Stone Rolled To Margin Shifts

Stone Rolled To Margin Shifts

STONE ROLLED

Stone rolled, go where the rock
has gone! To unroofed churches, wall ruins
to crumpling tombs, empty doorways, vacant
windows with vistas out to the shed skins
of the inland, to a view to marginal country
on tracks leading away by desert saltbushes
where no one waits, to the shadowless lands
of homesites where every heart-draught
has been parched and gusted clean.

For aloneness to true being comes to
a head in vanishing things, in unbroken
still-points in watchful kangaroo eyes,
to be with a wary unattachment to tears,
as in the eye-water of brainfever birds,
to be incanting daily soap-bubbles in the wind,
for pasts dashed like wren eggs below
too-needled thornbushes, and know the eroding
destroyer that cuts into the mudstone

of ochre banks and spear-mounded graves
so that the ages mount up, light up the nerves
like stark bible, in stories of thirst filled with
rifle-holed watertanks of hope, the flat-tyred cars
and dry shells of long-distant land-snails thrown off
like spent cartridge casings, to be left bleaching
under arid cloud-vanishings, as the fading principle
fertilizes sparse pastures, eats colour, and splinters
the kindling from the white-ant consumerism of fenceposts.

To be sympathic of prone bones, trip on roots of
knucklebone, or stricken trees surviving on side in
the lee of the relic threat of an unhoused chimney.
For museums know nothing of the muses; your dead stump
of life exists to be eaten out, to be a vast castoff
at the margins of life, shedding will, emptiness is the gut,
in being as the gutted things, returning, turning dust,
dust in the slow wheels of the great engines built in
the chassis of harsh climes in an arid place,

True heart longs for the reveals to be broken;
give us barrenness to find those eyes, such eyes.
Pierce every rusty bullet-hole we try to plug.
Let the tanks of rungs ring scarcely till the tossed-off
skips of sling-stones fly home at the wet brows
of your presumption's tunnel-visioned champion,
and dash down the rock-footed surety of every celebrity
puffed with any pin-up Goliath's hollow-boasts.

Bedregged of all false sentiment, soberly soft-wined
of comfort's balm, the politically-correct pharisee, the urbane
dragon needs must leave off possessive mending of old
wineskins of mind to be human, so wall-down, let a breach,
undoor the mind for passage, allow a nave to lie in ruin.
If we would be messages in this thinning scribble, our false-borders
will be breached; marginal inclemencies will pare a way
to unpeel our skins of their mind-fat thickness.



-after June-July 1995 at Farina, the Maree Plains, SA

- written after going 'Out of Districts' through the Flinders Ranges, SA , then slow-finding the ruins of Wilpena, Beltana and Farina -following the dismantled Old Ghan railway line north past Lake Eyre South by Witchelina, Curdimurka, Strangways, Irrapatana, places of pioneer legend now in ruins.