Selected poems
From the North Country
He loped into the terminal at Prince Rupert,
a tall gum tree, bush accent piercing.
We looked at each other, laughed, thought alike.
Not so worldly as we chose to believe,
our trek to Alaska testing, we hooked up with him.
Below deck, skint, we seized a saloon table,
nursed two beers four hours, laughter extracting
toxic looks from a waiter coveting our space
for tipping patrons, not unwashed backpackers,
a word orgy, a bullshitting kookaburra cabal.
In seaspray we slept, vessel yawing, fog folding us
in damp dreams on deck, through the Inside Passage,
waking to watchful indigenes, bow wave reaching
them in eerie light, their presence etched
in my own vision splendid that can never be again.
He turned up, back in Oz, early in our decline,
like a war buddy landed on his feet in Darwin,
a travel veteran now betrothed to a Texan.
We didn't make it to the wedding, too far to go.
He takes me by surprise, my Clancy of the Overflow.
Germaine Greer at Heathrow
Imagine a painting in the style of Jeffrey Smart,
a bare airport terminal, a well-known woman.
Compositionally, the woman stands near the edge
as do Smart's figures/friends in some pictures.
Space, stillness, surrounds her in a banal setting,
a desolate reminder of de Chirico, Hopper,
stark emptiness, their echoic sense of regret.
Barely the breakfast hour, the jetlagged scarpered,
I watch bags, my partner changing money,
lean against a pillar, focus on a lone woman
who looks sad across all that emptied space
as though disappointed a dear face hadn't shown.
She smokes, or she doesn't, looks straight at me.
I once read The Female Eunuch among books forgotten,
the only bloke taking a course on feminism,
admired Greer's chutzpah, knew she lived in England
where I came to dwell on the edge of belonging.
I mourn unplanned lives, mine, others', back stories,
each of us carrying private clouds of sadness.
What happened next, that distant dawn?
Photoshop the picture. Now see two figures.
A man with luggage, that woman.
So much space, possibility. Time stilled.
He tells her, imagine, about a book he liked.
Parsifal
Fortified by photographs we flock for tickets
like a theatre crowd, Mad King Ludwig's castles'
ethereality whirring our Tinker Bell wings,
our childish fantasy of spires sky reaching.
Fifty million have ogled this gilded fairytale,
the grandeur in stone of Verlaine's 'only true king'.
Pious, overrun by the Prussians, our puppet king
loved dress-ups. Television would have loved him.
Nocturnal Ludwig rode noisy Wagner's bandwagon,
and an elaborate sleigh, enrobed as a chieftain
of the Middle Ages, part of the architectural mix,
his other favourite the House of Bourbon.
My thrill on first seeing the photographs overturned
boyish disbelief