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