Deadman

To know and not to speak. In that way one forgets.

What is pronounced strengthens itself.

What is not pronounced tends to non-existence.

C. Milosz, Reading The Japanese Poet Issa (1762–1826)

The day is clear. The tide ebbs,

a wide shallow flow of water full of shadows like a second-hand

wardrobe mirror.

Bony arms reach up, river mangroves workman-like

against a mineral-blue sky.

Around their feet,

mud caught in this island thicket’s baleen roots and seedlings;

everything lands as litter.

Daily at the lip of these wetlands, That Deadman Dance.

Giant brush turkeys of steel tend their diamond-black mounds. Coal

loaders alight with an orange glow, fill the holds that fire the furnaces of

nations to our north.

In this version of the dance, I can still make out a military drill,

muskets held high in perfect alignment. Today’s march

is to work, the manufacture of distance.

From a far corner of this forested swamp, this strange half-lit

parkland,

screams can be heard.

It’s not what it sounds like, a lynching or some excoriating piece of local

history and its fallout. No just uncanny cries;

a colony of flying fox preparing, as they do everyday, to roost.

* * *

Reverie: a forest of slim grey trunks and the flicker of black bodies.

A small boy’s invention, friends imagined for company or did they

recognise kinship

with a child, who in his hands and knees way loved the rocks and trees?

Such fluent touch and flight, the landing and staying still—

like the impossibly fluid notes of a morning magpie’s song—they

elude me now.

It’s a simple science to belong in a child’s body.

* * *

As far as I can tell you don’t despair.

Is this dementia’s gift?

You are in fact receding, only conversation along the arc of your

career

still sparks in your eyes.

It’s easier to visit now the strut that drove you high and away from us

is almost gone.

And it helps if I remember the boy you were.

A boy who watched in mute disbelief, as a train packed with troops

pulled out achingly slow from Central Station.

A train carrying an ageing father, a volunteer, north to Darwin and

his second war.

You were a boy determined to forget,

who forged a more than favourable story; not once have I heard you

be candid about your father.

How can I tell you, I remain your unresigned boy.

Now like then, you’d sooner forget.

* * *

A man with four daughters: he tries not to wake her, slips a hand

beneath the sheets and along her leg.

He watches

her sleeping face closely—if she stirs, he tells a tired

story— Just checking you’re warm, it’s cold tonight.

Desperate for order? Better to pretend

such dis-possession is the province of only a few and try to forget

murder understood as economy;

muttered under a hat, it’s part of a second peoples’ dreaming.

* * *

My mother is dying.

Country she loves, suddenly turned indifferent.

Behind me fires and bodies turn cold, a people keen, flee

an inexplicable plague.

And I am little more than a ghost.

Where are they, the great circle of friends and family that love, even

revere her?

No-one else here

for whom the passing of this laughing, intelligent custodianship

matters. Then I wake.

* * *

I navigate the staggered line of the board-walk through

the mangrove,

my head among the heads of the trees in this archipelago of endings

and beginnings—

it’s not land, not water, salt nor fresh—

and glimpse the glassy reach of the river, the vacant industrial lots,

the saw-tooth

geometry of factory sheds and begin to hope

in the way the salvaged silt below me must too, as it waits

for alchemy,

longs for the transmutation of loss.

Winner of the Local Prize of the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2014, published Broken Ground UWAP