For Ben

Against a flat blue Summer evening, reflected in the flat blue glass façades, the gurgling fruit bats are the only things of substance, until finally a song cracks open the shell that surrounds us.

Bathtime

To the tiny honey-eaters, gravity is trivial, yet approaching water is a delicate dance, refining the approach in successive sorties, ever closer until finally the belly just kisses the water. There is always an over-zealous life-guard who stays dry, yet chases any perched anxiously on the edge of the bath back up into the branches with a chiding tutter. But then the dare-devils arrive, and all take their dive, in quick succession with precision and delight. The spiky foliage fills with the fluttering of drying feathers.

31 January 2012

A tiny tornado of tweeting,
as though a nest itself
has taken to erratic flight:
is it their mother who follows,
voice like a rusty hinge?

30 January 2012

Half-way through the newspaper, the garden encroaches, a slow, bursting flood of green and red and yellow. He keeps his eyes intent upon the pages, but his grip is tight. As the clearing shrinks, his long beard will grow whiter as the pages grow yellow, and when the dark, dense thicket closes over him, he will finish the last page, fold the paper in half, add it to the stack and lay his head upon it once again.

29 January 2012

1.

The rain says, “stay; be still,”
and so I let ink follow water,
try to catch the words
that fall from the sky.

2.

birds flock to the feast -
his smile makes the smallest things
into carnivals

28 January 2012

The ibis teeters on the highest point of the battered old gum tree, its weight in its wings on the wind, before it surrenders to the gusting of the coming rain. The others, jostling for perches, seem to be cheering or jeering, or maybe they’re just trying to wake the legion of fruit-bats, still wrapped in their blankets next door.

27 January 2012

Two small stones today. Train travel makes it easier

1.

One Winter tree, skeletal,
stranded in a verdant rainstorm field -
a picture hung on the wall
of this new home

2.

The ibis,
.     long legs half-vanished
.          in these impromptu lakes,
like lanky spear-fishers
.     before the sails and shackles,
dance
.     and probe
.          at what the rain washed out
and do not turn
.     to watch
.          the train roar past.

26 January 2012

A thrumming and screeching mass of green, yellow, orange and blue feathers swarms to seed and flower, the garden as lush as had seemed an impossible dream before I flew away. I watch, my skin slick and body heavy in air you can almost drink, surrounded by the eternal tinnitus of cicadas. I dream of a clear head, of movement, of a rockpool high on a forested mountain.

25 January 2012

Tapes from the early 1990s
An archive of my youthful heartbeat
Every note, every place I’ve been
Printed into the patterns of my flesh

A radio telescope trained to a distant star
Reveals the image of our own beginnings

24 January 2012

grey cloud, white noise day -
a thousand new-made rivers
breach our clear-cut lines