Poetry Archives | Page 2 of 8 | Giramondo Publishing

My grandfather spoke more…more in pastiche when he became widowed. Came down the Paris boulevards looking for a mouldy stick.

Cottage. The four worn steps. / Clusters of purple lilac. / Know it? / And now, forget.

Some come down from the mountains / into the searing belly of the wind, / and sit between six fires, then turn, / already blind, towards a seventh fire, / the sun.

Now, when I ask if you can hear the waves, you turn / and point to the dunes before moving towards them, / dressed for the cold in a swagger that would be / at home on deck, on a solo cruise, in big water. / I have used the voice of a teaching man too often.

and I found myself / drifting from thoughts / of a troubled heart / into what his first sentence / would sound like, what / it might contain

something announced itself and set snares behind my eyes – / something formal and free, / troubling and instructive.

worms gnawing on my slats / drop their sound into the water / my fear becomes the crier / and screams: / watch out it’s collapsing as

The one who cares / is the one you abandon / to the slow germination / of village days.

Thanks to Gra-Gra the planet knows your patch: / ‘Here’s Nola,’ he grins, ‘our girl from Woop Woop West.’

Since everything old is always turning neo: g’day Peter (this is Alan, chum, / songwriter manqué, author of these stanzas)…future Oz icon from Fitzroy through to Freo,/ with bodytalk more pirouette than scrum

After church the drive, the singsong: Dad in tenor mode / winds the Vauxhall down Mount Dandenong Rd.; / lulled, Mum’s glad, these patterns still keep: / Janet reading, Carol pulling faces, Margie asleep.

Yes she loathed Scotland, but wants to return. For all that’s crass- / cum-tragic must pay out with happiness

Four women came to visit me. / They all wore the same dress. / Not four identical dresses / but one dress encased all the four women. / How was this possible? / The dress was like a large pomegranate. / Each had her place within it.

there was a kind of sweet loneliness / standing alone at the dark water / eating the hot dog that my father / would have bought me

“It’s all right, Dad,” I whisper. / “Stay with me. / I know exactly where I’m going.”

Small things betray us. / The jaw that aches as the oxygen dwindles. / Deep and delicate this depression / as it walks across me into the other world.

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Poetry

In The Year Of Our Modernism 1922

Translations from the Russian

Three Poems

Gathering Pine Cones

The Sleep of a Learning Man

Hill End, 1963

Three Poems

The Two Mothers(A Conversation)

Walking The Night Alone

I Go To Rio

On The Road To Gundagai

Ever Lovin’ Man

(The Pomegranate-Dress)

One Frankfurter

From Elegies For My Father

Last Things