Counterpoint

Counterpointing the death of twenty-eight 
parrots so named because their call comes 
twenty-eight twenty-eight twenty-eight
which is seven on three times a scatter gun’s 
twelve-gauge call, dumped by the boxful 
four days into the new year and awaiting 
the bulldozer’s shadowy blade. Maybe 
they hung thickly about a farmer’s fruit trees, 
maybe they sported under the sprinkler
on his only patch of green lawn. Maybe.

Funeral Oration

                                  (for Joyce Heywood)
 

The grave is a gate you send flowers through,
and the pink blossom frosting the northern hemisphere
is, on closer observation, a confluence of species.
There is a scent that’s as much about lingering
as leaving, and it’s about time the ploughs
were moving down there. The geographical
centre fluctuates while the magnetic centre
remains rock solid. Prayer goes somewhere
and is not lost and expects nothing back.
And old tree — a York gum — oozes sap
like it’s something special in the genealogy.
Most of the family is there and words are said
and those who can’t attend wait for news of the dead
          as now it is all about memory.

Rapt

     To identify oneself absolutely with oneself, to identify one’s ‘I’, with the ‘I’
     that I tell is as impossible as to lift oneself up by one’s hair.
                                                                                             Mikhail Bakhtin

1.

The blue crane parts
a pair of black-shouldered kites
at the home-place, jam-tree
blood-letting
and field mice wary.
I tell: we saw
their narrative
and exteriors.

2.

The perfect — I hesitate
to tell — replication
of black-shouldered kites
down the track, the highway,
the angles only
different.

3.

Windhover is literature
and centrifugal.
But brown hawk
over Yorkrakine Rock,
graffiti and exfoliate
sheets in a heap
at the wavering base,
is speech.
Micro-climates
and rock pools
that might breed
brine shrimp on the granite’s
face. Tor-shift
talon-locked, dryandras
rare: hereabouts,
come apart
from the bedrock.

4.

Squared twists
of gimlets
and sand mallee
gravitate
sparrowhawks. Nests
lurch in a stiff breeze
I ask: what’s
the lifespan of a tree?
Above Lake Polaris —
turquoise shot through with sunset
where miners and farmers meet,
sunset and pied butcher birds
that get into the picture
by force of character
and not species:
another of Hunt’s wells,
saltlake aprons,
the backtracks
past gnamma holes that add
up to a map, filled
with pig melons
and shire projects which dry
on the banks, paper skulls
tearing, cracking up,
in winter.

5.

What I missed out on —
being the stories I tell —
is seeing what I might have told
or been told,
as I, by a hair’s breadth,
become yours to say: black-shouldered kites
over the garden all day.

6.

That hill, Mount Bakewell,
Walwalinj, effects
the flow of air,
makes interiors
stir. Back at the rock
dragon lizards
lash and dart
as rock-warmth gravitates
up. Halfway there,
back home or where
we made our start,
another pair of kites
[blue crane elsewhere]
work tangentially
to tree and cloud,
to resolve
oneself
absolutely.