|
|
Les Wicks
Biography
ETHER
Claudie is the bladed memory of intelligence, smiling.
I remember a touch,
mourning weight on fighter-jet shoulders. Her judicious outbreaks of nurture
/world-city oxygen.
All recollections are wrapped in the leaking paper of our language gaps.
She is murmured song
the thesis of fingertips.
I cannot kiss her
because our lips are stories...
she is in Paris.
We cannot even talk now, her phone booth
from the winter midnight Seine - complicated burdens of history like
we've all come to bear.
Me in pyjamas, no coffee or sense
antipodean parrot dawn
words like
cue cards to monkeys.
I was talking to my youth
the words delayed and caught in magma
warped as they slipped down cables
beneath too many oceans.
LANGUAGE POETRY
for BE
Persian read & Persian written are joined.
It starts from another border
but travels as men's minds are built to do
when agitated with purpose.
There is none of the Western alphabet thatch,
nor German's phlegmy bark.
Cloaked mountains lead with a gesture.
We are shepherded to the page
beneath the adamance of the moon
Imagery sneaks past
in slippered susurrus.
Children's heads rest as in deepest privacy
their parents dance beneath a shooting star,
scarves in zephyr.
We are a congregation
lulled to consensus
in the runnel of black ink.
FOOTPRINTS
Fat from the rains,
guts full of mud
the adolescent Derwent River
is teak & cream.
Red/gold toadstools
aseasonal pink bells, petals bowed
beside ferric stained & beaten stone.
In a corolla of flotsam
one monstrous boulder ignores
this cacophony of life.
Industry & wild water are together here.
Potoroos concede the road verge,
pipes hug the bridge.
By wet rotten riverbank picnic tables
some industrial plant
like a steel pin in the valley's hip.
Man is rain.
Beneath kookaburra sky,
the raincoats of paycheques.
In Tasmania, what's untouched
what's harnessed & the stuff propped up
all stand adjacent.
SHAKIN & EATIN
The trees rain.
Tasmanian winter morning...
but dry now, the mist lifts
& a soaked forest collectively shrugs.
A benediction falls on this one hiker
& the wombat road-kill
yet to be processed
by the Devils in the scrub.
I have seen their work
in the new ecology.
Cleaning up after timber trucks,
they leave only a few teeth, bones,
lines of furry droppings.
The next downpour will wrap the lot in its shroud.
Life is dinner.
All Copyright Les Wicks 2007 All rights reserved.
Send private comments to author: leswicks@hotmail.com
Top
|