Perth Poem - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by John Kinsella

Perth Poem

   Branch: river, local teller
   never tempted to dip into the till,
   phosphate on the oval, goal-posts
   mocking with their lean white-lines
   a boundary where church and state dissolve,
   the temple or meeting house next to the petrol station,
   or near traffic lights: the odds are high,
   like car-wrecks in front yards
   or high-maintenance European gardens,
   or prawners dragging the river by hot tilly lamps
   on those evenings, every place a scared place
   overlaid; place of the of the vacuum,
   The Terrace was The City, tunnel of bankers
   and mining executives, importers and opticians,
   land developers and newsagents, consulates
   and the constabulary, courts and governors,
   where the draught would drive you to drink,
   drive you up into the city to Mangoes
   to search out the other singles, floaters,
   partners intent on cheating, or into a bar
   in Northbridge, the Equator Club,
   freaking out to a band you knew too well,
   the blank-faced brothels and stand-over merchants,
   the surveillance cameras in their smoky bubbles
   keeping an eye on the cosmopolitan, souvlaki
   and pasta and dim sims, tofu and rice, wines in raffia
   and boarding houses wandering back
   behind the picture, labyrinths with death
   the only way out--a coffee-shop proprietor
   leans out into the traffic as if it's a stream of sharp boats
   off Pireas; wandering out of the 'done clinic,
   or a hostel for backpackers, or the Good Sams,
   or the Arcane Bookshop with the idea for a sexual fetish,
   or the Vietnamese Grocery store, or the strip club and peep show
   or by-passing the terror of lobsters trapped in a tank,
   tourists eyeing them over as though they've never been alive,
   either observer or observed, or coming out of Buddhist
   peace and splendour or families making the budget
   work at the markets while young out-of-it crews
   cram in as much food as the pollutants
   in their body will allow, diluting the effect; branch:
   the train line out to Armidale--stations,
   chapters; another car caught on a level crossing,
   boom gates locked either side, a family
   in a station-wagon ... the train stationary
   at the same place every time, these accidents
   happening over, and through the sirens
   you look into a garden backing onto the line,
   the same back yard you
   are always looking into--high
   grass, fire-trap in summer,
   rusting Holden without wheels,
   teetering on termite-bitten wooden blocks,
   a pyramid of bricks with chunks of cement
   making precipices, canary weed and morning glory
   pulling down the fences, a pigeon coop,
   lost toys; towards the hills you drink beer and Cinzano
   and houses are rented after divorce
   has driven them down from the heights,
   from houses on stilts tucked amongst the orchards,
   the smell of spray and stone-fruit
   morphing with linseed oil and turpentine,
   highlighting the crackle of creeks,
   the hum of the potter's wheel--down
   in the Westfield Tavern it's darts
   and Tammy Wynette, deals done away from home,
   the Christmas stocking outside the supermarket,
   and the born-agains reviving the sun
   on swampy ground; at Kelmscott station
   kids are wagging school and hanging out,
   despite the police, railway security,
   cigarette packets jammed square
   to the shoulder, cabalistic stores of ritual--death
   and Prince Planet's power packet
   rolled into one, governments warn, and the micro mini
   runs like terror over narrow things, over the slice
   of enticement that's a way out of school,
   a way out of a place that's hard to leave: cock and balls
   still grace the walls, tags and paeans to AC/DC,
   LET THERE BE ROCK, and none of that trendy city-beach
   techno stuff; branch, recall the Triffids,
   the bloody horror of Thou Gideon,
   Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, the Neptunes
   at the OBH, twenty-somethings looking down on Cot
   as if it holds the answers, a guitar rift almost better
   than the stuff going around the car park,
   and the punk bands decapitated in the overhead fan
   at the Stoned Crow, the old boilers
   and their Jazz down the road; branch, the smell
   of bricks and hardiflex, of oil-soaked black sand
   in backyards, the burning of tyres in incinerators,
   fly strips and chlorinated above-ground swimming pools,
   the decking perishing, detailing those off-hours;
   the nitrate drift of the fertiliser factory on Coburn Sound,
   chipping out the wagons of super-phosphate,
   the rivers sourcing their anti-lives
   from shifts and safety records; branch,
   the freeway dropping suburbs like double-gees,
   the Cut that cannot heal, annealed stone
   torn from the hills--the fall of grevillea,
   dryandra, jarrah, hakea, roos, echidnas,
   28s, pink and grey galahs, the storm-warning
   white-tailed black cockatoos, dusky minors,
   red wattle birds, dugites, gwarders,
   sandlions, dragonflies, parrot bush, scarlet runner,
   star of Bethlehem, leschenaultia, paperbarks, magpies,
   crows, green eyes, hawks, stalking birds, seed birds, mud
   and sand birds, bats and geckoes and mosquitoes,
   the corridor choking, trails cut, families
   disconnected, lost; branch, the drive-through
   primes a party, the front bar during Friday
   session is bursting, electric, exuberant,
   by closing time it's wan and bitter and drenched;
   beneath the glass, beyond the facades, the redecorated
   Town Hall and almost-in-time clock tower,
   jousting knights and a slice of old England,
   buskers in the mall, the Nyungar camping grounds
   are patrolled by sealed howitzers and playground equipment,
   totems driven out, this making of the fringes,
   while the eroding codes are undone
   but those who know in studies centres,
   recollecting and focussing and declaring
   the power of learning, the power of family, the power
   of dreaming: the elders warn the young who cut loose,
   the young who will find family in the country
   knowing the city scrambles the tracks, the branching
   brothers and sisters, uncles and aunties, mothers
   and fathers, the unity of cousins;
   in the parks mothers scour the sand for syringes,
   Moreton Bay figs swelling at the interface
   of earth and "heritage", the settler sways of commerce,
   the new chums and the servants, the loss of language
   to the single language of English, as if the brilliant
   coast will absorb all odours, misdemeanours;
   reticulation drains the mounds and cavities,
   drains the muscles beneath the city,
   drains the dams rung by rung
   so you can hear the hollow sound echo out
   through the hills, melding with the chainsaw rip,
   the jarrah clumped on the forest floor,
   the reservoirs drain like some kid's
   backyard experiment, the sharp expressions
   of bird of paradise looking out through the fine mist
   of the time-triggered sprinkler system; the drier
   the place the more it's about hydraulics,
   as those spontaneously produced by the city
   look to get away, or give in and stay forever
   refusing to believe there's a better "lifestyle"
   anywhere! They eat along the river--solve
   crimes and circumvent zoning laws,
   have affairs and think about the flow of water,
   the meeting of sea and river, evoke
   odes to the lights that guided astronauts and poets,
   discuss art of fire and murder, ponder sell-outs
   to corporations espousing satellite cities
   as the lynchpin of a new global economics,
   the far away getting closer closer closer,
   this language of landscape we proffer;
   branch: in the Supreme Court Gardens
   we sell our arse and eat slightly-out-of-date
   throw-aways from companies with a social conscience,
   peak-hour traffic on Riverside Drive occluding
   the ferry lost between Barrack Street Jetty
   and South Perth, the morning sun sizzling
   like a barbecue behind clouds in this "sunniest"
   of cities, eye of the power grid, the views
   from apartments counter-productive: navel-gazing.
   Branch: powerlines, those sails strung-up
   over the river, as if a meditative religion
   might be drawn out of them, luff, stiff breeze,
   stilled like stone or angle-poise lamps,
   stone indentured by slave labour--they
   wanted convicts here--to build
   their (their) future; what? "our city is not like that"?
   Surely: gateway for heroin, sex slaves, racist
   diatribes ... and so little water?
   Up North refugees drown.
   In Port Hedland the detention centre
   hides the city's crimes. In the harbour, icons
   of the "coalition of the willing" offload
   seducers of thirteen-year-old girls
   and divorcees, allegiances that would swing faster
   than the stock exchange, or with more impact
   than tactical nuclear weapons. What does
   the Narrows Bridge, for all its expansion,
   become a symbol of: who wants nation?
   Who wants Crane's Bridge, symbol
   of the New America? We're too busy
   worrying about the volume of traffic.
   Branch: from Mount Eliza the dreamings are drawn,
   and the Wagyl branches out against modernity,
   the pile-drivers that split open its head.
   It will not be updated, incorporated, appropriated,
   absorbed by metaphor, contained by simile,
   strung out by conceit, reduced to a symbol.
   In the market garden the roots of carrots
   entangled, the family might have been Italian
   or Vietnamese first or second or third generation.
   They would say they were of "Perth",
   the here and now. Past the factories
   of Kwinana, they say the British migrants
   settled in Rockingham. And down
   from your primary school, a hostel
   for those from Eastern Europe.
   Nissan huts after the war.
   This is a refugee city
   planted on ancient land: all or nothing,
   with little or no thanks to the custodial owners,
   and reparation for the songs lost to the jackhammers
   and speculators, the klaxons and orchestras.
   Branch: fed by the country. Vacant blocks
   closed off, no through road, the outer
   becomes the inner suburb. A quarter-acre
   becomes a fifth and then a townhouse
   then an apartment block. Squirrels populate
   long-standing trees around the zoological gardens--they've
   crossed over, though stay local;
   the old Mill a star in the eye of a speeding motorist,
   and those sails in the windows, lightplay.
   Branch: the Great White comes in close to the shore,
   tracking seals and the human swimmer
   on the surface agitates the water
   in much the same way; government
   must be seen to be in control
   so increases air and sea patrols,
   a network TV station lends its chopper,
   fishermen hunt like sentinels; on Swanny
   cocks shrivel with the evening cool,
   in the sand hills relief and comfort unfurl,
   free in their bodies an elderly couple
   pick up towels and fall into clothes,
   fishermen here staking their spots,
   happy to catch an eyeful and store
   it up for their mates, the tailor
   running fast, ripped up by gang-hooks
   as the sunset's volcanic and of increasing depth,
   the blue seas drained pink then black
   with the blood of fish, colour shifts
   working outside the spectrum; branch,
   the drag races at Scarborough Beach car park,
   the land-developer illegally clearing bush
   out beyond the northern suburbs,
   the city planners making the river
   narrower with limestone and dirt,
   the Cut at Mandurah flushing out algae
   and shattering microscopies: empirical and rhetorical
   the images haphazardly choke the channel,
   the cut a skippy's arched scales, plimsoll and serrated
   despite the clean line; branch, the racetrack near
   the old brickworks, in the place where swampland,
   wetlands, bird-heart of the area, is compacted,
   desiccated: a certain kind of Tuscan Splendour
   glowering out of the Mediterranean river,
   the Bristile house down by the highway,
   the photo developers looking on
   as the plate is cleaned up and views
   become exponential, the race-track--the love shack
   where rape was a rite of passage,
   absorbable by the testicular culture of horse tranq
   and fixes, shock therapy and stand-over merchants;
   refuges for battered women are hidden in the suburbs,
   children play and fathers drive around
   waiting to be let back in. Most go back.
   It happens again. Counselling. Branch: in the Fremantle lock-up
   you watched as a young Nyungar guy was tossed around the blue
   circle, dead-limp. You are warned. Silence. Deaths in custody.
   On the Horseshoe Bridge--as if crossing the railway lines
   to the wrong side of the tracks can't be a straightforward
   gesture--an arcing circuit that needs centrifugal compulsion,
   the cops kicked your face in for protesting
   the harassment of Nyungar guys drinking under photographs
   of ancestors in chains, troopers proud as peacocks, rifles
   unslung; tracks imposed on a map,
   no more than a few might be gathered together
   the Court declared, and the wealthy shall gather
   like old money in Dalkeith and Peppy Grove,
   though nuns behind high walls garden and consider
   the little flower of Therese avidly, they love us
   from their cells as do the Krishnas with food
   in the belly, and the Central Drug Unit, and the cop
   who pulled you from the bath, drowning,
   nothing said, and the railway to Freo, branching ...
   Flying in, even the forested hills in winter
   ache with dryness--uplifting and eroding,
   a place of simultaneity, paddock dams
   greening and below-ground pools overly blue,
   firebreaks turn into clearings, there's no hiding
   from mining and logging companies,
   people on the ground suddenly surprised
   to see it gone, all along hollowing
   from the inside--it starts with a dirt trail, gravel road,
   then bitumen ... even the rules of catchment purity
   are changing, in small ways around the boundaries;
   branching, development, the cordoned space
   becomes the hub, families and fast-food
   and evangelising religions cycle
   along shorelines, nature strips, through parks,
   past pyramid sellers, strip shows at sunset taverns,
   bike-run sex shops. In the booths it's sticky
   and an apprentice mechanic crosses paths
   with a town clerk, junior, and a social security
   case worker, senior, taking in the private strip,
   worried the watching seat might not be cleaned
   thoroughly--later that evening, if drinkers,
   they wouldn't notice, but some will always
   be paranoid; branch, next door
   the guy who did a bank job
   and did his time
   makes idle threats,
   only idle because he's retired,
   and determined to keep his head
   above water selling smoke alarms; on the sand spit
   orange-legged waders absorb Blackwell Reach,
   they know better than to think on history--that
   family enterprise as decorative as the State;
   in a flat by the river chickpeas burn on a stove
   and the smell is all the places that make the place
   the place it is, erasure and warmth in a body
   that feels like someone else's, though this
   can be forgotten; the picket fence runs
   treated through the ground, a missing picket
   a child's view into the neighbour's world:
   dogs debarked haunt back verandahs,
   in asbestos sleepouts kids see aliens;
   a school siren sounds and someone
   flips on a show delayed from Sydney,
   the time shift misprisions, later
   she's booked for picking up the kids
   while full of valium and alcohol;
   branch, in the hills the orchid lady
   speaks of the sun and damage,
   fires singe the event horizon--circuit-breakers
   of beauty,
   and arsonists looking out
   at all they survey, shaking
   with power; to reach out,
   to fall short, their portraits
   dimly pyrographic on the public
   consciousness; as off the boats in the Fifties
   they searched Fremantle for coffee,
   for a glass of wine; branching
   though the port, rival and liver
   of the city, sea-breeze bastion,
   seagull cleanser of dropped foodstuffs,
   place of laundering and dubious landlords,
   America's Cup flash in the pan rip-off,
   displays of public comfort dressed-up
   as quaint, boutique, trendy, rough and ready,
   as chillin', stylish, beachy, po-mo, maritime,
   historic ... sailor larger than the shops, cars coming in
   by the yardful, dealers clustering, rustic in the pubs
   with dreadlocks and board shorts, bikini tops
   and sun glasses, poets and musos homebaking
   locality, recalling family when inspiration
   dries up, smoking under the wharfs,
   waves of export guilt waved off
   with hats and caps, dolphins
   signaturing the river's mouth,
   pink wash a sail in a permanent sunset,
   this drip-dry decking, lines of gossip
   meandering as art, a substitute dreaming.
   Settlement. Federation. Architects.
   State Printers. Title Deeds. Surveyors.
   Sanitation. Landfill. Last buses
   running quickly through midnight districts.
   Whale tunnel. Limestone. Barges up-river.
   Pylons. Barrack Street Arch drop-off,
   toxins in the arteries. Clip-board collectors
   in the shadows where it's cool. At the showgrounds
   the train shows timetables can be flexible,
   though it's cyclical. Like the Ferris wheel,
   the rocket, the twister. Aggressive types
   who assault people in the ghost tunnels.
   Coronation. Flights to mining camps
   to bring back the big bucks--the iron North,
   Prix D'amour drag show on the hill,
   always overlooking the mirror, the river: remember
   the sideshow, the friend you can't find
   on the net--some don't go there.
   Some names remain hidden,
   keeping their own company ... branch: as a name displaced
   exhumed begged borrowed stolen, as a shotgun
   hidden in a tree just up the road
   from childhood homes, serial inversion,
   as kangaroo paws come out in force and the river
   under broken cloud is indigo again, streetwalkers
   blocked off, hemmed in, driven out; at Midland
   train station a white woman is being ushered away
   by cops harassing an old Nyungar guy,
   points changing, signal boxes buzzing,
   the Hardy products factory clocking off
   near Welshpool station on the Armadale-Perth line,
   such the switches, such the changes of platform,
   trestling over the river, casino gloating, golf courses
   pallid with lawn; about rosewood pianos
   families keep up with the classics, some compose
   their own music, flowers on the wall, mattresses
   upright and leaning away from guests,
   next door, they take their shoes off before
   entering the house, each notes that the other's house
   smells different, and after vague suspicion
   they grow to appreciate the difference--cooking hints
   sneak into the predictables, and a new hybrid cuisine
   is rumoured; in Bassendean a retired gentleman
   plays with toy trains he's bought religiously
   from the hobby shop by the subway;
   he knows the best places for kosher food
   and his wife tinted photographs as a young woman--both
   are new to the internet and are taking lessons
   from a Muslim couple from down the road--we
   know something the world should know
   is their motivation--we know here in this most isolated
   of capital cities, closer to Singapore than Sydney,
   as the guide books crow. On the Upper Swan
   fruit and horses are by the river, phosphate run-off
   is suffocating the mulloways and flathead downriver,
   a middle-aged guy who brews his own beer
   is about to head off to a folk do up at Parkerville,
   up on the rim of the city, above the inversion layer:
   he is single, and hoping to meet a like-minded woman
   of similar age. During the day, he removed
   racist posters from his neighbourhood.
   His family travelled from New Zealand
   by way of the Victorian Goldfields
   in the 1860s. His ex-wife called him sexist,
   but he's sure he's improved over the years;
   branch into the gardens, the fanfare of palms and brick-lined
   paths--covered in woodchips from the shrinking forests--coiling
   coolly through ferns and snapdragons, a grass-tree
   that hung in during the clearing,
   that out of guilt and a bizarre exoticism
   they've built around--they're everywhere, these gardeners,
   in their thirsty gardens ... as Balga and Balcatta and Thornlie
   and Spearwood and Bedford and Applecross and Brentwood and Palmyra
   and Wanneroo and Calista and Westfield and Nedlands
   and Woodlands and Rossmoyne and various groves
   and valleys collude and fold as visitors
   cross the lines and admire or demean or remain
   indifferent to the circumstances of others; branch--rain,
   closing in, sparking the Doppler, a pall rising up
   before the scarp, the news reveals
   that it's a pool factory fire, toxins
   poised on the wind-shift, atmospherics
   of chemicals as Parliament House light-fractures
   across both chambers and a committee
   fractures through the fountains; frosting and brick-clad
   the intention of parrots high in well-watered trees,
   canopies of precedent and legislation, rosellas
   hidden when a show of hands is called for; elsewhere
   a yellow donkey orchid, pressed between pages
   of a book brought out from England,
   a collected poems of Wordsworth, and plough discs
   from rellies in the wheatbelt, shoring up
   rose beds, and nowhere to park
   on footy days unless you're a local,
   and even then, fines: multanova, parking
   infringements, prime movers dropping trailers
   just outside the city limits, those trucks
   gearing down coming into the city
   know the cop's radar places, know the gravel trap
   should the beast break free; branch the drag
   on momentum, the raw materials running Eastwards,
   the broken marriages, the young on dole cheques and those
   afraid of flying doing the bus trip, confronting and quelling
   the doldrums of the Nullarbor, its gothic activities
   well below the surface; branch, the Sunday schools
   and prayer groups and prayer times
   and meditations beyond internet shops, anonymity
   of download outside the private home,
   the Russian porn, the chat-room liaisons,
   New York and London and a small town
   on the edge of Greenland, an ice-confection sticky
   on the keys, dropped, melting on the footpath--the
   figure will always stay red, and we'll never cross,
   even on a Sunday afternoon where all is dead
   in the inner city, except for skateboards tearing
   past the GPO, a Nyungar family laughing outside the central
   station, a group of youths smoking against the sculpture
   they helped create, install; outside the private home,
   students in flats, families who waited years
   for citizenship; outside, the town heritage
   and settler follies, restaurants, masons, and charities,
   philatelic societies, women's group and the infinitesimal
   but vocal men's con-fraternity,
   drag racers, rock hounds, covens, dog-walkers, Siamese cat lovers,
   AA groups, narcotics anonymous, the Magic Circle,
   balloon shapers, Asian cooking classes, vegans, PND,
   collectors of esoteric smoking implements,
   printers, photographers, newspaper men and women
   caught between the sensational and sincere
   and the verities in between--theirs
   is a liminal art; branches ... zamia palms
   and concrete towers abandoned
   like an Apocalypse in Eden--Wireless Hill,
   mud flats and blood worms as the tide goes out,
   the odd grey nurse shark and swimming lessons
   before ears eyes noses and throats
   became victims to bacteria: who
   was it dived for a brick
   off the end of Deep Water Point Jetty
   to prove worthy of a Junior Swimming Certificate?
   Those driveways with boats marooned
   after cutting the slight but gnarled white-horses
   on the khaki waters, green hosepipe
   snaking into the motor,
   outboards driven in tubs,
   flushed out as the concrete driveways
   exposed evaporating lines
   of automatic writing; knives in jetty plank
   and pylons, fishing line tangled around all
   in casting range, blue-manna crabs
   swimming against the trend,
   against the current, failing in nets
   while cormorants sit stock-still, sails
   draped against Kings Park, rising up
   against gravity, the gravitas of war dead,
   widow-makers, bottle-brush flowers,
   those jets passing over leaving
   filaments, dashes and diacriticals
   of water vapour strung in sentences,
   branching the commute and expedition,
   bringing back clothing and photographs, branching:
   so the northern lines they spoke
   of when you were a child
   finally went through: Perth, Leederville, Glendalough, Stirling,
   Warwick, Whitfords, Edgewater, Joondalup, Currambine ...
   each with a ticket machine, this frontier policy
   of outposts and then filling in the space
   between extremities in--modernist bent
   in architecture, new age interface
   with all that moves and moves ahead;
   those banksia coils fading, rough bark
   not enough to grip, the lake shrinking,
   swamphens amongst the tyres,
   a different kind of necklacing
   that doesn't need much unearthing;
   branches, the bypass outriding Midland,
   train town, shunting yards and heavy machinery,
   the faded workshops, past the tallow works
   and a stink that drives the windows up, cars swerving
   or jagging just a little, enough to pattern
   asphalt into a story; the meltdown
   like water-rungs against the hills; oh faultlines,
   oh deaths in car chases, oh the gang fights
   and genre violence over territory
   and stolen video machines, oh companies
   sending tentacles out into New Guinea,
   Bougainville, sucking people and communities dry,
   little empires at the Weld Club,
   oh whiplash of a stray and persistent cyclone; branch,
   configure the afterimages of Julie Dowling's ikons
   burning with tribal faces that no Church could undo,
   as all Gods and all peoples see through,
   sandals and thongs and sandshoes and bare feet
   sounding the sand, the stone, reeds and paperbarks
   in their thinning places by the river,
   hammer working the drum of the hills,
   a resonance down the pipe of the Swan Valley,
   names branching, cycling ...