I
You take this stare-eyed monarch on her tree;
below her whimbrells strut on gawky legs
and damsels poise like lightning in lagoons.
You know how nothing's dark beneath this moon
of tissue except her round imperial eye,
nor will the sea's mutations modify
her gimlet-claws, the sharp Tzarina's brow,
this frown that's cocked against the scrabbling panic.
The male is smaller and more sudden, glides,
a scimitar dividing gravity
at scarce pisonia height, the head downthrust,
flexing left and right above the sea's
lean populations. Self-possession has
its archetype in this, the finger feathers
playing the currents like a pianist,
requiring no extension of themselves
to monitor each tremor on these hundred
turquoise islands. Throughout each minute, each
millennium the same imperatives hatch,
the threats wear no disguise. The hunger resolves.
You've read in Pliny how in the end they starve,
the mandible that curls and locks the beak
forever, plumage whitening, their bones
bleach with the viscera on the eyrie-stone
(imperial irony that ought to move
the super-powers). Their map is round, they're thrust
by thermals high above the chains of food,
the island's swivelling apex, black and white,
whose wingspans fall as shadow from that height,
a thunderhead across the Queensland coast.
II
And you've been in their power, like the skink
remarking a mote of ash the instant that
its world turns upside down and darkness bursts
in seas upon its tiny house - eyefirst
pushed into a nestling's mouth and sunk
through black intestine, muscle, bone and back
to that perfect hovering balance. Appetites?
Who will distinguish them? Metaphors
are air, are volatile. The bird soars
into emblem, perches on a stick,
to become one of history's dark exhilarations.
Blink an eye and Poland reels, the Slavs
go under. Blink - the sullen Pictish tribes
melt before Agricola. Time grabs
this effigy that hangs above the nations,
that brings grief's sulphur, streaming black and gold,
a totem launched across the Rhine, the Tiber,
embattled on the Beresina's ice,
toppled at Buchenwald. Mere energies,
mere emblems? Neither will stand reconciled
against the placid, fluctuating galaxies.
Bone, meteor, memory, they all become
the bio-mass, continually disarrange.
that which the mind will turn into the strange.
How many voices gone without trace
down the tunnel of that obscure need?
Bronze-age traumata distil to popular myth
as Neanderthal blurs into frost-giant
on the Jutland Plain, while on the Fertile Crescent
farmers swear to marvels - from mirage, a stampede
of men with four hooves, bringing mutilations.
The hawk-crowned eagle on Yggdrasil,
the bird on Jupiter's shoulder overlook
these hypotheses that tremble like music
at the edge of imagining. This pair remains,
astride the blood-red trail of the millennia,
claw and snow-white garter clutching silence,
while a tropic storm manoeuvres between
the industries of Gladstone and Rockhampton,
and the tide is turning on a flawless sea.
