Martin Harrison Poems

That half-open amber eye fixed on you,
the woman in the kitchen half turning to you —
drowsy tonight, you take in the angles
of chairs, walls, old photos, a painted vase.
...

A camera could catch it. Or a video. A painter can’t.
It’s October’s first dry wind, blowing in across the Harbour.
Rousing, irritable wind, with the feel of flat country out west,
it thrashes the red gum with its tentacle flowers, it blood-red new leaves,
...

A vague mood, a sadness, a feeling as when recovering from illness,
a kind of “whatever it is which is going on at the time” mode —
...

All water is dusk, or light blenched. A mauve shade,
Some water is so large it fills up the lens,
Becoming mere thought occurring here or there
As if in a place which was chosen for it,
...

For Marcia Stewart
After a day of Greek references, lunch, and Freudian puns
the mythoi aren’t appropriate to the dapple and sting-rays
any more than to a brain verbalising everlastingly
...

At first I think that they are someone else,
the blond woman and her fair-haired daughter -
it’s the car probably, a station wagon
pulling up on the grass, white like the teacher’s,
...

It leaves in my eyes the image of a
pearl-grey lake fleshed with blue, rain-clearing clouds,
the awakening scent of rain-wet grass, sharpness of
amber light through a clump of swamp-gums;
...

The dark green, the light green,
the pale native rosemary flowers,
blue-grey like low rain clouds,
and, behind them, an intense spiked green
...

As early as this - it’s just after dawn - you’re overwhelmed by the glimmering of things.
The grasses, the rocks, the bluff and its shelves, inland hakeas, casuarinas, some sort of
...

The bronzewings
come through, fossicking
in the pre-storm stillness, pecking
at the car tracks, drilling the dirt
...