Punctuation
Meditative on a brown park bench at the top end of, was it? Hampstead Heathin a colourful shower of ladybirdsI caught up the poet's canny division:ways of butterfly, ways of hawkbut how that sliced at an angle acrossprivate polarity in fox and hedgehog,his version at the unlikely leastnative to this ochre land of ours,whatever earthly ours may meanand how we jink between polarities.
Evening's extended mattress now,its burnt orange slumbers all alongthe sea's grey sill. Nearer to handseven surfers are continuingto provide their black punctuation,rescuing waves from silvery repetition.Inside the no there always remains a yes
and everything depends on yes.
Where soul might
As those furry plumping quinceshang above grit-grey lanesand crimson buds erupt all overthe sturdy corner gumtree
our plant world murmursripeness and foison,those cruel nouns of timetolling away my cells.a slithery concept, that.
But at sleep's near edgeI busily ask myself —redundantly, rather —where soul might have its home:
Like the golden tumblingapricots right next doorattending on Christmas,my body has attainedwhat another age wouldhave called a certain age.
Player of life's queer game,I'd better reach out to catchthe spoor of a soul,being's fine pith and core.
I'm afraid that's what I'm doingin the tremulous here and now.
Robert Browning at Bundanon
There's a kookaburra chortling, so I think it's time for tea.That's a cup in bed for you, then, and another one for me.We'll have a day devoted to creative enterprise,you exploring with a paintbrush and, after several triesI could come up with something: not quite burned out, after all;might hatch a crafty lyric handling chaos and Man's fall,but locating this among the valley's kangaroos and cowswith a special spot for wombats._____________________________________Around the lower boughsfantails are finding insects, swallows fossick for their food.Business bastards keep insisting profit is the only good;old Galluppi's out of fashion; Philip Glass is all the go,but any income from our art seems incrementally slow,poet or painter.____________________How the Brangus bellow there,wanting hay forked out for breakfast in the dewy atmosphere.
Who was it, I wonder, first contrived the electric fencethose cattle keep away from? They are not entirely dense.Nor am I, one keeps on hoping, though absurdly out of datewith a weather-eye for verse-forms, fanciful and intricate.What'll we do with the mystical, a question for us allin an age way past King Arthur, Joan of Arc and bold Ben