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Poetry

Poxes of the sun or of the mind
bring the force-ten firestorms.
After come same-surname funerals,
junked theory, praise of mateship.

Love the gum forest, camp out in it
but death hosts your living in it, brother.
You need buried space
and cellars have a convict fetor:

only pubs kept them. Houses shook them off
wherever diggers moved to.
Only opal desert digs homes by dozer,
the cool Hobbit answer.

Cellars, or bunkers, mustn’t sit square
under the fuel your blazing house will be,
but nearby, roofed refractory,
tight against igniting air-miles.

Power should come underground
from Fortress Suburbia, and your treasures
stay back there, where few now
grow up in the fear of grass.

Never build on a summit or a gully top:
fire’s an uphill racer deliriously welcomed
by growth it cures of growth.
Shun a ridgeline, window-puncher at a thousand degrees.

Sex is Fire, in the ancient Law.
Investment is Fire. Grazing beasts are cool fire
backburning paddocks to the door.
Ideology is Fire.

The British Isles and giant fig trees are Water
Horse-penis helicopters are watery TV
but unblocked roads and straight volunteers
are lifesaving spume spray.

Water and Fire chase each other in jet
planes. May you never flee through them
at a generation’s end, as when
the Great Depression died, or Marvelous Melbourne.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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