Poems with images

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the top floor of the old building,

in a room with a grand piano

(and a notice: Don’t touch piano),

I was about to photograph a painting

of her Country by a Western Desert artist,

when my phone died, which was strange:

it had been fully charged.

The incident reminded me of those

golden ellipses that hid the door

to the shrine of Kali in Patan Durbar Square

when we tried to photograph that.

Later, on the print, there they were:

a hint from the goddess, who is

always dancing, with her necklace of skulls.

So there I was: no camera,

no way to write sensitive responses—

just me and the art.

I worked my way round the walls

of that ceremonious room,

high-ceilinged, with four thrones

on a dais at one end, until I reached

the drawings by David Nolan (Wiradjuri):

stuff on shelves, corners of his cell,

a couple of views from the prison windows,

the toilet he used to do

1000 step-ups every day.

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.

This is sturdy shelving

in a blue cavern or the cathedral

of an orderly-minded god who puts

creation in livery: orange, brown,

a small suite of compatible colours.

And what do the shelves hold?

Several boats bearing cones of ice-cream,

half a pie-chart that wants to be a bar-graph,

a robot doffing its helmet,

two terminals of a battery, both positive,

and many other things, but all in the same

restrained colours: red, light-green, khaki.

Up where the dragons live

in a kind of treehouse

above the livid sun,

streamers fly (it’s windy).

One dragon, scratching its back

on a girder, eats a rainbow;

the other flies away on stripy wings.

The treehouse has a fold-out tray

of things to eat, dragon things.

A strong wind has caught the balloon,

stretching it, sweeping it skyward,

escorted by two spermatozoa

and a long worm with coloured segments;

while a little comet dives the other way.

A blue bird stands sentinel, proud,

puff-chested, holding its banner high;

two serrated arrows are its sight-lines.

A smaller bird admires it.

In this land inhabited by cats,

lightning cracks across the mountain range

to strike the deep blue sea.

Three rivers flow from north to south;

two of them red, and one of these

ends in a little pipe.

The cats have built many roads,

all parallel. They’re troubled by

a bloated shadow thing that walks

on shadow legs from the east:

that’s why their whiskers bristle so