II

          my ideas
seem only his, amusingly
          my suit fits him like a glove
my tongue snared
by his taste for the trashtalk of Vegas

          in him I see all the disasters
of an offended love
          but I’ll take his fingers
surprising my eyes, rattling my teeth
remembering how small I pack into luggage

III

          imagine if he knew how I practised?
how if I spoke, he might shiver
          as a sign uncertainly blinks –
he would be surprised by my elegance
and I would correct his grammar

          his mispronunciation
of Curaçao and the phrase noblesse oblige
          I think I might have spoken
once, of my own accord –
the smallest sound, a protest
          lost, almost before beginning

          a voice echoing against ochre rocks
my mouth a dark casino
closed

IV

          should one make so many verses
when a single sortie into sound would do?
          am I a barnyard
searching for an echo?
a voice – and its hypothesis?

          one day I’ll choose a landscape
perhaps a stretch of river
          tall cornfields, cobs ripening on a Sunday –
I’ll hunch my shoulders against the wind
and lean into the ribs of a hill

          sometimes the sun is so smooth
you can sleep for a while, holding on

Man on the Moon
by Stephen Edgar

Hardly a feature in the evening sky
As yet – near the horizon the cold glow
Of rose and mauve which, as you look on high,
Deepens to Giotto’s dream of indigo.

Hardly a star as yet. And then that frail
Sliver of moon like a thin peel of soap
Gouged by a nail, or the paring of a nail:
Slender enough repository of hope.

There was no lack of hope when thirty-five
Full years ago they sent up the Apollo –
Two thirds of all the years I’ve been alive.
They let us out of school, so we could follow

The broadcast of that memorable scene,
Crouching in Mr Langshaw’s tiny flat,
The whole class huddled round the TV screen.
There’s not much chance, then, of forgetting that.

And for the first time ever I think now,
As though it were a memory, that you
Were in the world then and alive, and how
Down time’s long labyrinthine avenue

Eventually you’d bring yourself to me,
With no excessive haste and none too soon –
As memorable in my history
As that small step for man onto the moon.

How pitiful and inveterate the way
We view the paths by which our lives descended
From the far past down to the present day
And fancy those contingencies intended,

A secret destiny planned in advance
Where what is done is as it must be done
For us alone. When really it’s all chance
And the special one might have been anyone.

The paths that I imagined to have come
Together and for good have simply crossed
And carried on. And that delirium
We found is cold and sober now and lost.

The crescent moon, to quote myself, lies back,
A radiotelescope propped to receive
The signals of the circling zodiac.
I send my thoughts up, wishing to believe

That they might strike the moon and be transferred
To where you are and find or join your own.
Don’t smile. I know the notion is absurd,
And everything I think, I think alone.

Ubirr Rock
by Mark Tredinnick

This story e can listen careful …
This story e coming through you body …
Tree … yes.
That story e listen

       Bill Neidjie, ‘Laying Down’

For Bill Neidjie

The world is not the place you thought you knew,
And you, like her, are much more than you seem.
A place on earth is what it makes of you.

Along the scarp a story’s listening out
For you, and who can say who told it first:
The world is not the place you thought you knew.

On your way up, you study the petroglyphs,
The burrowing bees; you ask them what they mean.

But a place on earth is what it makes of you.

The floodplain tastes like fire; it looks like rain.
The wind’s turning blue – the Wet’s coming clattering home.
And the world’s just not the place you thought you knew.

And who you really are is how you’re known
To everything else – the light, the stone – that’s here.
Because a place on earth is what it makes of you.

You turn and find you’re not alone – the tree
Is dancing the afternoon and singing you this:
The world is not the place you thought you knew;
A place on earth is what it makes of you.

Kakadu, 3 December 2004

Storm
by Maria Takolander

Dreams don’t happen like this,
Although we think they should,

The earth giving in, flattening
To the darkness, the storm

Fattening, blacking like squid.
It creates its own space,

This petit mal, this little night,
With a need as vast as that

Of the beginning of time.
It may be true we don’t deserve this,

Our earthly things reduced
To shadows we dream

Things from: the firs, the stooks,
The fence posts – none belong.

They don’t belong.
Yet we’ve always waked and slept

When the sky says we should,
Like birds and monkeys,
Abandoning the world,
Evening after evening,

With each noiseless revolution,
To the secrets of insects and bats.

Each morning we find
Something changed:

Something added –
A shift in the soil,

The sibilance of grass.
After rain, there are snails,

Startling as hailstones.
But always less remains.

And we’re left with this hurting,
As if in the darkness

Or the infant light
We might have seen

The ocean as it really is
Or god.

Headgear (a review)
by Sandra Hill

                                                ( Ho Chi Minh City 1995)                  

The tropical pith helmet in its post-colonial form is solid
            cardboard, moulded to shape, dyed olive green,
                                                                and reinvented
                                 as revolutionary icon
to grace the heads of millions of men here –
                                                                    and though,
like the bicycle, soon to be eclipsed once more by global trends
                         (car exhaust fumes and baseball caps)
                                                                        for now,
this superior basin –
                       which to foreign eyes might read as pure satire –
is worn by workers everywhere              
                                              with no trace of irony –
                        a stylish and straightfaced appropriation.

The same could be claimed for the baggy cap with bright tartan
           strips, cute peak, and clusters of fabricated flowers,
a statement favoured by fashionable girls
                                 when riding their motor scooters
teamed up with the traditional ao dai dress in pure polyester
  plus                 (quoting from the Saigon era)
         long slinky satin evening gloves on slender outstretched arms
            – to protect honeybrown skin from darkening in the sun –
and        while the references speak volumes,
                                  the cheerful aesthetics are much louder
      (postmodernism having not yet spawned             
                                              to colonise the scene into serious
selfconsciousness).

With its political gold star, the red peaked cap is heavily backed
with a kind of history that’s officially heroic but
                            (except for star badges on the military
                                              in their uniform dull greens)
          in these latest renovations
the locals don’t seem to buy it –
                         prefer Western text, displayed across the chest.
                                                                                    .
Simple – and most elegant of all – the traditional conical hat
                                           made from dried reeds,
             its form –   analytic and aesthetic –
                                                      shaped over centuries;
for these modern citydwellers, however,
                                   its exquisite geometry and clever utility
                                are coloured by peasant origins and they just
               won’t wear it –
so this classical beauty appears mainly in rice paddies
                                                                and postcards
         set against emerald green and blue horizons         or
on the heads of country girls         in the city for the day
                        selling fruit from loaded baskets along the streets
or the anomalous heads
                                  of outsized Western tourists
(and occasionally on the Parisian catwalk,
                                                    – seductive and enigmatic –
when simulations of The East are back in vogue).

But then – being fair – when is a hat not also a selective outlook –
                                  chosen to match the whole outfit –
          a fellow traveller to protect, announce or disguise –
                                 (always destined in the long run for the op shop
  of history);
                          and I include myself, of course – with this headgear
I’ve brought along for the ride
           and to which, for the present, I’m closely attached –
                         shades of urban grit              lined with green silk
             the broad adjustable brim offset by bright bunches
                                                      of thesaurus;
part creation, part proposition
                              it might sound impractical
            but seems to work in most places – like the weather
  or a capability – adapting to shifting latitudes and terrain, assuming
nothing –      a useful cover when travelling through the age
                                                                         of outraged hats.

Even so, nowadays in this climate, I find it useful to remind
     myself that
                      although appearing well suited to occasions
   of all sorts    (parties   funerals  sermons    battling other elements)
                 my hat needs more than string or gravity to hold it in place      
 because
            while the weight and pleasures of the hat are real         
        a hat is        after all    just a hat   –
               a designer’s whim             artefact with attitude
         sporting its broken words or dislocated phrases
                                   (like a language poet unburdened by meaning          
     or an advertisement with images flying loosely from the brim);
and also             
            a hat makes a lot more sense         on a head         
but not a dummy head in a shopping window    nor an acid head      
   not even one of those heads –    (symbolic – conceptual –
            classical – romantic) –        that occupy so much territory
  in museums, books etc – but on a rather unbeautiful
                                                        human head –                             
a head not trapped in the dead end tautologies
      of conceptual fashion but alive to the world –       a frail
                   miracle of an engine –      
              firing with surges of raw emotion and the critical process
                                                                             of thought
      with its slightly asymmetrical features
                                                                always open to revision,
like – caught offguard – the look on my face
                                                       that I can hardly believe –
      the mirror image           (revealing far more than I’d realised)
                     both destabilising yet                      unifying the subject
anew in my eyes.

‘Low at the edge of the sands’*
by Kevin Gillam

they told me I wouldn’t find you
yet I find you everywhere.
when you spoke; value of flotsam,
the quick note, calicoed thievery.
now this, weedy seadragon, lifted
from a mizzled island,
body of curves, a question mark.
and I’m in memory’s spume,
your stooped body no less questioning,
no less colourful, sinewy, then brittling.
perhaps (not a word you employed much,
always more percussive than perhaps)
you were to page as this was to reef.
a traveller, strong sense of home,
untroubled at not being understood.
they told me of white ants,
slow truth of bone.
in this fraught wind-whipped
weather, the distinction between
sea and sky not clear.
I am stilled talking to water
for you spoke in a clutter of tongues,
religion of purpose,
never rain but spiderings of drizzle,
sudden applause on tin,
drenchings of man and map.
this dragon too, a salt-infused fiction
of instinct and need,
unfurled for a last time,
plot laid bare.
in thin dreams of meadowgrass
you both feeding, being.
I am humbled, in soft focus,
sifting word and kelp from brine
though language, like your
rainbowed skin bleeding
through my fingers
seeks the familiarity of now.
was it time
or the diseased sea?
I am still talking to water.
they said it would be so

* from ‘Clever and Pretty’, by Elizabeth Jolley