rosemary dobson

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Rosemary Dobson

8 June 1920 – 27 June 2012

When true poets die

Some usually close wished they knew

Some who knew wished they were close

Few have the true grasp of it

The deading brain running off like bad cream

Leaving a stain some lick from their fingers

The poet chooses not to linger

  

Philip White

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white

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for Cathy White
on her completion of fifty laps of the sun



white


most places I’ve been on Earth
there are people called white
regardless of skin
every language has its own bright version

but unless somebody brings a prism
white hangs invisibly in blue sky
the perfect mixture of all other colours
morphing when it likes
through phantom shapes of aerial water and ice
which may or may not choose to fall
to fill Lake Eyre with fish and pelicans or salt
surge spume along a reach
make the friggin sand for chrissake
the Ninety Mile Beach
deposit the limestone Mallee
or smother Antarctica with ice

white concentrates in clays too
so clean it’s good enough for paint
and in the precise intensity of barite marble and talc
and the zillions of microscopic oysters
that make the cliffs of Dover
and the moist bright chalk of Chablis

somehow the oyster sucks the whiteness from water
and hardens it for a home
one dark old town in Japan knows this
the householders hurl their empty shells
onto the grey midden in the square
fifty feet of oysters towering over a waist-high fence
post and rail
they scratch the cured ones from beneath
hundreds of years they’ve been there
grind them up with boiled pig glue
and make exquisite faces for dolls
beyond pearlescent
pure white

in Australia you’d get a bag of fresh ones
take them up to Ashton Hills
guts them on the veranda with a riesling
and hurl the spent shells into the vineyard for calcium
so your white from the sun via the sea
enters you through a glass of crisp austerity
leaves the teeth and attitude a-sparkle
and heads off through the black gizzards
and the porcelain to the deep
to eventually worm its way back into the blue
dance the whole crazy move again

it’s called pissing on

this is where the colour thing comes in
my black mates giggle when they call me whitey
like a brother from yothu yindi mob
expertly siphoning great reds into his silver pillow
in the victorian italianate apartment I could not afford
watched by a spellbound wine critic from London
on whose behalf
I put it all down to morbid anthropological fascination
and got on with the business
passing the guitar
having a schluck
my girlfriend had a fluffball maltese terrier called oscar
he called it ggurrrrnnnnakkk then said
white cockatoo
he liked the contrast when he wore their feathers
them yolngu blokes could tell you a thing or two about middens


with love
philip white














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on my back

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on my back


on my back in the canyon
gazing at high cirrus
it is a long way up

laid here with lovers and killers
only time they get me
is when I look at the edge

eyes flop over sideways like that
next thing you know
you just gotta go


philip white













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noise

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noise should come out of a poem

































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the biggest cliché in most rooms

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the biggest cliché in most rooms

the biggest cliché in most rooms
is the jerk who first mentions
the elephant he reckons nobody can see
while the guests stare lovingly at the empty corner
imagining a white jumbo they could pat
the cliché steals the silver and scats

philip white


















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I had a soul

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I had a soul


I had a soul.
I took it through milkshed and byre,
tussock and thistle, ragwort and bog
with a burlap sack on my head for the drizzle.
With me it watched the blackwood hewn
and the underground tank surrender its muck
to bucket and shovel,
till all was strewn on grass so green
it really needed to be seen.

I had a soul.
With me it watched the poddy-calves drop
from the neat blow of the axe-back
and the steam rise from their opened flesh
as their gizzards writhed alive, still digesting.
It flopped with me on soft fresh hides
and the fleas in the hay of the barn,
with brothers playing on the beams:
everything was what it seemed.

I had a soul.
They flayed it over communion wine
and tortured it with hymns exhaled through trembling wattles;
pious old throats filled with the Holy spit
and sanctimonious halitosis.
I fucked that soul off across the gaping graves:
kinfolk and kindred who did no harm,
young whose souls some other bastard claimed.
I carry their husks home in the rain.


Philip White



















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Reaching Into The Car

Reaching Into The Car It was the summer. A girl passed us in the country. She had a little red car with celery and baguettes on the back seat and you could see she was happy. She had the radio on. Bobbing her head, white throat taking the eucalypt heat, singing along to someone with her hair in the wind. She pulled back in front of us and smashed flat strap into a tractor. He was doing no wrong: dawdling along to the next job, two wheels off the tarmac. two on, his back to her. I knew she was singing when the shatter happened and stopping had occurred. We drew up. I remember the sound of our handbrake as I opened the door anticipating horror. She had a compound fracture of the jaw which she didn’t understand, and because her vehicle was suddenly shorter, her femurs were, too. One of them, jaggedly white, was poking out the side of her purpling leg. In those moments of total shock one’s blood rushes to the major organs, so it doesn’t come out of the holes for an agonising dead length of moments. “I’m getting married” she gurgled through her shattered teeth, “I’m getting married tomorrow. I’ve just bought all the stuff.” I took her bloody phone in one hand, and as the tractor driver shuffled up, fondling his reflective jacket, whispering “I dunno how she did that,” I pressed the button of her last call, my other hand fumbling for a bit that wasn’t smashed so she could feel me as she screamed. I don’t remember what her name was, but I told it to the guy who answered. He worked in a bank. He arrived before the ambulance, a young man with spiky hair, a blue business shirt, pleated chinos and deck shoes. He stood beside her, reaching into the disfigured car for something that may no longer be there, his other thumb poking dumb numbers on his phone as he chanted “We’re getting married in the morning. We’re getting married in the morning. We’re getting married in the morning. We’re getting married in the morning.” It was very dry. Philip White .