Enduring things
After Jack Gilbert
The small animal in my head at night
hesitates, then picks up
the scent of an ancient route
and another place in me:
the city of steel and jaded bricks,
of mills, foundries and furnaces,
its locomotives grunting, whining
on tracks that sliced through the hearts
of the sweat-shiny, blackened men
whose households were regulated by the whistle
they woke or slept by.
The BHP, like a bulker tethered
amidst chimney stacks and luffing cranes
to a bollard on the Hunter,
rising out of the river mist, silhouetted against a broad sky,
is now a thing of air,
a transitory room across the birds' flight-path.
The coke ovens and furnaces are now quenched, levelled.
Platt's Channel reclaimed by water-hens, plovers,
the mangroves in the tide's ceaseless swell.
The last workers? Retrained,
shunted into retirement,
or an early grave.
And what about the housewives
whose lives hinged on too much work,
or too little,
on soot and the wind's direction?
They hold fast
to family heirlooms lest they break or are lost
in the bumpy transition.
Their weekend children rubbing the sticks
of themselves together, igniting the flame
that generates new life, at the Town Hall,
or the Palais. Their children's children
have grown, moved away:
on the web trafficking the atmosphere,
on the back of coal, Hospitality or Tourism,
in service, or drifting into the harbour on luxury liners
that look like sleek white albatrosses.
Perhaps this land wants its ancient self back:
the alluvial soil, the rocks (their art intact),
and the beach where I'm now strolling.
I think I understand how the elephant felt,
the one photographed for the National Geographic
as it tracked through the lobby
of the Luangwa Valley Lodge in Zambia,
on its way to its favourite mango tree.
My ancient routes have been criss-crossed and disturbed.
Nevertheless, I'm listening for the tribal sounds,
the South Pacific's breeze through the bush,
the soft brush of percussion
and indiscriminately above that, the wind
free as the Whistling Kite
above the foliage, and then above the valley.
The animal in me thrives among the natives
and the sound of sunshine
in this pleasant place my solemn heart has made.
Unhinged
Me and a stranger clutch
prawner's poles that hammock
a net. Dark's spangled hair
is tressed on the Watagans.
Streetlights fasten long hinges
on the lake where, stride after stride,
we scissor its black satin;
the cool fusion is riding my ribs
to a halter,
my mind's parched country.
We circle back moon-walking,
buoyed in