I’m delighted that two of my poems from these recent plague years have recently appeared in issues of APJ: ‘Online’ in Vol. 9, which explores the often surprising closeness that can come about via zoom conversations; and ‘Year of Breath,’ in Vol 11.1

Online

There is a pocket in the ether

         that holds us

it darts      elusive     around the globe    pressing

into what can be seen

             emerging    into the quiet air of daily

breathing       sometimes our voices

or our faces        find it     and

sometimes what might happen between one

person and another

really happens  

         and sometimes

those smiles      spark

                                      and crackle

in the possibilities of what might

yet happen

there is a pocket in the ether that

     holds us

              it builds slowly in shadow while

you sleep    while I work

while I sleep and you work

through the landscapes of our dreaming

while magpies call into cool autumnal air

while spring unwraps

its bright green flags

Angophora Costata is in Christmas flower. This poem, ‘The Hum of Angophora,’ first published in Writ, is coming out in my next collection, Increments of the Everyday, with Puncher and Wattmann in 2022. I hope you enjoy it.

The Hum of Angophora

The low and knotted branches of the Angophora
are laden with blossom the blush
of new tips pushes into daylight like dreams although
last night’s rain weighs heavy and

their fingers droop almost
brushing the bark-strewn grass

noisy and flamboyant wattlebirds and
eastern rosellas move along branchlets
through a community of leaves calling and feeding while

magpies wait thoughtful in foliage watching
the possibilities of the stirring
ground

one year a pair of tawny frogmouths built a platform
in the fork of a branch so that two
downy chicks could sit
waiting out precariousness
while parents
sounding softly into the darkness
returned with morsels until
ravens swooped spilling
the contents of the nest
tree mind holds them this pulse of things that live
and shift
and scatter

the wide and impassive generosity of its branches reach
and arch twist and knot
in filtered sunshine its own world
of space and twig sap and leaf ant
and bee the hum of

things that live and shift
then scatter

In Virginia Woolf’s life-changing novel, To the Lighthouse, the lighthouse itself – as a geographical, artistic, creative space or idea, is of course never reached. It’s dreamed about, talked about, planned for and Lily Briscoe thinks what it would mean to paint it – but it remains, deliberately, out of reach of the words’ extraordinary ebb and flow. The lighthouse is summoned into imagination but it isn’t owned or held. So I do recognize that as a place of destination, the ‘lighthouse,’ however signified, is by definition never arrived at; indeed it would be a reductive notion to think that such a thing could be achieved. However, I do want to say that when I come up the sandy, salty path that leads out onto the headland to the Griffiths Island lighthouse, my heart lifts in a way I can barely describe. This is a place where, for me, happiness arises, a place of re-centring, where it seems particularly easy to be present, simply, to smell the air, to follow the sea birds skimming the waves. Such an embodied engagement with a place, its powerful ‘here-ness,’ operates as a conduit – not for some transcendent meaning or elsewhereness, but as an experience of being fully awake, body, senses, mind, unfolding in the now. A portal to right here. A gift.

This pair of poems – two faces of response to the pandemic we are living through – has just been published in Mensicus literary journal. https://www.meniscus.org.au/Vol8Iss1.pdf. Thanks to Jen Webb and Shane Strange.

Pandemic Moods

1.      Anxiety

clutches               like a virus

at surfaces         the warm vulnerability

of membranes                               it hangs

heavy in air

droplets of contagion     impossible

to see   chasing at shadows

              filling my time   frantic

with the wrong things

or maybe the wrong things         I can’t

tell         presentiments of doom

weigh on me                    a vice that grips

like a headache

something is proliferating          

a wild cacophony            pounding

at the fragile borders of this body

                             seeking its own path

trying to get in

2. Compassion     

is a tall tree

a searching filigree of roots              a steadiness that

reaches               risky      into changeable air         while

leaves   like open palms       signal

to a restless world

I see you

and it’s possible to

rest here            a short time

in the deep pulse            and dance of      shadow

grass     sweet    with summer rain

under the arch of my arms

this        flickering            cathedral of green

In remembrance of my dear mother – and in acknowledgement of the complex work of mothering.

You came back

             she said     her hands

fluttering around her face      abroad   in the air

between us        they are brittle wings unfolding     in that scrubbed

corridor       when she looks up from her wheelchair    suddenly   

ecstatic            weeping                   you   came back

from where?   I come out of the day

flurried    my own worn hands    catching

hers     stroking        I will always

come back    to sit close    to walk quiet streets together

under plane trees       their generous leaves

until I remember     how I first left her   flush

with the hubris of youth     and how she stood on the nature strip

vulnerable      trying not to touch me      or hold me     just asking

me to come home          but I went     anyway   my face

turned    resolutely   in a different direction

it was years    too many     before

I looked back      properly   before I saw her      a good person

living her life     tending hydrangeas   cradling

generations of children      moving

like all of us           through uncertainty and pleasure

toward the always unexpected      dark fields       this slow

drift into clouded water  

  I came back      just

as she unmoored 
      

          
this island        this fragile

territory                              where I have always been

It’s a great honour to be included in the most recent issue of Westerly. This poem takes me back to my own childhood, to long trips to Queensland up inland New South Wales roads – and the figure of my beloved father, always and still just at the periphery of my vision.

A bit of a bonanza for me in this edition of Plumwood Mountain, thanks to Managing Editor the indefatigable Anne Elvey

I was thrilled to be part of the amazing collection, The Sky Falls Down: An Anthology of Loss (Ginninderra Press), edited and lovingly curated by Terry Whitebeach and Gina Mercer. It was launched yesterday in Melbourne by Carrie Tiffany (having already been launched in Hobart).

The book is available through Ginninderra Press or at Readings in Hawthorn, where it was launched.

As Mary Oliver put it, ‘Loss is the great lesson:’ if we’re going to be open to loving we need to learn how to be open to and manage loss. The diverse contributions in this Anthology I think are all ways of struggling with this great lesson of being human.

My contribution was a poem about the ongoing experience of loss – written on the five year anniversary of the death of my father:

 Five years and still –
  
 Five years –
 and still there are days when
 I want to pick up the phone and 
 call you;
 time seeps by,
 and though grief
           loosens its cruelest hooks
 I remain bereft,
 perplexed –
 where are you?
  
 Are you still sitting at your computer
 tapping out the stories of your life –
           the boy in the Queensland bush,
                      the young man stationed
 in Darwin,
 poring over radar?
  
 Or will I see you
 coming into the kitchen –
           a cup of tea in the offing –
 joining us around the table,
 the arc of your arms
 still
 wiry and strong?
  
 And if I could get a line
           through to you –
 what would I say?
 The children are growing,
 beautiful,
 I left my job,
 the old cracks in the family
 widen and groan like
 lathe and plaster in the drought –
 I admit we are all
           diminished
 without you.
  
 Most of all,
 unreconciled,
 I would ask you to
 come home –
 it’s enough now, 
 please
 come back –
  
 And here it is again:
 the persistence of that old,
  mad dream of
 restoration,
 when the patience of mourning,
 the gratitude
 for all the rich
           love you left amongst us –
 gives way
 to the shocking
 need for the miracle:
 the past
                      intact and
 cupped
 in the broad palms of your sun-tanned hands.
   

I had great fun on the weekend reading at this festival event: thanks to a wonderful and receptive audience for making this such a enriching experience.

Here I am -in black and white and in colour – reading amongst some of the terrific art works!

I think maybe the most enthusiastically received poem was ‘Clothesline’ – a poem that comes from my book, Even in the Dark (UWAP 2013). It’s a little window both into the pleasures of doing laundry and the possibilities for that interstitial moment , when we see the ordinary in a different way:

Clothesline

To walk between the brightly coloured flags

of washing –

to gently stroke the fall

of drying fabric,

rearranging peg and angle

so that every fold

might find the fullness of the summer air;

to smell the hard-won clarity of

cotton,                 

rising crisp and warm in the sun –

is to find a sweet hiatus in the day,

a moment

in the linearity of task and achievement  –

in case you’re wondering,

this is not masochism,

or some throwback to the rigidity

of ancient roles:

instead, listen –

a faint hum amongst the tomato plants and

the marigolds and

it is possible to hear this

humble poetry of the backyard,

this ceremony of daily love –

gathering, sorting,

washing,

ready –

for the rich harvest of the basket.

Is there ever a straight path forward? What happens when we wander in the so-called weeds, a ramble of body and ideas?

I’ll be giving a poetry reading on Saturday July 6, 2pm at the No Vacancy Gallery in the QV centre, as part of the women, work and wandering festival. This is a free event, but you do need to register.

It would be tremendous to see you there.

As many of you will know, it’s just recently been the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth – that amazing American poet of teeming cities, meditations on life and loving, and of course that great and terrible experience of the Civil War. My poem, selected for this celebratory collection, Endlessly Rocking (ed Stan Galloway and Nicole Yurcaba), takes as its point of reference, the figure of Whitman as he travelled to the hospitals of the Civil War, horrified by the scale of the suffering and spectacle and beauty of so many violently damaged young men.

The poem is dedicated not only to Whitman himsef, that ‘bewhiskered emissay,’ but to my friend, fellow writer and Whitman -o-phile, Lindsay Tuggle.

I hope you enjoy my review in Mascara of Tricia Dearborn’s fantastic new collection, Autobiochemistry (UWAP 2019)

This is from a cycle of poems written in memory of my dear young friend, Sophie Ellis. This particular poem is for her mother, my dear friend Kerry.

Pietà

For Kerry Dawson

Lay her here,
heavy as stone
across my shoulder, breast, the generosity of lap;

I long for this weight

Let the cataract of her hair fall
over my arms, across my face,
covering my eyes:

Child of my blood and sinew,
beloved daughter of my dreaming,
turn your face toward me
again,
here, into the crook of my neck;

I have shielded you before:

And in the hollows of the night when
my arms lie useless and
desperate for you –

then lean against me again,
returned to me on this crushing
tide of longing,
scooped out of darkness –

be present and
homed
beside the persistent beating of my heart.

Grey Fantails

On the rise in the middle             paddock, grey fantails twirl and

arabesque through morning air dense   with possibility, catching

the hands of the leaves and the light and our                    patient attention.

I wrote this paper a few years ago now in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges – but I’ve been returning to this ‘epistemology of wandering’ as evoked so wonderfully by Oliver’s poetic.

Ramble! Enjoy!

‘Drifting in the Weeds of Heaven: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of the Immeasurable’

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue13/lucas.html

Last week I did an inspiring workshop with Mark Tredinnick – a whole day dedicated to listening to, writing, thinking and talking about poetry. He introduced us to the form of the Sijo – a kind of Korean version of the haiku. I think I may have taken some liberties with the form, but here is another I wrote today.

Autumn Morning

You don’t have to go far   to feel the kindness of the

Light      to sit in a well of quiet sun beside the rosemary, the

Crush of mown grass, the heaviness of spent lavender    nodding as I pass.