In his prick-ears,the wind, that wanderer and spy,
sings of the dunes of Arabia, lion-coloured still.
The small blue stallion poses like a centaur-god,
netting the sun in his sea-spray mane, forgetting
his stalwart mares for a phantom galloping unshod;
changing for a heat-mirage his tall and velvet hill.
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So here, twisted in steel, and spoiled with red
they crushed out your throat the terrible songyou sang in the dark ranges. With what cryingyou mourned him! – the drinker of blood, the swift death-bringerwho ran with you so many a night; and the night was long.I heard you, desperate poet, Did you hearmy silent voice take up the cry? – replying:Achilles is overcome,…
What is the space between,
united person, yetdividing each alone.Frail bridges cross from eyeto eye, from flesh to flesh,from word to word: the netis gapped at every mesh,and this each human knows:however close our touchor intimate our speech,silences, spaces reachmost deep, and will not close.
We meet and part now over all the world;
take hands together in the night, forgetthe night in our brief happiness, silently.We, who sought many things, throw all awayfor this one thing, one only,remembering that in the narrow gravewe shall be lonely.Death marshalls up his armies round us now.Their footsteps crowd too near.Lock your warm hand above the chilling heartand for a time I…
That time of drought the embered air
The crackling lime-scrub would not bearand Mooni Creek was sand that year.The dingo’s cry was strange to hear.I heard the dingoes cryin the scrub on the Thirty-mile Dry.I saw the wedgetail take his fillperching on the seething skull.I saw the eel wither where he curledin the last blood-drop of a spent world.I heard the bone…
The blacksmith’s boy went out with a rifle
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,rivers hindered him,thorn branches caught at his eyes to make him blindand the sky turned into an unlucky opal,but he didn’t mind.I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can stare outany spider I meet,said he to his dog and his rifle.The blacksmith’s boy went over the paddockswith his old…
If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
of my great- great- grandmother,legendary devotee of the arts,who having eight childrenand little opportunity for painting pictures,sat one day on a high rockbeside a river in Switzerlandand from a difficult distance viewedher second son, balanced on a small ice flow,drift down the current toward a waterfallthat struck rock bottom eighty feet below,while her second daughter,…