Port Arthur

for Robert Hughes

1

Flesh-tearing prongs, tense crippled shapes,
Late autumn apple orchards bear
Dark witness to the island’s past.
Engorged, harsh ravens stiffly perched
On crowning branches fiercely jab

Christ crucified in every tree
And make of them a coat of arms.
Bad fruit and crazy, rotten-drunk
Convict-striped wasps continue to
Convey the knowledge I acquired.

2

Still water for a time became
A gallery with replicas
Of nature primitive and raw:
The sundered, blood-scabbed eucalypts

Like Trees of Man in glossy mags,
While knotted, clumpy, mist-patched hills
And fire-blacked rotting logs with huge
White witchetties were images

Of steaming beasts and stinking whales,
Club-dented seals and abos dead
From ulcerated gunshot wounds
washed out into a hazy blur,

A scrub-scarred cliff face slashed by sun
Glazed bare and characterless as
A sand dune surface before passed
As fit for young Tasmanian eyes

Already clouded with the lie.
I stoned the pool, rescued the past,
Permitting just the landscape’s scowl
As mirror for a convict’s soul.

3

Late evening in The Arthur Arms
And you as usual gulping beer
Like Brennan’s “huddled bulk of gloom”
As though no time had passed at all

In thirty years when we last met
To misquote and indulge ourselves
With Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde,
Obsessions you have not replaced

With anything more up to date
As on and on the record grinds,
Hal Porter coming to the bar
To down ten gins at ten a.m.

In nothing but his dressing gown
The story you must still repeat,
Stetched out into a cat-o’ -nine
Late evening in The Arthur Arms.

4

The convict strain asserts itself
With “she’ll be right cob, never mind,
We haven’t got all fuckin’ day
To muck around and get it right
For these smart-arsed professor cunts

In leather gear and silver chains
Who come out here from pommy land
To run the university
And edit literary magazines.
Besides, it’s only poetry

That even they disliked, by some
Flash nancy with a fancy name
Who’s snatched it and run home to mum.
The Old Dart’s just the place to read
It back the front and upside down.”

5

Try as we might we can’t remove
With pleasure launches and pretty English trees
The sting of meaning from this place.
Flogging posts and prison walls doused red with sun

Are exactly what they are. The past rubs off
On to what is now. A concrete cricket pitch
Is there to seal the spirits of the dead.
Those of the air are impaled upon

White-washed football posts. English waitresses serve tea
In a gift shop where the past is bound in print.
The Electronic Pest Control has broken down;
It is their turn to wait on me.

6

On one side
Of an English-looking park
Stone lions open-mouthed
In pure fury crouch
And guard a walkway
Lined with imported oak.

Centred in the park
Where horse-riding rulers from
The Mother Country walked
Turd-dropping hounds,
A weeping willow tinted red.
Coming into leaf it glows
Like a plastic sack of blood.

On the prison side
A sombre walkway
Lined with native pine
Has grown out of hand.
Roots above the ground
Spread to the other side
And marry into oak.

On branches growing out
From trunks as thick
As horses’ chests
Tight-knit clusters of
Shell-terraced cones
Refuse to drop.

The issue has been joined.
Stallion-black, a grease-slicked
Motor bike roars off
Through reddish hybrid scrub.
A strip of bark blown along the road
Shapes into a fox.
From branches humped and barbed
With sleek-feathered crows
Acorns part and drop.

locasta, wearing daisy chains,
Soft stems split
By dirty fingernails,
Cries out in distress.
Oedipus grins as he flicks
Pine quills from her dress.

7

A pine tree trimmed
And tapered to a point
Is fretted by the wind.

Ill at ease,
Its shape dictates
It should be still and straight,

Not like a jester’s hat
With its absurd
Off-centre peak.

A bird skims to its rest
And, lighting on the tip,
Draws upwards to itself,

Smooth-feathered,
Poised and light,
A tree in full expectancy of flight.

8

Five-fingered, fleshy and broad-veined,
The plane tree leaves are falling still
Around a wind-scythed stretch of park,
The gardener like the Commandant
Calculating numbers killed

As carefully he cleans his fork
Of severed hands onto a heap,
Determined as he seeks and adds
The fugitives from hedge and pond
To more completely rule his world.

9

A golden fish among slack lines,
The mild sun wavers as we joke
About the largest catch of all,
Until we start to fill the boat,

Tear dark holes in the gentle swell,
When grinning like a shark it moves
Across the water’s wounded face
And drives a hook into our eyes.

10

Burnt skin peeling under my ear,
I think of the hangman’s rough rope
Instead of fish sparkling like jewels
Before they were gutted and scaled

Off-shore from a bald patch of hill,
Where signals received were sent on
When convicts escaped to the sea,
Your red finger pointing it out.

11

How lucky to have managed fifty-one.
I take street corners wide and quickly say:
"Good morning ghosts, of crimes both old and new."
They soften. I shake them warmly by the hand.

A year ago, to this very day, I wrote:
“ My mother’s anger judges me through them.”
Now sheep-like they are gathered in
As friends. Their sentence is for life.

12

That maggot-crawl is in my flesh again.
It concertinas underneath the skin
Like music of the modern spheres.
I saw my limbs once as a stack of guns.

That’s why I’m tired: I fear that I might kill.
For wounds of the unhealing kind
A bullet through the head is best.
That thought is in my mind again.

I’m lucky, though. I have no gun
To wipe out what has always gone
Of its own accord: fear comes and stays
The time it takes to go away.

13

Set one above the other, ten
Square windows on the prison wall
Show racing clouds, give previews of
The main attraction of the day:

By three a hood’s a knotted rope,
By five a kicking thing, by eight
A flower with limply hanging head
Cut down and quartered on the last.

If filled and still, death masks appear
Featuring the neanderthal,
Police-file frowns, the stares that passed
For faces on The Fatal Shore.

© Copyright: Graeme Hetherington