poem

for my father

I am facing out.
The line is facing out.
Time faces out.

News travels, phases out faster
than limestone; more lost than desperate
light in a maze. A tide forgets

to return to bay, lingers wild
like a hungry thing, grazes at my
feet as I stand before the bridge,

landlocked under flocks
of pelicans stitching up the sky
with surgical precision; their wide vee lives,

their preset minds inside the present
like matches struck; all bones
and sinew cracking the wooden air.

We are carried closer to when
you are to claim your space
in dreams, in the catch of smoke

to the throat, in fireworks. I should
breathe deep on that day; I am
no robot.

But our formations faltered; stumbling back
into step I imitate your wing,
try to fold the light my way,

in my own hue. I pocket you
where weather has no highs
or lows, reset the course.

This is you now.
This is us facing out.

rapid I

everything has bones
even the lake
its pale sheet drawn close
over the spine of the earth,
the trees, the henges stiff and stalking
the outskirts, the edge of sleep
where liquid wakes, laps
like a wrinkled skin
at your resisting ankles,
your tight dreaming

anathema

how long is a piece of string,
a year of pasts and futures
translated from a text of
monolingual nows?

in a new and clear night
we talk of resolutions: look deep
into time, see blue galactic smudges

blot our lenses with kicked up
clouds; long dead stars just marking
their first revolutions off the
back of long gone light.

two streets away I see red
as a man chooses to see nothing
his eyes are narrowed, his skin
is raw from burning.

he spits hot, front page fear
into the face of a stranger.

Im told its just a pendulum
by those whove seen these times
before. but the clock to me

looks broken; leaves me counting
the ways our january sun
collapses in the west.

how the cool change rolls in
too late, too weakly on the dust.
how my chest tightens too soon.

unfurling

awakening
to a smell is different,
replaces these evaporating
scenes in your mind
with news, roused by the earth
a different kind of melting

stepping out into smoke
headlines, I follow the deaf
cat whose eyes work
double shifts; sees
the living and the dead
walking in step.

the bushfire ghosts are
almost ready to leave
they drop seeds like Hansel
and burst for their headstones
at the sight of first light.

I have overslept
I wake up inside my dream
where I dreamed I slept
comfortably in the damp
as a tree fern

I begin to grow myself back
from inside out

nomad

the connection bottoms out
try, try again
to stack fragile things,
make sculpture out of murmur

your mind no longer bayesian
the last thing you learnt
was of lakes making snow
dump on dark afternoons

now a week later it is
ultraviolet christmas,
cockatoos screeching laws and thermals
lifting the skin off the road

every few hundred ks the same
named river running
underneath you
unable to outrun your shadow

youre waning, your ancestors always
watching, outside of time, like
dragonflies on the wrong side of
glass. here

the bridges can act like black
holes, the land a ghost, the nomadic
sporadic like light touch but not
snow touch, just a melting touch
and the only touch.

rapid jazz

it is friday night vision
the strip is all jazz dots
hotel windows dont open
a bridge doesnt notice

the causeway is flooding
colours in concrete
swift like a crisp sheet
make your bed, flat earth

or roll on, underneath jets,
car tyres that seem to go back-
ward, let them drive over you
in what was
or will be
later
or earlier hour.

rapid II

a cave or inlet
opens its mouth

but we only hear
the shriek of water

from an ocean
or a lake rushing

in, unwilling to learn
of whether wind would

whistle and spit salt
across these hollows.

then, just as swiftly
it pulls, or is pulled

back swallowed by the rip
to where the real stories

roar, dragged up still hot
from the crust, frothing

like wild beasts, to crash
again and again

against the edges,
the erosion of walking.

rattle

when I heard
where you were

I felt something in me
rattle
like a loose filling,
a summer fan left on too long,
spun off its axis, falling out
of the day,

(see) in my mind you still burned
in that curious comet way,
your mood whipping wild, perpetual arc,
like scorpion tails,
away from order and the dull dust.

today there are volcanoes rusting
in the sky,
becoming scribble
underneath you,

lost in your lava sea,
white dwarves climbing back into
the mouths of red giants.

and now, despite the desperate
gravity in us,
you are a cool smoke memory
thinning
too quickly in the uncandled night.

here on the edge where your wax
runs away in ribbons

I spin,
I either feel myself
rattle
or fall in.