I’m Cliff Forshaw, not Clifford Possum,
and, being somewhere between,
I haven’t got a clue what this
(so far from surf, sea, shore)
or anything else, might mean.

But I’m thinking back, and I’m looking out,
if not exactly forward,
to the any other business
end of the itinerant’s agenda.

The Arts Council warns that whites
have no rights to blackfellas’ stories.
But what about a title? What about a name?
Don’t we really all end up
in one of Dreamtime Cemetery’s
seven basic plots?

Not even the Aborigines
have been here ab origine,
but came hunting in packs,
along with the sniff of man’s best friend.

Among the kookaburras,
the flash of rosellas,
these poems may contain images
of deceased whitefellas.

Ultimo in Arvo,
sounds like a Latin motto.
But it’s just a black and white photo
of a Sydney street, some spot near Darling Harbour,
on a sunstruck afternoon.

And it’s endless now, what’s burned in light:
sun, afternoon, the shadows
never quite making it to evening,
to the terminus and the cool rattle
of the last train home.

*

Sun-worship: bodies
felled on the beach, each stripped right
down to tan, grin, teeth.

*

Sun-worship: bodies
felled on the beach, each stripped right
down to tan, grin, teeth.

The sun has slipped dark coins
under so many skins,
left obols on a country’s tongue.
And now the state’s left wondering
if it’s enough to pay their way
to the other side of surf.

Out there, outlined against the crashing light,
a dark figure barely on that board
hangs ten.

*

Its vegetable love will grow:
rhizomes, tubers,
sprout right through

gonna take some rake
to sort your nitty-gritty,
dig up them bulbs,
their harsh night-glow

gallow’s laughter,
keep your humour,
say the word,
(it’s in the timing)
say it, say it: tumour.

*

Upon a man in black
with a cracked voice
I seemed to have stumbled.
“How’s it goin’, Lenny Cohen?”
“Mustn’t grumble,”
I heard him mumble.

*

Mark pops pills — in a flash Max is back
devouring what they gave his daylight twin,
for when it all gets too much.

A little bit of R & R
at pharmacology’s cutting edge.
Hanging with the guys,
might as well blunt the day with a dry run,
as sun pours itself another,
the doctor lies down to his siesta,
and Mr Hyde foams up to beer o’clock.

Be time enough back in Sydney,
to steel the mind, clench the sphincter,
then do the only thing you can really do:
lie back, relax, let white stuff go soft,
fold innocent as butter, melt
around the knife of burning light.

*

Palliative:
To lessen the severity of (pain, disease etc)
without curing or removing;
to seem less serious by concealing evidence;
from pallium, Latin for ‘a cloak’,
which is also a word for the cerebral cortex
and contiguous white matter.

Out in the night, drunken nutters:
neighbours, all that contiguous white matter.

*

From Zenith to Wreck
(the way they name these beaches).
Blue moon. No, really.
And the sound of surf
sweeping grit along the bay.

The evening’s polarised
to blue and gold, or peeling away
between sky-scuds and sea-caps.

That day, we forded water to the spit,
rucksack above head,
trying not to get the camera wet.
Glad now to have those photographs,
the notebook which says we saw,
at the end of their season,
a pod of humpbacks heading north;
ate barramundi and kangaroo pies;
lost count of skydivers piling into blue;
heard you say:
“Every time I look up into the sky,
there’s someone falling out.”

*

Unignorable horn. Man
slumped over the steering wheel
of a beat-up van.
Raid on the inarticulate:
his shabby equipment
deteriorated far enough:
Please Clean Me!
wet-fingered in the dust.

*

Through painful sun,
near Carthage, years ago,
I saw a cellarful of sarcophagi,
names cut into stone in
(am I right in thinking) Greek?
(am I right in thinking Carthage?)

Sometimes the chiseller,
starting with too generous a space,
had not anticipated the stone’s edge
and, running out of tomb,
had to cramp or abbreviate forever,
docked the last recorded syllables
of a loved, hated or feared one’s name.

As much as I remember: long time ago
with a woman whose passport once bore,
next to next-of-kin, the curt formula
of my initials, surname, the country where I lived.

*

Heard your last trip was to the Outback.
Never made it myself to the Red Centre,
just flew over its dusty suburbs.

Hope that where you find yourself, there’s
no spider in the dunny, snake across your path.
Well, what’s the chance of something lethal now?
Or do we still forever need to do the maths?

*

Here is seven yards and more of Dreaming
and other Dreamings bracketed within
its slow pan across the Western Desert:
Old Man’s Dreaming, Yam Dreaming,
Sun and Moon Dreaming.

Here is acrylic psychogeography,
brain-pan soup, palimpsest of soul,
mind’s hypertext.

A field of dots may mask the sacred, keep it secret.
The point of pointillism’s what’s between:
something scanned and reconstituted
behind the eyes and in-between
the buzz of Hertz.

Students will read stories of the Dreaming
and discuss ownership of these stories.
They will view an Aboriginal artwork
and identify meaningful signs and symbols.
Students will also write a short story
about their own spiritual beliefs, land and family
and create a painting to describe this story.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Stand in the desert..’ Shelley, "Ozymandias"

Here’s what remains: colossal holes in rock.
Not even legs. Each trunk’s just that: hollow,
an opened, empty, god-sized box.

Raided tombs, recesses shaped like Pharaohs’
coffins or their huge cast shadows.
At their absent ancient feet: boulders,

rubble, mortar casings, spent ammo shells,
Taliban on Toyota trucks - Allahu
Akbar! ...Meanwhile, back in Kabul,

it’s hush-hush Video Night - venue:
the old World-Wide language school. Banned,
but what the hell. Soldiers, perhaps ex-students,

scratch lengthening beards, bum smokes
or fiddle softpacks from black turbans.
Some place Kalashnikovs in stooks,

pass round a plastic lighter, trade contraband,
squat on the mat. Swarzenegger’s back.
Tonight his sneer of cold command’s

getting personal with a laser-sighted
45 slide; while the late-model terminator,
unperturbed, just mops up punishment,

absorbs whatever’s handed out. Boof!
And - here’s the groovy thing - from it he learns
to - how you say? - shape-shift, morph.

Once Buddha was just an empty throne.
Round here his face grew Greek or Persian,
half-way between Apollo and a king.

Xerxes, or Iskander perhaps, robes grown
stony with potency. Or Kanishka,
whose idea these statues were. - His own

headless statue stood back in Kabul:
enormous pantaloons, mighty kingly feet.
He got his last week. Full circle.

For centuries, huge mummies
wrapped in grubby bandages of rock
stood here, blind to passing armies.

Today, they blew away his legs and chin
- tank shells, rocket launchers - then
dynamited that big mutha up to heaven.

It took twenty-five explosions
to wipe the smile right off that face,
incarnate him as dust, air, an empty throne.

Bars of light across eyes, mouths that whisper
through the hatches of shapeless prisons:
women, in chador, burquas, watch the distance,
rebel gunfire where the mountains rise.