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All poems © Copyright 1996-1998 Andrew Burke
All Rights Reserved.
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for Mary Maclean you offer us, a taste of our land. The air so crisp with chill we wear entire wardrobes like hunters' furs - jeans over track pants, footy socks, beanies, scarves. Mary's roo dog does our hunting: an emu caught by the throat, plucked and thrown whole on a cooking fire, smoke full of singed feathers and flesh stings our noses. We wrestle with tin-canned standards in words the wind blows away. Huddled 'round campfires morning and night, we go where the sun breaks through as day unrolls. Breakaways, mulga bush, a never-used dam a hundred years old; this place of bleached bones and broken glass queries our presence, unwashed, awkward on its unpaved ways. Marrakesch, Kathmandu - tales of former hikes, but none so raw as this our land. Whose land? Our week is up; we take away film rolls, rusted horse shoes, and ochre rocks. |
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for Geoff Page the Western Desert, minus 2 degrees Celsius, silence. Moon late, campers asleep, fires out, I hear a distant road train kicking up red dirt like a country & western song when all you want is the white space between church bells tolling. Frogs listen too between the lap- slapping of Niagara Dam's hundred-year-old waters on red rock shores. It's as close as I'll ever hear to hearing nothing, like Basho atop an old craggy mountain. Charles Tomlinson writes "it rings true: for silence / is an imagined thing." Listen |
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for Denis Cherry staring up at the hanging anatomical drawings of the forestry around the skeletal frames of man and woman, and trace the muscle that pulls at my leg from my lower back. Now I know why I'm in pain. Upfront I joke with my friend, my doctor. He sees my eyebrows, my laughing eyes, the leaping fish in my mouth. 'You see,' he says, meaning I understand, then loses me in medico lingo. I wander, see him in two plays on the same stage. To him I am also a double bill: he sees under my waves to my currents and caves. Lap lap goes my blood, following itself in blind obedience like a bloodworm from river's edge. Does he sense my fear? I see he is curious, like a mechanic with an out-of-tune engine. 'Your timing's wrong,' he could say and it would be no surprise; I am driven by analogies, abstract ideas. I back away until I back into somebody coming the other way, a boy who couldn't cry at fourteen and blamed his father for dying. |
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a head to chop earth pushing up an open cloak drowned sailors' hands a sundial arm |
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of the Swan River by the slumbering suburb where my brother and I fought, sunlight, gripping rocks and holding roots, then sliding back twenty feet salted with rocksand, blood running like a river like memory. in jars under beds, scuttling like pirates on coral islands, caught with girls in springtime from Smith's boatshed, now Mead's Fish Gallery. across screens like jeering children behind glass, and scuttling earbuds on Walkmans ... Then floats to now in sharp-smelling mist, rowboats driftwood to shore, cars wrapped around trees, friends torn like ragdolls, used to wrap gutted fish, blood seeping through onto salted hands. |
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precarious as my memory of our driveway yellow, orange, white - planted by Mr Hobby spent a day a week at our home. a dozen new sprinklers he strapped and washered to create his own. No better portrait sculpted of the old scrawny scarecrow torn cloth chokers stained and wet. and barely worked all summer. rewinds me forty years ... |
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for my brother Michael and I remember your crystal set, its antenna running around jarrah fences, under the grapevine's twisty tendrils, behind the flapping banana leaves ... And in that backyard, by the circular barbecue of coloured stones, your yacht collected rain where weeping willow leaves and leeches created their own environment. We hadn't heard the word then. We hadn't heard the Poms were exploding bombs at Maralinga, we only heard Bob Menzies speaking more British than Royalty: reds under beds, the yellow peril. an old marbles bag found in an attic: Long Point, Mr Rushton's Perfume Factory, the running boards of Dad's Pilot V8, Mum's Agatha Austin, your first Vespa ... Now the information superhighway Internet has replaced your crackling crystal set, and we are the fathers who complain of power and phone bills. We have come through an age, and await our medals, looking to the daily mail or the next phone-call to praise us, but hear nothing. So I praise us as brothers, as sons, as fathers, I praise the daily male in us that we have come through these harrowing decades of change with our humour and wonder intact. we are still in the passageway, laughing. |
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rattled the sleepout's louvres, Father sang - "It's illegal, it's immoral, Or it makes you fat ..." crude tableaux on the grass. 'Go on, dare ya!' but the girls didn't bite. Mother sulked in her sundress, swivelling ice with a red-nailed finger. our host sucked air to fire-up the barbecue. Father sang on, oblivious. of ice-cubed raspberry cordial, clinking our glasses together. The other kids just looked at me. |
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stirring the blood between us, how sick of the ties that hold me. told me to write. To who? I have made you up. You are the air in my birthday balloon the clown at our barbecue proud patron of the bottle-o you shape my fingers and my toes you cast my shadow my every look-over-the-shoulder you carve my tombstone in womb bone. Let this be a letter to the Dead Letter office (I'm sick of your jokes). air rushes out and I whoop ... it's time to let go. |
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Rushing like an ambulance to the Casualty Ward at Royal Perth Hospital our car on a hill at a Stop sign, me not able to push the fear that drove us this far, wife, daughter lurches between us and the hospital, we walk slow- in greystone shadows, leaves locked in chicken-wire cages, a presence I suck air like a desert wind, air-conditioned Casualty. 2. We wait. My panic leaps inside me in this chapel of victims - her blunt tongue; cops like store mannequins, too much blood, eyes spinning ... our car, tows it away. I lie back amongst This scene's a clip from a madhouse movie - to play these cops just so, standing, their free burgers, shaping their anger the angst of others. 3. I am towed now, scanned, and parked. A toothless crone mouthing soundless air, thrashing at her belts, jerking like a dying fish's fin. new to her coffin, thrashing, hands her soundless mouth opens and shuts. laughing, 'Taxi!' |
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in memory of Sam Burke (1977-1995) and my days so far hanging yourself, Sam. I am all the more bitter for saying this after the fact. Family life is a joke, I know - I lived with your father as my big brother all my young days so who's laughing. Now I steer away, little in common at the bottom of our hill, your grandfather's tender, bought and moored for membership, sank, tied to its jetty. 'Put it on my tab,' he'd say in the yacht club bar as seaweed dressed the mooring line. At home, we stalled in the wake of our blood. lost touch. I remember trying to kill your father with a butter knife, then, later, a spear I honed with love and hate, dark days by the river, sunlight knifing my eyes. The whys rise up, arguments of our days ... How much older he is now. He sits straight-backed in the front pew near your coffin, and in his neck muscles I see the weeping he won't allow. - Even before I was a teenager I was a solitary boy. In our ti-tree hedge I would sharpen my pen-knife, then balance it on the edge of my hand, finding its seesaw spot. On windy nights the almond tree¹s blossom drifted like snow. At first light my sister, brother and I walked out and stood in it barefoot. The cold feet of the dead. I hugged my knife in my dressing-gown pocket ... Who can cut me down now? I watch the river clear itself into the ocean. |
