Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Preface
- Foreword By John Lucas
- Prologue
- To Tasmania with Mrs Meredith
- On the Right Side of the Earth
- We meet at last
- I've been wanting to ask …
- Dear Mr Simpson
- Taking things in
- A Bummer
- Swanport
- And for the Record
- Fax from Launceston to Michael
- A Hasty Rejoinder
- Something you can't deny
- The Interview
- In Mount Field National Park
- News of a Death
- On the Answering Machine
- In Flowerdale
- Hadn't we the Gaiety?
- About as far as we can go
- Your art Mrs Meredith
- The Princess Theatre, Launceston, 18th October, 1995
- Threads
- Journal entry for Tuesday, 31st Oct.
- Dangerous I know
- A Poem for Wybalenna Chapel
- Making an Exhibition
- A Last Glimpse
- Epilogue
- Melbourne Central Cemetery
- Select Bibliography
We meet at last
from On the Right Side of the Earth
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Preface
- Foreword By John Lucas
- Prologue
- To Tasmania with Mrs Meredith
- On the Right Side of the Earth
- We meet at last
- I've been wanting to ask …
- Dear Mr Simpson
- Taking things in
- A Bummer
- Swanport
- And for the Record
- Fax from Launceston to Michael
- A Hasty Rejoinder
- Something you can't deny
- The Interview
- In Mount Field National Park
- News of a Death
- On the Answering Machine
- In Flowerdale
- Hadn't we the Gaiety?
- About as far as we can go
- Your art Mrs Meredith
- The Princess Theatre, Launceston, 18th October, 1995
- Threads
- Journal entry for Tuesday, 31st Oct.
- Dangerous I know
- A Poem for Wybalenna Chapel
- Making an Exhibition
- A Last Glimpse
- Epilogue
- Melbourne Central Cemetery
- Select Bibliography
Summary
This is what
you look like then?
An obvious
charmer still,
hand on shoulder
fingering curls.
We meet at Warrandyte,
the good professor's house
where distant bell birds ping
and magpies chortle in
the pepper trees.
I mean I get to see
a frontispiece. The carte
de visite photographer
has gone for that soft-focus
pre-Raphaelite look
the men all like:
that studied ambivalence,
noli me tangere yet
console me in my hour of need.
I know — for I havemiles
of retrospect —
that your if-only eyes
are artist's eyes,
the company you yearn for
is angels different from
the ones aloft: you want
luminaries of the brush and pen.
And there are fraught times ahead,
counting the lost, the dead,
the Swan River flood,
terror-stricken horses straining necks,
and only just,
above the battering water line.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cutting the Clouds Towards , pp. 25 - 26Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999