swan reach

this is a long poem written as a university exercise some time ago. it describes a riverside town in sa as experienced by the greater community of beings - the trees, the birds, the river.

swan reach  

 

swan reach is an empty town. 

inside the houses there are high skies of quiet air,

of wide, wan light and silent listening;

wide miles between their doors

for the slow swing of the wind and glide of time

and the way away cry of a crow.

 

the punt brings heavy loads of packed cars

 at long weekends. the town is packed. 

you can’t get into the shop; it’s packed

with the people from town and their kids

and they’re stuffing themselves.

all the weeks they spend in town stuffing themselves,

their heads with noise and their minds with news,

and then they come here and empty out into the town.

 

after they’ve gone we clean up.

our hands in the wan light on our cold kitchen tables

roll up the peels and the pods and the shells 

and the rinds and the cold teabags

all rolled up in newspaper and we throw them away.

 

the newspapers never fill our heads.

we breathe in the news with one breath, 

we go out on the step

and we breathe it all out

in one long slow slide of the breeze,

way, way away across the bluebush,

way, way away across the limestone,

way, way away over the horizon

till it breaks on the sandhills out bakara way.

 

hissing among the spinifex,

catching in the spear grass plumes,

and the lizards go shimmering through the news of the world

and you’re empty again,

so there’s space in your head for the flying cries of schoolyard kids

coming in through the wan, white waft of the curtains

along with the light and the air and the limestone breeze

and the smell of the river mud.

 

our hands rake up the questions and the curses,

and the diseases and the fossil griefs

and unpleasant masses of no sense and mad sense

and our fingers flick up the insults and epithets into dunes

and we cup them into pyramids with our palms

and slide them off the laminex into our hands.

we brush them off onto the paper,

we roll them up, we throw them away,

then we wash our hands under the tap.

 

then we stand for a while on the step and the sun shines through us

the air enters our bodies and the light  of day which is brighter now 

is in the cavities between our hips

and the wide aeons of blue sky between our ribs.

 

and look! the sun is laughing.

light shoots from it like fat spat from a frying pan!

watch out for the ricochet when that big truck off the punt just now,

turning,

catches us in the eye -

fat spat from a frying pan mirror-full of the fried egg sun

right in our eye. ha ha! what a joke! 

right in our eye from the blue sky which is in our bodies

over the slow wide and empty grey slide of the river

between the high yellow cliffs of our pelvises!

 

with the sun in our eyes laughing we call hallo to each other

with voices like creek beds strewn with oolites

and with voices like the flow of galah over the galvanised

and with voices like the raspberry jam on our toast

and with voices like crows’ voices: hallaaaaaaaooooooooooooooooooo

to each other out on our steps watching the punt laughing

with our heads empty and our hearts empty

and our hands empty and our souls empty

 

and we’re ready cathedrals every day for the trucks and birds

and for the slow slide of brown snakes underneath saltbushes

in the hollow donga of our empty bellies.

 

see the mallee now, drinking up the news of the world,

the bright scraps of fame

and the obscure sense-rich spiricles of deep enquiry,

writing the plausible prayers of emporiums

and the spruiking prayers of manufacturers

and the boasts of big businesses

and the whole desperate push of cripples round the pool

and the deep important chortles of the journalisms

and the light, gay pastel-coloured laughter

of the homes and careful gardens

in small grey lines

through the cream and grey and lavender parchment of her bark,

and layering their implications in the chasms of her burnt and crusted bole,

articulating their unwritten supplications

in the wishing hands her branches are becoming.

 

o you people, you soft, walking wood, my leaves are words.

your news i have been taking up in sentencefuls

in newspaperfuls, in whole townfuls,

sucking it soft , sighing, and sugaring it in my wood

into climbing tears which i shed for you,

o you pink-armed fingers at your cool kitchen tables

and you laughing trucks coming off punts

and your schoolyard yells, o town,

as leaves, each one a word

 

and they are all the same word,

too articulate for anybody to say

and too uncompromisingly intelligible for anyone to bear 

and too wishing-to-be-heard for any crow, raven or jay to ignore.

the scientific leaf, a pattern of thin spinnings

wherein howl hauling tides and all the newspaper tidings

and wherein sparkle mysterious starry spaces.

and the crowding leaves covered the nest from the sky.

this is the edge of the town’s fear.

it is thick, like water. 

i lean my wings upon the thick skin of fear. 

i beat my wings against the town’s obesity. 

i am repulsed.

i’m not let in. 

the scraps are all wrapped up where i can’t go.

but believe this, o souls of empty sky and tidal time,

my heart’s an angel’s heart like yours,

and loves.

 

o eerie, eerie souls, we elbow out our envelope of fear.

we do roll up the scraps. 

we push our bellies out as far as out can be against you, crows,

to make our town a thick resistingness

against you and the ravens and the jays.

 

magpies we welcome in, because they sing descriptively

the curves of their prey,

the tan and russet lustre of wasp’s wings,

the navy centipede,

the earwigs’ sepia shine

and the cockroach’s carapace,

their molecular fragrances,

their elegant venoms,

and their finely structured fear.

 

they’re welcome in the river

gums, their nests are there.  their songs

dart and tumble under the laughing

sun like fish in the river, or

like fishing shags.  their songs are

sweet honeys of great delicacy.

 

i am all the day the morning’s melodies made in their throats

carved from raw sound by their stiff, sharp-edged tongues.

i engulf everything, then:

the grey mechanic spits out valves,

whistles loudly,

rolls a tyre across my concrete floor;

the two fat girls serve truckies off my punt pies and cokes

in my refrigerated green and purring shop;

the woman doubts her empty body’s breath

and sweeps the empty doubts out of my kindy room

in my church hall

within my eloquent magpie-melody curves.

i am a welcome song, truly i am!

 

the river draws all oceans in the tiding’d tides

all down its massive weighty wake,

all solemn in its deep, withdrawing greys

and the light laughed down from my melodic sky

in my deep-rivered song

 and yellow-cliffed and broadly landscaped world,

spinifexed and malleed  beneath the bright, laughing weather

in the swaying cavern of my walking hips

and sun-hearted heaven held lightly

in the cradling fingers of my ribs.

i walk quickly, cradling my four letters

for the mailman in his white van

just now off the punt

in the caging ribs my fingers make.

 

laughing i turn up a lubra face i borrowed from a river gum

with a face as high as a man

that watches the mechanic every day

and the kindy and the church

and notice that the mailman is a pelican

and the wide, heavy heaving wisdoms of the weighty waters

are his wake.

 

harnessed like a team

to twenty thousand centuries of water,

he is gliding with supreme good humour.

he is the river’s gliding and its glide.

his heart is lightly laughing and there glimmers in his sunny eyes

the pelican’s fastidious disdain,

its consequence,

its solid mathematics

and its oh so supple structures under water

and its still more subtle structures in the air.

 

many pelicans are weaving our aeons wide wakes

and being our wake-woven rivers

and carving yellow cliffs majestically into ancient ocean floors

 

which are still visited by tumultuous tides

which we breathe out every morning

from our sunny steps.

 

the high, exploding wave of the mail van

packed with the leaves of the rich full trees of life deep under,

writing their tearsful of dense ordeal and earning,

breaks onto the foaming hiss and chuckle-threaded throb

of our still-dinosaured shore.

the purring, plundering suck of its ebb back over the punt

with our rib-caged and finger-cradled,

vast-skied and wide-beached,

thinly thinking and slowly hearing

empty spaces now in the back of the van,

 

leaves us silver-brindled and sand-ribbed

with the day-long swathe of a golden beach

between our dawn and dusk

and the years-long reach of the bright river

between our births and our deaths

and the blue sparkling ocean wave of time

between the first yearn of a passionate molecule at the beginning of life

and the meticulous management of unimaginable forests

whose atoms are galaxies,

whose cells are cosmoses,

cradling each one its own big bang in its carefully carrying hands,

its rivers too discoverable to seek,

its lizarded and birded land too inevitable to worship,

that will have come to be

 

when our ancient chemicals’ lusts have been cherished and gratified

from hand to hand and from age to age

in the exploding waters on the wide-awake beaches,

in the glide of pelicans on rivers,

in the laughter of river gum lubras

in the wisdom of truckies on punts,

in the tears of articulate trees,

in the stuffed city stuffing itself,

the flowering of the high and faraway future of this life

of which we are the veins.

 

a mile from town,

on two azolla-rich and willow-drenched lagoons,

several swans generate a medicinal geometry of intersecting rings. 

their feathers are thrillingly black.

their wings are edged with white.

their beaks are red.

 

Author's Note

i got a HD for this when i was at deakin university in the mid 90s. the man marking it is a distinguished australian poet. yet i think some parts sound a little strained, are some lines a bit jejeune or laboured? what do you think?