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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                               #12/thyla12k-mc AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 12 The Poetry of Michelle Cahill Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Michelle Cahill by Mike Spitz, 2005. I The Photographer's Light I Survival (in Subtitles) I Platinum After Shining I Maitland Bay I I Cowan Creek I Waves I The Photographer's Light All the petals scatter in the folding light. The road before me has its own emissary. Tree branches bow to changed weather, this afternoon they were sunset's veins. Birds lash the dark, dissolving sky, make a scene of leaving where something like dying is not the reverse of memory. The future's rank with the scent of duty. We walked past pilgrims, spirit houses, ancient monasteries in the dry, orange wind. Instead of magnolias, you sent crocuses grown from old cuttings, withered stumps. Their new life stuns me like moonlight on the glacier you once photographed: the dusk, an indigo, slowing down time, its precise calculation. You stood so still. Survival (in Subtitles) Soft-mouthed girl, mollusc of the sea's vault the years alter you, how coarse your bones. Your spun hair's whipped, torn raiments flap like fragments of a curse in a foreign tongue. Sad preludes swim in your such honest eyes. Border towns, the inn stiff with formaldehyde siphoned from a glitter sea of death: children were floating tariff for an overcrowded junk. Famines are forgotten, your husband beheaded. (Was it for war crimes? Electronic adultery?) Cities burn. Crazed bloggers & cross-eyed robots. Tell us in your own language what happened. Published in Going Down Swinging (Australia). Platinum After Shining That day I saw the sea turn platinum, infinite corpus,                         reflecting my dog lost in the waves. Their shimmer seemed to integrate her grey-flecked fur,                         her velvet snout, her blood-flushed eye. Each refraction a relic, diluted yet preserved by the sea                         which asked to borrow her shine. And this, the idea of a watery tomb. She will sleep with kelp,                         with anemone. She will float with ambergris. She will wade in the surf where once she loved to flirt                         long, awkward legs like an adolescent girl. The cancer will be her anchor.                         I remember on wintry days how she'd canter beside me along the shore, head held high, discerning the air.                         Or the way that school-boys would admire her sheer size. It's humbling to view the endless scarf of sea,                         the cliff spooned out to shoulder the break, the sea that we stitched to our heels.                         To know the white foam, the pearl are disappearing. The shale fissured like decaying teeth, the way everything                         is slowly perishing, the way sometimes you need to say this without permission. In my solitude, what had brought me to the headland?                         I was a coward hiding behind bracken, burrawang, watched by a curious wallaby. And I said:                         tell me about love, the price you pay for being loved? How it's impossible to retrieve the ephemera lost to distraction.                         Bell-bird. Dragonfly. Blue tongue. How the search for happiness somehow becomes warped.                         And this a kind of epiphany whose intensity fades the way if you stay here long enough the tangerine, chalk-white,                         the indigo hues are slowly swallowed by starlight. Not quite assassin, I felt a stranger to my own life                         here in this delicate crib of wattle, callistemon, ti-tree. More than a petrel's wing drum in the platinum sky,                         more than a stunned wave falling synchronous to wind, or a startle when the king-parrots splash their red and green                         vials through the fish-scales of eucalypt. It's like waiting for something big to happen, a young girl                         leaving memory to reinhabit these bones, this flesh. For the runaway puppy of childhood to return.                         His breath a fading smoke, his speed a lightning, bright as the fascia that binds him from nothingness to nothing. Maitland Bay You hardly moved lying like a sea slug in sepia, dreaming of sky fluorescence. As if reading braille you ran your fingers over tiny shells, a trail of ornamental bones on bleached sand. Hours later the moon rose, full breasted, white Godiva, flaunting it all for the green-tipped crowd, for bleeding eucalypts and saffron-sprinkled lichens. At dusk we left the gossamer bay. Your body heaving, breathless from exertion, wanting to break the shackles, wanting to enter the spirit of all these forms. Published in Cordite (Australia). Cowan Creek Mudlapping, mud glitter, water shadows shallow browns and green, the coarse sediment. Oyster shell necklaces the creek, its mangrove decay. The rise and fall of the track teasing us; there being something wild beyond the brink of wealth, style, authority. After the European cars, the sparkling marina, a diesel shift freshens to cool heath. Stark ochre middens we pass, with their echoes of native tongue, the sun's laser diamond-pulse, avian arpeggios. In the canyon it's so quiet you can hear the heart speak- petulant, contradictory; famished. Waves You tell me how it feels to be inside the glass of a wave, quiet as a womb with the force to pitch against the velvet rocks what skims iridescent from its dark mouth. Sea-gulls angle off the point where I watch the grommets, black seals in wet-suits with livid lips. When the wind turns the sea wears a mask of mercury, begins to swirl and chop. The sky is spitting rain, the surfers paddle back. I wonder when love turns. You scramble down the cliff sprint across the rocks. Now the waves close out a monologue wracked by contradiction. About the Poet Michelle Cahill Michelle Cahill was born in Kenya. She was educated in the UK and Australia where she studied Medicine at Sydney University. In 1998 she graduated from Macquarie University with an Arts degree majoring in Creative Writing. In 2005 she was one of the 'Poets On Wheels'. Her first collection of poetry The Accidental Cage was Best First Book with Interactive Press 2006 and was listed among the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Books for 2006. She is the founding editor of Mascara Australasian Poetry.    [Above] Photo of Michelle Cahill by Mike Spitz, 2005. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007)