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Martin Harrison

A selection of poems

This selection is about 12 printed pages long.

Cheap Movies

In winter dusk, a mindless sea.
A rear-view mirror filled with red —
It’s like a 50s cinema screen,
before the film begins. Late wind

shakes the car, blows the waves, flutters
torn wrappers in the rubbish cans.
The bushes suddenly are tipped with chrome,
the grass turns grey as unwashed wool.

Out there, it’s going on, this change
from blue to deeper blue and grey —
a cormorant tracking over water
looks like a hair across a lens.

The sea returns its jolting light,
surf-noise rolls towards the cliffs.
No moon tonight. Just a wave’s whiteness,
like leaping grains on an old print.

— from The Distribution of Voice

Stopping For A Walk In Reserved Land Near Murra Murra

It’s a stop-over on a Spring day
when, walking through the bush, I see them.
Bees. Wild bees, already clustered,

already swarmed. A galaxy of living honey,
they hang on a branch
in a swollen, brown gourd, a primitive shape

caught on the move. All gouache, clay, and bubble,
it’s hard to fix it for what it is,
frightening to imagine stumbling into its pelting dust,

having just landed from the horizon’s blue planes
of Spring light, dwarf ti-tree, red earth.
Pummeled soil, hanging, between sky and ground,

it takes on a flickering, gold-dyed sheen,
gold as in a strand of hair
that’s threaded, quartz-like, in that ochre mass: bodies, heads, legs,

writhing on each other, pinioned there.
It’s as if each is already a future cell.
Or as if the air has opened up a hasty, war-time grave

where corpses, tossed into the pit, drown each other
with their awkward, rotting limbs.
This swarm is that exposed. That stark.

A wattle-and-daub affair, compacted
in a furious swerve
to a taller tree’s white branch, the swarm hangs there

sandstorm-brown,
a haze of movement
and molecules. It’s as sharp and deafening

as if all the body’s sensations arrive
at one go, or as if a life-time’s
thoughts are suddenly, spontaneously, recalled

by someone moving, at the very edge of life,
when the mind’s
sky-white with memories, swelling with

the fruit of experience, swarming
at death,
yet holding all feelings together;

or as if, veil-like, it’s summed up later (generations later,
after the earth
has soaked up spilt blood and honey-streams)

by the philosopher who says:
Things are not things,
but groups, sets, swarms, flux —

playing their music of ant
and bird. The swarm
is light. It’s energy. Fruit of the desert’s edge.

Fruit, indeed, is fruit. Yet, whether
in grief or orgy,
these bodies pile on top of each other:

they’re a huge brown pear,
they’re an outsize bobbin of unwashed flax,
hanging from a yellow-gum.

It takes for ever to focus on. It swirls.
It implodes in the branches,
hanging like a wind-harp

of silk-glitters and half-dried mud
with outriders taking off and returning,
like flies to a carcase. Not beautiful,

dark, full of anger, full of sting,
it changes shape
like a pot spun between invisible hands,

slowly growing bulbous, then tapering to a narrow neck,
in danger of falling apart
or attacking like a Mongol horde

yet still clustering, still forming itself
from Spring’s exile
and the struggle of poisoned virgin grubs —

till it steadies its larval magic
into an Earth-Mother drone
of particles, dynamos, ancestral flight.

— from The Kangaroo Farm

Remembering Floodwater

Back of the mind, it’s the white sliver which is
neither misty trace nor meaningless: it probably
isn’t snow, nor that glare effect of a white line
which the sea’s horizon can sometimes have
on days when the air’s clear as untouched cellophane.
It’s a particular white sliver, or smear of white,
like a patch of sand bursting through leaf-cover,
held forever, remembered, from some walk years back.
It’s the stripe of light on sandhills towards dusk,
caught just once, recalled, seen again somewhere else.
Or it’s untouchable shadow on the white metal of the roof
of the house next door, a shadow that’s also a silhouette
of a bougainvillea, cascading red flowers
down the walls, overgrown round the drain pipes —
and, above the roof, three pelicans hanging in the sky
as if they’re boats moored in wind-slopped water.

This is the brightness I usually wake up to, or
which wakes me, after a night of dreamless sleep.
I slept like that last night. After weeks away,
I wake up once again in a house tranquil as summer,
a house full of things (lamps, sinks, chairs, doors)
which do not need to sleep. Just for those first
few moments, after I’ve come into the kitchen,
everything’s as calm and cool as the fridge.
Then it hums, quietly, and the lazy, gliding pelicans
flap their wings. It could be once or for ever,
like a particular sensation which arrives and goes,
before it’s anchored, then felt again. Getting back,
I’ve that feeling that somehow things
have changed, when really they haven’t:
perhaps they should have changed. They haven’t.
You’re still asleep. The neighbour’s roof offers
back a little ultraviolet to the unsmudged blue,
while I’m thinking of the time away, the journeys,
the days and days on arid, high-speed roads. It could be you’re dreaming of it right this moment, curled over
like a slope of land. Nothing changes. Or perhaps it’s country light
that’s burned itself behind my eyes. Now the trace
becomes that sliver. Like a shadow getting through
the lids, I remember spilt-out glaze on flooded wetlands
with their dead, grey trees still standing there
and ibis cruising down to land. A string of fence posts
wades into the water’s middle, before it drowns. Up close,
two swallows, scissoring, vanish across the sun.

— from The Kangaroo Farm

Night’s Paddock

When we meet at night,
this is what I feel:
you are moving under dark trees.
I am those trees, those shapes.
You’re the stars moving down the plain.

You’re the stars moving behind
the motion of that move,
the inwardness of mood
by which stars and night modify
their space inside a moving mark,

a restless mark, a figure of moons,
of present and absent moons,
of darkness shining on the water-tank,
of dark motion at the edge
of dark matter, holding it, cupping it

as if it’s water-glitter in the mind
or a single thread of memory
moving like a herd across the dust:
my own night within me —
miles of fences under the night hovering.

— from The Kangaroo Farm

Letter from America

Two white men are arguing about the earth mover:
how to get it down from the truck
parked outside the rail station. It’s too humid,
they shouldn’t be outside. Stocky, they look like they spend their lives

working with machines — their day-lives, which is to say — working
with the contraptions which underpin
American life, these earthbound flying-
ants, these nooks and crannies of green, rich complexity:

green, rich complexity, though, is an abstract phrase
for something which denies particularity
in this local cybernetic mode of lakes
and highways, dense woods and rusted factories,

invisible and visible wealth careering
down tollways, where labour’s become
a non-stop office behaviour, a commuting
between islands of coolness, synthesised voices and a pace

a village blacksmith could deal with, all of it on line.
Interiors are enamelled, clean,
decked with white and gold-trimmed lamps. Future time
is already here, extracted from pockets of memory loss

via thresholds and samples, making it impossible to fall
beneath a level still to be invented
or imagined differently: green, rich
complexity occurring if we go forward without things.

Trailer parks will eat up the earth one day, but not here.
Dipped in fire, they’ll be tidied away
whether by local ordinance or, as here,
by simply ignoring those lives ‘of quiet desperation’ —

that 19th Century American’s phrase — which were viewed
from a hollow of mirror-like, Ice Age pond
not far from where I’m now: yet those two guys
have worked it out, in green sun-vizors and white T-shirts,

inching the earth-mover down to the carpark’s gritty asphalt.
I’ve the sense nothing touches the ground,
not even this behemoth with its caterpillared
wheels, yellow perspex-glassed cab and proboscis

with half crab-claw, half-shovel prong. Perhaps they mean
to excavate a flyover or an
isthmus with it, thereby adding to the communication
load which their rich, death-seeking neighbours, trapped in this time,

are burdened by. On their highways they drive right through that load,
preferring data to be piped to im-
maculate white clapboard village houses
with neo-classical porches where frayed Stars and Stripes

hang listlessly behind trim lawns. Multi-channel television
becomes both umbrella and window,
carelessly glimpsing a diamante storm:
somewhere in there, the necklaces of night-time, red-light, unsewered

tropical towns sprawl under purple sunset-pollution haze,
together with the verdigris mudflats of
coastal floating villages and (like an eyebrow)
that pale, elegant half-desert landscape I’m familiar with:

maroons, silvers, browns, splashes of red-flowering gums haunt it,
and haunt me. But these things don’t matter
viewed from here. This is the age
of division, of rhizomatic loss, of litter ground down in a unit

with its custom-built, push-button motor. May it never
break down! May it always churn and chur
from that hole in the gleaming sink! May the
Nasdaq keep rising on the basis of chewed up islands

with their jets flying in for cocktail-hour! Their sharp-nosed flight
mimics the ibis landing in a wetland. Parked, waiting for the train,
I’m in automatic stasis, half-caught
in half-thought: a balance between highrise white as a pelican feather and a yacht-sail

crumbling in a contrary breeze. They’re just tokens.
Smears in paintings, memories of photos
where a moment ripples like wind in tall grass behind a barn.
This light catches it, makes it local, freezes it in corrugated iron.

— from Summer

A Patch of Grass

The dark green, the light green,
the pale native rosemary flowers,
blue-grey like low rain clouds,
and, behind them, an intense spiked green
of boronia, seed-heads, meadow-grass,
thistles and thistle-heads —
a slope of them, a scarred bank,
held down by agapanthus clumps,
rambling grevillea, more boronia:

patches of bare, hard clay
exposed where the sun burns out the
surface, or where little run-offs
stop the grass from taking, offer a
tattered shawl of thin weeds, spires of fireweed,
a kind of parsley, twigs,
bark-litter from a gum-tree,
and the bake of a harsh, blue sky
reflected in quartz-hued

pebbles, a sandstone rock
not too heavy to lift, dwarf-sized
escarpments waving with
shell grass, dandelions, small groundsels
also flowering. There are slender violets,
too, which I thought had been
introduced, but I looked them
up: they’re native — two-toned, purple
and pale mauve (like lilac)

interlaced with chickweed
and couch grass. The land slopes somewhat
there, giving that chance
of openness which some species need
as well as the chance of dead erosion
by rain, by heat which splits
earth — I mean, by motion
of soils as natural as the shifts
which hollow out slow changes

in any body tak-
ing on contours of age and use.
Taking on more, it’s a
place for everything, allowing an
instant of transformation — of wildness —
as a registering
of greenness beyond the eye’s
capacity (what does it see?) to
grade green as straw-coloured,

verdant, or shadowed. A
green re-mapped by swirls of firetails
on a seed-search. In such
half-seeing of the world, it’s the bird’s-
eye view which makes the tangle into a
fixed space for words, adding
once more that hint of pale
rainy blue, shimmering beneath
the network of grasses:

a phrase like “everything’s
place” might be appropriate to this
lingering gaze — though that’s
to say, “lost to its people,” “no long-
er mantic,” “not named in speech.” Small patch
of earth. It stays like this
until you understand it
as light, unconscious flesh; and it
becomes you, as you it.

— from Summer

The Witnesses

At first I think that they are someone else,
the blond woman and her fair-haired daughter —
it’s the car probably, a station wagon
pulling up on the grass, white like the teacher’s,
and the profile’s the same. But, no, they’ve found me,
driving in despite the gate’s nearly lack of sign
and washed-out entrance turn, and twenty yards
of scratching, noisy wattles. Pretty soon
I know what’s afoot or what’s likely to be,
greeting them on the edge of the verandah —
surprised to see them, but guessing everything
as I watch them walking up towards me
with the pamphlets. “It’s a beaut day,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “ how’re you going.” “We haven’t
been out this way a while,” she says, “but we’re here
to talk about God’s message.” Just like that:
and me, I’m thinking how not to ask them in,
and of how many times this has occurred,
and how many seconds to close the door.
They stand there in the flooded morning light —
the woman with her opening lines, the daughter
glancing nervously at her, embarrassed
perhaps by the whole event — and me absorbed
not in what they say but in the fact they’re there.
I let her talk on after I buy The Tower.
She talks of her earlier life, what’s she’s found,
how she now trusts only in what she’s found,
how she’ll spread the word while the vehicle lasts —
there’ll be money to fix it when she needs it.
She talks of a convention down in Sydney.
All the while I watch her daughter looking on,
making the link which holds me, as I wonder
what’s gone wrong, and how many phases
this sixteen-year old’s been put through to date:
I can’t help but think of small town poverty,
a broken marriage and — guesswork this —
ex-commune life, aging, a late start. A
past’s dark stream flows in her new-shared faith.
The daughter waits as if the day is long.
Behind her, I’m watching the half-full dam,
a silver coin shining at birdless sky —
it’s so blue and bright, the first day like this
now that the heat’s over and there’s cold.
Listening, I find the woman’s motives too frail to break —
I scuff a plank and mention how the neighbours,
unemployed, stay at home, happy at how
talking outdoors has usually got some purpose.
There’s no clear way to tell the truth, or lie.
There’s no way to shut out clean winter light.

— from Summer

Summer

The hotel’s blue pool has little shipwrecks on it:
last night’s mosquitoes, a bug or two, a lollipop stick.
It has coolness, too, greyness and limpidity
together with the slight echo of pre-traffic moments,
shimmering across its transparence, its daybreak light.

Blue tiles, chlorine smell, a filtration hum,
someone’s caulked this ad-world image of a dream
for (it says) ‘hotel guests only,’ then painted it,
cleaned out the pumps, filled it, set it going.
It’s a rooftop machine to plunge into, loving its feel.

Exhausted travellers, for instance, sky-dive in its clearness.
Water (they think) cares for them as it lets them through.
Besides, someone jumping in won’t worry how much turbulence
whips up corrugated peaks, valleys slopping
into hills, sprayed-out grunge, glistening parabolas.

Stilled, its mirror surface is no more than mirror deep.
A lap-swimmer cuts through it shaping a wake
before he turns, twisting from underwater, like a shark.
Right now, unused, it reflects a city’s post-dawn sounds,
unknown bird-whistles and (familiar, this) that hour-long coolness

of slightly lifted pollution which is a breath of heaven
before the heat. Someone’s waking up in the building
opposite — a Thai family on a balcony who haven’t slept.
They’ve been outside all night among the knick-knacks there,
a cheaply tacked-up electric bulb in the kitchen

left on: — a washing-line, clamped from the wall
to a bamboo pole on the balcony, sags under a confetti
of shorts and T-shirts. Are they rich or poor
to live in low high-rise in the tourist zone? This might be
wealth if you’ve moved from an up-country village,

laced through with smelly waterways, green
luxuriant foliage and the spike of a golden shrine
which Americans, heiffer-garlanded with cameras,
walk through. Here, too, there’s a wealth of angles:
that family’s exposed to any bastard foreigner

who pushes out from the passageway’s air-con
onto this humid, half-warm, half-cool platform
where, terraced ten floors above the carpark,
this wind-free, smooth lozenge of water
has been arranged behind concrete tubs in a fake garden-

effect, four square metres of grey-green pelouse,
and six white plastic recliners articulating the
full stretch of imaginary bodies, sipping
martinis through straws. Those chairs —
the thought’s a shock rising over clear, bare seas —

are really signs of death, sculptures signalling ‘absence of body’;
while quiet water, I suddenly remember, is stagnancy and grief.
(It’s water with a texture which seems to look right past you.)
There’s always this desire simply to stop. But I drag
one of the chairs over the concrete to make somewhere

to sit, so I can take my runners off. Everyone wears
such sporty clothes, when travelling: Nike, Adidas,
waist-pouches, sweatshirts with Penguins on them
like we’re overseas salesmen for a New York gym:
glucose drinks, cholesterol, sparkling mineral water

are the unconscious of its regulation code. More seriously,
I’m thinking what is it lines up a world-famous shot?
So much which, floating, fills up time is already visualised.
What is the accident which drags you to the shore?
What’s the moment, focussed not on that family,

but the one which flashes through its web of neurones,
signifying the merest fact of being here, snapped
in this age of debris, smoke and fire? A glittering,
electronic dust dissolves, mind-wise, in a constant
background hum, indicative as a lawn’s pink flamingo:

only the dead, their remembered messengers, walk in and out of it,
like figures drifting, ghostlike, on a riverbank.
No Odysseus goes there now with his flasks of blood.
This split second — this jet-lagged moment — fixes my mind on home:
a humane life that’s rootless, mindless as summer is.

— from Summer

Seeing Rain

A top branch shakes down
heavy rains of diamonds
while, amethyst-eyed, a silent bird
flies off among deeper leaves

After the cloud-burst this is one
can’t hide in its midnight blue.
Each leap inside the cotoneaster
sputters out diamond showers.

Do bower birds see rain as I do,
glimpsing more than texture?
And what does an observer know
of pecking vermilion from the air?

Going outside, I scared it off
as if, in hiding, it could hide itself,
neither of us sensing through rain-wet light
how we divide the world with thoughts.

A top branch shakes down
heavy rains of diamonds
while, amethyst-eyed, a silent bird
flies off among deeper leaves

— from Music

The Past

The drive back from Melbourne is a patchwork of histories. Back home, after three days on the road, the paddock’s new grasses are wind-free, still. At last green. “It’s as if it’s all making up its mind,” someone said to me day or so ago. Yes, I thought to myself, it’s true there’s a kind of tremor in which this return to green is conducted. Much of Victoria was green, tentatively so. But as we cross the border, the blond dry quality returns: the slopes are straw-coloured, silvery blond. When we turn off to the beginnings of the high country, we skim an unmarked frontier back into green. In the journey’s speed, there’s both stasis, no-change and, at the same time, there’s constant change. In the larger world, there’s tentativeness because no-one knows how long these conditions will last. Rainless years, die-back, dry dams, swarms of roos, crop failure, stock reduction, fires, mice plagues — the list is so negative, the particulars so “bush”, that you can’t help but smile. Can it get worse? It seems — well, how to put it? — that there’s a weather of things, as well as a weather of prevailing wind, rain and pressure patterns. There’s a weather of the mind and of personal senses, a weather of this other psychological “world”: namely, a weather of intimate feelings which change and sharpen each person’s idea of the world. If it weren’t like this, everything would be equally noticeable. Everyone, for instance, would have registered the news of locust swarms far west of here and seen the handful of scattered, windblown outriders flittering across the half-way-between-ankle-and-knee high grass in the back orchard here. But, no, they’re here for a few days only. Not many people see them

                  ¶

I wake up with a heavy sense of — already the word I want for this feeling has gone back into sleep. Anxiety, a sense of inextricable failure, a heaviness mixed with guilt about something I should have done and could never have succeeded in doing: all of these are part of the name I’m searching for. A single word to name the feeling....”What have I done wrong?” is what I am feeling, or, more exactly: “Where have I gone wrong?”

Some deep internalisation’s occurred and, momentarily, a rift, a wedge, of embedded emotion stirs up, like a swirl of sand from a fish disturbed in the creekbed, which then filters through the first few hours of the day. I’m a child again, waking up to the electric, tingling sense of negativity — of anger and resentment — which my parents wallowed in for weeks on end with each other: irreconcilable difference, fret-saw of irritability, slur and sneer, moody non-speaking! What a life! Did they ever make up, forgive and forget? A burdensome, bruised cloud pressed into the back of my mind: that’s the name for what I’ve woken with. And the pathetic, doglike sense (only children can be so abject) of somehow having to make it all right, to make up for it.....

So let’s say that the nameless mood is a key element in the breaking down of anxiety. Nobody can be so sure of things, so in control. No-one can expunge, in every regard, the daily sense of living a life divided, of having another life which, always accompanying us, goes into shadow as soon as we turn to look. It’s as if we carry in us a forgetfulness the other side of a rift beyond which memory works without connections. We try to recall and immediately we are wordless. We read the character and then we guess —

      (two pears, two small pears, still hard — hanging in their pale-green leaf sprays of old wood)

      (a gash of fruit across the mind)

      (the poet’s words about his mother’s death: those hands, that face, the gesture of a life which isn’t any other life but exactly this one )

      (the sense that the others, the dead ones, never lose their intimate link with us)

      (how much love is tied to their presence)

      (a chipped stone flake)

                  ¶

Along the road winding beside new green paddocks, the already dry dust spurts       blowing away quickly, like words just out of reach —
“the past will always exceed the everyday”- much as if, in an abandoned house, a       phone’s still ringing

                  ¶

Yet the green keeps on expanding. All the wreckage of dreams, fears, complex constructions floats through it like abandoned machinery, rusted by the sky.
Fences and cars go down in it like holiday makers on a beach entering the water, slowly, inching their way, with a hundred different gestures of surprise, a hundred different screeches and laughs. The sound of so many things sinking into time never ceases to fill one’s ears: for at a certain point, things only remain visible because they are half-eaten, half-formed, half-vanished (they’re all the same process) in time. The simplest impulse reaches from one end of consciousness to the other, from one moment at the remembered beginning to the on-going moment of immersion. I wake up, for instance, with a single feeling of concern and with the parallel sense that the feeling is, itself, a signal — like a sail trajected between water and sky, like a plough skimming between surface and air

— from Summer

Seeing Paddocks

*
across the slope, emptiness like a tide sweeps everything away

*

Dry wind grazes like fire in the middle height of trees.

If there’s a cloud it’s in the mind not in the world.
If there’s a trace or hint of it, it’s a thought not a thing.
If there’s an edge, it’s made here along the slope.
If there’s darkness, I bring it with me like blood.
If there’s more darkness, it’s exposed in the tree fringe.
If there’s a distant zig- zag, it speeds like a snake.
It runs down the sky like an upside down tree.
If it delivers an idea of change, it hits, it strikes.
(Rain smell, memory of wetness on strewn bark litter,
sound of rain, markings of rain on the ground.)
If it strikes, it brings fire, air, water.
If it breathes, it undries the mind like waking from a dream.
If it remembers, it gives back the dream’s clear outlines.
(Today no-one remembers the earth dream, the land dream.)
(Over there, a car goes silently by in its wind-river.)
If it’s too hard to get back there, leaf clusters parachute down.
If you want to look, you must look in the corner.
If there’s a play of shadow and untruth, bright wind still glares.
The surprised stillness of earth powders into dust.
The wind too is a leap a jump from one look to another.
If a root system drops from a swollen purple cloud.
One strike brings fire, air, water.
Three strikes brings gaol, mostly over nothings.
If you look you must look in the corner of the eye.
If there’s a gash of granite boulders, the flesh clefts them.
If the breath’s elements (soul elements) have dried like a dream.
(Rhythmed by the fence, a car goes silently by.)
If we place death somewhere, we will start forgetting it.
If death is placed here, it will start remembering.
It happens instantly.
The wind too is a leap between two views, two looks.
If — even if — there’s a dry place the past still weeps there.
When the wind trowels the sky, it leaves blue hints of thunderheads.
Over there, the paddock gazes out with its blond, bare contours.

across the slope, emptiness like a tide sweeps things away

— from Summer

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