The Fog of Freedom

(Incident in an Outer Suburban Park at Night Time)


A low fog of distorted sky
in the bush park after 3 AM
Fudges a streetlight shine
among re-growth gumtrees.

And the halo of the highway halogen
blurs its eyeless-coward-yellow
into the shadowed creek recesses
of remant bush-wetland rises,
where an unminded flotsam
of loose teenagers ramble
to the smoking of fat grass
about thin sixteens of years.

In a freedom of nights being
now taken out of bed,
Out of the fenced and gated
detachment of their lives,
As if no parent back in
the shrouded night’s shutness
In the damp-dreamed houses
of streets near or far, bothers
About them enough to
be getting up to asking after
Where they are or waiting up
to find how they are.

Huddled in the fog
along tarred bikepaths, like a shadow
Heidleberg school of scenes in these
after midnight landscapes.

With no camp, no clandestine fire
to circle as a centre,
no satisfactory or temporary hearth
to gather round.

Just a wandering darkness
picked out in red joint ends
As they knock marijuana shoulders
and elbows each.

Then a female, stranger -
an older teen or 21stC adult? -
Screams from the scrub, comes
falling to broken wings of knees,
a waif curling into a foetal ball
before them, frenzied, not breathing,
choking up in fog, coughing liberty
as if wanting some other, frothing
grief, wailing hoarse abuse, incapable
of focus on a conversation.

Her distress sows discord
like the inarticulance of a kicked fungus,
let loose in the night,
poisonous in its stray uprootedness.

With a gaggle of teenager help
she recoils into higher vegetation
And only with the arrival of
a quartet of police does her
banshee wail settle to curdle
in a sentence that they can hear
and understand:
‘My ex-boyfriend took my mobile phone!’
Said as if she’d found, and lost,
a key to one of those houses.

The female, quieted, eschews
the arrived medical ambulance,
Wanting only to go to a free friend,
begging someone's mobile to call for a lift,
but failing, she accepts a prisoner-like lift
up-back with the police.

The other squad faces the teens,
now perched suckpipe-free
and smokeless on the edge of a BBQ,
like daybirds liberated from night trees,
like daybeings freed of a darkness.

And freely commands them,
binding them like public parents:
‘Now Go Home! Go Home.’

Said with more passion and bother
than the ones at home.


26 August 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Bayswater, Victoria

Socially Secure Arithmetic


Official unemployment only shows
Itself as the viscious niggard, when
It thinks in you: you’re hostage!

As if, as your confidences are
Taken by all the paperwork:
All your Confidence goes.

Am I reduced to this? That
Question keeps begging, begging.
Worse: that b-word asks: Apt?

Yes, you had your transports!
But as your old vehicle goes
Off the road, you try… and fail.

Life becomes arithmetic: the
things you can’t do multiply,
and things you can subtract.

Unemployment only just shows
Itself economic rationalist, and then
It counts you! - a wedge statistic.


7th October 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

Being Left Behind


Being left
behind when
your loved ones fly away,
travelling to places you’d like to be
and in their company
each step you make afterwards
is useless,
remembering the finality as those wide doors
shut you
on the wrong side.

The duty free shops have no attraction then
and along the airless airport malls
you bounce on sweep-worn sheen,
an alien among greyer aliens.

The outrageous price of the monopoly-run
car park grinds your pocket in your teeth
and, as you yearn unrequited, not now
for the noble, but for any exit
through those bilaw-hoops of grey ups and downs
that rise nowhere, you loose all sense of direction,
and only happen across the way again
in regret by remembering true north
which was the way
the flight out went.

so as you approach the first lit
intersection, you can’t decide
which way you want to go
indecision cripples you, your
accelerator foot looses its strength,
you dawdle off into the left lane
paused between non-take-offs
in non-acceptance of this
spirit-grounding

Then, you realize
that a rapture has happened
and you weren’t in it

And that, for your departed,
the universe is much increased
while for you the dome has shrunk
the walls are closing in, the grey roof’s
come down

your evening is yawning open
your tomorrow is a pedestrian repetition
of the mundane again,
your steps are leaden with the dull
ache of regretting that one step
you did not take

and this is hell.


29 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

Apology To The Future

- for my grandson

I’m sorry, so sorry. I saw
our imp-selves lifted up
-and this selfish meanness
- as it was happening... I
thought there was too little ‘one’
could do about ‘it:’ -this loss of
our holy beauty of being, the failure
of our mere private integrity,
of being a united people. I saw
the last days of social belonging,
the last of public joint commitment.
I tried, tried so little. Did what
I thought I could. Risked little.

I see, now, I was too much a robot
of the problem, thinking in that ‘one’
demoralized math of the time, even
with my solo finger in the dyke
– slave to that head-born head count!

Why was I in conformity?
to that labelled cut of cloth?
to what really didn’t matter?
when I was raised to courage
biblical enough to know how
by an inspired one, with a just few,
hosts of enemy can be put to rout?

I know! I failed.
Failed to engender enough faith
to lead with the brave and right.

So I saw roads swell to this
bloated soul-snarl. Saw outdoor
villages empty for shopping centres
as internally-built as prisons.

I grieved, uselessly, as I heard
that germ of our traffic subdividing,
multiplying like an amplified virus.

I saw the land concreted down
and paved with developed intentions,
the creeks piped to a fascist music.

I saw education become graduation,
debate, ideas, in abdication; saw
people let the Masters in Business Rule
gladly, as if that was learning! Saw
flow charts become virtual rivers for
future drought; saw suburban universities
swelling with Orwellian sustainabilty
courses; saw Religion become a fertile
prosperity cult! and spirituality become
a party balloon. I watched as demon
fisherman of the souls dressed normally
as a businessman in its suit and tie.

I was raised in earth, seeking divinities,
but I let the mass common-low culture
overwhelm me, let this dense conformity
cower me, for shame! Curse this bought,
this shopped-for shame, my son,
my scion! Curse this comfort, this
skein of our satisfaction that is drunk
too merrily as it rots our souls.

Courage be on you to grow in truth
and stature and find anger in
my dust to fight this enemy occupation
of our lands and souls. And when
I die, lower me that day
in no cute Lawn Cemetery, but put
my flesh in a public box and declare
me a Missing Link, the Link
of the Devolution from devotion
to decadence, then preach a hot
sermon against mere seedy being,
mine or any other. Be inspired
as the Avenging Angel at the last.

Preach of the reality of Death and Dying,
of the saints who set example in brave lives
to a brave dying for the cause of truth - as
the seed for the germination of
the other world in this one, to sprout
the bravest words of transcendence
out of the garden of your soul.


31 May 2006- Jan 2007 © Wayne David Knoll

After School

(with a nod to Richard Jefferies for ‘After London’ 1882)

I go up the street
and the young people grouped
round mandolin and guitar are trying out
lyrics they have written
while waiting outside
a venue for scripture study
They have taken imprecious metal
from their body flaps like last
ablutions before their song

I ride on the bike paths
and the young people
having abandoned tags,
yell out their ideas as they
whitewash the overpasses,
abseiling off bridges on rope slings,
preparing to write intelligent creative slogans
like their ‘Something Beautiful is Going to Happen”
in witty readable graffiti
on the clean slate of this old concrete.

I get on trains
and the young people
nod hello to me, and
instead of cadging a cigarette
say, “Mister! Can I read you
my poem about Billobelary.”
While listening, I hear one of the girls,
not plumbing that telco-sewer to gossip, but
philosophizing on her mobile phone.

I go to the hall tuition room
and the young people
run out before I’m in, saying:
‘Tell us the Lydian story of ‘The Song of
the Unnamed Queen’ again
… with a puppy grin of excuse: “because
Melanie didn’t hear it.”

I visit the library
and the Young People
are poring over classical histories and sharing
classic incidents in juicy plums they have found:
Melanie from the Odyssey,
a farmboy from Hesiod,
young wits from Juvenal.

The Future of Youth… maybe,
in Iceland, Falkland, or Poland ?
or
when Secondary School in Australia
is abolished.


2 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

Media at The Big Black Hole

(for Kerry Packer versus Phillip Adams)

That Big Black Hole
of the Prince Of the Air
is limitlessly small.
In it, vision shrinks till
only the media, the shell of things
can be seen, just the transmitted pods
with the seed of life eaten up
before each could die
into its potency.

Where Phillip Adams
wears his black outside,
blackwashing the conceit
of his title win in the bout
with the whole;
his much ‘pitied friend’ Kerry Packer
was more brutally honest, for
Kerry loudly declaimed that what
he had was a big black
hole inside.

Adams then had the perspicuity
to called Packer a damaged man,
and, this was said in glib temerity
as if he wasn’t, as if we all aren’t.

The reason why Kerry Packer saw
nothing when he momentarily died
of that renal meltdown,
was - nothing changed.
He had seen nothing
beforehand, just as he saw
nothing when he came back.

When Kerry died his inner hole
didn’t die, it stayed with him.
He saw no heaven,
just as he did before.
He saw no hell
just as he did before.
What did he expect
coming from a black hole?

But he knew its sign years before,
for he lived in the hell of that black hole
- living on as the nothing yawned.

He only saw what he expected
from black hole to spreading black hole,
-the amorphous black and ravenous
gaping hole which only the yielded
up embrace of an upright self-dying
last post of a cross can fill.

Then, he, spoken for
closer to that Kingdom,
chose to die, and Kerry Packer
secretly went to his last
broadcast Boyer-lecturer’s Christ
whose relayed Peter
blessed him at the brink
of the small hole it took
to bury the unspeakable
earthly remains.


24 Feb 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

The Wood and Stone Petition

On the 2nd of June 1849, my great great great grandpa C. Erdmann Jäckel, a tischlermeister (cabinet maker-joiner) with 210 other settler of 'New Silesia' in the Barossa Valley, signed what is now called the ‘Wood and Stone Petition’ lobbying the South Australian Governor to take material from Crown land to build pioneer homes. Though Erdmann soon had to leave his trade, and learn to farm, his family fell into distress which saw the death of his wife, his children’s mother. When he re-migrated to the east of Melbourne in 1853, where he could practice his craft on town houses built with gold rush wealth, he did not trust to this mastery, but kept to a hard-won providential life, with a small farm, cow, vines, orchard and hives at Boundary Road: a freedom practice many of his descendants still practice, or remember.


With hands in flesh worn to touch, but no ready money,
with families in health to provide, but no ready homes,
with rich mentalities, with skilled hands to use, but no materials,
I, Erdmann Jäckel, with my compatriot New Silesians
of this Barossa Valley, on the North Gawler river, petitioned
the then Governor on the 2nd of June in 1849 in a plea
to obtain wood and stone from the wastes of the Crown.

Finally, the Governor’s reply came with a breach
in the prohibition, - as if this was permission:
‘You will be allowed to remove dead trees.’

Those dead hardwood Australian trees are hard near to
a Prussian blue Exit signature inked at last on the too-easy writ
of dense legislation; and me, a tischlermeister, able to turn
the finest wood into even finer interiors…in a time of bark
huts, free-stone cabins, of wattle and daub, of unceilinged,
newspapered walls! Interiors? What use was dead wood?
What use was I? I lasted few years, then took ship for Port Phillip.

So, the fine fancy of lace-wrought wood in Victorian
gold scrollwork on front verandahs of Melbourne,
or the timbering of Hawthorn-brick homes does not answer
as well as a table, a chair, a bench seat, nor a shed roof, but there
in the wilds of ‘The Nunawading’ my mortises and dovetails made
fine hives for honey, my joinery made a prize cow bail, a water barrel,
a wooden home with verandah post and beams for vines, and my coffin.

Now, 157 years after my day, I, Erdmann Jäckel, the Earthman-builder
whose rustic bones underscored and spokeshaved what has become
suburban-Melbourne’s rise, am not blind to you, who still have hands
of flesh, much compromised to a world of paper resourcefulness,
in a mortgage shuffle of paper skills, good at the too-easily printed paper…
I petition now for you (and for your freedom) to ask for wild wood and stone
against many a signed paper, to foil a death-pledge of documents
you hold in the bought-surround houses of your night.

Give a Grace for Wood and Stone! Gnadenfrei -free grace
always will be what matters most for a signature writ
in the all-weather building-blocks of cultured simplicity.


July 2005-Jan 2007 © Wayne David Knoll

Getting an Obfuscation


Thought I was studying a diploma of education!
And bought the 2006 teaching textbooks.
Then gagged trying to read them.

And I am slightly literate! I returned them.
Not worth buying if they fail the readability test.

Yet, the pain is, I have to know them to pass.
Is this the self-styled educator’s ordeal,
the testing ground of strained intelligence,
where I pass if I fail?

Fail to reject: ‘Education outcomes’ where I would say: ‘learning.’
Fail to reject: ‘school achievement behaviour’ where you could say: ‘learning.’
Fail to reject: ‘experiential skill areas’ where you could say: ‘skill’
Fail to reject: ‘various indices of effective behaviour.’
where you could say: ‘learning’ or ‘skills.’

Is this the word-car’s crash - on education’s dingaring road,
The pile-up of dud and plastic language into a traffic jelly
A commuted stupidity A word-snarl that convinces willing idiots
to crumple up to abstracts as if to be seen in profundity…

Achievement becomes abstract riders on abstract nouns
in our mind’s death sentences, convoluted with crippling
injuries of syntax, in complex clauses
that would render us less significant, or stupid.

Call that an educative menu? Just mouthing the texts
I get the foretaste of retchings I don’t need to digest.

A sick empire’s tailors spin up
insubstantial clothes.
This time, not transparent, but
stupefying, obscuring…

The obfuscators? why do they do it? making
teachers for school with those long periods
of subservience to the institutionalization
of our obfuscation, being idiot conformisers
who turn freedom on the loom of confusions
into this conformity, this slave obscurity…
this ignoble, obfuscated slavishness to form,
a yet suave unintelligentsia.

I am a reader, an educator,
seeking education, and knowledge
of mankind in truth to stay sane, so I turn
back to books
as readable as Thucydides who wrote
in 408 BCE:

“as the result of these revolutions
there was a general deterioration
of character throughout the Greek world.
The simple way of looking at things,
.. so much the mark of noble nature,
was regarded as a ridiculous quality
and soon ceased to exist”

Now that book gets me a noble education
With the others I’m getting an obfuscation.


16 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Victoria

On Anxiety Attacks

[ How am I - How are you? ]

How are you?
I am not very well
oh - what is it?
it is the emotions
oh
it might be a nervous breakdown
oh
it could be anxiety attacks
oh - what happens?
emotions drown me
oh - what is it like?
feeling tidalwaves over me
oh - what feeling?
- being this cracked
- this poor, this broken
- grief at the good which died
- fear of rejection again
- love for my nativity land
(a country made nouveau)
- grief at our lost assurances
- anger at the neglect
- pining to be loved
- grief for how we are
- homesick for dinkums
- despair in our cowardly leaders
- disappointment at pretence
- afraid of experts and statistics,
- chronic love of small beauty,
- of hopes unrealised
- of vision undone
- impatience for faith to come
- too much thinking - I cannot do
- too much feeling - I cannot shake
- my unrequited soul
oh - what effect does it have?
it cripples,
oh
it knocks me for six
oh
washes me out to sea
oh
or else it opens a chasm beneath me
oh
and inflates my fear of heights
oh
and I frieze as if in vertigo
oh - are you okay then?
Since I am not obeying it:
not bad, no.

30 August 1999 © Wayne David Knoll

1. Fillbaskets
- circa 1956

['Northumberland Fillbasket' raspberries were one of two local native-born Wandin and well-known varieties which my great-great-great grandfather and pioneer, Edward Hunter, bred and grew in his wholesale nursery, till they multiplied across the Yarra districts; -the other sort were called 'Hunter's Perfection.' Hunter took up land there in 1866 and settled at Wandin Yallock from Heidelberg in the early 1870s.]

Before our biggened dam was bayed into the bottom flat
with excavations made by my mother's brother's dozers,
there used to be a patch of raspberries, in close to the creek,
[it is all flooded now, the memory is sprinkler-dripping leaves],

generation-tall bushes which grew in rows close-spaced as a careful pedigree
which the horse and tiller could fit, to exactly cultivate;
and in my first toddle of waking, going years of hot summer in
familiar bounty, prized at picking time, into shade for the cool,

I went among ends, invents of ingenious rows, being in, not doubting,
a scion basking in a born inheritance of life and nurture
as if all creation had been improved and named for me
-life which had been decided, bred and nurtured until then

-from Scottish border shires to the fertile Yarra Billanook-

where my own cornucopia basket could fill, warp and weft
like muses strands, for even these very raspberries were
a bloodline inheritance, first cultivated by my own ancestor;
-plant-breeder, and rootstock of faith in the parish,


-pioneer immigrant going native to Wandin Yallock red-lands
who planted and bred for his future native sons;
-Methodist elder, first Shire man, public Christian:
Ted Hunter, -in Australian nativity, my grandsire times three.

Fillbasket! Like an outlasting providence;
this was one nameable strand linking back,
a milieu of cultive nativity outside my blood:

I heard the adults say the ancient name
like a familiar litany of life in practice:

"We're picking the Fillbaskets."

" We got a good pick off the Fillbaskets."

" The Fillbaskets are still bearing well!"

like songs woven in the air
voicing this place as my place;

as if raspberry plants were an attendant angel host
giving the present of circumstances
in joyful nativity.


* * *
7 Dec 1996 © Wayne David Knoll

First Published in ‘Studio: a Journal of Christians Writing Albury NSW 1997

2. PermaCultural Hunter
- circa 1996

In Memory of my great-great-great grandfather, Edward Hunter -Born: 1817 Longbenton, Northumberland, England Departed 1852 on 'The Emigrant' from Sunderland to Melbourne, Died: 1895 Wandin Yallock, Victoria, Australia.


In Yarra Valley Lilydale,
outmoded in late decades,
from being

the horticultural
people's country town,
Limil shire village,
Melbourne lime supply depot;

to being sub-urban
a vegetating rank-growth
of suppurated suburbs!

Edward Hunter,
My horticultural forbear;

-like a plant
long-loaded after bearing

lies in wait
in his century-outlasted grave;

for,
though now unsung,
his Lillydale can still be read
in the cemetery,

speaking good
as he once spoke
in Council

counsel engraved
deep in his tombstone:

" There is no death!
What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life Elysian
whose portal we call death. "


7 Dec 1996 © Wayne David Knoll

First Published in ‘Studio: a Journal of Christians Writing Albury NSW 1997

Posterity is the Invention that Surpasses

or (Cold War of the Fallen Tombs)

“Unlike these tombs, which were real ones containing the bodies of the dead, all the other funeral mounds which are to be seen at Plataea were, so far as my information goes, erected merely for show: they are empty, and were put up to impress posterity by the various states who were ashamed of having taken no part in the battle. There is one tomb there, bearing the name of the Aeginetan interests which I am told was constructed at their request ten years after the battle, by Cleades, the son of Atodicus…”
Herodotus of Halicarnassus in ‘The Histories’ c. 300 BC


1.

I am Cleades, the son of Atodicus
the Australian
who made a pile at Gallipoli
- or was it further down the peninsula?
those foreign places are all Greek to me.
Who cares if it was ten years or a hundred after?
but, a tumulus, a road, a barrow, a great big mound
was needed for public recognition, as they say.
Posterity is the invention that surpasses
- at least at present.

Our Victorian Mornington Peninsula might do
- for a small retainer,
it’s circumstance is splendid. It looks
like Gallipoli from both the sea and air,
and there, a reconstructed re-enactment
of pomp and ceremony
can take place. And, on the Westernport side,
on flatter lands at Hastings, or Tooradin,
we can have Plataea, Boeotia,
some rural theme park.

2.

I am Albert Edward Henderson,
my scribe’s first cousin twice removed,
born Mildura 1898, absconded from law
school where I was sent to finishing
in Sydney, to be a number in the first A.I.F.
- aka Albert Edwards -
against first parent knowledge;
draining through Suez in a mob
shipped like schoolboys on the free excursion,
then steaming up the blue-skied Aegean
as if that was a sight under darkness,
going ashore to this Thracian hollow
where my eighteen-year old legal bones still
fool with consequentiality without a trace.

I have my whited cross! Seeing my mother,
unhorsed from her equestrian champions,
fey, mad with grief, my Mayor-father
lettering his failure to find my bones
cutting writ in the granite stone
of new public parks, a crux
of clanking flagpoles by duck-ponds
of river Murray pump-water!
as if my prospects deserted there
to keep annually appearing in a Mallee-Park air
with the pungent rosemary in herbal
conventions of quack respect.


3.

I am my scribe’s grandfather,
Horace James Jackel, who refused
my name to Billy Hughes P.M. when
he came slapping the sword of his army
for our crowd to encore.

I did not register. I did not enlist.
I was not conscripted. I did not go.
I went instead to public shame, to white
feathers, to prison and its shaming afterlife
in a curtailed ordained ministry.

A gospel conscience was my commander,
and then, I could not countenance killing my
distant unknown un-Australian-German cousins.
I learnt the other meaning of active service.

I had sixty eight years labour
for the kingdom of peace I believed in,
primary producer of Spirit wisdom,
of wide brimmed shelter,
in open home and family.

And, I still have this cheek
turned out to you for shame
from where my bones lie
collapsed in Nangana Cemetery,
in the ignominy of heroic reticence.

4.

I am Posterity: judge me not, judge me;
as our Australian War Memorials,
rising years after the battles,
like development project tombs in new Boeotia,
which, by clubbing to the memory
of the crowd-joiners, are rebuilt
as in honour grandly…


to catch both those ongoing views
- in the daily sacrifice of pilgrims
- entering the compromise
of that public selling -
at the crossroads, and also,
the rising path of the sun, with
a masonry of traps and snares,
as the endangered spirit creature
is turned to profit bred and tamed.


11 November 2005 © Wayne David Knoll

The Two Tables

- Based on ‘The Histories’ - Herodotus of Halicarnassus

Herodotus wrote: ‘It is said that Xerxes on his retreat from Greece left his tent with Mardonius. When Pausanias saw it, with its embroidered hangings and gorgeous decorations in silver and gold, he summoned Mardonius’ bakers and cooks and told them to prepare a meal of the same sort as they were accustomed to prepare for their former master. The order was obeyed; and when Pausanias saw gold and silver couches all beautifully draped, and gold and silver tables, and everything prepared for the feast with great magnificence, he could hardly believe his eyes for the good things set before him, and just for a joke, ordered his own servants to get ready an ordinary Spartan dinner. The difference between the two meals was indeed remarkable, and when both were ready, Pausanias laughed and sent for the Greek commanding officers. When they arrived, he invited them to take a look at the two tables, saying, “Gentlemen, I asked you here in order to show you the folly of the Persians, who, living in this style, came to Greece to rob us of our poverty.”


After the far-flung freedom battle had ended,
and that ‘invincible’ World Power’s tents were taken
Pausanius, captain of us The Empire called outlandish,
could hardly believe a sight new to our rustic vision:
seeing the embroidered tent that Xerxes left his chief
of staff [the now dead Mardonius] and his army
bureaucrats - that bevy of badge-rewarded subalterns,
with its imported brocades, its gorgeous decorations,
its high table of silver bowls, platters, its cups of gold.

But Pausanias, of Spartan raising, kept his nous
from cheap greed or avarice, even so, he ordered
his now servant once-Persian bakers and cooks
to reset the tables and fill them with prepared
dishes as if for a victory banquet familiar
deemed customary for their former masters;
with Pausanias looking on in private amusement
at the opulent feast of Oriental foods, decanters of red
Shiraz, the piled up spread of draped magnificence.

Then he ordered the helots, his own servants, to
put up a trestle for an ordinary Spartan meal, aside
from the captured Empire’s spread magnificence.
Then, in casual good humour, he freely invited in us
victorious Western commanders, to lead us salivating
like bazaar dogs around that plush Eastern marquee,
vaster now the difference was displayed in two tables.

‘Welcome! Come in Gentlemen. Walk with me
around these two tables. Look long before you taste
the rewards. Only, after pause for consideration
you may choose between: “The subaltern or the free.”
This was the joke of Pausanias, Commander of Spartans,
then saying: “I asked you here in order to show you
the folly of the Persians, who, living at tables in
this style, invaded Greece to rob us of our poverty.”

At the time we enjoyed the joke. What would you do?
We laughed. Two tables beckoned and we were
free to take. And then we ate, we whooped it up!
We freely took all spoils - from both the big table
and small, as victors by tradition take. But now, this
nausea. Undigested, what we swallowed goes gastric
in our souls, impossible to vomit, a cureless bug,
like coward feeling, gutting at the bowel, all while
robed in the win-win of this freedom’s tablecloths.


November 2005 © Wayne Deavid Knoll

Time of The Memory Man


In memory of Joseph Michael Mahony 1929-2005

Written and given to Joe in 2001 after finding we shared a common birthplace at The Airlie Hospital, Darebin Creek, Ivanhoe, Victoria


Joseph Mahony: man of the faithful
with lady magnificat,
Loving history and lineage,
- in that knowing kings!
Recites the names, dates, as if purring
thanks like a cat,
For once upon all times where
a noble heart sings.

Tell us truths and of justice, Joe,
for the good and no less,
Tell us of pain and of losses,
that ought to be grieved;
But give us pause for mercy, -
turn their ‘no’ into ‘yes’,
Tell us, fighting, of great battles fought
for a world that believed.

A world rejected you as mad, Joe
Tsskd you bad as an alcoholic;
In a crazy sin you lived, that you knew
Being of courage they denied;
Knowing a memorable belief makes us
Truly Christ’s and broad catholic
With a quixotic truth you clutched to,
Though a whole world lied

Never let us forget the soul-warriors,
the women of courage,
Don’t let us forget Christ's martyrs,
the men of high degree;
Never let us forget the zeitgeist
imprisoning our age,
Don’t ever let us forget
how we get spiritually free.

Tell us of champions, Joe, list Popes, Kings
and Melbourne Cup winners,
Tell us the human toll in all times,
in prayers of the faithful;
Be our reminder, give benchmarks of saints
and changeable sinners,
Keep litany of memory
till we rejoice to the full.

Praising Cat, like the poet, Chris Smart,
with his cat ‘Jeoffry’
Penning your fellow-souls into glory,
- inconsiderably odd;
Enlight! to the good conversation found,
in a world most unconversant…
Shuffling, shambolic, in the risk-balance
of the Living God.

"Never be surprised by Death."
you said - like my grandfather!
You knew old truths that our world
Fears, and makes taboo;
Righteous men perish, and few
give a damn. Being rather
To keen not to give one's mortality
the thought you had come to.

Lets charge that ghost cavalcade
off its oppression-beast,
Let’s charge the glasses, Joe,
let’s drink the glad wine;
Cheers to Christ’s miracle!
our well-vintaged Cana feast!
Cheers to that final release
from the shackles of time!


25 April 2001 © Wayne David Knoll

Corpus Christi Community, Greenvale,

The Snare

~ for Chris Wallace-Crabbe

(on attending Melbourne University
for the first time, age 47, 2001)


I remember my face
with chin-bristles like wire,
I remember my growling
in the chest as a bear;
I thought in my bones,
had feelings in my bowels,
I was a manual-articulate being,
Peasant-raised, muscular-minded,
All God-wrestling of spirit,
- a fundamental soul -
My rubric brawned gentle
on a raw whole: my world,
Now gone stupidly to Theory
that says: I don’t exist!


I remember, it must have been twenty
see-thru’ years ago,
And I, a hair-sprouting gauche radical
on hot memo of God,
Shirt-fronted this ‘Moderne’,
at Doubt’s Theory bookroom,
And hunted ‘Their’ academic doings
with encyclopaedic eyes,
Sniffing for spoor of Revelation,
for tracks of the primal creature;
Anything Biblical, Saga, even an Epic
that ‘leapt to faith’ ?
But what I found was little subject salvation
on the shelf.


Even now, as I come to the clever Baillieu’s
Theory library,
Dead dingoes of Land-Boom lucre
gilt up a bone of memory;
And hackles of bushlands where my hoary tribe
dug untold ways,
Go up. Roots ungilded make me!
my own solar plexus hits.
Mock-worlds! apartment, assumption,
specialisation, privilege and fame?
All danger-doubt!
it sighs audible memo
to a Neanderthal me,
In automatic glass-doors that
close open the air like a fist ...

…..………………………………Lying in wait.


12 March 2001 © Wayne Knoll, Melbourne University

The Nietzsche Women

or (The Hand of the Nietzsche Women)


Retreating to alpine hermitages, in lonely
visions, Friedrich saw that greedy Wagner,
playing upon the base instincts of the masses,
would lead a lost Germany to ruin: Dead ruin.
And Frau Nietzsche, said: ‘Jah, mein sohn.’
mopping his brow, as if he was the first of many.

Up there, he thinned: to love glaciers, icebergs, the
alpine Swiss chill… so the Cross of Christ became
a plot against all manhood, a damnation. Brotherhood
was curse! Care of the helpless: a weakness. And his
good Lutheran mother came and tended his fever, tucking
a blanket over to save him feeling a further chill.

Despairing man! lost from his boyhood anchor:
Belief! hardened to beautiful icicles of words more piercing
than a Swiss yodel, a frost speech - ridiculing Christian charity,
Christian compassion, Christian care; while his good Lutheran mother
came to him and eased his bodily suffering.

‘The founders of religion,” he said, 'are but
half-castes of sickness and the will to power”,
“ Zaruthustra is My greatest gift to humankind.”
Himself, taken with the sickness he scorned,
Still said:“kick down all that is meant to fall”
And his sister, Fraulien Nietzsche, a good Lutheran
girl, lifted and bathed his head with her warm balm.

The Female Nietzsches: their unwritten grief!
For his sake, his state, ceaseless in compassion.
And then these woman mourned him, buried him,
shed tears at the enemy’s cruel backhand. Him, a pastor’s
son, with so fatal a dose of the Illness, turned against
the hand… and went down, being Christians, extending
their touch, while near all Germany read Zarusthustra,
and got ready to live without compassion and die.

Last night I met a muso on a Met train in Melbourne,
Saying how his own faithless woman had betrayed him,
again. He said
“ I’m spending my last night on earth’
as if that goes by way of a greeting in Lygon Street.
... Brunswick is another country.

Carrying a backpack and a bottle of stout
Reading Hermann Hesse and Friedrich Nietzsche
and wanting to tell me of a faithless woman
the reason, the reason that he has no hope
as if that one was new ! I said: "Faith
is a gift of God you can recieve."

Catching a train from the city to Belgrave
With a bottle of Coopers stout instead of a ticket,
With a mobile phone, too low in battery to call
- it was his last night on earth - and then...

He pulled a copy of Zarathustra from his pocket,
saying: ‘It’s 2006! How can you believe in God?”

“His loss does not have to be yours.' I said.
“Nietzsche went to mountains as if up to God.
But he could not leap. he would not yield
to that risk. And, it is a mountain leap.” I replied.

“But, for Nietzsches like the women.”


17 November 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

TITANIC MANHOOD, 14 April 1912

Christian Manhood Comes by Chance - 14 April 1912


This modernity then, has taken me, finally caught
me and quite unpreached me, got me exactly where
the preachy sin hid proud of virtue from my eyes.
Nevertheless, minus one the word will survive.

My rough edge always was in a liking this most modern
way: this Titanic power - and the glamorous speed -
this sleek planet-cutting progress-high horsepower.
And I, conviction Christian, active Congregationalist,

editor of the Northern Echo and the Pall Mall Gazette,
William Thomas Stead, a tough journalist galvanized to faith
by being a prisoner of conscience in Holloway Jail,
for Christian muscling up in a public crusade against the

injustice of the privileged-profiteering in child prostitution;
a man who wrote against ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’,
supporter of General Booth, and his poor Salvation Army,
on my very last conceit, I took this luxury ship, the biggest,

the extreme-best vehicle of its day, the great trans-Atlantic
four-chimneyed Babel of the sea, this indestructible
Titanic ship, for humble passage while going over on a tour
to preach to the Americans on Christian Manhood!

And, this Grace in me is a revelation! Now, as the world
as we know it is sinking and this whole grievous
congregation is clamoring for some material salvation:
for boats, life rafts, for buoys, anything that floats,

for gurus or saviours to follow, and the material panic
of shifting images keeps tilting poor humans souls
to screams, to wordless moans, to wavering cries
wilder than deep seabirds. Yet, yes, I am calm.

Told there are not enough boats, surprise! This I knew,
there never are enough! And it is too late to rail against
injustice now. Can we watch as the honour of many
is broken? now, integrity is at its strains in this test.

So, then, thankful for grace, my silence, a quiet
solace of peace, nothing dramatic will be my last sermon.
Pray to God I might encourage myself with enough
among others to be a gathering of the faithful for what

we are about to receive, we who, in this life-passing hope
claim to believe: So I have humbly led with an announcement,
loud enough to penetrate the crowds' striven melee:
“I am going to the library to read a book!

I will read to any who will join me.”
And some do follow... I open the book
and begin to read those old words of others.
(I am a beginner in writing story).

“In the beginning … I was on Patmos
and I saw … A storm came. But God
was not in the storm. A sea rose, but
God was not in the sea. A dove flew,

then a wind came, but God was not
in the wind. Then a still small voice
said: Peace be still … asking. But could
you not have waited an hour with me?”

Icy death cries, curses echoed on iron walls.
The faith muscle needed us to be unflinching.
And in grace we waited, read the Word aloud till
fresh waters baptized us with an open book...


25th November 2005 © Wayne David Knoll

In memory of the martyr witness: William Thomas Stead who went down on the Titanic

Profession For a Day

The day I am expecting I am
woken before clocks as pre-electric
night is torn by gloaming;
[ the vogue-tug
of distant commuting
for an easily-bought
cereal of trafficking
unravels before this dawn].

For a prior appointment calls.

The lowing of cows knows my name.

To go down old cobbles
with a lamp-lit bucket of warm water.
To sit a three legged blackwood stool
turning my cheek to cow flanks
and wash the mud from milk-heavy
Dandelion or Glee’s udder, then to grasp
far and near teats in two ungloved hands,
and capillary pump a warm load of this
heavy animal bond with humanity
into release for her ...

This most important meeting will begin
my professional day with an edge drawn
of grass in that froth making sound
heard long before capuccino machines…

Afterwards, in new light, I’ll milk-lip
a bowl full for Gilp, the tabby mouser,
then pour the bucket of udder-water
into pans to cool for settling and knead
a nob of rennet in while the milk’s warm
releasing spore to go to work at culture

Then I’ll kick grass down to were Kaiser,
the blazed Chestnut half-draught,
hangs his great head over rubbed beams
on a cast cyclone gate as he idly kicks
the massive red-gum gatepost, yearning
for the husbandman to put attention
in careful rein with chaff and task on him.

I’ll run my fingers through his temples
like the otherness of being in need of human
touch and something will grow as religious
as true feeling, like a return to innocence…

I will then be committing the long-lost
prodigality of belief.


New Year 2005 © Wayne David Knoll

Night Song of the Willie Wagtail


A flute, sweet as honeysuckle,
twists sound spoons up in curlicues
and turns off the walls of darkness.

A rich-bell off a good high mettle,
sure as bold bronze in its casting,

is struck with sure notes, to carillon
in colours - as music catches alight.

They call it ‘Australian Nightingale.’

But this will-o-wisp in the night
is daysprung, a branching bud off
living wiry tendrils, dancing over
the graves reluctant weight.

A song is writ in the shadows
with bent sunbeams it has
roped and trapped, a quick of light,
spirited away and worked to

a physics’ reed, on instruments of
throat, in an ‘out-of-school’ coverless
emotional chemistry, so, late-lit
on the blackboard of night,

a music of gyroscopic sleight of throat
implodes in audible sparkles and flash
-flames of sound,

it fills the air like the most
sleepless prayer, as it signs in a flourish
of audio-calligraphy on my heart.


28 Nov 2003 © Wayne David Knoll
Footscray Park, Marybyrnong River, Melbourne

Message in a Mollusc


You, Creature of my world,
whose grounds I once shared
whose home I once shared
whose horizons I once shared.

You breathe oxygen in
but don’t breathe it out,
turn the family atmosphere
poisonous as a closed room.

Your eyes are as gluey a well
of self pity dug with a spade of
coin counted one on one as you
calculate and weigh success.

Though you work like a slave
you retired from life long ago
your world is all inside you, a
univalve being inside its shell.

You seive out the crumbs of living
you concrete the mercury as spirit;
you invalidate the life of vision
you abolish soul in that thick a skin.

Yours is the predictable God
staged for a televised church
whose thin line of silver slimes
every snail path you to take...

carrying a cruel-heart in dry clag
galvanised in gossamer glamour,
a mother-pearly selfish shell, my
house-owner evolved-slug father.


24 April 2003 © Wayne David Knoll

First published in the Forward Press anthology ‘Prisms Of Light’
30 Sept 2003 Ed. Heather Killingray Poetry Now, Peterborough UK,

Shopping Centre Breath


Breathe deep,
Ten minutes is the limit
holding out against
all that in-bought
poison atmosphere.
It is enemy element, so
dive, pierce it hard and
fast (this not-water is thick);
swim the gasps of palm-oil,
past glinting credit sheen,
in its slow-liquid glass wall.
Quick! Cross the tile polish,
the brass-bright coinage trim,
bypass paper discount traps,
sexy pictured sea-leg tangles,
fluorescent eye-caught specials,
the ear-leading ambient display
All buy-ability, eat-ability!
remember, you are in a
shark aquarium run by sharks!
Till, at the news-stand, just
get your paper. It could get wet !
Hurry, swim back
Outside. To the air!

28 August 2003 © Wayne David Knoll
Croydon, Victoria

THE LITTLE BOX


He always has it
by his side - to wind,
God the little box,


He makes it do
each magic time...
God the little box,


He pulls rabbits
out and jump-
starts them alive,


- with cruel heart
he slams their ears
in the lid - of God


the little box
- His little box -.
The little box with


four close sides,
a close roof,
a close floor ...


God the little box.


15 April 2003 © Wayne David Knoll

1st Published in the Forward Press anthology ‘Never Hold Time’
Ed: Sarah Marshall, UK Poetry Now , Peterborough, 30 Sept 2003

Sunflowers
or
Vincent Van Gogh’d Yay the Preacher



Sunflowers ! Russell, my now teacher brother
Once was their grower, their primary producer.
He was artful, inventive and grew to be a preacher
First selling those flying big Yellow flower-saucers,
in markets, where a lost world begs a passion.

Sunflowers to city-suppliers out of the floristed hills
Off farms along the Great flower-growing Divide
At last, even Australian family dirt-flowerer's
art, could cash-crop the passion of Van Gogh
at least, picked young, long before the seed is dry.

Sunflowers, counting in an aftermath of fan
times as culture stock: Bold, Vivid, Vibrant
The Prints - copy products - old as parrotfood
Bloom a gold-dust of daisies - a hundred years
In getting valued, getting bought.

Helianthus nostalgia romancia
- Artistica spiritualosis iwishia
- solarpowerarticus fadeous
bright, free, and botanical inside the hard
rubber bonds of each bunch.

Buy them off the market florist!
five dollar yellow identities!
vegetarian blooms (not to be consumed)
and a bucket of sensibilities ( like a grace
that’s missing) for your laden table!

1992 © Wayne David Knoll

First published in ‘Watershed’ Magazine, as ‘Sunflowers’, Daylesford Vic. Aug.Sept 1994

The Lost Accident

On a nicely-dull Sunday afternoon for homebodies
out on drives and blue skies,
in yet another day of the festival of life and limb,
sticking to the paved ways,
- too fine for eucharist or sacrifice- yet bottlefed
on incidents, bathed in accidents,
and unweaned off headline violation, cars mouthed
ahead at the gape of open road
and shimmied in the sun, like viewers awaiting
a revelation in any sign of footage.

But ‘The News’ was a long boring highway
swelling with spirit sap of spring
Fast curved-eyes saw panic-starved men mow
lawns, inspect their alarms,
Suspicious that somewhere the intruder must
break-in - of necessity.
Day-tourists held themselves into their bodies'
need to be wrenched in passion,
While down-town at the depot, deputy bloodsweepers
stood by in bright uniforms.

The lone eyewitness burst across the doors of
the old pub on Highway corner
( running out of pedestrian obscurity from the side
streets for a phone!) A phone!
Ready with bloody thumbs and graphics: ‘Ring
Emergency! He's a hospital case!
A biker took the viaduct too fast and come off.
His arm's gone at the elbow!
But a woman motorist stopped to staunch the
blood with her carseat cover!’

Highway Police fishtailed in iridescent flashes
of red and blue - finding nothing.
Towtrucks at high-tug-pull, leadfooted the verges
in U-turns and gravel spurts,
Roaring their V8s in hunger to lay rubber across
the junctions, trying to win
First Prize in the Accident Awards just to be there.
But they found no tow to own,
No mop-up to prize, -like a legacy stolen
from the expectant heirs.

"Where's the accident?" Tow truck drivers called
as did the ravens in the dead pines.
Cop-car cleanskins studded the tar, and Divvy vans
found the same case not there.
"Where's the accident?" The constable husked , as if
it was a conspiratorial secret.
While the ambulance went so close to where the
accident wasn't it never came.
"Where's the accident?" tailpipes of cars spoke
and smoked like rich-n-powerful cigars.

Front-seaters shuffled the turntail-wheel full of
headlights and driving-eyes
Backseat drivers sat upright as they studied the
offroads for any sight to see.
Only odd passengers sniffed, indifferent to less
than could be seen on TV
while Bystanders huddled in a mass, asking about
the accident, cursing a false alarm again
Annoyed that no public mutilation of a good victim
had left them out of the holy-trough again.

Uniformed experts scoured the lanes
trying to pin it down. Gone!. Then let him suffer!
Not a drop of blood to be found.
The pained biker had skipped it, wound and all.
The accident was nowhere. All those observances!
Those duties! Those called felt cheated.
No answer met a human need to be quenched
-which ate bits off lips
like coldsores: saying: "Where's the accident?"
"Where's the accident?" "Where?"

1994 © Wayne David Knoll,
Calder Highway, Malmsbury, Victoria

USELESS

[ Imagining: I am the useless man! ]

I can’t help but notice
any thing that’s useless:
-Like the wagtail on a fence,
or a seashell in the sand.

I notice hares jump the long grass.
First useless blossoms on a tree.
My head fills with useless places, useless beings;
I know where a myna takes straw to nest.

My skills are useless for a living,
I see flowers before their arrival
I am Inspector of clouds, of birds,
Namer of useless things in words.

I can’t help it! I am bent
For my soul believes it heaven sent.
And I despair unless I can be there
Where the useless things are.

I hear larks above the wasteland!
I go where they sing - as if stray angels…
I forget my own ground, I am their fan.
Bound with skylarks in their spells.

I am the useless man
Waiting and watching the land
For an odd flight of eagle or dove
As if awaiting a love.

I am a man, but useless
No good at any business
I trance each day - to be truthful
Imagining ...it’s useful.

Imagining ...it’s useful.

26 August 1999 © Wayne David Knoll,
Coburg, Victoria

Jesus of the Trees


He is the Christ who touches
wood as soon as he arrives.
He comes naked to a bare wood
manger; his shelter is
a rough-hewn timber stable.


His family tree
sees its help in the treed hills
and dates to pastoral-poet David,
branched out to an earthly father;
a carpenter at creation now in wood,
in staffs, hafts, and chips off the block.


Palm fronds salute, a royal tree carpet
for his passion under olive trees;
sent down a human crack of seed
under the barren fig of Gethsemane.


His martyrdom
upon intersecting timber beams;
sanctifies all wood and branches.
His blood shed in defeat of death
upon a tree makes all trees sacred.


All avenues are in his honour now;
His timbre in them since his nailing.
The straight, the twisted reach of sorrow
is driven into the lignum of all living,
grown with and not against the grain.


He is the tree of life
bursting seed to be re-scarified
as we, grafted in, will be suffering
life driven to glorious integrity
in the rejoined branches.


31 Aug 1999 © Wayne David Knoll
Corpus Christi Community, Greenvale, Victoria

Behind The Leaves
[ On SMOKING ]


In smoking I am
trying out the detachment of packet love

absorbed in the pall of the person,
self-wrapped behind a smokescreen,

a pipedreamer who takes ‘Time’ out
from tasks, from people, (and mouthing)

to roll-up, retract, light-up,
and take ash-space for myself
also going to be dead.

The smoke I inhale is more
the breather I know I need
than the urge for smoke inside me.

Yet smoke does set a person apart
for, as fag-mouther, butt-sucker,

I tell myself I am no thrall joiner
no quick-grip conformist, even
if unweaned.

I puff all the signs
of the fire dragon from my nose,
taking draconian measures, to act
impregnable as a dragon, a ruse
my self-conscious self likes.

In the drag I am firing myself up,
I say protesting, a moratorium in space and time
for my snail-soul to catch up the pace
of real immensities,

the Goliath’s, battle fronts,
which I fear would
otherwise quell me.

There is weakness; a fag dragon.

Firebreathing a detachment from immensities
belies the limbo I’m out in,

sucking my fragile
soul through paper tubes,
filtered through the smouldering
stuff of poisonous foliage

which go one better
than the fig leaves
behind which Adam and Eve
covered their butt from God,
but fashionable enough till now.

1990 © Wayne David Knoll 2002

There Is A Mind


There is
a mind in me
separate
to my own
likes and dislikes,

a mind
which sees
through me
- both ways.


1980s © Wayne David Knoll 2002
Fusion Arts Colony, Malmsbury, Victoria

Live Early

Go up! out of the wheelruts of your mind.
Live early. Stop being theoretical.

Be hungry for profound religion,
Be crafty with the earth, creative in arts
To keep the blood stirred for eternity,
Against the littleness & sham.

Let the wind lift you.
Watch the free birds
Blossom like wildflowers and give out honey.
Set down love like sorrow at beauty
And she will come back to you.

Serve nothing but the Most High.
Be your heart, yielded up...
Even being lost in life is
Nothing the matter...

Weep, laugh, mourn, let go...

Take risks: each day comes up
With the sound of crumpling eggs and
Motortyres mouth the gaping potholes at speed;
Every watched tick dulls the silver thread
So why not cast out now?

Follow the Divine Compulsion.
Be rigorous.

Give yourself to take up life
In wonder, in fun and fascination.

Let your heart off its leash
So you can exhaust yourself,
Be hungry to be fed deep in.

Take heart!
Feel the pulse
Of your renewed self...and give that drumbeat
To life... then you will know
Abundantly, live abundantly...

And so, finally, live!
By living finally.


© Wayne David Knoll 1994,
Kyneton, Victoria

Border Crossing’s Hurrah


The thin mirror film
of a long doodle-shape
landscaped in sedge-banks
of a far redgum-terraced lake
is all Murray water, yet

my open canoe swans me,
all elegant neck and curtsy,
as the still level is panned
to skim across heavy silts
-as fluid lands up this earth -
poured out to the full.

Afloat like a pelican lifted
above border and gravity
to veils of the sky, I am
buoyant on a bow-wave

in light lake-fresh sheets
as this stuff and matter
is transfigured by
an uncreated glow
of refracted sky.

4 January 2000 © Wayne David Knoll
Barmah-Moira Lakes, Murray River, Victorian/NSW Border,

Wonnangatta Kneelscape

After breaking my leg far down the Moroka Gorge in the upper Wonnagatta Valley in Alpine Victorian wilderness, and then taking 22 hours to walk the 7 kilometres to get out, on bush crutches, hand-made with the help of my champion sons January 2001


East, a dawn-over sun bursts like candle spotlights
from smokescreens of a charcoal cloudstorm
each unclouded sunray beams its pauper’s gold

with wide music in the varnish of cinematone film
to overawe my ironclad warrior brows and screen-
test the powers of us sweated, here now enduring

this bushed-hot Wonnangatta of Australia. Lit clear,
it descends from God’zone country where the stain-
glass river gorges spill down ancient Moroka’s places,

for paradise falls to break and fall again, as the blue
white water unwinds on redstone and cascades splash
through holy fonts toward us from the stone-domed

mountain-villa, boulders in a Shed of Vision, a watershed
towards which I break a limb, literally, my God! the bush-
crutches support me, cut at my knees, I’m learning to walk

from the sky-down. I am ground up where a One goes
the wallaby trackwinds of holy wilderness, elation beyond
the pain is trod before painstaking itch of peaceless feet

in the bitter-solace of this stainlit sacristy
candled in soft yellow altarlight on scree
to and from which redcarpet runners chequer

the trace of Christ’s mass, a step-up sacrament,
on sweeps in untrammelled expansiveness, a vast
way-paved settlement in or out of offwhite marble,

that I, pained, diamond-rough, trip upon, to a settled
content in parrot-hued welcome, in dust and gravel,
cool as a dip of cucumber, warm as wafers,

the leaf solace of matter unstable that slakes
appetite, in the place of my hot so-fallible
flesh moving on in broken ginger.

9 Feb ~ 4 June 2001 © Wayne David Knoll

- a compnaion poem to 'Each Step' see this Blog - entry of 18 Feb 2007

Travel does not broaden the mind*
*quoted from G.K. Chesterton

In cars and carriages, or in houses on slab or legs,
we turn, we journey
on our owners-rings, coy or cocky, with oil-power
or our own plodding,
we tinsel the inchworm of our way, riding over
local earths...
Correcting to market grooves, skinning up a down...
Contourists!
buttocking the bob of our weight like standup
knock-about toys

We pass, satisfied with our results, amazed at us
in otherplaces,
dressing ourselves in the dish of our own horizon,
fancying, climbing
up the cornflake scree of choices, tidbits, deferments,
denying
our dread of the earliest fear: we are lost.

The slope behind
us rises, the slope before us rises like the sides, we are at
the centre
of the bowl of our own limits of sight, where
we insist
on striking out, in strokes we believe will
breast
the other side, sure that will
save us.

We decide over the brink of our dish
we fall off
the selfsame world, And then who would
we be?
"There Be Dragons" - as it says on
old maps
The earth is not only flat, but
concave
Deep abysses gape, you can fall off
the edge

death untimely, Death! Nighthorses bolt
in frenzies
that will unsaddle us from ourselves,
be thrown
into traps and funnels where holepassing
snakes
writhe terribly with green blinklight that
knows us
like a spot of seeking behind our recesses,
down
Out there we are unknown to ourselves,
so insist:
"Don't go out of the bowl!"

So, we: we make a force, buckle earth into
our own shape,
bowl out our own pitch. That bowl buckles
the landscape
as we go, so it is us that sees and not seeing that
comes to us,
like an eye looking out the thin end of
a funnel...
our peepers scoop a socket out of the whole compass
to empty
the unseen out of mind, and then we screw
a piggy squint
at the wholus-bolus and ask: "What?
How could it be?"

© Wayne David Knoll - January 1996
Nullarbor Plain, Western Australia

The YONNIE: A Bit Off The Bedrock of our Horizon

( To a red stone found broken off the hilltop bedrock in our family-farmyard )

For my six brothers: Melvyn, Daryl, Russell, Leighton, Craig & Quenten


Stone: remnant split egg of our land’s high fertility,
in a hilltop heritage of that big small-hold on a living
by family of wealth subsisting, in fierce love of a soil-
liberty, that we know also as slavery: held fast by toil.

As often is the globe, redder within than without,
as old earth-blood, rusted in - to be crumbled out,
is cavernous, hollowed out, yet softening at heart.
to grotto in paddocks in hope of incarnation’s art.

Suggesting a cave of making in a Spirit-plussed womb
out of the annunciation by the grain of a volcanic bomb
in old plateauing eruption: from that aboriginal peak tide
to the fruit of the metallic furnace of refining fire inside.

This is work’s every day dream! All skin refined as this here
Creator-Jeweller’s clay toss and spin, breaks down to a mere
self-mulching fertile soil. Our degradation is at best red dirt;
the enamel polish - our bite’s ache worn down to the hurt.

Yet as your offspring also receive the seeds we bring
our flesh also wells up, growing a hope sexed up to sing!
As dividing mountains paint their art-walls on our horizon -
Cooeed up with all the immortal longing of mortal men.

As you would, I throw you, meaning us (and me) as it,
On target, this rock, this ‘Yonnie’, aimed as best I can,
A target as I choose, hard and high, and to see it land
So I my works can be. See! Let it prove it’s own hit.

Written in and of the Stony Creek Valley, Burleigh, (Silvan South), Victoria
2002 © Wayne David Knoll

Tempest at Trinity Falls

[At the Coliban Falls, The Fall, and the fall at the foot of the cross ]

Open Up!
Oh jaws of rock,
my bones; pour me,
gouge me out like water.

Fall water!
Fall out of the author of glory
Let this Coliban be gravity's tears
Welling upon the backwoods
pool of myself.
Shit Prospero!
I too read it all, fact and data, I
scoured prose's tempest for the Word in vain,
kidding myself that these books
of Legion's pages were all of me.

- The Whirlpool sucking -

I damned near plucked
the store of the vortex
and went down text
into double death.

I repent like a waterfall,
to God I need, I repent.

Shape me, unplug me,
well on oh living tears,
mar this narcissus image with splashes,
by ripples drip through me,
flood the pent up dam of me,
make me the spillway
for a bigger catchment.

Surge in,
let no backwaters still,
find no waterhole to stagnate,
no murk to be becalmed
for a romance of coward peace
where mirror vision under-looks
in roseglasses of eyed daffodil
to colourwash the golden age
in postcard re-floristations
against the Wordfire gates
of Eden in fruity blossom
where little i would grow ,
vegetate, shadowy,
worted with seedy leaves,
lost to light.

Dross my clay, I'm in
your hands,
You: Who Am Who Am
pray shape out
of my muddied puddle,
spring out,
let your overflow break out
in me,
let the gates
of my dammed soul
free to being,
being clear me,
in the river of your Being
[so far above,
in bottomless,
to smallwater me
in which my vessel
celebrates invigoration].

Kneeling
at the hearth and altar of El.
At the footstool
of hammer torn cliffs
Nailed
by grace in sin's new purity
Refreshed, restored,
baptised in aquatic wings,
forgiven in
the stream of living water.

Yes master, Yes.
Jesus Christ my transfiguring king
Integrate me upstream, stir
me a clarity, settle
my selfdelusion, saturate
self absorption, shift
selfsatisfaction and rush
selfdoubt
so downstream will swell
its becoming
and I be clear and streaming.
At One.
Sprung.
A pool of electric water
where schools of desire-fish swim,
bright stars
right to the rock bottom
of me
as You make me.


Trentham Falls, Victoria. August 1992 Wayne David Knoll

Wayne Knoll's

Spinning Top Bottom

People
once were with
the masses in contact
with earth’s reality -which gave a
true base for Leaders who were not too far
above and a human fabric which spread wide and true
because it honestly specialised a sense of each person's place
and a respect for them chosen few who had authority and responsibility
at the apex of a power that had a few tiers of sub-estates below its little pyramid
but then more and more had desires to get away from the earth wanted to be up

higher and less and less wanted to do menial, manual earthy chores, ones in the

middle
grew
thin
in

discontent, firstwanting to be at the top with little sense of what being up there was

meant to be for ! so we threw up in the middle - as in envy and the world of civilisation

bulged and became misshapen as we trod upward on the others as fast as jealousy

would drive our
mobility
and so then those at the very char bottom
heaved like coca-cola
upwards and in so doing dragged the bottom sides of society in towards the middle so that
the pyramid grew higher and higher, only it broadened out below the apex so that the
figurehead was flattened and there was no pinnacle left up there to aspire to except
a broad plateau from which those on the top and wide tiers could feel good in
themselves simply because they were above the other layers and not deign to
look over but instead look out each way from a height which gave no real
view of the earth below which was supporting them because they
only looked overways across the plaza and if a rare one looked
over the brink they would cry in alarm, and not be believed
because no one else could see that the whole
edifice was now built upside down and
the pyramid of this society was
teetering on a fine point,
on a single abstract
place down
below
us

Heaps

There were heaps of nets:
wives & children, dependants,
parents, dying Grandma and Pa,
old friends with secrets,
habits like Uncles, Aunts,
the game, neighbours in shame,
traditions of competitiveness.

There where heaps of nets, in knots
Ahab's to be supplied, fish to produce,
moneylenders owed, employees,
dowry wine, bellies to be satisfied,
rates, taxes, boats to be upkept,
ropes to be spliced, knots fixed
people to avoid, entanglements.

There were heaps of nets,
nets to mend, lakes of mending,
repair hills, all coils and catchings,
contagious as fishing, like mates,
like the knack, like what you know,
like this place, like scruples, opinions,
like doing the job, like nine to five
like commitments, double loops.

There were cogs to mesh, heaps
of nets, like society, like morality,
fixed ties, like meetings, be responsible,
like appointments, like church,
like school, like bonds, like the busy,
like houses, like backyards, like washinglines,
like pegs and baskets, holding in, fast.

There were heaps of nets,
armfuls, bodyfuls, lifefuls of nets,
like the past, like family graves,
like path ruts, like bridles,
like ploughfurrows, like farms,
like apronstraps, nailbelts, pens,
like gavel and wig, like workplace.

There were beds of nets, heaps
like suburb, like possessions, cars,
collections, manipulations, expectations.
all catching, all gripping, all interknitted,
like tea cosies over the familiar drink,
all valuable, all opportune, all precious,
and Jesus said: "Leave your nets
And follow me."

Wayne David Knoll 1993

Lake Kardavillawarracurracurracurryaplaarndoo


Once, I did see many starlights shine in the salt lake water - this is true
But was it at Lake Karda-villa-warra-curra-curra-curry-apla-arn-doo ?
And did I get to see the rare water - not just a mirage in the hot air
For so far a place is hard & long in times too out of the way to get there.

If I thought I ought to have brought us all deep outback past Oodnadatta
There'd be nought but tough thought to be caught up a track of rude boneshatter
A man on a saltpan is like a Ghan lost from ghosts of camels in an old caravan,
For the land in a band of a sunstruck hand measures man as in grains of sand.

I once didn't see any starlight shine in the salt lake water - this is true
At Lake Karda-villa-warra-curra-curra-curry-apla-arndoo
Nor did I get to see any rare water except a mirage in the hot air
So long a place is hard too far in times too gone minus a way to get to be there.

If I could only keep wanting the dews to fall there like tears of the world in pain
The salty taste of the few drops I cry might flow out to make lakes again;
But whose tears would it need? to water this thirst-pain with a drink come true?
So we all might swim in Lake Kardavillawarracurracurracurryaplaarndoo?

At Lake Kardvillawarracurracurracurryaplaarndoo
I'd like to see the close starlight shine beneath me in a saltlake water true;
Yes, I'd like to know that the rare water was not just a mirage in the hot air
And I know that I've got to go out too far in times too gone in loss to be there.

Wayne David Knoll
Written, Katherine, NT on Oct 1 1995.

I never did find out where the place is, though I believe it is somewhere in northern South Australia, - maybe an ephemeral dunewater in the Simpson Desert? The name apparantly does mean: the occasional water of starlight seen shining deepest in the reflections. In the Fusion Arts Colony library, which I managed in Malmsbury, Victoria I read about Lake Kardavillawarracurracurracurryaplaarndoo in Read's valuable book ‘Place Names Of Australia’ with a then young Amy Holmes. The name was listed, by the way, under the entry for Lake Cadibarrawirracanna (far north of Woomera) which we skirted as we travelled from William Creek to Coober Pedy in South Australia. So this is for Amy and all "Kids of the Waterholes" - people who enjoy learning the untramelled, the hardest and longest placename in Australia.

Liquidity

The wind is blue.
air splashes lead light
into the fresh crystal
of my rubeyed strings
- made sense able.

The blue is a kite.
Up passerine smoke,
swallows tear out,
and hopes slow away
like a campfire billy.

The blue is my publisher.
My success, my salary is paid
in notes of blue, the payout
streams out of the liquid
bank account of my eyes.

Perth WA Advent 1995 W.D.Knoll

Consider the Wren


In the scrub
of jingling heather,
on the dewy
tussock grass,
a blue fairywren
lays dead...


A matchbook
of cockfeathers
still!
gas-flame blue,
come to
a rich pass.


Like sky-stained
glass:
Bright-shining!
after life.


1988- 1997 Wayne David Knoll


This poem was first presented in public in a live performance by the author at the Vice-Regal memorial service for Princess Diana, at the 'Tent of Meeting', Canberra, 1997

Surface Luminary


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.


Wayne David Knoll 1987

First published in 'Compost of Dreams' 1993
Also pubished in 'Watershed' Daylesford, Victoria

Hot Day Tree

Old Gnash: chewn glory of a Red Gum
Tree massif living off chaos, branch arches,
Knot reaches, to steam above trunkled columns:
in branchlets, up spouts - fixed in slow trances

Of riband leaves are exhaled of a lazy dance,
To partner airs at the sky gates with breath,
In a silhouette of noon skies in forgivenance
Like the last-ditch rites of our lifesaver death.

The knurls of its flesh are knotted feeling.
The ropes of its limbs, the robes of leaves,
Shake in our hearts, the earth goes reeling
As we bleed up its wooden parable of eves…

With a mouth to mouth it hosts our days
To eat the sun and give us back its shade

Wayne David Knoll © 2 Feb. 1999

Hot Tuesday in Red Gum Country,
near the Corpus Christi Community,Greenvale, Victoria

Each Step:

[ Stick and Buckle-Slope,

Slip-Scree and Boulder ]

[Written after walking seven kilometres on a broken leg, with the help

of my sons, up and out of the Moroka Gorge, in the Wonnangatta Wilderness,

a remote part of Victoria’s Alpine National Park.]

For my sons: Timshel & Dylan

Stick and buckle-slope,
slip-scree and boulder.
I am a bush-walker-man in
Trouble: I know where I am!

I’m just a bit broken now,
gamy-legged. It was by just one
miss-step I am turned a wounded
thing, greensticked by that one false
step after six thousand mountainous
steps! I inch on - now I step on my own

wild bone-break and savage terrain
as I got into this. I must get out,

saying: ‘Maybe it’s only

sprained! A twist?’

Stick and buckle-slope,

slip-scree and boulder,

Wild bush-crutches just step me now.
(Forked hazel-pomaderris poles)
my sons cut with a pocketknife, the bush
struts lashed across the forks for
armpit-bruisers, rough bearers of
a body-weight my leg wont take.

Stick and buckleslope,

slipscree and boulder

Yet, I walk! a crone! inching is

some relief! I step like a crawler,

getting there will be late, - as vulnerable

as a hot January gumleaf in leaf-fall -

fragile to gravity in my own weight.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Stone and grit and boulder,

crackling stick-leaf, root and slope,
- this game-untrammelled country
- makes its inhospitable tries to get me

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

The rough diamond element conspires
to rubble me, worse, to skew me into curse
in my pain, to needle my injury.
Each step is a milestone, a victory.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Five wild miles of pain are a life.
Elation is no one wrong-step.
Ecstasy is hard distance covered…
with no stop to wince in pain.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Small things retain in each step, the ant,
till the pain proportions the hours
by a hundred-to-one odds - that drop:
a bush litter, a ring-pull, shirt-tag, bits
that fell, having nearly lost a man...it’s me.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

I lay there in the midnight pitch
as January hours swelted:

Too warm to rest in peace.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

A cool river decants a descant

down Moroka gorge,
like an unattented siren

of somnolence

in distance
a magnetic song

heard without resistance
as breaking nerves bellowed up

the forge of my lit fire,

comfort lit ,

a glowing

wrought of the night.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Then seductive bed-rack jawed a new danger!
Bullants use tracks like armed veterans
to acid-bite die-sticks pointed at flesh.

Woodroaches, off spitting firewood,
get away like charry ghouls marching
in memory of a January wildfire.

And this was January! I had to quell
the urge to put out the fire!

I got here on a broken leg!
Uncounted filamented centipedes
in as many itches
leg in to the exhausted place
where I lie to rest.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Sticks in the surrounds, scamper and scuff
There outside I where I close my eyes.
Wild dog claws fang the flesh-of-my-mind
scavenging some wounded creature.

Deer antler and hoof my seeming corpse.
Bashing the scrub on the getaways.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Night crashes the bush - that clumsy spy.
Frogmouths moonscreech their lidlessness.
Yet, finally, this dawn has no outside rescue,
birdsong times match one hazy source of light
as morning hours inch across the integral line.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

This me, broken sleepless body,

in stepping out again in a sleep of pain,

is a broken joy, as broken, my despair

is cease, all common anxiety: dead.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Cooee! this pain of body is
tearing my soul of its death.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope.

Wildflowers are my desire to get out
Where blooming hope is I am bound,
my own boneskin moves over the shards.

Slip-scree and boulder,

stick and buckle-slope

I am, a fractured cripple, next step,
Like a cracked bottlespill of spirit,
To step closer elated, up in my soul
Smacking the flesh of my lips
towards that bodily release.

I get by with the help of seed strength
That sown by the step last taken, and
The step, many steps, taken before that.

It is my sons who help me, my daughter
Like a fellowship in bond of victory.

Stick and buckleslope,

Slipscree and boulder.

Each step of seven kilometres on a broken
Leg, with one or another son at my side, a
daughter at the end.

Sons are like handrails in the soul,

a help - where offspring are spring Steel,

where self respect is in a spirit that knows

that present suffering is embraced
for a high destination that breaks

us into the higher.

Jan-Dec 2000 © Wayne David Knoll

Strong Views


Give me ‘Strong Views’ - with clear vistas!
Long sweeps of sight over the land I’m in! Elect,
To be truly a Countryman, I know my country’s
places from within… up places with aspect.

So let me take bearings from a crow’s nest,
a hill, tower, mountaintop, any eyrie asserted;
to establish where from I’ve come and why,
else why I might have been diverted.

Then, to long survey the whole compass
of country: features, obstacles, a layout below
and so, finally, decide a route onward, so I
can head off strongly in the way I need to go.

Looking out beforehand for barrier: cliff, gorge,
scrub, forest, fences, beasts, rivers, section;
the hills, roads, paths, chasms, guarded areas,
pitfalls, defences, and so going with direction.

With a sense of the context, of why I am taking
this way, this point of view, a taking that brings
me, among possible ways of seeing things,
to being on arrival in the best shape of seeing things.

So my feet have read by step the letters which
colour in details as the way-story was detected,
- which the heightened foreseeing in the eyes
had already minded them to be expected.

For then my eyes have fallen in love with
my feet, where they cared, they take that rap;
[sorry for some I meet who surely come off
half-trekked inclinations with mischarted maps

Drawn from the low slopes, as if decided down
some schism, casual not thorough, with a picture
decided in their plans of a way ahead which
doesn’t square with actual dangers of the area

And so journey thinking it’s all relative, that
there's no need for strong views - a coin tossed
for anyone’s opinion is valid as anyone else’s -
Live and let live transposes as lose and get lost.]

For my time in the scrub taught me to trust the
elevated view, of one whose raised sights trace
a thorough-fare, who took time to look long and
hard for a way ahead from a good high place.

Strong views are horizontal balance lines of
sight in the soul that orient out from the middle
for the vertical horizon-traveller to level the true
magneticality in their own built-in compass needle.

Pilgrim I commend strong views. Strong views
that know the lie of the land hook the sky to navigate,
gripped by a good hold on that sense of direction
had with prior long judgements of pendulum weight.


by Wayne David Knoll © 2001

Gellibrand Hill, Tullamarine, Victoria

Desire - In A Time Of Full Moon


Hello! play moon:

Be me no want in life!

Go easy then for our dream, a kiss

Sincerely drunk as from beauty

For frantic is my language

Beneath this gorgeous suit

A smooth spring picture bed

White at summer with sweet ache

For a blue-most woman, live of breast,

Who one pleased boy, so weak to crush

Urges shine a man yet up our shadow’s cry

Needing the skin we sing to fall as garden rain.



28th August 1999 © Wayne David Knoll, Coburg, Victoria

First Published in 'The Weekend Australian' Literary Review 28 Feb 2000

Sing The Paper White

for the Corpus Christi Community, home for homeless alcoholic men
(opened in 1975 by Mother Teresa), near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia


On that more homeless-free day,
the day ‘Care’ met ‘Accreditation’,
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.


‘They’ wanted to Meet -
after the Day staff, the Duty staff
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.


And the Officials said to me:
‘And what are your Qualifications again?’
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.


And their Guilded Clipboard eclipsed
my humanities - in diploma and degree
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white


with Forms of white paper awaiting the pen,
with whiteout dealt by an Index finger.
- Sing the Lily, sing the Lily white.


So I said to them truly: ‘I am born and bred
a horticulturist - an earthy flower grower.’
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.


And they said to me: ‘What’s that
got to do with ‘Human Services’?’
- Sing the Lily, sing the Lily white


So I said to them: ‘Well! There’s
a lot of Vegetation going on here.’
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.


And they said: ‘Tell us men’s Names
we will Journal it! Document it!’
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.

But I said: ‘Here such men live, in use
or useless, as often die in Honour nowhere else’...
- Sing the lily, Sing the Lily white.


‘And if we have ‘Used’ men, it is not to script
a note in Power, but in beds of a garden where
they can sing the Lily, sing the Lily white.’


‘For even the flowers in our flower beds are
best tended by such a useful man of them...’
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white...


‘they neither toil too hard, make themselves busy,
nor keep pristine clean, nor are they much use.’
- Sing the Lily, Sing the Lily white.


‘But even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these’... to Sing the Lily!
Sing, in appreciation, sing the Lily white.


And they thanked me, They noted it on the Form.
They neatly wrote down fresh words that said:
“Sing the Lily” to sing the paper white.


8 Sept 2000 © Wayne David Knoll