Flirting in Norwegian
i
So the light when it came was already exhausted
and the sky lay down like a blanket
the ocean was muttering
under its breath.
Two women stopped to ask me if ants had ears.
A native bee was working its wings
hard to remain stationary.
The sea kept coming and coming,
dreaming of the moon as a terrible white casket.
Three dogs, individually,
came to visit
and sat beside me, after which everything
began glittering.
ii
So when the new wing of the Museum
of Contemporary Art
in Sydney was a new thing
my sister saw it before I did
and told me
it looked like an orca
mating a giant corgi.
iii
There was a trill.
The way sometimes
a thing reveals itself but remains hidden.
I was focused on the waves
then on the canopy of the fig
both high and low enough to screen the sun
but not the hills.
Only the rock stayed as it was.
The trill was necessary for the soul
in lieu of certainty.
iv
Because the waves with their pointy hats
were like mountains.
That.
And the cormorant from up close as it flew
past from behind. As if I were the one driving
the warm cockpit.
v
Imagine light from a star
that has subsequently died
travelling all those light years to arrive
(how many millennia that would take)
only to be disappointed by cloud cover.
vi
The sound of two herons
greeting is another hour
that passes.
(The morning like a strange dessert.)
The shadow of the bird moves faster
than the bird.
Cicadas have gone to earth and won’t return
until the sun stops its love affair with Norway.
vii
There’s a poet I know dreaming
in his dark bed. Composing in his sleep
one room at a time
in praise of light.
That’s how it is.
One thing arrives because somewhere else
it has gone.
Morning gleams on the face
of the poet.
The late afternoon is waving her long arms.
The sun polishes the wings of a currawong
which flare like two lamps
at the very same time the casuarinas
which all morning have been shining
go dark.
(Finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2022)
In memoriam
The round body creeps
into the canopies
of the dark
gums
and lights finally
the sodden and felled
carcasses
and rootless grass.
Look!
The casuarinas are singing
oracles of light and whisk
their fine needles
until they’re spinning with celestial harmonies
until they’re like Catherine wheels or great halos
of fire.
Who knew casuarinas had the generosity of angels?
the balls of their roots like old giants who have grown
into their bones at last by staying
resolutely here.
Even felled they have gravitas –
it’s not for nothing
I use their fingers as bookmarks
(you can’t kill them – who burn
their songs like incendiaries
along the fine horizon
of poems).
(Published in the ACU Poetry Prize Anthology Chapbook 2020)
Bow side
What was it I saw
sinking its head in the night
like a slow body
so quietly
I shivered
Which never resurfaced
Not a brim
not one single
finger
or toe
though I stayed with the image
long after I arrived home
and all the time
I was cooking the leg
of the chicken
And later still
watching the pricked skin
of the creek
as it rained
. . .
(Shortlisted, Dermot Healy International Poetry Award, Ireland, 2017)
Vanishing point
because it’s 8 am
already
because the din the cicadas have raised
is a blunt carriage
because the sun hasn’t yet risen
over the hill
(because)
I’m vanishing:
my attention
transfixed by an image —
sound as landscape
in perpetuity
(the elevated pitch of even the smallest
driven insects
staking their claim
their future prospects) —
the way Hokusai’s wave
still hoists him up
towards
infinity
…
(Shortlisted, Henry Kendall Poetry Award, Australia, 2017 )
My initiation into poetry began in 2012 via a creative writing workshop with the Australian poet Mark Tredinnick. This was followed by several other poetry workshops with Mark Tredinnick, Judith Beveridge, Martin Langford and Deb Westbury.
After more than three decades as a visual artist I was not expecting to be overtaken by such an overwhelming hunger to immerse myself into a new creative practice.
For a period of nearly three years writing became my most constant practice. It was only after three years of juggling art and writing that I managed to find a happy balance between the two.
497 small disappointments
My dear cell follicles,
I apologise for keeping you
in suspense for so long
and for any false promises my body proffered.
For not granting you the long-lived opportunity
to leave home. For the inconvenience
of being
perpetually on hold. Also,
for not having considered how easily
the long trajectory of the past (the undocumented
lineage of lovers) would be lost. Their scent
gone cold,
like old blood.
Today, I apologise for the inconvenience
you had in being on time, every month
without exception; congratulate you
in the face of such stoicism:
497 minor disappointments
released without rancour
into the dark.
If I think of you it’s as imaginary
pearls —
impotent jewels
cradled in the safe
harbour of my fortified canals.
Did you try out names for size?
Slip on gender and disposition like so many
well-fitting jeans. Lie in my warm salts
dreaming of the infinite
bath. David, Sonia, Pedro,
Sally?
When the waves of blood stopped coming,
did you weep? Will we keep company
until the dead end of the road? Eggs?
Are you still speaking to me?
Are any of you still here?
(Sincerely),
Yours
(Winner of the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, USQ, QLD, 2016
Published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2017)
An awful hush
It wasn’t the repetitive click of the keyring
still swinging from the dash
or the shift of the song to a minor key
on the car radio. It wasn’t the slow beat
of the drums or the drip of oil as it leaked
from the bonnet in a slick stream.
It was the awkward camber of the wheel
as it lay half out of the snowdrift, almost
floating, and the gesture of the child, the slack
fingers resting so casually on snow,
as if to suggest she was only sleeping.
shortlisted, O’Bheal Five Words International Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2016)
Currawong:
Say it aloud and you have a name that stays
at the back of your throat –
as if it were a song inside you
as if you had become the bird.
Say it twice and you have the beginning of a lament
as if the curving beak were a blade
beside you urging you to pierce
the sombre membrane of the night.
Would you have courage enough to prick the dumb fabric
dawn is making
to raise the yellow threads of sunlight
every morning that you live?
I would gladly leave the Currawongs bring the dawn in
who hold their charge before them like a torch.
Can you hear them? Every morning
singing in the day.
(special mention, Welsh Poetry competition, 2013 )
Not even landscape with its cordial trees...
How many times, looking towards
whichever bay it is
I’ve been drawn to, casting myself out
across the horizon
held aloft by this or that
particular bird (today a flycatcher
suspended above the River Derwent
singing out its heart
on a wire)
watching a tree teased out of its trunk
by the acute sun, its shadow
like spun wool
drawn off a spindle that won’t stop
being pulled,
thinking I can stop the inevitable
fall
back in my bone.
Falling, of course,
the bird long since
gone
all the feathered lengths
my head went to
shot down
at dusk.
(published in the Cordite Poetry Review, August, 2017)
What ear sees, eyes can’t say
I close my eyes.
This, so I have the hillside beside me sculpted
in decibels.
A rooster’s chisel throat
carving out
the shape of a vineyard
also
a woman
(the long association ear has
with memory)
lines of clothes flapping
around her
like inherited chooks.
Rows and rows of Pinot Noir dream themselves
into their full bodies
each ascending crow of the cock
shaping histories. More than eyes can say
from this distance.
(The pie on the sill. The wine
in the chicken.)
An anonymous twittering so precise
my mind’s fingers trace the shape
of acacias
across the pricked braille of ecstatic notes
and landscape the garden.
This, ear does.
With one sharp cry hands me an ocean, a lament
on one pitch.
Gifts me the cracked rocks
with mussels in it.
Their black hearts.
And all the salt and rubbery embrace of the bed
of the kelp.
There’s brine on the gull’s breath.
Something like sadness
articulates the jagged
coast
between here
and the point:
my ear is the melancholic and introverted
counterpart to my impressionable eyes.
It hasn’t been seduced
by worldly things. And likes to mix its joy
with grief.
And loves to cry.
(highly commended ACU Poetry Prize, Australia, 2017)
White rabbits
A shaft of sunlight falls diagonally
in front of us
across the corridor.
He points towards it.
Look, he whispers,
transfigured by the sight,
as if he too were full of light. Look!
But all I see is how meagre the light is.
How it cuts through the antiseptic glass
of the nursing home window
like a razor, slicing through curtains,
bleeding
onto the mean
linoleum.
He looks up at me then, his face alight,
the subversive fire still burning in his eyes
after all these years.
And I am full of wonder,
not of the light,
but of him.
The wardens patrol the corridors
looking for fires
to put out.
But the inmates are wily—
they hide their fires in the corners
of their gowns and wedge them down
the sides of their chairs:
the sick and the frail, still capable
of remembering their lives
bigger than the reduction
perpetrated here.
The wardens have been hired for the size
of their hands.
They know how to put out fires—
they’ve been trained with the bare minimum
of their wage. They know how
to strangle rabbits.
But my love is a magician
and pulls his rabbits from thin air.
(3rd Place, ACU Poetry Prize, Australia, 2013)
The Red Kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway
They stay with me now like fallen gods—
the red kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway.
Look how they stroke the air with their hands
one last time, their feet like two spears rip open
the horizon as if they would carve themselves
a place in the cosmos.
Their staring eyes steal back the distance between us
until I want to stop and kneel at their feet.
Compelled by the appalling grace
that survives them
and make my amends before the birds
take their eyes.
(3rd prize, Rolf Boldrewood Poetry Prize, Australia, 2017)
Like seed that falls
there’s so much innocence left in the woman
of the young girl
who dreams of what she never had
and sees
through the magnification of salt
as though through diamonds
how casually
love is handed out but not to her.
Only later, watching how her body leads
her step by awful
step towards her death
(like seed that falls on impervious stuff
and not on soil),
she feels betrayed.
(published in the Australian Poetry Journal, volume 5, issue 1, July 2015)
Between
Today I can grieve. Slung like an eye
between two centuries.
Years like poultices.
I think of shadows as indulgences
we tried not to get lost in.
Better to follow the slant of a transitory light.
Your smile when it came was so deep
your head fell back when you laughed.
All the shadows were behind you.
(published in the The Hunter Writers Centre Anthology, Grieve, Australia, 2016)
Conversion
I went to the sea to be like the sea.
And because I was thinking in whispers,
because I was talking to myself
in one hundred tiny ways
about insects,
listening to the earth
with my feet, kissing the ground
with my pale
insteps, wanting,
somehow,
to be green,
became
like grass.
The idea of snow
Imagine a scene – one that begins with a glance
as if a poet was looking out a window at something discreet
of which the main ingredient was the meal
and snow
the most exotic element of a dish
towards which she’s leading us the trace of it
so heavily concealed and mysterious
you have to imagine how a woman might
lean forward
and with a long and deliberately slow hand
cast out her spice as if she was sowing
her mind’s tongue
and if you can’t discover it
imagine sumac and lime crusting the rim of the plate
like inclement weather
and imagine the salt
falling
thick
and
white
which is as close as the poet gets
– January, mid-summer Sydney,
and in her bikini.
(highly commended, O’Bheal 6th Five Words International Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2019)
The idea of snow (Youtube link)
i
So the light when it came was already exhausted
and the sky lay down like a blanket
the ocean was muttering
under its breath.
Two women stopped to ask me if ants had ears.
A native bee was working its wings
hard to remain stationary.
The sea kept coming and coming,
dreaming of the moon as a terrible white casket.
Three dogs, individually,
came to visit
and sat beside me, after which everything
began glittering.
ii
So when the new wing of the Museum
of Contemporary Art
in Sydney was a new thing
my sister saw it before I did
and told me
it looked like an orca
mating a giant corgi.
iii
There was a trill.
The way sometimes
a thing reveals itself but remains hidden.
I was focused on the waves
then on the canopy of the fig
both high and low enough to screen the sun
but not the hills.
Only the rock stayed as it was.
The trill was necessary for the soul
in lieu of certainty.
iv
Because the waves with their pointy hats
were like mountains.
That.
And the cormorant from up close as it flew
past from behind. As if I were the one driving
the warm cockpit.
v
Imagine light from a star
that has subsequently died
travelling all those light years to arrive
(how many millennia that would take)
only to be disappointed by cloud cover.
vi
The sound of two herons
greeting is another hour
that passes.
(The morning like a strange dessert.)
The shadow of the bird moves faster
than the bird.
Cicadas have gone to earth and won’t return
until the sun stops its love affair with Norway.
vii
There’s a poet I know dreaming
in his dark bed. Composing in his sleep
one room at a time
in praise of light.
That’s how it is.
One thing arrives because somewhere else
it has gone.
Morning gleams on the face
of the poet.
The late afternoon is waving her long arms.
The sun polishes the wings of a currawong
which flare like two lamps
at the very same time the casuarinas
which all morning have been shining
go dark.
(Finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2022)
In memoriam
The round body creeps
into the canopies
of the dark
gums
and lights finally
the sodden and felled
carcasses
and rootless grass.
Look!
The casuarinas are singing
oracles of light and whisk
their fine needles
until they’re spinning with celestial harmonies
until they’re like Catherine wheels or great halos
of fire.
Who knew casuarinas had the generosity of angels?
the balls of their roots like old giants who have grown
into their bones at last by staying
resolutely here.
Even felled they have gravitas –
it’s not for nothing
I use their fingers as bookmarks
(you can’t kill them – who burn
their songs like incendiaries
along the fine horizon
of poems).
(Published in the ACU Poetry Prize Anthology Chapbook 2020)
Bow side
What was it I saw
sinking its head in the night
like a slow body
so quietly
I shivered
Which never resurfaced
Not a brim
not one single
finger
or toe
though I stayed with the image
long after I arrived home
and all the time
I was cooking the leg
of the chicken
And later still
watching the pricked skin
of the creek
as it rained
. . .
(Shortlisted, Dermot Healy International Poetry Award, Ireland, 2017)
Vanishing point
because it’s 8 am
already
because the din the cicadas have raised
is a blunt carriage
because the sun hasn’t yet risen
over the hill
(because)
I’m vanishing:
my attention
transfixed by an image —
sound as landscape
in perpetuity
(the elevated pitch of even the smallest
driven insects
staking their claim
their future prospects) —
the way Hokusai’s wave
still hoists him up
towards
infinity
…
(Shortlisted, Henry Kendall Poetry Award, Australia, 2017 )
My initiation into poetry began in 2012 via a creative writing workshop with the Australian poet Mark Tredinnick. This was followed by several other poetry workshops with Mark Tredinnick, Judith Beveridge, Martin Langford and Deb Westbury.
After more than three decades as a visual artist I was not expecting to be overtaken by such an overwhelming hunger to immerse myself into a new creative practice.
For a period of nearly three years writing became my most constant practice. It was only after three years of juggling art and writing that I managed to find a happy balance between the two.
497 small disappointments
My dear cell follicles,
I apologise for keeping you
in suspense for so long
and for any false promises my body proffered.
For not granting you the long-lived opportunity
to leave home. For the inconvenience
of being
perpetually on hold. Also,
for not having considered how easily
the long trajectory of the past (the undocumented
lineage of lovers) would be lost. Their scent
gone cold,
like old blood.
Today, I apologise for the inconvenience
you had in being on time, every month
without exception; congratulate you
in the face of such stoicism:
497 minor disappointments
released without rancour
into the dark.
If I think of you it’s as imaginary
pearls —
impotent jewels
cradled in the safe
harbour of my fortified canals.
Did you try out names for size?
Slip on gender and disposition like so many
well-fitting jeans. Lie in my warm salts
dreaming of the infinite
bath. David, Sonia, Pedro,
Sally?
When the waves of blood stopped coming,
did you weep? Will we keep company
until the dead end of the road? Eggs?
Are you still speaking to me?
Are any of you still here?
(Sincerely),
Yours
(Winner of the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, USQ, QLD, 2016
Published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2017)
An awful hush
It wasn’t the repetitive click of the keyring
still swinging from the dash
or the shift of the song to a minor key
on the car radio. It wasn’t the slow beat
of the drums or the drip of oil as it leaked
from the bonnet in a slick stream.
It was the awkward camber of the wheel
as it lay half out of the snowdrift, almost
floating, and the gesture of the child, the slack
fingers resting so casually on snow,
as if to suggest she was only sleeping.
shortlisted, O’Bheal Five Words International Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2016)
Currawong:
Say it aloud and you have a name that stays
at the back of your throat –
as if it were a song inside you
as if you had become the bird.
Say it twice and you have the beginning of a lament
as if the curving beak were a blade
beside you urging you to pierce
the sombre membrane of the night.
Would you have courage enough to prick the dumb fabric
dawn is making
to raise the yellow threads of sunlight
every morning that you live?
I would gladly leave the Currawongs bring the dawn in
who hold their charge before them like a torch.
Can you hear them? Every morning
singing in the day.
(special mention, Welsh Poetry competition, 2013 )
Not even landscape with its cordial trees...
How many times, looking towards
whichever bay it is
I’ve been drawn to, casting myself out
across the horizon
held aloft by this or that
particular bird (today a flycatcher
suspended above the River Derwent
singing out its heart
on a wire)
watching a tree teased out of its trunk
by the acute sun, its shadow
like spun wool
drawn off a spindle that won’t stop
being pulled,
thinking I can stop the inevitable
fall
back in my bone.
Falling, of course,
the bird long since
gone
all the feathered lengths
my head went to
shot down
at dusk.
(published in the Cordite Poetry Review, August, 2017)
What ear sees, eyes can’t say
I close my eyes.
This, so I have the hillside beside me sculpted
in decibels.
A rooster’s chisel throat
carving out
the shape of a vineyard
also
a woman
(the long association ear has
with memory)
lines of clothes flapping
around her
like inherited chooks.
Rows and rows of Pinot Noir dream themselves
into their full bodies
each ascending crow of the cock
shaping histories. More than eyes can say
from this distance.
(The pie on the sill. The wine
in the chicken.)
An anonymous twittering so precise
my mind’s fingers trace the shape
of acacias
across the pricked braille of ecstatic notes
and landscape the garden.
This, ear does.
With one sharp cry hands me an ocean, a lament
on one pitch.
Gifts me the cracked rocks
with mussels in it.
Their black hearts.
And all the salt and rubbery embrace of the bed
of the kelp.
There’s brine on the gull’s breath.
Something like sadness
articulates the jagged
coast
between here
and the point:
my ear is the melancholic and introverted
counterpart to my impressionable eyes.
It hasn’t been seduced
by worldly things. And likes to mix its joy
with grief.
And loves to cry.
(highly commended ACU Poetry Prize, Australia, 2017)
White rabbits
A shaft of sunlight falls diagonally
in front of us
across the corridor.
He points towards it.
Look, he whispers,
transfigured by the sight,
as if he too were full of light. Look!
But all I see is how meagre the light is.
How it cuts through the antiseptic glass
of the nursing home window
like a razor, slicing through curtains,
bleeding
onto the mean
linoleum.
He looks up at me then, his face alight,
the subversive fire still burning in his eyes
after all these years.
And I am full of wonder,
not of the light,
but of him.
The wardens patrol the corridors
looking for fires
to put out.
But the inmates are wily—
they hide their fires in the corners
of their gowns and wedge them down
the sides of their chairs:
the sick and the frail, still capable
of remembering their lives
bigger than the reduction
perpetrated here.
The wardens have been hired for the size
of their hands.
They know how to put out fires—
they’ve been trained with the bare minimum
of their wage. They know how
to strangle rabbits.
But my love is a magician
and pulls his rabbits from thin air.
(3rd Place, ACU Poetry Prize, Australia, 2013)
The Red Kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway
They stay with me now like fallen gods—
the red kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway.
Look how they stroke the air with their hands
one last time, their feet like two spears rip open
the horizon as if they would carve themselves
a place in the cosmos.
Their staring eyes steal back the distance between us
until I want to stop and kneel at their feet.
Compelled by the appalling grace
that survives them
and make my amends before the birds
take their eyes.
(3rd prize, Rolf Boldrewood Poetry Prize, Australia, 2017)
Like seed that falls
there’s so much innocence left in the woman
of the young girl
who dreams of what she never had
and sees
through the magnification of salt
as though through diamonds
how casually
love is handed out but not to her.
Only later, watching how her body leads
her step by awful
step towards her death
(like seed that falls on impervious stuff
and not on soil),
she feels betrayed.
(published in the Australian Poetry Journal, volume 5, issue 1, July 2015)
Between
Today I can grieve. Slung like an eye
between two centuries.
Years like poultices.
I think of shadows as indulgences
we tried not to get lost in.
Better to follow the slant of a transitory light.
Your smile when it came was so deep
your head fell back when you laughed.
All the shadows were behind you.
(published in the The Hunter Writers Centre Anthology, Grieve, Australia, 2016)
Conversion
I went to the sea to be like the sea.
And because I was thinking in whispers,
because I was talking to myself
in one hundred tiny ways
about insects,
listening to the earth
with my feet, kissing the ground
with my pale
insteps, wanting,
somehow,
to be green,
became
like grass.
The idea of snow
Imagine a scene – one that begins with a glance
as if a poet was looking out a window at something discreet
of which the main ingredient was the meal
and snow
the most exotic element of a dish
towards which she’s leading us the trace of it
so heavily concealed and mysterious
you have to imagine how a woman might
lean forward
and with a long and deliberately slow hand
cast out her spice as if she was sowing
her mind’s tongue
and if you can’t discover it
imagine sumac and lime crusting the rim of the plate
like inclement weather
and imagine the salt
falling
thick
and
white
which is as close as the poet gets
– January, mid-summer Sydney,
and in her bikini.
(highly commended, O’Bheal 6th Five Words International Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2019)
The idea of snow (Youtube link)