Martin Harrison

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
...

The shirtless young
man pushes (blue tint,

brown) a hand back
...

You, the world, the house,
but tonight you’re not happy.
No-one can sleep this month.
Across the park, the lights are sultry.
...

As in a photograph by a small town artist
regional, unknown, whose sepia wandering work
fetches up in libraries as support
against myth-made progeniture, or, as here,
...

Moments of connection,
of intimate attention to the nooks and crevices
of how mind and body fit together,
of the melting and blending of imaginary and actual flesh,
...

A sea-leaf is laid across the bark:
I’ve given up talking
save through the world as it is.
...

When he walks towards them they come up
for the sheaf of long grass
he’s holding out. They’ve been
left alone far too long. What he notices
...

The meaning of that movement must be found,
in the collapsing schema of red sails,
though it happened out there, in dwindling light,
upon the edge, half-seen, a mere detail.
...

Back of the mind, it’s the white sliver which is
neither misty trace nor meaningless: it probably
isn’t snow, nor that glare effect of a white line
which the sea’s horizon can sometimes have
...

*
across the slope, emptiness like a tide sweeps everything away
...

The white table, the white chairs,
there under the casuarinas —
flies circle it, buzzing, zig-zagging:
the eye’s blood-red cotton vein.
...