A poem from Mirror Landscape by Lisa Gorton

Read an excerpt from Mirror Landscape: New and Selected Poems (May 2026), a major collection by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet Lisa Gorton. ‘Apocrypha’ is from a new series of poems by Gorton called Caesars, which reflects her fascination with the perspectives of space and time, and the ways in which memory and landscape, the past and the future, fold in and out of each other.

Mary Magdalene, desirous of sovereign contemplation,
sought a right sharp desert—
and abode there by the space of thirty years—

At midday a gong sounds, the sea
turns on its side and I see my cloud
coming from a long way off to feed me—
stately and vague, slipping easily across the mirror-
like distance dividing there from here,
filling the cave with its damp
down feathers each one made of that fine-
ground marble light sinks into until I
lie myself down in the fullness of stone—
Stone tongue in a stone mouth
speaking only in the carving of my hair, stopped 
gestures of my hands—

Sleeping and waking, there and here. Only, 
after so long, it gets confusing.
Which is which? For instance, the dead woman
left on a mountain—that is written.
Yes. She slept in stone under a mantle, suckling
the wordless child who had seen nobody—
this child feeding stones to the sea, the sea 
mumbling over them, raw-gummed,
spitting out that fine-ground marble that scuds
the top of the sea, making
statues of horses, statues of gulls, bringing its 
hammer down on them repeatedly—

What happened to the child, I’d like to know?
I think he’s still there
throwing his stones to the sea. Each time I
sleep the sea sucks back leaving such
ranks of statues—No, leaving the one statue repeating 
as far as the eye can see—One
by one, night by night, it walks towards me
and its right eye is my right eye,
forgetful as a mirror. One by one it stops,
pinches a strand of my hair, eases my
death a little way out from my skull, this
long gold hair I walk around in. Pelt.