I am a sundial In a sunken garden. On the days when you show your face I bask, all those long warm hours. You only see me when I glow, borrowing your radiance – but behind me, where you cannot see, circles a cold shadow blade. It gets longer the closer you are to leaving … Continue reading
everything is as cool as this drink and as warm as the amber sunlight the right amount of salt tastes sweet so make it crunchy and add a good friend to talk with and the living gets even easier so often we are dreamt into the rarest of places in fact, there are no facts … Continue reading
i want, i want, i want whatever it might be that i happen to be wanting today it is a view uninterrupted of where the desert meets the sea instead what i get is a plane-flight over rivers of roads superb ideas that pass like smoke and birds that cut nothing i won’t take my … Continue reading
My former self crouched composed by every element coming in through the broken screen blizzard froze my hair heaven electric pink through the two-in-the-morning window. Now I think loneliness is like lightning. It is attracted to its previous victims. Luckily solitude keeps me company. © Anne Walsh Continue reading
The day tries to be as beautiful as you How she mimics your eyes in the dawn How she dresses the wind in your soft T shirt How she laughs sideways at me when I don’t hear what she says How she paints her doves with the same colour wingtips How she escapes me © … Continue reading
I die every second in everyday places you catch the light in my throat and lemon it so I can’t speak easy Make it moon light on the river of my chest Make it sing long as morning on the slow spines of trees green as Sunday school for lovers oh! I die many … Continue reading
In a dream there is a veil of water between us, your face green with algae: my mirror image, separate, waterlogged in a world you trail within you. The Aztec water goddess is you, who grew the hearts that were thrown to her into a prickly pear tree, each fruit unpickable, embroiled with the spines … Continue reading
Dark days are here. Nothing can stop them, they crowd like hair around the temples, everyone knows and now we can say, at last, it is dark. On Manus, they are walking along fine edges of themselves, under a borrowed moon, a borrowed sun. Nobody follows them, they would lead only to an end of … Continue reading
Up Broome-way recently, I was reading Philip Hodgin’s early poems about cancer and thinking back to my own fights with it, wondering what the poems might have been like had I started writing my own by the time it all began. I put his book down to pick at a nail and found a huge, … Continue reading
do you know do you want to know my people? we’re the ones sitting the hairy legged gnomes sitting by the o cean paddocks sipping moisture from salty scars blee ding the in terminable drift sourcewards opens the wet eye so we can leave the bushy one c losed losen up read currents swells … Continue reading
Off the bus, it’s all light breeze and sea birds, a bit of fish smell, but mostly open sky and an air than lifts you towards it. Later on it warms up and the whole corroding city could be gliding over the escarpment. Things occur at a distance, their sounds barely reach you. Up closer, … Continue reading
CRIMSON ROSELLA Platycercus elegans A bushfire has let its embers fall onto your back they cling there still red and black but when the light is slanting low on each feather of your stretched out wing there shines a narrow rim of green the bush begins again and grows in flight your breast curves smooth … Continue reading
It’s the way he stands nearly naked in the winter sun turning on and off the railway station tap. I have seen people look less reverent tuning Mozart. I have seen hands give coins to beggars appear nonchalant compared to the way his hands give this water to his body. Don’t tell me this is … Continue reading
At dusk she walks to the lake. On shore a few egrets are pinpointing themselves in the mud. Swallows gather the insect lint off the velvet reed-heads and fly up through the drapery of willows. It is still hot. Those clouds look like drawn-out lengths of wool untwilled by clippers. The egrets are poised now—moons … Continue reading
Let there be snow My beloved tucks her hair under a pillow of smiles Let there be snow My beloved sleeps in the open like a morning star Let there be snow My beloved shields the olive tree where the Master knelt to pray Let there be snow My beloved tames the wind – a … Continue reading
The oranges made a gorgeous, swollen pile. —Fiona McFarlane, The Night Guest 10:15 on a Saturday night: my housemate’s asleep, Tiger Coils roil an air wet as whelps (a bitch yelps), Mulder’s chest hair exposes itself like clockwork. Grindr trills Bud what ya into Familiar thrill. in general? in bed? Whatevs HAHA proving his youth. I … Continue reading
even sunstruck the ribs rise from Bennelong Point like Arthur C. Clarke’s black slab I storm the frets, stopping only to whirl when your aperture’s cocked at my spine this hair’s a tornado of sand ridiculous, you needle, a blond gothic no licks of laughter (Father, Son, Ghost shedding Prozac) my Scorpio sting: fuck off, … Continue reading
for Michelle Cahill Some evenings are this fragile. Rainbow lorikeets court baroque chords creaking in my nest of bones. You wrote to wrap my limbs. Morning will sprinkle the conifers, Which of us abandoned the other? We cannot answer with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth? Some days we trust more than desire, … Continue reading
Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits. What does it matter that I … Continue reading
Anyone who has died that I knew: I can feel their essence. Still here. It’s not a thought or a memory I am having. It’s a feeling. They are here, with me. They are abiding. My grandmothers, my grandfather, my dearest father. Even the boy who fell off a cliff when I was at school. … Continue reading
