Upland Dusk

UPLAND DUSK

Pre-dusk deepens into the frost-dark
Gum trees die-back into silhouettes
With leaf-bunches, hanging black.

Mist smears of the stilled dam
Trickles from the fag-end, curls over
The embankment and sinks downstream.

The day-spent bush gives birth a kangaroo
Hopping down a clearing of fog-grass, its tail-arc
Waves across a grassy sea in a leaping rhythm.

Horizons up light - coloured galah - pink and grey

Silhouettes rub out upward and wash into dim
Outlines thicken, colours die, and shapes meld.

Only the throb-engine creek of frogs is alive.
Didgeridoo-croaks call up the time of bats,
and mammal-butterfiles play
shadow puppets on the sky.

The zenith tube which filled with light is earthing down
Fluttering grims touch down with stiffling kisses
And ancient mopokes two-tone of the dim.

Only Venus is the dusk-sun, a cold crystal grail
In the drink, and the crescent moon
launches its smile boat,
as if taking bearings
for the dreamtime.


1989 © Wayne David Knoll
Doctors Creek, Trentham, Victoria



The view from the verandah also became the view from inside the shadows. Facts went down with the sun, as if the sun-god was too small. The moonis only lit with Other light, and the grails of inspiration will beckon men to dream rather than to be real. Bit the light still beckons me to be charmed by an utterlast dream... a promise... that there will come a day.

Surface Light

- SURFACE LIGHT -


And then
the innocent moon
stood still
over the land of midnight
And said:
“I am the best of
all possible moons
I am.”

Answering its subjects
as if the darkness was a question
and the darkness was

“I am a democratic moon
one light for all
shining on this
everlasting night.

“Acknowledge me
Give loyalty to me.
For I am the best luminary
of the night
I supply you with phases of light.

So, we’ll make a bargain:

“You shall live by my astrology
like the seas;
You shall move to the tides
of my making...

“ Plant, tend, procreate
in my pale kingdom...

For a thousand years
of peace and stasis:
In a government of moonlight.”

“We will keep this one little rule

“ Let’s not talk about
the day
or sunshine
and its anarchy of light !

And the darkness seemed to say yes.

1989 © Wayne David Knoll

Saint Augustine said: " The world is drunk with the invisible wine of its own perverted earthbound will." The spiritual supermarker wants all shelvings equal, but astro-fatalism ad little sopy idealisms leech the truth from human hearts. What about sin? This tale came to me in a rush of inspirations hours after a sentimentionable debate with a overcrowded mob of new-agers.

Little Thornbills

LITTLE THORNBILLS

I'm happy now, I'm in a fine way.
My lot in life will not clear. Even
under cars I love my wife, my children.

I walk around the mudbrick house happy.
I did that! See, my new pioneering, my
garden landscape, the orchard. I did that too!

I'm happy reading 'The Age' mornings.
Wrap local-rag arvoes with a thawing chook
Doled with a little happy.

I even enjoy wheeling off to school the kids
Car a glass-can on oil-rubber wings
Gettin out and burnin fuel: zooom, zoom.

I'm happy. I quite enjoyed dashing
My lonely mug of instant coffee
On the big stacks of unlaid bricks.

I can even not entirely hate grovelling...
Like locating boltholes on the gooseneck
Of my happy towbar, if I'm down, (and I am).

I'm happy the car still goes (and stops).
The school letters children and come sunrise
Plastic lunch boxs must be happly filled...

But tell me why the little thornbills
Picking lerp off gumtrees out my windscreen
Make me catch my eyes?

1990 © Wayne David Knoll

I have twitched and watched birds, making birdlists since I was a boy. The little flight beings are wonderful to watch. Watching, I have yen to try. Where are the boltholes to be gone, that lead somewhere better than this? Pold the clod can undress the wings of his tongue, for who does want to be 'my man' ... 'Home among the gumtrees'? But it too often seems to be down on his knees in abjection that gets him somewhere.

Call Of The Wind

CALL OF THE WIND

The Wind
Oh The Wind
On the ear of night
it blows

The Wind
Oh the Wind
On the breath of going
It Passes

Sighing, the Wind
whispers of the passes,
of the path it takes...

"I'm a travelling
Friend, my friend...
On the breeze we'll go!

Gently tugging all ties away
In gusts in leaves
the desire to stay
Cold on the grounded hills.

"Sweeping on !
Sweeping on !
Are you coming?"
It sighs
"Are you coming"
It moans.

Softly, it
breaths it,
sighs:
" TIME"
Time passes...
......Time, it's passing...

.............. TIME ..................
... ......... Now is the time !

" Come, come"
It puffs away
"I won't be blowing
on another day.

"Come, come,
we'll a-whither go,
without weight on the earth
or bonds below."

"Come with the wind
and blow!
We can go anyplace
we'll go!"

" Come, Come,
Come with the wind!
Pick up you feet and go!"




Wayne David Knoll © 1988
Bridge Street, Trentham, Victoria

In 1993 I dedicated this to my children Timshel, Shalome & Dylan. It is so wonderful to break free of baggage, and to leave unwonted weight behind. There is a pull that also come with a decided push: a dissatisfaction with the way things are. The Holy Ghost is no mere zeitgeist, no seven-year itchwind of irresponsibility, but an inner voice, a call to intiative, to go with an imaginative vision of what could be, a breath of ingenius gift. And, Australia is the unpredictable land of jests and jesters, resourceful, wily, gamblers with God. Many of these would never admit to a spiritual desire. Others, others are religious without a breath. It is the forceful hallowing breath that takes out of our own rut.

Heartlessness

HEARTLESSNESS

In Sydney,
a donor - first
catatonic, then dead
- some body’s person!

His heart cut loose
- still beating -
bloody strong
as it hit the ice!

Surgeons lobbed
the good heart in
packed ice in an Esky,
battened the lid with metal braces
and flew it, ‘Express’ ...
to Melbourne...

They knew their thrust:
waste heart to be recycled
- come what who pays

- and in Melbourne
'Badheart’ waited.

At Tullamarine,
Police waited for an Esky.
Policecar lit the Freeway
blue with sirens on Signal 8
through Moonee Ponds:

Must short-time one heart
from airlift to operation.
Emergency! A man might die!
Pull all stops out for a heart!

In the Policecar Sergeant Duty
& Constable Geewizz
Surgeon Ambition & Sister Makename
nursed a metal Esky...

made a speedway of
the freeway not done
at END FREEWAY signs:

The wheelspin
made a heartbeat,
for the one in the Esky
in them all.

North Melbourne: no freeway.
Midday traffic! They slowed.
Felt the beat doubly slow.
Sergeant Duty sirened Faster!

Needed Heart for hospital,
Hospital for the heart.
“Shit Move!” Ambition cried!
...so Duty drove harder...

Parked cars sped past.
Housefronts fled by.
The T-junct came up too quick.
And Duty lost it!

The Copcar flipped,
and a powerpole came in.
In an iron-embracing
Gush.

In slow replay:
Duty died pulp between
engineblock and powerpole.

Geewizz’s armpit
was quarried all the way thru’
- by the scoop of a parked-car’s open door.

Sister Makename slumped forward.
Her door-edge-severed head
wired by veins across the Esky.

And the Esky still whole!

In a metal mangle, stuck
in spotlights of windscreen shard,
surgeon Ambition flinched...

Ambition shocked passersby
with bits of life!

Shocked to a single sentence
he bristled with speech:
“Get the heart out!”

He ordered the Ambulancemen:
“GET THE HEÃRT!”


But they didn’t know whose.

1990 © Wayne David Knoll

First published 1993 in “ Compost of Dreams
Wayne Knoll,

Fusion Arts Colony Malmsbury Vic 3446

Also published in 'Studio' Magazine 1994.

Rooted back in faith again, I return to the heartwood of my making. And I believe more than ever in the one Great Heart which increases ours as other-softened hearts which allows respect for the Image to its full tenderness in sacrelised humanity. But, this ticker of an action poem beats with something else. Written in Melbourne while visiting from Trentham, when a real striker like this happened. I think The News told of smashed-up emergency vehicle that killed a number while carrying a kidney loosed toa free radical in an iron box.

in indoor clouds of the soul

In The Underbelly Of The Air

In the underbelly of the air we fancy
Ourselves apart...everyone bit pea-princess
Gone-soft! Affluent and inflated with Care.
Insured-up to cottonwool our heart's eye
From eaglesight, the link-back, the omphalos inside.


In the underbelly of the air we have
Shagpile ninecluds to mundane on
Suckering ourselves tizzy in imagewinds of gorblimey
Frothing out the sails of our lungs to cushion-speed
Palming us down in cold heart-comfort soup.


In the underbelly of the air we sit
Stuffing images into ourselves, chickenfeeding info!
Weekending our souls on the breast of duck-down
Like fool Canutes at low-ebb on heavenblind sands
Scuttling our happy shit on the doorstep.


In the underbelly of the air we pity
Ourselves and tell each other how
Vulnerable we feel. Making ease and society
Saying: " Don't be critical! Don't be hard!"
In the underbelly of the air.


1988 © Wayne David Knoll

Where has our Vigour gone? Where is the Nous? Where Gusto? Yakka? Quiddity? All bowdlerised? Gone to gewgaws and hype, gizmos and dithers. We procastrate ourselves with distractions and make a world gone to cheap gawks and tinsel talks. Gone to schlock- truth and Newspeak! Puke lukewarm in our mincewords! Give us Acts of God and prophets to stir us out of spiritless comfort zones.