Issue 8
September 2001
Gregory Day
Australian, poet, songmaker. My main themes are landscape, and increasingly its alienation through tourism.
Tourist Hearth
I don't see any battled tartans over the wet fields
But the soft cloth on your ankles, round your neck
Is a swatch of colors on the wide main street.
Scotland's in Ireland's shadow until the mountains
Argyle is confined to golf courses until the wintercoast.
There's a million heraldries to follow under the bar-heater
& boxes of pewter mugs with which to drink of your connection;
Hear the music the tinkling teaspoons make as you sort them.
Hear the pipes come over the hills of the eftpos & conversation.
It's a shop as a cloth & hued crypt, a paraphrasing of legend
The grades of wool's abundance a strange & muffling heaven
Now that fresh new clouds go drifting on in the alpine sky like clans.
final lair
Lair (OE, OS, Goth, O Teut) ~ a place for an animal to lie down in;
the resting place of a corpse.
Radical beauty running
across a broken ridge
disapproved of, hunting
in haunt or range
hanging out & pretty
near freeway ramps
sheepstealing
stalking just beyond verandah lamps;
nose to the wind
on a high hill paddock
always in the scent,
moving with a sleek lilt
of the high instinctual
unmurdering stock
beyond right, beyond wrong
this lone crooner will never knock
on doors of imported housing;
magically taking what's in the night
surpassing art or evil
ripping out throats
with stars in the eyes
whose is the better farming?
curled up in a frost, digesting
the long sharp muzzle-tool resting
waking then finding
warmth on the paws
roaming in the ironbarks,
breeding and staking
playing with breeze-flicked leaves
on the way, and preening,
puppies supping, milk oozing,
protecting,
loving,
growing wild
& strong, red and lithe,
a mastery till this final lair.
my kind of wheel
Far from the bridal rice of town
this dusk is large
as we walk on
time is a pump
pressure on,
the walk a valve
in the world of it all.
Give fern a chance
and she'll grow back
as amber water rivulets
along beside the flowerlets
of emblematic heath.
Across the view
in dying light
the plough has turned
the insects up
no other being leaping out
no revelation's kangaroo
just living cubits of the ground
concordant worlds, die-back & you
like stripes upon my kind of wheel
of turning crops and scrub
of dusk then wedded night.