JAGUAR

Nasal intonations of light and clicking tongues... publicity of windows stoning me with pent-up cries... smells of abattoirs... smells of long-dead meat.

Some day-end while the sand is yet cozy as a blanket off the warm body of a squaw, and the jaguars are out to kill... with a blue-black night coming on and a painted cloud stalking the first star I shall go alone into the Silence... the coiled Silence... where a cry can run only a little way and waver and dwindle and be lost.

And there... where tiny antlers clinch
and strain as life grapples in a million avid points,
and threshing things strike and die, letting
their hate live on in the spreading purple of a
wound... I too will make covert of a crevice
in the night, and turn and watch... nose at the
cleft’s edge.

WILD DUCK

I

That was a great night we spied upon
See-sawing home, Singing a hot sweet song to the
super-stars Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze...
Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river...
Lights dwindling to shining slits In the wet asphalt...
Purring lights... red and green and golden-whiskered...
Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud...
... But you did not know... As the trains
made golden augers Boring in the darkness...
How my heart kept racing out along the rails, As
a spider runs along a thread And hauls him in again
To some drawing point... You did not know
How wild ducks’ wings Itch at dawn...
How at dawn the necks of wild ducks Arch to the
sun And new-mown air Trickles sweet in their
gullets.

II

As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird
That has lately flown across it,
Yet trembles with the beating of its wings,
So my soul... emptied of the known you... utterly...
Is yet vibrant with the cadence of the song
You might have been....
’Twas a great night...
With never a waste look over a shoulder
Curved to the crook of the wind...
And a great word we threw
For memory to play knuckles with...
A word the waters of the world have washed,
Leaving it stark and without smell...
A world that rattles well in emptiness: Good-by.

THE DREAM

I have a dream to fill the golden sheath of a remembered day.... (Air heavy and massed and blue as the vapor of opium... domes fired in sulphurous mist... sea quiescent as a gray seal... and the emerging sun spurting up gold over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....) But the day is an up-turned cup and its sun a junk of red iron guttering in sluggish-green water where shall I pour my dream?

ALTITUDE

I wonder how it would be here with you, where the wind that has shaken off its dust in low valleys touches one cleanly, as with a new-washed hand, and pain is as the remote hunger of droning things, and anger but a little silence sinking into the great silence.

COMRADES

Life You have been good to me.... You have not made yourself too dear to juggle with.

NOCTURNE

Indigo bulb of darkness
Punctured by needle lights
Through a fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars,
And a sliver of moon
Spigoting two high windows over the West river....

Boy, I met to-night,
Your eyes are two red-glowing arcs shifting with my vision....
They reflect as in a fading proof
The deadened eyes of a woman,
And your shed virginity,
Light as the withered pod of a sweet pea,
Moist and fragrant
Blows against my soul.
What are you to me, boy,
That I, who have passed so many lights,
Should carry your eyes
Like swinging lanterns?

CACTUS SEED

Radiant notes piercing my narrow-chested room, beating down through my ceiling smeared with unshapen belly-prints of dreams drifted out of old smokes trillions of icily peltering notes out of just one canary, all grown to song as a plant to its stalk, from too long craning at a sky-light and a square of second-hand blue.

Silvery-strident throat so assiduously serenading my brain, flinching under the glittering hail of your notes were you not safe behind... rats know what thickness of... plastered wall... I might fathom your golden delirium with throttle of finger and thumb shutting valve of bright song.

II

But if... away off... on a fork of grassed earth
socketing an inlet reach of blue water...
if canaries (do they sing out of cages?)
flung such luminous notes,
they would sink in the spirit...
lie germinal...
housed in the soul as a seed in the earth...
to break forth at spring with the crocuses into young smiles
on the mouth.
Or glancing off buoyantly,
radiate notes in one key
with the sparkle of rain-drops
on the petal of a cactus flower
focusing the just-out sun.

Cactus... why cactus? God... God... somewhere... away off... cactus flowers, star-yellow ray out of spiked green, and empties of sky roll you over and over like a mother her baby in long grass. And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees, pricking multiple leaves at his amazing story.