for Robert Adamson in Australia
i.
Currawongs
in wattled trees
run a song
from reel to reel
in slow reverse.
What I feel
I felt. Rain
hurtles toward
its source.
ii.
On work detail at Mount Penang
Training School for Boys, you built a road
to nowhere—bittern in the rain,
addressing stumps and clarts
with half-remembered songs.
Holy on! Holy off!
Learning time from appetite,
you made a half-loaf last
by rolling each pinch back to dough,
or “viper raising” [prison slang].
At night, you read What Bird Is That?
before the lights went out.
iii.
Now, in sight of Lion’s Head,
you cut the outboard engine. “Look,
a butcher bird!—which Whitely gave
the eyes of Baudelaire.”
To keep amused, we crush bits
of sandwich bread for bait
and fish for Tuti, cross-eyed cat
of porches, purring on the wharf
in expectation. Checking lines,
you lean across the gunnel and sort
a shadow flock from schools
of substance, jellyfish from cloud;
between them intervenes
a nest of fine white hair.
iv.
Further out than we will go,
breakers squander, recompose;
time curls back on time.
v.
Take a garfish caught
amidst uncertainties
of early fog
and wrapt in sheets
of Water Leaf
and say what chrome
of Customlines
has faded from its scales.
Distinguish frequencies
of short-wave radios
from the mimicry
of cockatoos.
Explain to those who ask
how white was ever false,
or how to mix
a perfect Whitely blue.
Then speak of things
that everybody knows.
