‘The world is all that is the case.’
Wittgenstein
but not a newsfeed, not really...
A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
When the termites swarm over dry tracts
after sudden wet, after deluge, after the rise
of moisture mocks the dryness and threatens
caltrop as the only viable greenery, they –
winged termites – reconfigure locality,
at least for the shake of their wings,
such casual attachments to limbs,
quick to shed as the pheromones
are dished out – flight is not
as wonderful in itself, these crappy
flappers who will chance upon the best
outcome, from ground from nest to lovely
rotten wood surface ripe for mastication
and digestion and a new colony. It’s
not wonderful being inside the bad joke,
but the act of experiencing and telling
is – in the circumstances – a display
of the joke being on one’s self.
A termite isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
What’s left after the swarmers
have expended their moment, when
heat has set in to sap the dry, is the event
of black house ants removing wings
and the deceased from window frames.
It would be carnage but it’s really
a ‘clean-up’, and we overinvest
our role, having a householder’s say.
Irony is the radar showing a storm
where there is none and failing to warn
when one comes down like endgame.
A poor workman blames the tools?
This technology of experience, of setting
out to set roots anew, a conflict of tenses.
But wow, seriously, things are burgeoning –
where out of the months of dry, out of ashen air,
has all this life come? Praying mantises,
dwarf skinks, gerygones, all ecstatic and meticulous
in the frenzy of flying termites: the coming
out that is cataclysm and wonder, and I’ve
nothing meaningful to add other than, Hey,
we too are overwhelmed by water – drinking,
washing, soul-soothing water. Even erosion
can be a terraforming in the novelty,
and old scripts recycled to make new sense.
A bird isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
A heavy rustling outside – I expect
a monitor but it is a heavily pregnant
bobtail swaying side to side as it sweeps past,
that deft and heavy-slow quickness, that extra-
curricular knowledge and fine-tuned awareness
to other observers – immersion, frequency,
everyday familiarity. Knowledge systems
at variance, at synch when necessary
for those on the ground? Semantics
can mess up the description but not
the allegiances, the vast memory
of experience: ticks under scales,
in ears, clustered, and yet the moisture
is stirring the shaping of organs, fast. Consciousness
is the vast release of energy consuming galaxies.
A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun
and nor is an animal or plant, or the earth,
so that leaves objects made to be admired,
and we are none of these. It’s an echo of the crux
of a praying mantis’s front legs, the mimicry
of its capturing. Such blanks in ontology
are links in the conveyer belt, the rare earths
of storage that lies about time, about species.
What motifs grab the crags of speech, settle
in the softest places of the mouth, flicked
by the tongue? Turn the sound down on one
of the three television stations you can still
receive – there is no intention to update
technology – and in the lip-synch dropout,
in the delay between shout and sound,
the grark! then sound off and picture
staggering along, to listen to the grark
graark...rrrrrrrrr....rrrrr...grark...grark...
of the owlet nightjar, super-audible despite
the terrifyingly high easterlies that mock
all the labour and exploitation and hype
that went into making that movie...nightjar
perusing same locale as usual – by the great
tank now recharged up to the algal-leak eye,
the visionary crack that brings spiritual
clarity in its pragmatic outcomes: daybirds
often gather to drink in the eminence of heat
of concrete walls, the friable air, but do nightjars
venture there in the way we hear them make
contact with windows and flyscreens, picking
off swarmers and solitary insects drawn
to the artificial light? Recurrence is not motif,
but maybe I compensate for the lake of channels,
the flawed vision, the disrupted soundtracks?
No, it’s always been like this: it’s my birdbrain
reaching out to voice other perspectives,
but them being little to do with flight or feeding.
An owlet nightjar isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
To whom and why in the spread so many deny,
the address to a fallen tree they felled indirectly,
to the house settling where the swamp was
excavated? Each degree, each distraction –
the sun overwhelms and holds our senses
as source and aim of our apostrophes,
arrangement of song we are swept
away by. It’s glib in the recording studio
if the noise of commerce can’t be accounted
for, cancelled out. These textures of visible song,
mostly felt through the skin, but also as idea
of bird and word, the having been there, experienced.
All lucked out, something like ‘atrabilious’
and the egg-kick of the cuckoo can add up
into a compulsion to augment our murmurs.
A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
Please don’t think this any less hallowed
or holy for the secular nest, for the lack
of role-players in costumes leant by restraints –
here there are doses of belief that don’t fit
and run against sap, making claims
that ruffle the feathers of birds losing
their mates, or corella flocks brought down
from the skies, scattered bloody over paddocks.
A corella isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
I can’t give you anything and I can’t take
anything from you, objective corellative: cloudy,
it burns harder and deeper and the search
for a cure gains pace: out of love of one another,
and for profit. The rub, just as thunder and lightning
is made, tilts entire agglomerations of people
towards a solitary figure in a field, on a mountain,
staring into a chasm. Volcanoes ring the edges,
fiery even in extinction. From a land of conflagration.
You don’t get to write about termite galleries
once and move on, unless you’ve saturated
the world in toxins so deadly they measure presence
in decades centuries maybe in a sense forever.
So I get outside and clear along the front
of the house between path and slab – raking
away the leaf litter, letting mimetic grasshoppers
and praying mantises move away at their own
pace – quick hop, then hop back...scissor leg
anglepoise lamp posture to take me on, and I retreat
from the mantis, whose eyes consume me. Motifs,
refrains and that strong bloody wind agitating
dust and sand as I scrape away to keep the slab
above ground clear from a heavy swell, from tubes
for termite surfers to house consciousness,
to plan their galleries, to climb higher into walls
and the wood of books, the grotesque intrusion
of the written word, the picture plates, the facsimiles
of languages from the Mediterranean, ruins from
ancient Ireland, Sanskrit, Persian from Persepolis,
poems in exquisite calligraphy from the T’ang
Dynasty – all in this house perched on the side of a valley
where the eroded has been eroded further down
to consequence, to words of bodies and rocks,
where termites build across the divides making truth,
recycling, translating, transcribing, undoing, restating.
And also say, over, mimetic gumleaf grasshopper,
mimetic gumleaf grasshopper mimetic gumleaf.
A praying mantis isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
And then the sound of preta-conflagration
the sound of deathgrind the rain of sparks
the reign of terror the grinder on a summer’s
afternoon the wind to carry the embers of oblivion.
A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
In the breath of the world is the breath-destroyer
that should never have been – locked away in tissue,
prodded in labs, the level 4s that dot the planet
as distillations of hubris. There are many
manifestations of stockpiles and isolation,
but trade and travel won’t let anyone go:
humans traversing in machines is mass
death for animals. Birds chewed up in the sky.
The chokehold of smoke, of pollutants,
the failure of respiration as well treats
the sky-lungs as membranes we can pass
through and through and though. Impunity.
The unpleasant interruption to an idyll.
An animal isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
Wings everywhere – wings looking for their
matching partner, to pair, to make possibility
for renewal, redemption. To be taken on to lift
again, brown filaments, curved ends of a fan,
animal tissue leaves that flitter around if a page
is turned, a creature passes, stirring. Wings
everywhere, after the fact, gradually carted
away by ants of all sizes, taken back under-
ground in different circumstances, different
kinds of tunnels, different chambers – but still,
that earthy smell, that air so close and absent,
that spiracle to trachea that bloodless journey
of oxygen molecules under, under, and wings
of ants will form for nuptial days as well –
different wings, their wings, falling everywhere
from their bodies, their bodies made in part
at least from termite corpses collected from
the swarmers, the wing drop. Wings everywhere.
Heard a pied butcher bird at the limit of its range –
pushing its voice and its geography, pushing
mimicry to undo the patterns embedded in your
memory. How many times have we heard the pied
butcherbird around here? Not that many, not really.
It covered the rufous whistler, grey shrike-thrush,
magpie, and, approximated in a deeper voice, a gerygone!
The position of the sun in the sky – sun path – tilt –
arc – is the tuning fork which I notice is becoming
a characteristic of jam trees here – curved forks
enlichened, more than sharp isosceles, skinny triangles.
The curve that lures the pied butcherbird to test its range.
A pied butcher bird isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
Something scrabbling in the south-west corner
downpipe – a reptile unable to climb back up
to the gutter, the roof. Scrabbling. The only way
out given the shiny interior’s resistance to clawing,
is through the trap – the ground-level outpipe
for debris. I open it to air, and even in heat, sludge
of the storms spills out. I hope the reptile will
find release, escape. Otherwise it’s death and rot
and into the Great Tank to disperse amongst
the house water. House we occupy. I am fairly
sure it’s an ornate dragon, as we see them rarely
here and another is on shadecloth near the wall,
just down from the roof. Offspring...partner?
Ornate dragons colour and blend, favouring granite.
An ornate dragon isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
And out there for a full viewing for first time
since days of storms after drought and then high
hot winds from the east, I am dismayed to the point
of agony to find five old York gums brought down –
two to the base, another falling and uprooting another,
all the small hollows characteristic of termite-eaten
old York gums torn apart, and owlet nightjars lost.
It is the collapse of a city, the changing of time signature
here – yet again, yet again in profound way but never
as profound as the slicing up into lots, the making
of ‘Coondle’, the fencing and ‘opening’ for livestock.
There is no post-trauma, it is ongoing, and this felling
by distressed nature seems more than a caveat. Much more.
I cannot rewrite what has been rewritten, I am the vacancy
of a signature, an unofficial signing-off on the report.
A fallen York gum isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
Even out here it’s hard to believe people speak
of those ‘already ill or old’ as the bulk of the dead –
the hideous relegation of life to a table of stats,
to bracket creep of age. All roads lead to and from
a reassurance that consoles the numinous body,
the survivors, the Logan’s Run futurism,
the jolt of social media and dislikes dislikes!
A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
How can any ode remain immune to what
is going on around it – the spread and the fear.
And to thwart anxiety the bluffers deploy ‘panic’
as a weapon, as a tool of ostracism, rather
than working with empathy – take the
Easter lilies risen after the storms, and the first
opening of this ‘invader’ fallen fast, neck broken
by weighty bird or roo hopping past, but still
searching for the sun through the shade.
You could never set a clock by their appearance,
and now less than ever, but their appearance
shows the contraindications of a chronology
imposed on the land as if it’s immunity
to challenge, as if it was always going to be
this way – as if the Serenity Prayer
is the complete answer, whatever
the context. Don’t worry, it stays
with me, but it’s never infallible.
But I did notice in the warp of post-dawn,
amid grim stats of infection and bodycount
across the globe, a curve in the valley I’d never
really noticed before, and it was uplifting.
That an ongoing colonialism has bent ground
to its wants is not in question, but it’s not recent,
though a firebreak has been carved through
the depression and its rise, but I feel the upraised
palm gesture laid bare by clearing is something
deeper and of greater duration in its making,
and says something beyond survey-husbandry
and is a guide more expressive and less prescriptive
than ‘old-world new-world’ spatiality.
I pause and rest my gaze in the upturned palm,
the contour so close I had ignored without volition.
A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
An echidna has moved through and unearthed,
torn open, broken into the broken trees and dislodged
termite galleries, has supped deep into dying trunks.
Earth is jumbled moist to dry and crumble and reset.
An echidna has moved through the wing-fallout,
traced and broken open, extracted, reset, terraformed.
An echidna isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
No reflex in the making of this ark poem,
not moss quivering before the gnashing cut,
not now, but far back, or further back...but
pop-up forest in paddock already in agony
is different...different from (not ‘to’) old
growth persistence, distant, not seen out
this window and probably fewer and fewer
naturally occurring holes – tunnel vision
that blooms beyond cells of the human
brain, outside neural pathways, in the sap;
the resistance of moss on the ash trunk
in a growing realm of fire on fire on fire.
This intervention in composition, this drain
on power, this call for words fuelled as if
they answer and give more when they can’t.
And I weep looking out – here at point
of composition – at the breakage
of old trees, the swathe angling down
valley, reconfiguring Jam Tree Gully
which is more than a concept,
it is an obligation and thornbills
are the present continuous, the ongoing.
A forest isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
Out of the abuse and trauma and theft
and massacring you can’t take on voices
of the dead the injured the hurt the affected:
it is not yours to document but to offer
restitution in material ways, maybe spiritual,
but not to write something you will benefit
from even if it’s a Good on you for uttering
a truth. Other voices have a right and a need
and you can listen, and act, but not tell.
Corrective stories still bristle with story-
telling as if it’s a way through: audience
says it can’t be when that audience
sits back to read, sips on a drink,
takes in a sunset after placing a bookmark.
A people isn’t a noun or an abstract noun.
Still the thornbills, still the seed gatherers
gathering when the seed is thin on the ground
and some has sprouted after rains to die off
in the new dry, barely beyond a low grass.
And now the mutations, the L-types and S-types
that are geographically inclined, demographically
requisite, their own little bigotry in sun and rain.
Here it has dried so quickly again, but thornbills
work together to gather, though at the end
of every moment of feeding action, it’s their
own beak and their own beak alone that plucks
a particular seed from a cluster. This is no
analogy, no ontology, however much observation
pulls us that way especially when alone, isolated
or semi-isolated, holding what we have to hold.
And near the little finger of my left hand
as it acts to make letters – gentle strike of key
to type to shape words I see written in thought
ahead of sight ahead of speech to erode a narrative
into an imaginary page...it is not real, not
really, is it?...near my little finger is the partial
silk-enwrapped shell of a ‘swarmer’, the vomited-
on and broken-into corpse of a swarmer that kept its wings,
a small spider – hard to identify – upside down above it,
digesting, symptom of its symptom, refrain in the pulse
of my our-world, our collating of senses and recall
and loss – when the termites swarmed over dry tracts
after sudden wet, after deluge, days and days ago
now, days back when this ode began and experience
could only fall away, unbalance, seed-twist
away from its cause, take root to pull up short.
And yet, the qualifiers are to be heard
and seen and sensed brushing the skin
if waited for – sometimes, should, possible.
