A City Walk Down Under
Fitzroy to Brunswick St
Smith’s to Johnson’s Rd
The lanes I walk are many, with
Many a heavy load
Shop windows are light as a fairy’s
Though without the rains are cold
The people are blown verily
Up and down the streets of gold
Bronze statues offer avenues for the brave
and bold
Snatches of photographs of bookshops
Signing autographs
A St Kilda Builder of autobahns
To a coffee house strode
Jazz in a bar off Blessington St
Rose in the arm’s of chessington meets
The mauve army of the black and white sheep
Who sail their newspaper ships to work
The metro creeps like a worm underneath
Trams as blood clots are forced up the
veins of the street
Corpuscular people disembark and greet
Then form fresh tissues in cells of cafes
The city’s cognitive organs are its
university and schools
Its stomach is its shopping centres and
mauls
Its liver or lungs are its business
districts
Skyscrapers, factories that hum
Shipping yards of cargo make for a mouth
and anus
Where it imports cars, exports grains, oil
miscellaneous
If it had legs it would get up and run
But this city is Melbourne
It is an octopus which spreads itself in a
rock pool
Under the sun
Frost
The icicles tortuous hang
Below the bridge as if a fang
And the cold, cold air
What made man in this frozen spirit land?
What sacrosanct communion can him to Nature
conjoin?
Is this Lent enough
To be reminded of his Love?
The Hawk soars above
But a shadow is what we see
What is this absence of essence
This non-being
Less than the sun, less than the big sky
It is unbeing – the ice of the land
Unbeginning Eden’s Rivers
Unbeginning time and man
In the chill depths of understanding
In the frozen waters of despair
I feel your love still surrounding
Through the ice layers I see you there
When the cold clasp of evening has gripped
The saffron sun in its palm
Then the ice winds moaning
Comes as an arctic fox
Prowling about the farm
Beneath the arch of the bridges fangs
Where the icicles of a jagged tooth hangs
Gawping at the abandoned fields
Where the moon white river runs
Solicitous in its death dance
The earth puts on its frost mask
To entrance
Life out to its last waltz
Its last moon light tango
And Jack is tripping,
Is slipping on the ring of the horizon
In its embers of hedges
And brittles sedges
It is the eye-line of a fox – sharp and
cold
And I know I am too late
I wish to give up my soul
To that harsh relief
Of the fox, whose slinking loner figure
Is wily to this life’s lease
And beneath a wooded dry hedge
His eye is bright
And his heart still beats
Ode to a Toad
The toad is more akin to muddy holes,
Lies in wait beneath a mossy stone
He is Charles Atlas
Always wishing to be lifting weights
Carrying the world on his shoulders
The unfortunate thing
Like a Shakespeare’s King
Ugly as a broken plate
All warty, ill-seeming to company
Apart from one or two nights a year
When he must mate
Then out on a midnight stroll
Solipsist, the harbinger of droll
Should have been born to the Mafia
And just sat there
Stayed there with his Fairy Queen
But when she kissed him
On that midnight road
He arched his crooked, boiled, rumpled back
And remained a toad
Down, down into the deep
Into the depths of the hills which sleep
Earthly death the temporal bowl
The bowels of the earth
The hell hole
Dark and black
Damp not cold
Warm as bark
From the fires below
Down we go, down, down, down
Down to the depths of the pits dark pole
Rock that’s round, slime and mould
Warm and black don’t lose your soul
Farther back, farther still
Reaches the slack of the Mendip sill
Subterranean rivers run
Inside the place hid from the sun
Farther back and farther still
Runs coal black the rocky gill
Breathes the stone lung
Its wet warmth not chill
Yet eerie stack upon stack the boulders
fill
When so far down
Beneath the crown of the hill
When above you lay the weight of a hundred
ton sill
What drives you down is an impossible will
It draws you down
To the world beneath
To cavernous clowns
Who hurl your belief
Into echoes around the hideous relief
Where a voice may drown without knowing a
grief
Where the fantasy stalactites like acrobats
stow
And chastened as sleeping bats roost under
bows
Of roofs a thousand feet below
Below, below, to and fro the arches bend
and breech the throw
They lend a spectacular frieze
As in a cysteine chapel we fall to our
knees
And reach such wonder lust as only heaven
must know
A man must be humble, crawl and lower like
a snake
Slither on belly, on back on sides between
cracks
Around bends without using his eyes
Just feel with his feet
Trust to the unknown
For it is in refusing to accept defeat
That for our greater sins we atone
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