the shadow’s keep
Book Sample


I

the shadow’s keep


this is some of the territory from which we strayed in our quest for the land of prayer


when we fly now, lower than hair on the body


breathing the glow of the trees


the everywhere the moon always was and rests


the territory that the blowfly makes


black ducks. They fly over in the night and create stillness in a body


the ironbark is slow to go up in beauty the ironbark is slow upon the land


I shall not be haunted, but do you remember black tree ants dying?


My fingers curl towards the East


the mountains took a long roll outwards they were a fan in my heart


the mountain and its cragged creeks


my brains sleep in the marsh


the rocks are the ocelli in my blood


the soul sound the brine sky


bright wastes


voices spoke for me across the desert


the bare commands of the soil


earth bastion opposite us


those who study the soil find friends with the giants


dawn creeks go by, go by dawn creeks by twilight


now complexity came across dawn deity’s face


a geology of contrary responses


the moon blows red


and what of man? So long as he holds influence the earth dreads its very own water babies





the winds jam our task like a foster century


by our histories we are appropriated


selling Vienna to get to Ceylon


when a thoroughfare requires years of broken bumblebees


then axeman builds as rustman stalks them


the old watertight roads have sandbars along their edge


an apple seeming to the wasteful falls


the abandoning of the permanent must give way to the attic


maintain the ruins of the previous restoration


souls are weakening batteries when always in use


Look, the moon, hard yelling for yellow


overwondering love





the magpie spoke as on the grounds of the immortals


For different reasons there might be things that curl up and things that last


You are evolved at the bay of life, and can come back whenever you want


Dust is your conjurer


I believe in life after death because things always are, they always extend


the black sons of waterlilies


one of us is going to be told a long story by the dead


Pictured by the dead, told by a longer language


I quite like listening to the words that have puzzled me since I was made tenant


words that would feather us


I had the sense I could drink in the darkness and get it down on the page


in the shadow’s keep


His own death, but that is not held, nor secretly discussed, emblem to emblem


a truth veiled as in its veiled effects


something stronger than our everyday shadows perpetrate


Yes, there are palace guardians. They are paler than thought can see





eschewing effective moderation of sorrow


curtains kneel, bereaving at the laundry


on the pastel eve of his departure the delicate colours of the fading house


chaos is the last labour of salt


strange and erudite sobs and passions


Like me to sign you? asked the ghosts of the past


quiet ruin is the conversation of the bulbs


the still of the dawn of the Halloween time


sweet o chilly calm


Don’t be less than strange with them


like a thin fossil that moves outward at midnight


never think to pull your whole self out of there, moon swallow and dive


those being lived again are better off


Doctors only made loyal friends Santan Eve, Santan Elly


boiling down folded blankets until of course gnostic, caustic, sticky


Rooms to let. If you don’t speak English, that’s O.K. Voices must be rusty or volcanic


he swept his voice a grand piece gravel


dagger and tie


Creatures made out of morning sun claim their first victims


we knew him, for the shark was having its birth with him


It’s not Cak the duststorm but Thud the spy


in Sea Pew Up Eye Hunder came


Keats can admire bedroom techniques for the Sabbath


her mother, whipside, genitally, over the fridge


I’m blunt, but then I’m twentieth century man I suppose


Funny lad, brought up on opossum


feudal relish


she painted all that she didn’t understand white


Cider moves through his moves like a glitter through satin


We went well inside the harpies’ birthplace. They said they gave us jelly


I entered my penis today, and shrank like a gem


Fat pilot recalleth his broods




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