It breaks behind the eyes
of a continent and it breaks
along the lips of migrants
who wake up and cultivate
pebbles and pigface:
the inland sea is a fine
blue line which laps the pool
and buckles its bland mosaic.
The inland sea is graphic music:
a sine curve of sunlight
pushing through your speakers.
Or the inland sea on holiday
is a Blue Emperor butterfly
at Cairns, which settles,
in slow motion, all the way
down to a stone Victoria. Its story,
old as dreamtime and told through
micro ecology, dots her marble eyes.
A chrysalis of frozen
light over Fitzroy Street. Sky
cold-blue with the lepidoptery
of banknotes: Farewell Antarctica.
Here a St Kilda tea room's
walls are papered with
an old map of Empire. Its vast
rule of red salted to pink
sunburn: the spectrum's
ultra violets blooming where
Ceylon gestates Sri Lanka.
Trouble brews when we travel
down the map to where we are,
more insouciant than laconic,
and a lapse of tension
drones with vacuity, groans
with space, or merely fills it -
with blowflies and diphthongs.
Outside, the slap of plastic
on cement does not wake old
men who listen to a sea roar,
who wait for a light that
is fragile as kisses
or with blue methylate hands,
touch upon a literature
denied its surrealistic phase.
But everything changes
in a sudden sunburst. Australia becomes
benign, eats flowers, flips over its records.
Crows crowd the sticks
along the adrenaline Hume,
the air splashing your windshield
is like champagne. And the radio ignites,
'How I want to go home
My heart is so full of pain'
where crows wheel West to Perth
across vast absences of rain.
Like playing chess on an old
Czech shirt is nonsense, glazed
at the amber lights, you reflect
how we turn fossils into power,
then automobiles into fossils.
They line the backblocks,
burnt-out, numerous as tinnies.
Like everything that does violence
to desire, consumerism breeds
incendiary acts: wheels
head over heels, axles to the sun
and motors screaming. It distracts
roadside pubs from boredom.
Pause from your amber
sunset then, to stare into the glare
of the beautiful accident.
At night, ghost breakers of light
shatter over whispered depths:
a phosphorescence of myth which leaks
through the coffee-table hum,
your late-night conversations.
The next day real estatesmen sell
Sydney, entering deals with the ease
of goanna oil. Behind their creased
white shirts Mururoa Atoll is ablaze.
But the suburbs are in love -
beyond a daily, deadly struggle
for soft toys and white bread.
Armed akimbo, let the myth swell
your chest like a breaker, your zinc-
pale face drift above the foam,
shot with blue lightning. Then press
on towards the Centre
where you falter into sand,
clawing at dunes with hands
like five-lane highways.
Above you, a world of graphic anxiety:
little people fall off the sky
in a mirage of the roadside,
where deck chairs and click toys
pave the way to Darwin.
Like gold, cappuccino
is where you find it
beyond Ayers Rock.
An old Zero's wing sticks up
from the sand where years slide
away in millions. The sheer
elegance of the inland reflects
in glancing graphs at Roxby Downs.
Even here, it all becomes abstract:
your sweet surge of sperm
translates into a mushroom cloud,
a fleet of red Maseratis fuse
into the parking lot, into the empty desert.
Vast regret, like a last blue movie,
pales above the roaring inland sea.
Yet blue flowers still attract
blue butterflies at the Daintree.
And in the warm Pacific
coral accretes a benign ideology
which, as patient as a pearl,
says our hearts are full
of blood and pulse
along ancient arterial routes
from the Centre to the sea. It lulls
and sings like kooris in a ring
and holds a soft and beating
chalice where blue cranes cry
above a dream which is timeless;
of deep blue stars.
The song is young again
on Mallee paperbarks, in ghostly script
of the wind, a frail skywriting
across branches, where spider lines
glisten above this bullant trail
to the Southern Cross.
"I gave my radio away, cut my ties
and left my house, I no longer needed
anyone, only to be alone, out there,
with just the stars at night,
like a sandgrain, out there, they were
so clear, the sky so huge..."
So said the old prospector
I met in Adelaide. His neighbours called him
"mad hatter" and said "lots of them go strange
out in the scrub alone". He showed me
gems he found beneath a stump
at Lightning Ridge - the five blue
sapphires of the night.
Apocryphal night, which breaks off
and glows in soft half light,
floats across the back country.
Your suit is folded across a chair.
Out there, you have been lulled
only by the purr of the power
of your engine, your love of speed.
For hours, daylight has ricocheted
like gunshot. Rocks, once hot, now crack
with cold; and will do so
until the future toes old TV tubes
out of their sands.
In your motel bed, your head
is lit by blue light, the soft glow
of digital numerals from a clock radio
set for five a.m. Do you
understand? Until then, your shoals
of small regrets and disappointments
we could begin to call a culture
are just pale ash drifting across
a continent of sleep. They settle
on the inland sea; frail spume
of white memories.
But, be soothed. Out here, there are
no sharks. Caressed by a blue
voice, the blue across the walls
of your room, whisperings of coral
cornucopias, a swirl of days down
to the last red bowser at the country store
those sudden miles away...
By the hush of a lullaby on a thin
blue wind from the Centre, where
the air now fills your empty sleeve.
