Selected poems
Dingoes
Through a drab-green social afternoon
as to-and-fro the emptied bottles roll
this question floats up, bleary, out of tune:
can a fuckwit have an immortal soul?
When will the vulgar court the lyrical
and bullshit fertilise the laurel crown?
When will cute images plainly tickle us all
with ratbag stylists going on the town?
Only when stories happen on a seam
whose gist gets memorised from north to south,
swimming through mythology like a dream:
the dingo with a baby in its mouth.
Smartarse and dickhead, trendocrats and folk,
nothing unites them like a dingo joke.
Bastard Valerian
An ample buzz of bees this year, thronging
that lairy bottlebrush tree and
plenty of sparrows once again. How
the living creatures do go forward
in cycles! But our ebullient blackbird
flaunts up high, even on the chimney
to boss those insolent Indian mynas,
near a swooping reptilian wattlebird and
hard by two somnolent doves. Are these then
seeds of the new life? What to write next
that's grand? Or utterly strange
but suitable for spring of course,
a season that flows to us in the coldest winter
as each blossom amplifies its temper
Near Ferntree Gully
'I always wanted to see more.' — Hockney
Staring toward the stringy picture
through a linguistic lens
I have begun to see that the elderly magic,
deplored by most religions,
was a daughter of coincidence
mathematically robed
in some downright glorious colours.
That's the satin-sheen of it
or a very simple fall of rattling dice.
Fair enough, but necromancy
had no trouble believing herself
the stern mother of history,
able to carve its crude bush track
through the merely actual
like a cake-knife through cheddar.
But staring still at the number thirteen,
I wonder how we got here
so greenly, after all.
Naturally after all
some kind of sleight-of-hand,
using an old projector.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is an Australian poet and emeritus professor in the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.