The Black Beaches


    Yellow rimming the ocean
    is mountains washing back
    but lagoons in cleared land often
    show beaches of velvet black

    peat of grass and great trees
    that were wood-fired towers
    then mines of stary coals
    fuming deep in dragon-holes.

    This morning's frost dunes
    afloat on knee-sprung pasture
    were gone in a sugar lick
    leaving strawed moisture

    but that was early
    and a change took back the sun
    hiding it in regrowth forest.
    Coal formed all afternoon.


Inspecting the Rivermouth

    Drove up to Hahndorf:
    boiled lamb hock, great scoff!
    Lamplit rain incessant.

    Next morning to the Murray mouth,
    reed-wrapped bottlings of view
    grigio and verdelho.

    Saw careers from the climbing bridge,
    the steel houses it threw
    all over Hindmarsh Island,

    the barrages de richesse,
    film culture, horseradish farms,
    steamboats kneading heron-blue

    lake, the river full again.
    Upstream, the iron cattle bridges.
    So. Then a thousand miles

    home across green lawn.


The Canonisation


    Rome, 17 October 2010

    Mary MacKillop, born 1842,
    what are the clergy giving you
    on my birthday, Mother Mary?

    Sainthood? So long after God did?
    Independence? But you're your own Scot.
    The job of Australian icon?

    Well yes. Black flies in the buggy.
    Bush pianos. The cheek-sawing wimple
    in summer: you did do local penance.

    Your vow to "educate poor children" –
    might you now say "to heal
    the education of poor children"?

    Who says a woman can't rise
    in the Church? Mother Mary,
    awake in Heaven, pray for us.


High Rise


    Fawn high rise of Beijing
    with wristwatch-shaped
    air conditioners on each window

    and burglar bars to the tenth
    level in each new city,
    white-belted cylinders of dwelling

    around every Hong Kong bay –
    Latest theory is, the billions
    will slow their overbreeding

    only when consuming in the sky.
    Balconious kung fu of Shanghai.
    A nineteenth floor lover

    heroic among consumer goods
    slips off the heights of desire
    down the going-home high wire –

    above all the only children.


Nuclear Family Bees


    Little native-bee hives
    clotted all up the trunk
    of a big tree by the river.

    Not pumped from a common womb
    this world of honey-flies
    is a vertical black suburb

    of glued-on prism cells.
    Hunters stopping by
    would toe-walk up,

    scab off single wax houses
    and suck them out, as each
    smallholder couple hovered

    remonstrating in the air
    with their life to rebuild,
    new eggs, new sugarbag,

    gold skinfulls of water.


When Two Percent Were Students


    Gorgeous expansion of life
    all day at the university,
    then home to be late for meals,
    an impractical, unwanted boarder.

    When rush hours were so tough
    a heart attack might get stepped over
    you looked up from the long footpaths
    to partings in the houses' iron hair.

    Hosts of Depression-time and wartime
    hated their failure, which was you.
    Widows with no facelift of joy
    spat their irons. Shamed by bookishness

    you...