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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #6/thyla6k-jm AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 6 The Poetry of John Mateer Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of John Mateer by Melissa Mateer, 2001. I TOWARDS WILPENA POUND I TASMANIAN OBSERVATIONS/1 Devil's Gullet/2 On the Plateau/3 Visitors Centre I IN A FOREST (BEFORE HE SAW THE THYLACINE) I (SELF)(PRAISE-POEM OF THE URBAN FOX) I DURING THE KING HEATWAVE I LAST NIGHT I TOWARDS WILPENA POUND When salt and bluebush country gives way to the small yellow constellations of wattle, the mind enters existence. Then native pines stand - where rabbits had cleared the undergrowth and where they themselves were wiped out by an island virus - echoing plantations. Further, in the sung wind, subtle bodies are a glimmer, fluid as the invisible river over broken rock geometry, as extinction. The sentence, then, is an unrealizable mountain. Published in loanwords (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). TASMANIAN OBSERVATIONS 1 Devil's Gullet In staring down, our sight becomes falling rock, those precipice walls the edge of a glacial tongue that calves - with rupturing like pistol shots in a courtyard - icebergs huge as thirty storey buildings. The leaden shockwaves, of ice on ocean water, of boulders on valley rock, can't be heard, except as distant, raspy gusts. 2 On the Plateau Buttongrass moorland, edged by snowgums, is still as an unbreathing mouth. Here the air's thinner than membrane. My heart accelerates at the sight: One ice-tipped mountain. An imported zero is exactly this: The exhilaration of the plateau, afferent, like memories from a beloved photo. 3 Visitors' Centre The thylacine, in hologram, returns from annihilation as a watery green wraith, a dim luminous incarnation observed between two umwelts in a blue forest of nerves. Published in loanwords (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). IN A FOREST (BEFORE HE SAW THE THYLACINE) The question of how a limb vanishes is of how the father long dead appears, saying Watch out son, then steps behind a tree. And the son watches the tree he's busy felling in the solitude of all the time in the world, watches this tree not falling clean as it rips like a crashing car through the past's safety zone, and his reflexes throw the chainsaw so he can flee. But the trunk's on him, across his lower leg, the wildernesss' absolute wildness waiting for morphine. The trunk's on him like the foot of a giant, saying Here. Now. Published in loanwords (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). (SELF)(PRAISE-POEM OF THE URBAN FOX) In these suburbs, what my yuppie friend called 'The Golden Triangle', between river and sea, where professional men and genetically chosen women (or vice versa) sleep through this musky briney night, where the hospital rises between you and the river like a titantic ocean liner, the river where prawners up to their necks in black water trawl wide nets past laughing sharks and unsmiling dolphins, in these suburbs there're huge seditious roaches immigrant and native birds possums and even (like me) foxes - expert survivalists cosmopolitan as you like - who hide in the parkland and limestone caves on the foreshore, who mesmerize chooks in the millionaire's backyard and are never sighted slinking down these leafy streets. Published in loanwords (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). DURING THE KING HEATWAVE Desert wind's been blowing for the past week so I stay in the unit, drape bedsheets over the hot glass of the windows. Our plants wilt, even while I drain bottles of water into their parched mouths. In the semi-darkness I sit at my trestle table or on the mattress in the other room. Dreams of the Pilbara dissolve into recollections of my sprouting wings, my gliding over familiar Crown Land. Like the anecdote of the blackfella who was 'given' a postcard-sized board and told to re-paint the large-as-life croc (he painted only one foot!), I'm invisibly edged. To me now any sentence is a road into rippling magnesium flame, and my skinless bodymind is only seen in this darkened room that's detaching from the ground. Published in loanwords (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). LAST NIGHT Last night, in lucid dreaming, I was a black cockatoo, one of those heard sharp as a moon sliver but couldn't see under the high Southern Cross. I was naked, shaggy with feathers. And lifting one foot, then another, flexing. Looking around the branches' fretwork under the roof of leaves. I was uneasily considering if I had the right perch. Published in loanwords (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). About the Poet John Mateer John Mateer was born in Roodepoort, South Africa. Since 1989 he has lived in Perth in Western Australia and then in Melbourne, Victoria. He has read his work at Poetry Africa 2001 in Durban, South Africa, at the Teater Utan Kayu in Jakarta, Indonesia, and at the 62nd World Congress of PEN, as well as at festivals and conferences in Australia. He has published a folio of poems for performance titled The Civic Poems. A number of his chapbooks have appeared in Australia, South Africa and Indonesia. In 1998-99 he was writer-in-residence at the Australia Centre Medan in North Sumatra in Indonesia. Currently he lives in Melbourne where he teaches a poetry course at the University of Melbourne and works as an art critic. His non-fiction and criticism include articles on the contemporary artists Bill Viola, Domineco de Clario and Brian Blanchflower, as well as the essays on his own work, 'The Use of Burning Swans: on iconoclastic language' and 'An African City: a poem and reflections on a ghoastdeamon'.    [Above] Photo of John Mateer by Melissa Mateer, 2001. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.6 (September, 2002)