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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                         #6/thyla6c THE POETRY OF PETER PORTER Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Poet Peter Porter by photographer unknown, 1996. "The land, themselves or God, but with a level voice To mark their presence in a sky of perfect stars." I FROGS AT LAGO BOLSENA I THE SADNESS OF THE CREATURES I AN AUSTRALIAN GARDEN I MY OLD CAT DANCES I TALKING TO YOU AFTERWARDS I LITTORAL TRUTH I THE PINES OF ROME I TO MY GRANDAUGHTERS SWEEPING SPELSBURY CHURCH I OLD GOLDFIELDS, MARYBOROUGH I THE DECLINE OF THE NORTH I THE KING OF THE CATS IS DEAD I SONATA FORM: THE AUSTRALIAN MAGPIE I SEAHORSES I AWAKENING OF PLEASANT FEELINGS UPON ARRIVING IN THE COUNTRY I ADDRESS TO THE STARS I PHAR LAP IN THE MELBOURNE MUSEUM I ESSAY ON CLOUDS I THE LAST OF THE DINOSAURS I STILL LIFE WITH CATS I FOSSIL GATHERING I FROGS AT LAGO BOLSENA Having come down and run the car into sand Not a foot from the reeds, the tense changes to The Italian present and stories of Montefiascone Are right for the first perambulation - Only a few plastic bags floating and the smell Of burning in the hills mild as eleven o'clock: Then the frogs start - out there in the shallows, one After another clamouring against official Nature. For Nature is official here, its privilege extended To recalcitrant weeds and momentous blossoms - The Miracle of Bolsena struck from an open sky And like a sunset the Host ran blood: what then Can prevail upon the gentle waters, calm and bloodless, When Christ's sanguinity fills the slaughterhouses And the bone-dry churches? A corpse in damask Holds the unsyntactical silence of despair. Invisible and croaking in their plainness, the frogs Speak of a similarly certain pain never Lessening, and of the will to bring new pain After, which this Italy has squared into art, And which pilgrims with books in their hands try To exorcize by long looks at lakes, judging The far bank and marvellous islands until The picture is captured and killed for their dreams. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). THE SADNESS OF THE CREATURES We live in a third-floor flat among gentle predators and our food comes often frozen bit in its own shape (for we hate euphemisms as you would expect) and our cat's food comes in tins, other than scraps of the real thing and she like a clever cat makes milk of it for her kittens: we shout of course but it's electric like those phantom storms in the tropics and we think of the neighbours - I'm not writing this to say how guilty we are like some well-paid theologian at an American College on a lake or even to congratulate the greedy kittens who have found their mittens and are up to their eyes in pie. - I know lots of ways of upsetting God's syllogisms, real seminar-shakers some of them, but I'm an historical cat and I run on rails and so I don't frame those little poems which take three lines to get under your feet - you know the kind of thing - The water I boiled the lobster in is cool enough to top up the chrysanthemums. No, I'm acquisitive and have one hundred and seven Bach Cantatas at the last count, but these are things of the spirit and my wife and our children and I are animals (biologically speaking) which is how the world talks to us, moving on the billiard table of green London, the sun's red eye and the cat's green eye focusing for an end. I know and you know and we all know that the certain end of each of us could be the end of all of us, but if you asked me what frightened me most, I wouldn't say the total bang or even the circling clot in the red drains but the picture of a lit room where two people not disposed to quarrel have met so oblique a slant of the dark they can find no words for their appalled hurt but only ride the rearing greyness: there is convalescence from this, jokes and love and reassurance, but never enough and never convincing and when the cats come brushing for food their soft aggression is hateful; the trees rob the earth and the earth sucks the rain and the children burgeon in a time of invalids - it seems a trio sonata is playing from a bullock's skull and the God of Man is born in a tub of entrails; all man's regret is no more than Attila with a cold and no Saviour here or in Science Fiction will come without a Massacre of the Innocents and a Rape of El Dorado. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). AN AUSTRALIAN GARDEN for Sally Lehmann Here we enact the opening of the world And everything that lives shall have a name To show its heart; there shall be Migrants, Old Believers, Sure Retainers; the cold rose Exclaim perfection to the gangling weeds, The path leads nowhere - this is like entering One's self, to find the map of death Laid out untidily, a satyr's grin Signalling 'You are here': tomorrow They are replanting the old court, Puss may be banished from the sun-warmed stone. See how our once-lived lives stay on to haunt us, The flayed beautiful limbs of childhood In the bole and branches of a great angophora - Here we can climb and sit on memory And hear the words which death was making ready From the start. Such talking as the trees attempt Is a lesson in perfectability. It stuns The currawongs along the breaks of blue - Their lookout cries have guarded Paradise Since the expulsion of the heart, when man, Bereft of joy, turned his red hand to gardens. Spoiled Refugees nestle near Great Natives; A chorus of winds stirs the pagoda'd stamens: In this hieracrhy of miniatures Someone is always leaving for the mountains, Civil-servant ants are sure the universe Stops at the hard hibiscus; the sun is drying A beleaguered snail and the hydra-headed Sunflowers wave like lights. If God were to plant Out all His hopes, He'd have to make two more Unknown Lovers, ready to find themselves In innocence, under the weight of His green ban. In the afternoon we change - an afterthought, Those deeper greens which join the stalking shadows - The lighter wattles look like men of taste With a few well-tied leaves to brummel-up Their poise. Berries dance in a southerly wind And the garden tide has turned. Dark on dark. Janus leaves are opening to the moon Which makes its own grave roses. Old Man Camellias root down to keep the sun intact, The act is canopied with stars. A green sea Rages through the landscape all the night. We will not die at once. Nondescript pinks Survive the death of light and over-refined Japanese petals bear the weight of dawn's first Insect. An eye makes damask on the dew. Time for strangers to accustom themselves To habitat. What should it be but love? The transformations have been all to help Unmagical creatures find their proper skins, The virgin and the leonine. The past's a warning That the force of joy is quite unswervable - 'Out of this wood do not desire to go'. In the sun, which is the garden's moon, the barefoot Girl espies her monster, all his lovely specialty Like hairs about his heart. The dream is always Midday and the two inheritors are made Proprietors. They have multiplied the sky. Where is the water, where the terraces, the Tritons And the cataracts of moss? This is Australia And the villas are laid out inside their eyes: It would be easy to unimagine everything, Only the pressure made by love and death Holds up the bodies which this Eden grows. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). MY OLD CAT DANCES He has conceived of a Republic of Mice and a door through the fire, parables of the reinstatement of his balls. But not this night. Isn't there a storm in the light bulb, condors circling the kittens' meals on the television screen? He heard once that people wearied of each other to escape unhappiness. In his lovely sufficiency he will string up endless garlands for the moon's deaf guardians. Moving one paw out and yawning, he closes his eyes. Everywhere people are in despair. And he is dancing. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). TALKING TO YOU AFTERWARDS Does my voice sound strange? I am sitting On a flat-roofed beach house watching lorikeets Flip among the scribble-gums and banksias. When I sat here last I was writing my Exequy, Yet your death seems hardly further off. The wards Of the world have none of the authority of an end. If I wish to speak to you I shouldn't use verse: Instead, our quarrel-words, those blisters between Silences in the kitchen - your plainly brave Assertion that life is improperly poisoned where It should be hale: love, choice, the lasting Of pleasure in days composed of chosen company, Or, candidly, shitty luck in the people we cling to. Bad luck lasts. I have it now as I suppose I had it All along. I can make words baroque but not here. Last evening I saw from the top of Mount Tinbeerwah (How you would have hated that name if you'd heard it) A plain of lakes and clearances and blue-green rinses, Which spoke to me of Rubens in the National Gallery Or even Patinir. The eyes that see into Australia Are, after all, European eyes, even those Nationalist Firing slits, or the big money pools of subsidized Painters. It's odd that my desire to talk to you Should be so heart-rending in this gratuitous exile. You believed in my talent - at least, that I had as much As anyone of a commodity you thought puerile Beside the pain of prose. We exchanged so few letters Being together so much. We both knew Chekhov on marriage. The unforgivable words are somewhere in a frozen space Of limbo. I will swallow all of them in penance. That's a grovel. Better to entertain your lover with sketches And gossip in a letter and be ever-ripe for death. You loved Carrington as you could never love yourself. I think I am coming within earshot. Each night I dream comic improvements on death - 'Still alive In Catatonia', but that's no laughing matter! Perhaps I had Australia in me and you thought Its dreadful health was your appointed accuser - The Adversary assumes strange shapes and accents. And I know, squinting at a meat-eating bird Attempting an approach to a tit-bit close to me, That our predatoriness is shut down only by death, And that there are no second chances in a universe Which must get on with the business of living, With only children for friends and memories of love. But you are luckier than me, not having to shine When you are called to the party of the world. The betrayals Are garrulous and here comes death as talkative as ever. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). LITTORAL TRUTH You are discovering one of the mimetic truths About Australia - it is a long and silver littoral Within the sound of surf, a country rhymed by waves And scanned by the shifting outlines of the bay. We are all still strangers on its shore - the palms, The Norfolk pines, the painted face of concrete to the sea - No matter how far from the coast you go you only Leave yourself and drift in double legend to An old impossibility - no wonder those explorers sought An Inland Sea; it was the pool of madness in them Fed by rivers running into nothing. Relax instead Along the endless shore, the mountain seas of sand, The various heads and raging bars where change of tide Rips channels to a narrow bottleneck - you can be Odysseus or Captain Cook, forget the package tours Flying into Cairns. The washed-up stubbies on the beach, And step into a balanced darkness, mangroves, mud And soft withdrawal at late evening. Your inheritance Is welcoming you, and as you flap along the sandbanks Look out to sea and watch the tourist preen himself: 'Thus sung they in the 'Australian boat' but not to praise The land, themselves or God, but with a level voice To mark their presence in a sky of perfect stars. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). THE PINES OF ROME (For Katherine & Royston) As ghosts of old legionaries, or the upright farmers of that unbelievable republic, the pines entail their roots among the rubble                 of baroque and modern Rome. Out by the catacombs they essay a contradiction, clattering their chariot-blade branches to deny the Christian peace, the tourist's easy frisson,                 a long transfiguration. Look away from Agnes and the bird-blind martyrs, the sheep of God's amnesia, the holy city never built, to the last flag of paganism                 flying in mosaic. Then say the pines, though we are Papal like the chill water of the aqueducts, refreshment from a state divinity, we know that when they tombed the martyrs                 they ambushed them with joy. Rome is all in bad taste and we are no exception is their motto. Small wonder that Respighi, 'the last Roman', adds recorded nightingales to his score The Pines                 of the Janiculum. And the scent of pines as we dine at night among the tethered goats and the Egyptian waiters is a promise that everything stays forever foreign                 which settles down in Rome. Therefore I nominate a Roman pine to stand above my slab, and order a mosaic of something small and scaly to represent                 my soul on its last journey. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). TO MY GRANDAUGHTERS SWEEPING SPELSBURY CHURCH It's August and hay-fever weather, We've left the house in Summer's tether - While you girls scamper hell-for-leather                   And climb the wall Our adult hopes are all on whether                   We'll find the Earl. The youthful Earl of Rochester In this small parish church interred Proclaims the triumph of the word,                   A true contrition, For penitence is gravely heard                   In a patrician. A bully, fiend and alcoholic, A brilliant Hobbesean melancholic, A frightened sinner, parabolic,                   Yet first and foremost A mind which rendered apostolic                   Sad Reason's ghost. What would we find if we, instead Of looking pious, raised the lid Of where he lies encased in lead -                   Memento mori? I doubt it - when the flesh has fled                   All's nugatory. His soul which bigotry would save Is shrunk to copper in the nave, A mere inscription. Thus the grave                   Keeps all in sight And wife and son may only have                   A year's respite. But bouncing through the door, you girls Pounce on the verger and with skirls Of laughter, sudden whirls and curls,                   Take up his broom, Then, like George Herbert, for the Earl's                   Sake sweep the room. When Martha and Amelia raise A little dust to rightly praise The magnitude of other days,                   They're only playing - It's Grandad's pompous paraphrase                   Which is dismaying. Life works the other way around: It's what George Herbert saw which wound His metaphor into his sound -                   A parish priest, He'd keep his ear to the ground                   This much at least. So give the verger back his broom And let the Earl sleep out his doom, I must return to London soon                   And you to Rome - Though you're not Catholic, you assume                   There God's at home. Is Oxfordshire more savoury Than the ill-swept Trastevere? Is Rome all foreign knavery?                   Our cows are mad, Our people sunk in slavery,                   Our climate bad. But still we speak a language which The whole world seems to have an itch To learn, and this may make you rich -                   England supporters - And since you don't stray on the pitch,                   Dutiful daughters. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). OLD GOLDFIELDS, MARYBOROUGH                                                 A terror made for midday, they had walked in galleries beneath our feet through tinted naves of clays and quartz five miles and back to Maryborough and hard by vents and blowholes seen the pulleys raising ore through Roman arches and the spacious graveyards fit for those who never could feel safe in only air. And now stout Hattie, energy's own dog, is on the wrong side of the underworld scouting at the creek's torn barbican to sniff to life the latest of lost worlds.                                                 Down such a rabbit hole The Nineteenth Century lured our grandfathers and great-grandfathers -                                                 gold made sense of leaving home, entitled all who hate themselves to test the power of fortune: impervious gold was a gem in destiny, and all along a parliamentary Nature was on hand to clean the mess up. For fifty years the earth lay gashed by hopefulness and built a sort of easily assembled Babylon for these new-minted Gods - today some sixty souls are forum for the trumpet of its silent Judge.                                                 When Hattie's rambles take her to the mullock heaps, she skirts a fossicker with detector and soft hat looking for the fillings in his skull.                                                 The landscape now is featureless as scar tissue through scrub revives wherever water rides and ghosts of acid-fingered men hover as hurt roses or the plums which fall before the sun has sugared them. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). THE DECLINE OF THE NORTH Round the house, among the ruined cars And pick-ups, where the armoured lizards Shelter in a tyre, five dogs are chained, Five kelpies on a statutory watch. Decibels of silence fill the day When belling dogs and creek are tired at heart: A kingdom comes with dust, a slaughtered sheep Hangs from a river oak, the text of life. Your heresy is in new starts, that wheels And economics travel latitudes Across the bays of hope. Home might be anywhere, As otherwise perhaps as in a Jute Town's Darkened warehouses abutting water And the smell of sugar burning - that or glass Receiving seafood pizza, hands at love And novels with the rigor of the hour. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). THE KING OF THE CATS IS DEAD The light on his thigh was like a waterfall in Iceland, and his hair was the tidal rip between two rocks, his claws retracted sat in softness deeper than the ancient moss of Blarney, his claws extended were the coulter of the gods and a raw March wind was in his merely agricultural yawn. Between his back legs was a catapult of fecundity and he was riggish as a red-haired man. The girls of our nation felt him brush their legs when they were bored with telling rosaries - at night he clawed their brains in their coffined beds and his walnut mind wrinkled on their scalps. His holidays were upside down in water and then his face was like the sun: his smell was in the peat smoke and even his midden was a harmony of honey. When he stalked his momentary mice the land shook as though Atlantic waves were bowling at the western walls. But his eyes were the greatest thing about him. They burned low and red so that drunks saw them like two stars above a hedge, they held the look of last eyes in a drowning man, they were the sight the rebel angels saw the first morning of expulsion. And he is dead - a voice from the centre of the earth told of his death by treachery, that he lies in a hole of infamy, his kidneys and his liver torn from his body.                                                      Therefore tell the men and horses of the market-place, the swallows laying twigs, the salmon on the ladder that nothing is as it has been                                                      time is explored and all is known, the portents are of brief and brutal things, since all must hear the words of desolation, The King of the Cats is Dead                                                    and it is only Monday in the world. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). SONATA FORM: THE AUSTRALIAN MAGPIE It makes a preliminary statement with its head to one side, and an eye far too large to be seemly. It is no relation to the English magpie yet is decently black and white, upstaging its cousin the currawong. Its opening theme is predation. What it scavenges is old cake soaked in dew, but might be eyes. Such alighting and strutting across the mown grass of the Ladies' College! Siege machines are rolling near. Bustle in a baking tin, a feast of burnt porridge - the children are growing on their way to school. You can upbraid the magpie, saying, 'What do you know of Kant?' It might shift a claw an inch of two. It can tell when an overlord is unhappy. When one sweeps out in tears to clatter the petrol mower, magpie flies off. But never flies far. Big feet are moving to their place in dreams - a little delay in the sun won't count. We have certainly heard this theme before, the sound of homecoming. Anticipation needs a roof, plus a verandah for magpies. Are these the cries of love or of magpies sighting food? Some things about desire call for explicit modern novels. Magpie talk: Nation, National, Nationalist! In this tongue its name is legion. We speak English ourselves, with a glossary. The coda, alas. It can be Brucknerian. We say the end is coming. The magpie has found its picture in an encyclopedia. Where can there be nature enough to do without art? In despair, the poet flies to the top of a camphor laurel. Girl and magpie leave him in the tree. Tomorrow a trip down the coast for her and spaghetti rings left out for the bird. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). SEAHORSES When we were children We would cheer to find a seahorse Among the wrack the breakers lifted On to the beach. Sometimes two or three were together, A team to pull a chariot of cuttle, Or like a suicide wreathed in fine Sea ivy and bleached sea roses One stiff but apologetic in its trance. Seahorses were vikings; Somewhere they impassively Launched on garrulous currents Seeking a far grave: wherever That was, they set their stallion Noses to it, ready to be garnered In the sea's time at the sea's pleasure. If we wondered why we loved them We might have thought They were the only creatures which had to die Before we could see them - In this early rule of death we'd recognize The armorial pride of head, the unbending Seriousness of small creatures, Credit them with the sea's rare love Which threw them to us in their beauty, Unlike the vast and pitiable whale Which must be quickly buried for its smell. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). AWAKENING OF PLEASANT FEELINGS UPON ARRIVING IN THE COUNTRY I was talking to a tree near Kettering, admitted straight away I didn't know its sort - a kind of beech or hornbeam, rather spindly not well placed beside a fallen gate, too close to the railway and scuffed by cows and sheep -                     Nearby and all around more nearly noble oaks and sycamores and even the odd cedar rubbed the sky, with semi-undismantled hedgerows, willows scraping the canal and gardens dragging through the lees of autumn -                     I could barely envision a less romantic landscape, one made more derelict by men's necessary sad encouragements -                     Imagine my surprise when with a dark percussion of its leaves it answered me -                     'Vain as your fears of dying, the contusion of the planet in a frame of fire, is your love of Nature, the tall Wordsworthian glare which turns green fields to templates, douses in a swill of Technicolor the rooted struggle of articulation.                     We have no Pantheon, just a clinging to the soul of water, a light-filled ruthlessness which hoists a canopy on every hurt.                     Argue with the earth and lose your way: the only life which counts is any system which won't shift its ground. Set in soil, it lives and dies where it was made. Life was a jousting of two modules once: it's now a raggedness of old survivors looking at the sky, ungraded, blank, beyond nomenclature.' Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). ADDRESS TO THE STARS These points of light that metaphors debate Disclose a separation so extreme Infinity awakens from its dream, A tongue-tied horizontal figure eight. Since they are unimaginable, we Invert them till they shine through inner space: Up close they act as gods whose laws replace Extrapolation with sublimity. O stars encompassed by our measurements, Your integers show where belief may build And adding noughts until the chart is filled Exchange eternity for immanence. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). PHAR LAP IN THE MELBOURNE MUSEUM A masterpiece of the taxidermist's art, Australia's top patrician stares Gravely ahead at crowded emptiness. As if alive, the lustre of dead hairs, Lozenged liquid eyes, black nostrils Gently flared, otter-satin coat declares That death cannot visit in this thin perfection. The democratic hero full of guile, Noble, handsome, gentle Houyhnhnm (In both Paddock and St Leger difference is Lost in the welter of money) - to see him win Men sold farms, rode miles in floods, Stole money, locked up wives, somehow got in: First away, he led the field and easily won. It was his simple excellence to be best. Tough men owned him, their minds beset By stakes, bookies' doubles, crooked jocks. He soon became a byword, public asset, A horse with a nation's soul upon his back - Australia's Ark of the Covenant, set Before the people, perfect, loved like God. And like God to be betrayed by friends. Sent to America, he died of poisoned food. In Australia children cried to hear the news (This Prince of Orange knew no bad or good). It was, as people knew, a plot of life: To live in strength, to excel and die too soon, So they drained his body and they stuffed his skin. Twenty years later on Sunday afternoons You still can't see him for the rubbing crowds. He shares with Bradman and Ned Kelly some Of the dirty jokes always going around. It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a handsome chestnut gelding who ran fast. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). ESSAY ON CLOUDS A complacent Gulliver, I lie in silent dripping Norfolk watching these flying islands with selfish unconcern - here are planetary worlds of silvered science but I care only that they block the sun from signing my dull skin. So far down, this temperate garden and such reefs above! Oceans floating over us And still we breathe the neophyte scent of disengaging pollen. The rug, my books, the cruising cat are drowned with me, we do not even seem to sleep in our afternoon pavilion. The clouds address me: 'you will never see us after this, though our obliging cousins will bring continuity, but we have marked you, flying over, the last one of the dynasty of self.' I can calmly wait For such archaeologists to find me. Why is the sea in the air? It's only books which say it is the sea, the clouds abhor redundancy. Now a black stripe and then a pall of grey bring in tormenting voices. They are the sensitive ones whose ears can hear the million cries of animals in abattoirs. The garden is sticky with their blood. The sun comes out to purge exaggeration. The sun enjoys short sentences but clouds prefer a shifting Jamesian syntax. Tea is brought out on the terrace. Once more the clouds reproach me: 'because you are so incomplete you cannot think of us without dragging in yourself. You are fit for nothing better than for prophecy'. I watch one cloud come visiting. In half an hour it disappears to keep an appointment in the Wash. I wave goodbye knowing I shall miss it less than the passing cyclist on the road. Night awaits the upper wind. I decide I should not like to live in a universe kept up by love yet unequipped to tell a joke or contemplate the sources of its fear. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999) THE LAST OF THE DINOSAURS Chalky, you've gone - the only one to see the last stegosaurus, the blue-edged plain with bald egg-eaters blurring it, eighty days' rain before the mating season and parsley blades neck high - nice to have known such niceness, these Cretaceous days! Tyranno - sore arse - Rex and other thick necks thrive. Where's the gentle ninety-ton nonsense we ate mustard grass beside? So much time and blue. That great arc telling the centuries with its pivotless movement, tick, tock, tick: you can watch evolution in those hairy faces and poor Protoceratops being sick. Another gentle day and nothing to do. When you've lasted 150 million years you can stand the sound of time. Some day a mind is going to come and question all this dance - I've left footprints in the sand. Valete and Salvete. I hear the wintering waters rise under the hemstitched sky. Put me in the anthologies, darling, like Horace almost killed by a falling tree; life is a dream or very nearly. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). STILL LIFE WITH CATS Once more I thank you beasts: you have delivered me from the scrutiny of time's inspectorate nor have you insisted on alternative philosophies, endurance, love of limits or the world in little - you know expectedness and a sort of charity keep meals arriving and a few good rubs attract a stroking if the biped god is kind: the rest's captivity, the freely starving birds mocking you at third-floor window sills, the tray behind the door a sponsored graveyard where dreams of freedom waft the death-smell out, but you are moving firmly through our rooms defining objects, a whole cosmology of glass and cushions, stipulating with a yawn and outstretched paw the anti-matter of the visible. Supremacists of what is there, cats are the Chardins and Latours of inner-city living.                                     This room has lost its focus, no cat is in it. I am left with vanity of pens and speakers, panel-lights, chrysanthemums drooping now to dusk. Our human scale is sadness giving readings of selective understanding and when some happiness obtrudes it weighs like ornate bowls bearing the fruits and flowers of imagining.                                     Then the cats will say, trotting through a suddenly opened door, 'you had forgotten us and our sharp needs, painting your pretty picture, unnatural living is still life, you know…'                                     and I will lead them back into the kitchen where the sacred loaves and fishes wait in tins and boxes, and the light switched on makes sermons of necessity. Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). FOSSIL GATHERING Armed with hammers, we move along the cliff Whose blue wall keeps a million million deaths; The surf is low, the heat haze screens the stiff - Backed searchers for imprisoned crystals. Blind Eyes of belemnites watch from narrow clefts, Jurassic sun shines on them while they're mined. The children look them up in paperbacks And break an Ancient with impatient ease. Sorted and cleaned, the fossils are in stacks, Prepared and dressed for classrooms and jam jars - At night in cupboards the reassembled seas Break over England, straining for the stars. A Little Guide in Colour tells us how These creatures sank in their unconscious time, That life in going leaves a husk the plough Or amateur collector can displace, That every feeling thing ascends from slime To selfhood and in dying fin Published in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1999). About the Poet Peter Porter Poet Peter Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1929. He moved to London in 1951 and worked in bookselling and advertising before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster in 1968, working for The Observer as poetry critic. Since 1968 he has made his living as a freelance reviewer and journalist in Britain, chiefly for magazines and the BBC. Whilst living in Central London Peter Porter has returned to Australian often, sometimes more than once a year since 1974. Porter has published some fifteen original books of poetry as well as four especially written to be accompanied by the artworks of the late Arthur Boyd. In 2001 he was Poet in Residence at the Royal Albert Hall for the 'Proms' - a series of concerts given in London each year. His first collection of poetry, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, was published in 1961. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Australian Literature in 1990. Peter Porter's collection of poems, Max is Missing, was published in 2001 and won the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). In 1983, his Collected Poems first appeared; and in 1999 a revised version in two volumes, totalling more than 800 pages, was published in time for his 70th birthday.    [Above] Photo of Poet Peter Porter by photographer unknown, 1996. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.6 (September, 2002)