt river.
The eels are running
The Immigrant in Greek country
At any one moment, there will be black widows of Athens darting
from one century into another, across traffic islands
merging to squid-nights like red-backed
spiders under the lights of the property developers and the columns
of oratory mourning remembered cities.
From a monk with flesh of dark sunlight, in an orange
tree on top of a meteor, the boy has received
his first doubtful gift: the sweet of the Turk
from whom his first memories spring, an Ark from where his seed
spreads gun-straight on the fields of the Burdekin
where soft wattles now chant the song of the Two
Sisters, and of Agamemnon. The billabong burns
with retsina and brown looks of a youth in golden
water. In Nauplion, the old fort sulks again over the
deepening brow of the headland
crying along the mind’s winter, pregnant
with cold marble and colder loss of the dream’s
need. North Head gleams, now,
in another country, his fellow travellers sing
of olive hunger for the mouths of the tribesmen.
They are here and now, these faces, their myriad Greek
mouths are chained in gold, dappling the fruit
of the oiled sun. Along the edge of lost
country, they are singing of heroes and the river sucking
the unnameable grey ghosts from under the tideflows…
The Going from the valley
from “The Conversation with cancer starts easy enough”
No more. No other. A kind
of living saw us in:
a swelling in of seasons
years saying nothing
touches while a hand thickened
and another’s thinned.
There was one hope – the last
that we’d live on
in memory of one another
each breath along the path
a caress, each cry of our children
a celebration.
But what, in the end, can anyone say
about a life?... only this:
that we stuck it out
out of sheer, blind, stupid love
and at an end, could say
GoodbyeGoodbye.
Violet
Light cuts
from nowhere; I am born
bleeding
She slips
and cries out
for crushed violets
So many rains
I smelt
with her
Now the road goes dark
and can’t remember
its way
The children are wet
and laugh
at nothing
The Woman on the Island
Seabreath. You imagine roaring
above the barking of the seadogs
the black-dressed woman hopping from rock to rock
nine children dropping from her womb
and two bled out in the moorland
in sight of the lighthouse brushing
the granite under blown stars
it meant every year another child
pushed against the spume
and drunken stuttering of the light
hurt over grass and strict weather
the splutter and stink of the sea-oil
blackening the close room
licked by wind licked
by wind. And all for the stories: black light
the work horse that wouldn’t
that swam every year to the mainland
the giving up of hard men
bending to their sober duty
The child-cry of the seawind
The night-piercing of the Sun.
At any one moment, there will be black widows of Athens darting
from one century into another, across traffic islands
merging to squid-nights like red-backed
spiders under the lights of the property developers and the columns
of oratory mourning remembered cities.
From a monk with flesh of dark sunlight, in an orange
tree on top of a meteor, the boy has received
his first doubtful gift: the sweet of the Turk
from whom his first memories spring, an Ark from where his seed
spreads gun-straight on the fields of the Burdekin
where soft wattles now chant the song of the Two
Sisters, and of Agamemnon. The billabong burns
with retsina and brown looks of a youth in golden
water. In Nauplion, the old fort sulks again over the
deepening brow of the headland
crying along the mind’s winter, pregnant
with cold marble and colder loss of the dream’s
need. North Head gleams, now,
in another country, his fellow travellers sing
of olive hunger for the mouths of the tribesmen.
They are here and now, these faces, their myriad Greek
mouths are chained in gold, dappling the fruit
of the oiled sun. Along the edge of lost
country, they are singing of heroes and the river sucking
the unnameable grey ghosts from under the tideflows…
The Going from the valley
from “The Conversation with cancer starts easy enough”
No more. No other. A kind
of living saw us in:
a swelling in of seasons
years saying nothing
touches while a hand thickened
and another’s thinned.
There was one hope – the last
that we’d live on
in memory of one another
each breath along the path
a caress, each cry of our children
a celebration.
But what, in the end, can anyone say
about a life?... only this:
that we stuck it out
out of sheer, blind, stupid love
and at an end, could say
GoodbyeGoodbye.
Violet
Light cuts
from nowhere; I am born
bleeding
She slips
and cries out
for crushed violets
So many rains
I smelt
with her
Now the road goes dark
and can’t remember
its way
The children are wet
and laugh
at nothing
The Woman on the Island
Seabreath. You imagine roaring
above the barking of the seadogs
the black-dressed woman hopping from rock to rock
nine children dropping from her womb
and two bled out in the moorland
in sight of the lighthouse brushing
the granite under blown stars
it meant every year another child
pushed against the spume
and drunken stuttering of the light
hurt over grass and strict weather
the splutter and stink of the sea-oil
blackening the close room
licked by wind licked
by wind. And all for the stories: black light
the work horse that wouldn’t
that swam every year to the mainland
the giving up of hard men
bending to their sober duty
The child-cry of the seawind
The night-piercing of the Sun.
