“It’s a deep dirty secret, in Australia, that I’m the wrong class to be a poet.”

The octopus is dead
who lived in Wylies Baths

 Whatever the great religions offer
it is afterlife their people want:
Heaven, Paradise, higher reincarnations,

I glory centennially slow-
ly in being Guugumbakh the
strangular fig bird-born to overgrow
the depths of this wasp-leafed stinging-tree,

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now

The red serpent of cattle, that eclipsed the old dreaming serpents:
there it still is, faintly, winding out of far lilac ranges

Many resemble Henry Sutton
in sleevelinks in Ballarat
who invented television;

Chenille-skinned people are counting under the countryside
on resurrections by truck light off among the pines.

 

We ought to hang cutout hawk shapes
in our windows. Birds hard driven
by a predator, or maddened by a mirrored rival