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Jennifer Harrison
MICHAEL LONG WALKING
Eureka Stockade 150 year anniversary, December 3rd 2004
what does it mean to fit oneself out
with new wheat days and a eulogised stockade?
a man
cools his feet in the Albury Murray
he's walking though the fourth wall
of suburbs to Canberra
towards the smile gold
what can he ask heart blistered
by the long yellow road?
RINGMASTER
No one wants to be the clown
surviving thinly on the edges of a joke
interior, balloon-footed
carrying the meagre sack of shrill whistles.
I went inside to where the sky
could not be seen
to where tricks and silky laughter
accept the gull's loose nature.
I went inside the grass smell
of a tent to recall the desires of a child
hunched over games, five knucklebones
landing lightly on the back of her hand.
Perhaps if mannequins, pinned to night,
could reach, finally, the other side of the glass
then the rough sketch of a woman
would be whip enough to last.
I went to the circus, to take charge;
to remove blouse after blouse.
I went alone
because to master the sanded weights
the juggler, first, must perfect clumsiness
then write the same poem, over and over.
DROUGHT
Sheep graze the salt flats
carcass stink lifting from the gibber
Pigeons touch their claws to the dog's bowl
and an eagle stops, mid-flight
Yellow waves of dust
offer back carved acts of love to chance
Coffin-gnawing but drinking drinking
as deserts do
Carcass stink lifts from the gibber
(said tenderly, as though kinship's a dry word)
All things are water quotes Anne Carson
of the philosopher Thales, who quotes . . .
Behind voices, the empty dam
the black stumps of long-drowned trees
Who rise with ragged poems
and yabbie-eyes to face the pointed bone
Copyright © Jennifer Harrison