Henley Pub? I am one year from your death, and a mad mile from your achievement twenty or so years down the track. I think you may have killed a few of us off, brother, who rejoiced in your thicket of sorrows. Jim Baxter, if a cabbage tree marks your spot by the river, I am glad of it. After you went, we were too eager for another Apollo, and the laurel was tossed from hand to poetic hand like a hot kumara. Most dropped it. A number were swept by the winter river with the eels into the Underworld.The God Love and the God Vengeance sat down in a burnt out warehouse to share out the small morsels of pain. The poets are playing hide-and-seek with each other in and out of marriage. The sharing is done. A southerly whistles up over the gun emplacements on Brooklyn Hill,Jim, scattering the unposted Autumn leaves.
Christmas
Under the mining operations of the moon, continental drifts of cloud collude and a pelican scaffolds the air. In cities, bricks sweat. We are blinded by the rush to live; keep it moving, says the sense of loss, our common language. The information Super Highway informs to inform supra clicks the instinct. Hold on screens survival. We are built upon reflection; under the arch of the railway see the conduit flow & steady in the round. A piece of hill lights up and beneath it shadow so shakes the net. Hear the sheer drag of scythe on metal the shunter makes at the curve of the viaduct while, with elongated wail, rolls three spoil-wagons to the hollow hill.
Emblems
1. Adam
A lamp passed behind a perforated shield; stars leaked. What he thought thunder brought footfalls of lightning. He scanned over the plateau & nowhere found a neighbours spoor.
2. Oblation
The Island nations of the colder latitudes breed alluvial poets, it is believed, who convene once yearly under friendly, arched viaducts to talk of river shingle, boulder, and water birds.
3. Detail
The yellow machinery tracks on the freeway are as soldiers in single file stretching out into the late afternoon, slanting sun, shadow-crimson earth leaning forward to the compassed horizon.