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LITTLE LEAPER

You audacious fist of flesh,
set deep in every chest
we know you can leap
high as a wallaby hip hops
over hot rocks in the outback!

What sets you off? Is it
the wo…wtherem…ybeau…ty,
or the ai…n’tli…fegr…andmy
ni…mblef…ootedle…aper?

It’s never too late for the old
kicker. A word? A touch on
the shoulder? Finger in the waist
band or the zipper’s fizz?
Thar she blows!

You’re opening an envelope casually
and then you realise who’s written.
One hand follows the wallaby’s
jump and flutters from chest to throat.
But if the shock is true it will jump anew.

It’s an age-old gesture and yet
you never know when a face in the crowd
(mistaken of course) or a tone of voice,
or a photo slipped from and old book
can set the leaper bounding to the hilltop.

Wo…ould...n’titb…elov…erly?
Oh wen…dingo…urway…toget…her,
ni…bblin…geac…hot…hers…lips.
So, wan…ttokn…owm…ore?
An…yone…readyf…orano…therleap?

STREETS OF SOUTHERN CROSS

My birthplace alright, but
                    I was too young to know these
long red hills in the gray-green-blue
                   desert table-land they call
Yilgarnia. And yilgarn, the white quartz
                   ridge that the traveller climbs,
is the Wongai word, I understand, for
                  fabled veins the watjela craves.
So who was the prospector of poetic
                  soul to name this dusty scraped
bulwark, haunt of the desperate gold
                  bounty hunters in their hordes?

Legend has it was Toomey and Riseley
                   with a Nyungar guide
who named the site of Southern Cross
                   after being helped in their trek
by the four stars of Acrux --twelve years
                   before the nineteenth century ended.
Strange that these stars Corsali first
                  called a cross in 1517
could be seen by Chaldean astronomers
                  three thousand years ago
when the world’s axis more inclined.

Now I drive back to my home-town
                  on the red salt-mud shores
of Lake Polaris, watching over
                  the raffish clustered buildings
climbing Wimmera Hill towards
                  Fraser’s Mine. And here is Canopus
Street, where our schoolhouse stood, fenced in
                  with sheets of corrugated iron.
The nearest cross streets were Antares
                  and Altair, all rival constellations
to the Cross itself. Today I see pepper-trees
                  and ghost gums that throw
scant shade on these impossibly wide streets.
                  And still the red dust blows that
blew and blew all the summer of my birth.
                  Antares has its crude tower topping
the stunted town hall. Tower that supports
                  oracular-faced clock which De Benares
gifted to the town: and, like its benefactor,
                  locals soon learned its chimes
no more to be trusted than that fellow’s charms.

One by one, the mining stores and knocking shops,
                  hotels and drapery stores have failed,
though sundry service stations now trade well for tourists.
                  Fine sandstone edifices still stand,
tell tales of grander manic and depressive times,
                  but now serve humbler purposes.
Though some, like the grand Palace Hotel, have
                  been restored to live again.
And the graveyard’s stacked with stone Chinese
                  whispers: cholera epidemics, mine
accidents, transient childbirths. Yet these days
                  farmers’ four wheel-drives angle
outside post-office, bank or stock agent, as men
                  come into town to count their rising
coffers or muse in a pub bar over the last footy
                  match of the weekend against Marvel Loch
or Bullfinch, or Moorine Rock. And Old Lester’s
                  eyes light up as he recalls remembered
rich finds, sensational nuggets and the ‘good gold’
                  still left as pillars in abandoned mines.
Alone, he lovingly rebuilds his wooden-cabbed,
                  spidery Ford T model truck.

And where the mullock heaps once dotted
                  the main Yilgarn field and Fraser’s
great pit head wheel spun with the rising cage, there’s
                  now a chasm. Way down, like a mortal
spear wound in the Yilgarn granite block is a super pit
                  where haulpaks toil up spiral grades
bringing ore to the hammering crushers, tireless
                  conveyor belts deliver powdered
greenstone into digesting cyanide and roaster plants.
                  It’s all ‘high tech’ here, except
that in the deepest part of the hole I see remnant
                  of the old main shaft of the Fraser’s.
Can guess where ‘drives’ and ‘rises’, ‘stopes’
                  and shafts once bumped to the laden
skips, flickered with the ghostly safety lamps
                  and echoed the hiss of air lines,
rattle of drill and the final crump of a charge.

Strange that this was the mystery world my engineer
                  of a grandfather knew as well
as any Welsh miner. A mirror image underground
                  of normal people’s daylit universe.
Instead I was raised in open spaces above ground,
                  the world of mallee flats where nothing
hides by day except Crucis Majoris or Canopus.
                  And no trillion tonnes of rotten rock
hanging on a thread over my head when, in’thirty six,
                  my Dad drove Mum down Antares into
Orion, so I could get my first squalling glimpse
                  of the surface world of that Yilgarn granite block.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS ON A SNOWY MORNING
(for Katherine’s birthday)

From this hill-top where flash
of silver birches challenges snow
in remnant drifts, I see
far out over miles of reservoir and woods.

Winter ice still rests in its pale
shroud, stretched over blue
veins of these waters. And
deep underneath lie drowned

hamlets and abandoned farms
built by New Englanders
in their first invasion of these
drumlin hills and dumped moraines.

Frost, you were well-named,
for my fingers tingle and ears
inflame in the stiff hill-top breeze.
Whose woods these are I think I know.

LAKE VISITANTS
(A homage to Antony Gormley)

Trying to remember the word for mirage
I walk out on the russet clay of the lake
towards forms of the fifty one who lived
once in the remains of Menzies town.
Out on the flat salt the iron anti-bodies
crane sinewed limbs and look in vain
to the emptiest sky for just one bird,
their blind mute heads nodding and nodding.

One figure I see, a mimi manikin
who seems to stand thigh deep
in the bluest of blue water. Entranced
I pace over the red sponge of the lake’s bed
seeming to see black swans, wild duck
bobbing on that shimmer of a mirage.

Then I find the fence, which had looked
flooded up to its second-most wire, is derelict
but dry. A few prone posts fallen there
like long ago prospectors perished
in search of some mythical gold reef.
So I pause here with the curved end
of the rusted wire catching at my heel;
obdurate march of this fence points straight
to far-off scrub-lined safety of the shore.
But these unstrung wires no longer hum or sing.

Still in the distance, that knee-deep figure,
head held high, awaits my pilgrimage.
I begin to shuffle forward, the sky
still an empty lens of blue, until
someone or something whispers to me.
Over my shoulder? No, it seems to the right?
But nothing’s there. I stand mystified.

Then at my feet a faint swirl of foam
surfs in on this immense brown beach.
Staring down at this broken wave I see
the crowd of tiny wildflower petals
and winged seeds in their deep space travelling.
This was that whispering sound, this dry spindrift
and I notice more and more wavelets
of them, rushing and swirling in their hope
to cross somehow that blazing salt earth’s face.

The more I listen the more this hush
becomes a roar of molecules in which
my blood is intermingled and seems to seek
to leave me and join this spheric dance.
Shocked into motion I turn from the iron
sentinal, mastered by mirage. Stagger
all the way back while I still have strength.

WAITING FOR SHEARWATERS II
(Strahan, January 2000)

From the dunes the sun
was free-falling into dark
rush of the sea. Wild winds
from the west cuffed wave-tops
and hounded countless
creaming crests and drops.

North and south the sand
stretched wet and flat as spread
sketchbook pages. Crowds stood
or sat in wait on the dunes
walkway, flimsy gallery of wood.
Intent we watched, as soothsayers,
telling the cast of runes.

We could see before this roaring
west wind a small yacht
that ran with slip of canvas,
no more than a black jot
in the fading twilight. The sea,
angry and grey, bruised that boat’s
haphazard passage to where
safe inlet bided patiently.

Back and forth we searched
those lowering cloud-filled skies,
our upturned faces, craning ears,
awaited first signalling cries,
almost a second coming.
But falsely were shadows sent
and darker than darkness
seemed the first fluttering intent.

Then another and another. Yes,
one more swooped, like some
storm-tugged twisting kite
turning on humming string,
skimming in circles tight.
They were scanning, it seemed,
the wind-blown tussocks of grass,
searching for secret signals
in each wild wheeling pass.

We knew that in burrows warm
nestlings of these hero seafarer
birds waited for their storm-driven
tireless parents. Oh to be bearer
of such bounty to our own flock!