Poems with images

The world’s breaking up under its blue moon,

which, wrapped in a red corona,

has come a little too close.

Is it skyscrapers rising

to nudge that mournful satellite,

or are they slices, tectonic,

excised by the curved black saw?

Monocular beings are busy,

one playing a keyboard,

the other guarding the eggs.

Hokusai Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji

Always the mountain

witnessing

serene

jaunty in its white cope

a potentate

dreaming

while people struggle on

uncaring

dignified

it pops up here and there

inside the round of a barrel

or under a bridge

between propped woodyard planks

admired

forgotten

as now when these sailors are rowing

for their lives

up the slope of the great wave.

I’m not sure you intended

this as a self-portrait

of the Old Man of the Sea,

bearded with weed, barnacled,

bleeding tides and currents.

The figure’s stance is patient,

observational, as though

waiting to be trawled up;

or is it else a diver, bearing what

even full fathom five must be

some weight of helmet; or just maybe

your own massive head in age,

teeming with blue-green thoughts,

an oceanic dreaming?

See, there’s the eye-piece

like a deep blue hole.

After the death bed.

After brain death.

After the machines are turned off

or maybe a cleaner unplugs them

to run the floor polisher.

After the funeral, where everyone wonders

if they should have worn something darker

or lighter, or a touch of colour—

maybe a splash of red;

where the slideshow seems interminable

unlike the life it illustrates:

holidays, drinking, graduations,

arms around shoulders, kisses to cheeks,

big dead fish proudly displayed.

After the words at the grave,

the lowering of the coffin on canvas straps,

the rattle and thump of clay goodbyes;

after the grave is filled

by a purple mini-digger, and tamped,

and resown with fast-growing seed.

After the flowers have wilted

and been replaced, and wilted again,

and are no longer replaced.

After everyone has gone on with their lives

and grief has grown muted,

then intermittent, then occasional,

then ceases altogether, leaving only

happy selected memories fading.

After the flesh has nourished so many

small grateful beings and is dispersed

and the coffin, as coffins are made to do,

has collapsed and become one with the soil.

After all this has gone on,

the skull on its pillow of earth

is dreaming this beautiful flower,

this lily spotted like a leopard.

After the painting by Grace Cossington Smith

In my back garden I have science fiction:

two giant iron centipedes rearing to kiss

or fight? or remnants of a past civilization,

purpose unknown—maybe loftily to worship

the sky that breaks in waves of indigo

over a dingy Depression city skyline,

a ferry glimpsed between two piers.

Grace, you showed us this,

only to be ignored by critics

who knew that women artists paint

the little things, domesticity, flowers,

leaving big public statements, Futurism

to brash young men.  They might

have tolerated Sock knitters (1916).

Now it hangs on a national wall,

holding its own with Nolan, Williams.

This is Sydney, you tell us, a city

where anything can happen—

an old house brushed past by

rusted iron brontosauri

who are trying to eat the sun.