Discovery - Relating Poems to Quotes Flashcards
Close his bed and rattle up the sash…/there’s sunlight rotating/off the drab carpet. And the water sways/solidly in its silver bowl, so cold
Journey: The North Coast
One of those bright crockery days/so I recall
Journey: The North Coast
Flees on the blue and silver paddock,/ over fences that look split from stone,/and banks of fern,/a red bank, full of roots,/ over dark creeks, where logs are fallen,/ and blackened tree trunks.
Journey: The North Coast
As a nude descends a staircase,/ slender white eucalyptus
Journey: The North Coast
And now the country bursts open on the sea…/across a calico beach unfurled,
Journey: The North Coast
Hair/Ruffled a bit, stow the book and wash-bag/and city clothes. Everything done, press down/ the latches into the case
Journey: The North Coast
That for twelve months have been standing out/ of a morning, above the wardrobe/ in a furnished room.
Journey: The North Coast
As it goes up/ onto the huge dark harbour
Late Ferry
Beyond a gangling jetty…beyond street light’s fluorescence…beyond the tomato stake patch
Late Ferry
The longer white lights/feel nervously about in the blackness/towards here, like hands/after the light switch
Late Ferry
The ferry is drawn along/polished marble, to be lost soon
Late Ferry
A Busby Berkeley spectacular/with thousands in frenzied far off/choreography, in their silver lame/the Bridge like a giant prop
Late Ferry
This does seem in a movie theatre/the boat is small as a moth
Late Ferry
I’ll lose sight of the ferry soon…/I can find it while it’s on darkness
Late Ferry
The hot fertilizer-thick,/ sticky stench of blood/sent flies mad,
The Meatworks
Arm-thick corkscrews, grinding around inside it, meat or not…/chomping bloody mouth…
The Meatworks
White-bruising beach
The Meatworks
There was a flaw to the analogy…the way those pigs stuck there, clinging to each other
The Meatworks
We got meat to take home
Vs
most of them
The Meatworks
I usually didn’t take the meat
The Meatworks
Caught, where the only work/was at this Works.
The Meatworks
But after sticking your hands all day/in snail sheened flesh,/ you found, around the nails, there was still blood.
The Meatworks
I’d scoop up shell-grit/and scrub my hands.
The Meatworks
Treading about/through the icy ledges of the surf
The Meatworks
Working with meat was like burning the live bush…and fertilizing with rottenness/for the frail money
The Meatworks
But I settled for one of the lowest paying jobs, making mince
The Meatworks
Out beside the highway, the first thing in the morning/nothing much in my pockets but sand
North Coast Town
Car after car now…it’s like a boxer/warming up with the heavy bag, spitting air
North Coast Town
Tattoos and greasy Fifties pompadour/ Rev in High Street, drop their first can./Plastic pennants on the distilled morning, everywhere;
North Coast Town
A dog trotting and someone hoses down a pavement;/our image flaps in shop fronts; smoking on
North Coast Town
The Odeon,/A warehouse picture show
North Coast Town
The place is becoming chrome,/tile facing and plate glass, they’re making California;
North Coast Town
pass an Abo, not attempting to hitch, outside town
North Coast Town
Like fingers spread and dragged to smudge:/it is a rubbish dump, always burning
Flames and Dangling Wire
A waterbird lifts above this swamp/as a turtle on the Galapagos Islands
Flames and Dangling Wire
All the air wobbles/in a cheap mirror
Flames and Dangling Wire
Amongst these vast grey plastic sheets of heat/shadowy figures
Flames and Dangling Wire
Everywhere…it is…always…endless
Flames and Dangling Wire
And there are others moving…scavengers
Flames and Dangling Wire
As in hell the devils/might poke about through our souls, after scraps/of appetite
Flames and Dangling Wire
Seem to be wandering, in despondence, with an eternity
Flames and Dangling Wire
We
Flames and Dangling Wire
And standing where I see the mirage of the city/I realise that am in the future…it will be made of things that worked
Flames and Dangling Wire
A labourer hoists an unidentifiable mulch…throws it on the flame…like the rag held up in “the Raft of Medusa”
Flames and Dangling Wire
Diptych
Diptych
(…Raft of sap-oozing fiber,/ from which he’d climbed down, unharmed, his soberly polite,/had doffed his hat..)
Diptych
Of a small lizard, dragged through her lips. That bitterness, I used to imagine;/she running onto the verandah to spit,/and standing there, spat dry, seeing across the silent, frosty bush
Diptych
Back, step by step, she forced it, through the broken fence,/ it bellowing and hooking either side sharply at her all the way
Diptych
let it have few bloody flowers, Mum.”/ No. She locked the broom handle straight-armed across its nose
Diptych
I sway, for those little flimsy leaves/ she fell to at once, small as mouse prints, among the chopped-up loam.
Diptych
The gentleman, after all, is only known,/only exists, through manner. He himself had the most perfect manners,/ of a kind.
Diptych
After all, he was a university man/(although ungraduated), something more rare then./ MY father, I see was hopelessly melancholic…
Diptych
He often drank alone…wear a carefully considered tie/to get drunk in the sandhills, watching the sea.
Diptych
He advised me, pointing around, “when the sun is coming out of the sea, standing among/that lifting timber, you can feel at peace.”
Diptych
Was as strongly-spiked as the one/on his infantry badge
Diptych
I had accepted him…and I’d come by then to see that we all inhabit pathos
Diptych
Sideways and pierced my hand…and so I dug with that one/into his ashes, which I found were like a mauvish-grey marble dust,/ and I felt I needn’t thank of anything more to say.
Diptych
