a journey (2016)

from Redcliffe to Craig Larkin's death

I

does it last
the night a deep
a deep fissure
suspended day
like ash
light

half
the half tolting
belief-ridden
down the grain
grey
of a
twilit beach-head

what measure
round sleep
sleep curled
in sleep’s organs
lungs
brain a
heart like
son

how slow
commit

the sky-rent
of
severed furling

loose falls
dream-like
mouth
fingers
hair
hollow tongue
blood

can we then cascade
without
falling
without without

commit the question

she is an accountant
bare legs in summertime
but no

shadow of earth
rips through
all
all everyone all
everything all
gathered together

II

who is saved
has not presumed
they are lucky

who is damned
has not despaired
not despaired

I shall talk to you
and my words
penetrate

the delicate tracery
of your snowflake
heart’s venous

system. In this
way, I am an
intimate.

This life scales.
A voice is
animate

within
the voice, a voice
within and within

another, as
crystal ice
extends dominion

and despair
settles in general
over the land, winter.

III

over the ground
matter
laid down by
abstract bodies
some known
to us
as mothers
whose giving
now is rendered
ineffable nowhere concrete
like the potential for birth
of children
from concrete wombs
or as fathers recalled but
whose powers
now are decomposed
to bacterial potencies
of future men, women and
all of those clinging to inner
vestments like passengers
hanging off bone-hooks
in the walking, love-making hulks
of a people to come

over the ground of stones
world of stones the teeth of
sorting operations
conveyors of scree down vast
mountains to the mouths of valleys
stones carried by water
water the agent
universal solvent
and wind in the silica
sand currents
air movements delicate
pliable lifting one
solitary particle
and convulsions in the rock
springing out of magma
skin-like shreds
a molten blackening surface
from the furnace of creatures
everything burns

over the ground of shells
glass smoothed
a plastic anatomy
the husk rubs the placenta
the solid fluid
discrete powder
the soup of life
in the soup of more-than-life
grinding water to atoms
tears lost
all holding-together
passing in
all lasting
loss

over the ground
risen I am one
salt grain of all the
ocean of all
tongues one word
on its sky-kissed
cheek swimming
under star scatter
scintillant

IV

I feel a tension unlike any I have ever known
resistant to description I can only give you images that are vague and far-fetched
images I do not expect you will understand, images incapable of resolution
ineffective in communicating, and at this point I am reluctant I admit
but it is necessary to make the leap, to tap the arm and find the vein
and tap the arm: I am standing on the tip of a sharpened pencil
because I am sharpening the pencil. It is in the old style: hexagonal,
ridiculous the saying that relates virility to having lead in his pants,
was the wood too near in fact too close for tact to use? to say:
he has wood, not to see in it the lead, it would anyway come as some surprise
and be writing blanks with clear white men not shooting black men dead.
The shavings are softly scalloped and fall away, while the lead fractures in shelves
and detonates, ripping from its promontory the summit of the tension,
I feel but can not put my finger on, a writing tip. Unlike the old style,
I am standing on, the pointed tip itself measures not the margins of my safety
rather the slenderest opportunity to find any purchase to leap from:
on the skin of what is split it would be the tension of not feeling any shame
growing more slender more minute every passing minute, as if to tap the vein
we could not rise and break the surface because we were below it with our instrument
and our terror our torture was in understanding we must sleep-walk on a hair-trigger.

V

walk the dog,
inside the scene
another smaller
figure, who has
left the island
and an even smaller dog
tied to an armrest.
inside these,
waves form
on the lazy swell
of a sheltered sea—
the dog looks at the figure
who in his heart
has to fit
and barely does
and in the figure in the
heart
of a dog
what plans
the heart can know
nothing of.

VI

No sign of last night’s storm
the city sharp as a sheet of die-cut componentary
with the suggestion of
a merely conditional life.

VII

watch my tongue

the dumb land
rose clay red

shuttered blocks
of Moreton Bay

in the optimistic gloom

in the bright oblivion

VIII

blunt caws of raven
hack the morning open

for the sharper melodic procedure
of butcherbird

on the dripping
hanging carcase

black men prefer dreaming
while the white men’s dreams are a
coloured
a coloured film
over waking eyes

American suburbia

a slick of oil
pouring on the land
a seeping greasy froth
settling

unconscious.

what do the women do

people
the coloured
coloured film

on waking eyes

and dreaming

IX

The facts are these
blue and red strobe riverside
and in Sandgate blocking a sidestreet

So we drive home
from what Jo called
wet wild and willy world

having picked up
after a short wait
beef-fat fried cod and chips

each put in a cardboard box
a paperbag sealed with sellotape
and we spot

before pulling in to the carport
one of the dogs we’d left locked up
running loose on the roadside

pull in and jump out
expect the laundry window broken
no

a single pane
from the glass louvres
has been carefully placed in the

stainless tub and the
backdoor’s unlocked.
The dog’s escaped

through the short gap between
two panes
but stranger is the power’s off

checking the box four circuit breakers
blown
and not the main breaker

and although the smaller dog has got out
a kelpie cross
the larger mastiff-boxer still contained

in the back yard has not deterred
any would-be burglar
from breaching his territory

to switch off the circuits
to leave without taking
a single item in the house

not our passports
not the mac pro lying open
on the chest in the front room

not the birthday presents unwrapped
on the kitchen table.
A storm is forecast

but it never arrives
south of Brisbane the sky flashes
and we take every precaution

putting the car under cover
for protection from fist-sized hail stones
that never come.

X

Australian poverty

the children

who look after the children

every so often an adult shouts from indoors

sunlight breaks the brick-line in a sharp diagonal

and the kids’ toys

and the barbecue and the washing basket

and the lawn scuffed into leprous tufts by dogs and men

lie sad

bright and unattended

XI

things could have turned out differently
you might be forgiven for thinking
but I wouldn’t presume

if you’d taken another path
where the way forward was somehow
clearer instead of walking in deliberate

error even while knowing better it
would appear to me you had nothing
nothing left to lose does that mean

something
someone
…

what difficulty can excuse and
ought judgement ignore
dark within the heart of disbelief

or neglect that negligence

XII

when did history become so thick
and fat you could no more find purchase
for thought or feeling on its moving surface
or in its soft back for your hooked head
and fingerholes than stand on soup or plot
the action in the atmosphere of each atom
on every other when exactly did it become
slippery so no one could gain a hold on
its heaving neck or break its horizontal rush
but only sink in without a single thing
sinking in to the limitless vertical depth
we are all of us in suspension still animate
carried on in aspic limbs congealed
with carrying on where we gesture with
one another our chins tip forward meaning-
fully eyes roll and brains progress on jellied
wheels from one thing to the next and back

XIII

The love of the body is the longest lasting
because the body does not age
its breakdowns and desertions
where it was liquid now it is mineral
where it would move turning to stone
taking its leave falling ripening
sagging ripping folding in wrinkles
dappling blemishing dying to itself
and its touch deaf in its voice muted
by the noise of collapse shrinking in its
vision and its habits failing in its reach
and its holding dropping lacking in sight
of itself—foolish, its battles with disease
growing from its substrate its own senseless
vegetation wrapping organs in leaves
tuberous growths and wooden tumours
taking over the fatal defeat is not a process
to be managed because the body does not age
it is animated and has life at its essence.

XIV

because I can be seen almost everywhere I go
and the information is attached to my person
so that my physical location is for all practical
purposes a mere indexical and the actual
presence of my head and hands heart respiratory
and alimentary organs is a dimensionless
point and feet and legs which permit my per-
ambulation in space and get me around
do not amount to much of anything except
like the other things I carry from place to
place head and arm breast and genital
exist as liabilities and targets I am
constructed as a site for data flow a
limited silo over a lifespan
occupied by contesting interests their
sum monopoly on the nothing
of mortality
because of this
age ethnicity gender
passport number
this credit
and the rating
your gift to me
I cannot be fixed
anywhere
and I am
completely
mobile

XV

I have composed a list of bodies
entering the cordon of the homicide
the victim lying in his cold cocoon
I have included my own
without compassion without enmity
my childhood bedroom
my father’s coffin
I have compiled the names
of femicides
opening the present to
continuing mutilation

to direct a calm gaze
and not to turn away
from this world
what kind of hell
has literature become

XVI

imagine
and all I had to my name
—these lines

—a spider
knitting in cheese-wire

XVII

for Craig

walked among the wild comfrey and the weeds
naming fruit trees in nasturtium in the borage
bees worried and we about them on the edge
Craig in a collared shirt with an open face
of the day flung wide and garden earth
like the palm of a hand tilted upwards to it
as if accepting a gift held out in expectation
holidays coming to an end he said
the same disappointment when the doctors
told him he’d be going back to school
this time is not last time a moment came
in his clear enjoyment of our pleasure
excited to show him our place and company
between beds of bolting heads of broccoli
silverbeet racing to the sun we stopped
turning his glasses his teeth and belt-buckle
a slim man smiling with a similar excitement
of something that is always happening
still the bandage hope sickness gentle courage
and just to be in a good place like he was
he said how pleased to see us find our
good place too he was laughing
with joy just to be travelling
in the middle of his life
as at the end in the present
presence packed and holding out
a predicament like a ticket
because all ready
and on a journey