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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                         #1/thyla1j THE POETRY OF MARK O'CONNOR Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Portrait of Poet Mark O'Connor by Jenni Mitchell (oil on canvas 1989 30" x 36") "Above that jigsaw rockface lives a timeless Snake. It has no need of us or the world." I The Silence I Termite Lands I The Rock I Wild Budgerigars I Magela Floodplains At Dawn I Jabirus At Anabangbang I February Storms I Near Ubirr I Nourlangie Cave At Night I Live Wedgewood I Cream of Earth I Golden Orb Spiders (communal web) I Reading The Tracks I Turtle's Hatching I The Pairing of the Terns I Frigate Birds I Butcher's Budgies I Firestick Farming I Parrot on Wattle I The Hot Ridge I The Silence (Alice Springs) Closing the door, you go out - indeed out from the last line of houses over the ditch for thirty-year floods treading dry sand from an ancient ocean - fluent signature of a passing snake the night closing in as ever and the rock wallabies entering it - truck-roar and horns in the distance like some loud-voiced bird with two notes that repeats its nothing forever. Sand hushes the spinifex aisles in a scabbard of wind-rustle. The big roos, like grey mobile spirits among self-toned stones observe you from cover. Motor noise falls away like a wad pulled from your ears, so thick there is only silence, the lack. You are walking small gaps, and maps, of bare soil between spinifex - tussocks you once thought uniform and now think random feeling the soft rush of sand between toes watching for trip-stone or stub-root, an endless fitting of bare feet to country. Alice, the sea city, sleeps under its cliffs in its dry bay, glimpsed through dunes like Baia's marbles through the wave. A hundred metres in - glance back through a line of shrubs and the low, busy city is gone, vanished into the bush like Burke and Wills and a cool breeze comes, and gives you back your senses. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). Termite Lands Driving into the nothing, the road trains and erosion gullies, the burnt dead-swamp heart where termite trees are all that grow; past a biking swagman, brain-burnt beyond lure of comfort. Striking through smoky air, the breath of the burning continent, a hawk sheds the sun-strike off its wing slicing up from the leading edge a wake of cool low-pressure. Like fire-walkers whose feet would bubble if they stop, our tyres scorch down the melting bitumen strip through air made breathable by speed. Stop, and you're in the Territory. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). The Rock The Rock has exits and entrances womb-shaped vacuoles birth-caves and spring-caves, V-shaped notches where life and water flow like syrup from notched bark, Dreaming spirals in white ochre that make the Rock's spiral nipples flow with fresh broods of euros, hopping mice, and yams. Above that jigsaw rockface lives a timeless Snake. It has no need of us or the world. But it can be sung - sung, till water flows from its body in vast sheets down from the baking top, the black rivers of Uluru, long trails of dead algae, to a waterfall that in rain-time belches a town's water supply. The brief river falls from the Rock in flawless fluted shoals, drilling an invisible reservoir, hectares broad, sand-roofed. The Rock's lizard-shingles are flaked by millennial frost. Spinifex bushes mark the cracks like hairs in an armpit. A long plate creaking loose is the Dreamtime Goanna climbing the Rock - one day he will split, leap back. When he lands astonished on his spine he will, in an instant, rejoin that Dream where everything happened and happens again. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). Wild Budgerigars In the desert pool a scattering skyful of lime-greens and yellows, no captive blues. A hawk's shadow passes, distant, lonely, as they pour in, thickening a mulga's branches, grinding seed-paste from the grasslands; they dart, flit, flip, flick, sip drops for dough from a mud-pool two metres long; plonk hard down on its gruel, whir up like houseflies from a swat, return; less flap than buzz, on stumpy wings riding an invisible flicker, they pulse through light and heat, absent and back, in the twitch of a tomcat's paw. First there are two, then four, forty, four hundred, three, then none; and again. How to slow their wing beats, squeals, so the brain can unravel? Only that giant muddy eye is swift to snatch each flurr of radiant wings, give each shrill squawk its millisecond, and its drink. The cat mews, disconsolate. Its first slink from cover has sent these bright ragged troupes, querulous parliaments of birds, whirring up out of the pond's clay eye that shakes, un-blurs, and empties. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). Magela Floodplain at Dawn A dazzle licks at the rim of the world, flame at the edge of tinder; vast honking of goose horns like a traffic jam in the dark then across a slate mirror the cattle-egret runs to a splash its coiled neck-javelin at the ready and the leaf-trotting jacana, lark of the floodplain, kicks puddles on a dry lily leaf like spilt mercury on glass and the tiny white waterlily fakes a carpet of English snowdrops among tropical sedges in warm reptilian waters. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). Jabirus at Anabangbang The jabiru stork is hunting, is moving his fleshless shanks red and inert as pipes hitched to long muscles under the feathers. He lifts one leg, now the other, considering, stirring. His mate runs, ungainly, after the shoals as they swirl and mill, confused in mud-shallows, then pay her toll for escape. Twin derricks in the swamp the pair feed from stilts as others from the air. The sea-eagle's hovering spread struggles to jemmy a catfish from water, jumps and bucks like a tethered kite as the spined tail still under and beating twists him ninety degrees from the strike-path; but the jabiru pair lift with ease whatever their bludgeon-beaks stun. Lesser ducks and magpie-geese may dabble beneath them; and the small heron keeps his intent bent-necked pose, a feathered snake waiting to strike; the file-snake thinks him a branch, is stung, resists, despairs. Above, black cockatoos in flight: their slow archaic wail, their strange, slack falling asleep at the end of each downstroke. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). February Storms It's the green Wet - warm spit between down-drubs. Where else can you laugh so much water off your back?                                                Yam vines half-shot from tubers, now begin to put substance back. The year is floral, confident. The kestrel cries that half the Wet is gone. The paperbark blooms now between too much and too little water; its white brushes smelling of honey and meat enthrall the flies. Your noon siesta floats from unbearable sweat and lassitude to cool passionate thunder - a swift rise of yeasting cloud-cells; cold grit in the eye as the gust-front swirls, shrouds- vanishes, and then the rain. That first sharp spray -what else but spit, or seed? And the cool that follows, the end of some broil between sky and earth - birds the urgent messengers of its start and end, the downpour its fertile resolution, as the valley clears, obscures, half-clears like a lens pulled in and out of focus. Blissful too, the cool evenings after rain in which perhaps you've showered. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). Near Ubirr Entering a cave you shout to the bones within it, mothers, grandfathers, uncles, saying who comes and not to hurt the stranger who stands with you. A painting 10,000 years old impossibly high on the cave-roof - old people say a Mimi did it, but the pile of fallen rocks is a vanished ledge. The dancing figures are elongate with arms, cocks, legs asplay; horizontal, head down, or upright like an aerial dogfight. The giant barramundi, half human, half spirit, are the oldtime size that took two warriors to carry before the creeks were netted. This people through ages never brought in a log to sit on or knocked the sharp edges from a stone bench, yet will carefully, daily, sift pebbles from a patch of sand to sit. Dusk: and the cave is astir with spirits: thin Mimi spirits washed out of the cracks by evening wind or the smell of meat. At the silent whirr of a small black bat the screw-palms toss their tousled vanes; and the flying fox, that human face with wings drifts past on blacked-out velvet. A gecko on the sandy track outside flurries and flees, blood-warm beneath your sandal. Published in The Forever Lands (Beyond Images Press, 2001). Nourlangie Cave at Night - Utter stillness of warm air among rocks as if ancestors held their breath. Each niche has held its dilly bag of cracked thigh-bones, feared and untouchable till the brutal four-wheel drives. And Barramundi Charles came here with his Reckitt's Blue painting his people back into the country under the great faulted cliffs of Arnhem Land where the line was held, and the farms stopped short. From dry walls the Rainbow Serpent thunders: without her lashing explosion no life, no food, no worshipper. The Lightning Man and Woman have no mouth - their speech is in the spark that leaps from stricken stones. Timeless, primal Wallaby takes the spear in his lung, drips blood and baby-making fat. A horseshoe bat loops softly past my ears, harmless unless to moths; the vast bulk of stone a blackness and comfort from tomorrow's sun. A python, heat-seeker, lazily unwinds from the blinding heat of day, nosing out into the blood-warm night. The crisp chill before dawn will turn it murderous. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Live Wedgewood Soft slap of ripples crowding in; richness of moon-led water: the blue-spotted stingray steers its soft disc through the mangroves' craypot tangle. From day-beds of sand eight fathoms under, blue saucers rising at dusk edging ahead of their shadows. They have half-pearl eyes to swim the warm dark to the furthest ripple the tide makes. Five rays are paused in this pool like blue-gray stepping-stones, a matched set of china, their white tail-lancets stuck out at random. So round - yet each has a head and a forward; is the size of a frying pan, thickness of scallopine. My staring disturbs them: they know they must edge towards me first before the outlet turns deep and safer. They follow-the-leader, cautious as cows trailing down a slope, until - zip! - each flips up and over the pool's lip, splashing, away as three smaller ones slip in, flick the sand on their heads, and sink, a shoal taking root. From the half-erased discs protrude eyes, like a frog's in mud, with stout bone-gums to crush cockles, scent-pits, and keen internal ears. The fisherman says they make faithful pets and come each tide for a scrap of fish. And one settles upon another now, slowly overlapping plate on plate like tolerant platonic love. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Ibis Flapping The kingfisher flits, glinting turquoise over the crocodile swamp. - For adventure, choose the mild crocodile not the tiger. He'll sharpen your senses, make you inspect each log; a gentleman killer, stalks you on ground of your choosing. Stay away and you need never play. Yet the croc scores - an ibis flaps as the broken leg pulls under. No fantasies of digging thumbs in that soft under-belly of half-inch armour. Surfacing slowly so slowly a serrated tail breaks water like six autumn leaves raked at an angle. An eye blinks, perfect as the yellow waterlily flower, surprised only at your surprise. He won't strike till he's got the range. Then broad tail thrusting, rush of the squat webbed feet, a gecko launched at a moth, and you turn, dream-slow, to push uphill through sinking mud - an ibis flapping. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Cream of Earth 1. Delta Cooler rivers flow through land; this with land. A vast habitable plain where you walk with two broad oars, shod in a roomy single boat. Pushing off a whole oar vanishes in mud from a thumb's thrust. Land dries in patches on the grey tide-plain, rising smooth and flatly as a whale's back, assembling soft carve-and-come-again islands where clawed fish skip on an interface of mud and brine no human foot detects . . . At the line where earth meets salt and begins to flow mud reaches a melting point, and current parts from shoals as smoothly as the moon deserts a cloud. In a flood-sea the whole delta's bed might rise and drift; daily it pours a brown shelf of mud from its mixing-bowl, part of an outgrowing undersea plain - a day's sail till the blue begins. 2. Pool Sporting loud spots in their showy pool twin archer-fish backing and filling, like spruikers bow and fan themselves in a double act, wait for the marchfly to applaud. The young croc prefers character roles: root, stone, mud. At evening, ripples gone, the water polishes itself into shimmering plates, a vast tectonic sheen, shading to herring-bone ripples, tweeds and twills, or mud-green tartans, with somewhere a hint of black-and-yellow blunt-scaled tail. 3. Crocodile Haiku How the river is enhanced by the crocodile in it! Each ripple astir with richer meaning. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Golden Orb Spiders (communal web) A condominium of she-pirates, - its dome a wonder of suspension: laced apartments hang, nestling in silver, serried and strata-titled, sharing sun and breeze and passing traffic; the nursery hutches on the fringe all light and airy. In the centre the old Queen preens her golden rings, waits for the random suicidal male; her bunting, decked with the proofs of past loves, swings from a mangrove. Tides swirl up to slop the cellar with a broad tongue of dank grey water, where the archer fish, delighted, spits. As the droplets surge, spiderlets climb the rigging, waiting till sun and dryness return, jostling and sometimes eating each other, their manners honest, un-selfrighteous. In silk and gold they flourish. Collectively they could kill a mouse. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Reading the Tracks The pig's neat tram-track crossing. The dingo's trot-and-spy. The croc's clawed paddle-tracks. Buffalo's cloven highway. The snail's meandrine path and burrow. The ghost-crab's eight-needled lace-work path. The burrow-crab's fast skitter-out-and-snatch. The turnstone's neat trefoil. The human's bathtub with deep and shallow end. The roo's long gap between sharp pairs of claw strokes. The stilt's cave-painting of a flight of planes. In such country, the crocodile slides with ease; here he switched on the dry ridge to that high-walk, with lifted tail. The tracks you crawl over criss-cross and wander, meet in space though not in time, except once where the smaller vanish. Three hours later the stingrays will graze where you rest in a gray gruel of salt and clay. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Turtles Hatching Waiting for weeks till the last one is ready to run, they break through to twilight: the life-race is on. Winds and oceans that call give no order but one: "Downhill, fast; when you hit water, swim". Last will be picked; so will first. One in a hundred survives. So they break sand & run, downhill as if cursed. (Seagulls halloo joy, ghost-crabs skitter out). They are high-revving toys each wound for his chance. The course is uncertain, ten sandy yards to cool foam, or half of a low-tide mile over pits and castles of rock-crab, every hole an abyss, every cross-ridge a death-lane; unable to stop, indifferent whether scrambling in sand, scrabbling in slime, or sculling deluded through sand-pools to beaches of death. Caught in cracks they push hard down the crab's throat, still punting on while life lasts, in search of the dark and lovely reef water, the splash in the in-walled ear. Their limbs have no setting but go. Friendly and clean, with their leathery touch in the palm, likeable as a dry handshake, a childish pleasure to handle, determined as cats; this driving downhill force that will reach, tourist, twice the mass of your coffin, yet weigh, till it comes ashore, not a gram. Tweaks the heart, though, to see them seek fate in a crab-hole. I pulled one out once, wedged and still struggling down, dropped it with a jerk - a great horny claw like a parrot's beak had crushed the midsection, sheared off the head, and behind moved the armoured tarantula legs of a hairy scuttler with lobe-stalked eyes. In pity I gathered a living brother, hiked it over the rock-flats, (fighting on in my hand) while its brethren, obedient, filed along moonless crevices, sating ambuscades of queued-up crabs, laid it down on a rock slope, a foot from the water. It flopped on straight for its freedom, tripped over a two-inch ledge - fell and rocked on its back. (A crab darted out, saw my shadow, back- sidled to shadow.) It squirmed and righted itself, hurried on (since Nature has taught them to fear no predator but time, no approach will deflect them), found the slight wash of a ripple and lost half its weight; then, re-stranded, pressed on, met the incoming surf of a wavelet, capsized, scrambled up, then plugged on, hit new surf and breasted it well; turned its flippers to sculling, still floating, too light to submerge; spiralled a clumsy provocative line, spinnering out to the moon, lucky with absent sharks and gentle water. Slipping in, as it left, the shadow, a thousand times larger, of a parent come shoreward to lay; two ends of the earthbound process linked in the uncomprehending meeting of kin. As the small shadow pedalled and bobbed, the great one wavered and slid; for a second the greater obscured the lesser, then as surely slid on; and the lesser was gone. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). The Pairing of Terns Human lovers know it only in dreams the wild mating flight of the terns; riding the weird and unguessable surf of the air, blown round the compass, locked in pairs by invisible steel; wings taut as the sharp stretched skin of a pterodactyl; now criss-crossing moon-high in an evening sky, and now outskimming the wind on the waves of a twilit bay now rising, now falling tumultuous heights and cackling their random delirious laughter. Sometimes they hover motionless, high in a half-gale torrent of air unmoved yet sustained by the stream that surrounds them then sudden and sharply they break quick as a kite when the string snaps plunging down and across the sky then low against wind they row back hard plying with swift strokes their strong feathered oars, beating into curd the thick vortices of the air; then turn and take the gale under their wings running fast as the wind without moving a feather driven miles from their haunts, yet unworried, they know there is nothing they cannot do. Their love is everything for which we have only metaphors, peaks and abysses, stallings and dizzying speeds wild oceans of distance, and feathertip closenesses, and wingbeats that answer so swiftly none knows which struck first, which called and which answered. They were circling the globe when our fathers still cringed from the monsters beyond the next hamlet. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Frigate-Birds Windless they cannot leave ground; wetted, their oil-less plumage sinks. They float with the standing clouds and eagles. Below are the oceans, flattened; above, the infinite uplands of light. Etched out in pairs, the black wings elbow-broken, redoubled, show pirate-flag sharp; quiver tense with a song not seen in the crumpled bones where the wildcat sprang. Ten minutes they hang on our island's upstream, fixed till a flick of the half-disjointing wings has them turned for home. Forty miles away: they will go at the speed Earth pleases, hold us still in their view till a hill locks us out of the sunset. Orion, to us the lounging summer giant of southern sleepless nights, stretches and points them home, creatures of speed and air wave-bolstered, sun-lifted, sea-fed. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Butchers' Budgies These unwanted lovers, flying lice - bushflies. Public as dogs, they steal unwanted kisses from armpit or lips or turds or the duct of an eye, desperate for salty water. Too stupid to learn - you can mash their aunt and five sisters; by-passing your death-swipe they buzz back and smooch you the same. And their mates, the giant bumble-wing blowflies that seethed in the brains of a wallaby, and now grown-up and lustrous, drone off to show their new wings: "You don't know me, but - buzz - here I am! And I say - buzz - you don't happen to have any roast meat - buzz - here - buzz - or - buzz buzz - there." And what a proud chorus when they find a dead rabbit or a skylight to rattle and bluster against! And their high-class friend the housefly who likes only garbage - digested externally: pour out saliva, let it stand, then lap it up. Mmmm! And the great March flies that drone proudly past and fall silent - search and you find them sinking their mouth-pipes into your ankle: "Just a meal of your blood - to help with my eggs. You wouldn't object?" You tilt the piano, and just as you take the strain - one of the wretched things crawls in your nose. They are lords of Australia: We, the moist mammals here for their comfort. They're a problem we'll solve just after we get full employment. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Fire-Stick Farming To grow flowers in Blackheath, Australia, set fire to your field. Let flame singe the delicate dust-seeds of native shrubs. Soon they sprout, a thin patchwork of tufts, nameless and mixed, on ground bare as if hoed. Bright petals follow, as if you'd scattered fifty packets of English seed; but not one has a name Shakespeare knew: scarlet waratah crowning its upright stake, flannel flower, a grevillea in honey-and-orange with juniper-mimicking leaves, three nameless bulbs in cardinal shades, and a heath whose giant blooms seem threaded on grey wires. The yellow dillwynia conjures blue moths that endure their deaths from pale-lemon flower-spiders whose grape bellies swell with eggs to feed the thread-leg spider-wasp. A huntsman in the open disdains escape, dodging, faster than eye-blink, each lurch of the sting -- a game of hare and hound among plants like moss with snowdrop flowers and just a wisp of snake-slither. In the hot calm the bees are loud, working wings and elbows with an angry sound, as you leap the tussocks, amazed at your ignorant creation, the shapes and passions hidden in a sheet of flame. And among them all a new forest rising. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). Parrot On Wattle This wattle comes out of sandstone, its lemon and green rinsed from rock and rain. To drink it in is to know what the black men knew: that the blue and crimson parrot is a primal spirit, flashing from time to time through trees always the same, if sometimes in pairs; and immortal, though sometimes eaten. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). The Hot Ridge The hot ridge is snake country, eucalypt-scented, slither-and-scramble land, smelling of honey and dust, where no hot blood is needed. The shrubs have minute fangs, needle-leaves that sting like flagellants. The grevillea is rosemary-leaved with unseen spines. The thin soil's creeping ligno-tubers are the heath's survival kit, what the membership put aside for fire. The rocks are nuggets of unopened soil. The fire comes often. Tracks, first made by bare black feet, go straight with never a bush to block them. This is bare clay and blow-fly country, ant-hill and grass-tree land, where the fierce black Formic Police swarm in the trees, are unassailable on ground. And the black snake winding in the heat seems spawned by contrast from the midday sun, a shadow slipping sideways like a dark rod in God's yellow eye. Published in The Olive Tree: Collected Poems of Mark O'Connor (Hale & Iremonger, 2000). About the Poet Mark O'Connor Mark O'Connor has published over a dozen collections of poetry and gave a Series of 6 talks on the ABC Science Show in 1985. Some of Mark's publications include: Poetry in Pictures: The Great Barrier Reef (with photos by Neville Coleman), (Hale & Iremonger, 1986), Two Centuries of Australian Poetry (editor/poetry anthology), (Oxford University Press, 1988, reprinted 6 times). An A.B.C. TV documentary on O'Connor's poems was broadcast on A Big Country, 1985. Tilting at Snowgums, was the subject of two ABC documentaries. In 2000 he was given a 2-year grant from the Australia Council to write poetry about the 2000 Olympic Games and (in 2001) the 'remote' regions of Australia.    [Above] Photo of Mark O'Connor by Ron Evans, 1999. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.1 (March, 2000)