Elegy at the End of Mortal Day

- by Wayne David Knoll

Autumn's late green ache straws-off in pastures where
a congregation of wild white Ibis, some with sacred invest of
ruffles at the neck, in-gather wings like long-faced mourners

carrying the keen scimitars of their swords before them
in the paddocks of the (blanketed) living and the dead,
as their prey are, or likely soon will be. As all life feeds

on itself, so its end is ever before us, that sword; there, for all
who have it, for it is with us before we know we have it, and is
not other; before us, whether we are like this dank sky of clouds

that rue the last colours of a just-descended sun, as mere
fickle things of urgent chemistry and physics, else, transport
mind over the west of ends asking back east of our beginnings

In knowing that this longing, a love for breath we have, air upon
which the ibis takes wing, is given somehow as by a kind parent
who allows the vast polarities, this night, this far horizon breaking

slowly alight as the departure of light allows in the screen we call
darkness, with that absence that unroofs this small sky to draw
close in their immeasurable number the distances of the stars.

-9th June 2014

Fencing The Others Out

Fencing The Others Out


A true picture of us at large
is hard to fabricate in an age
of the proliferation of our own
shop'd image, where we now find
ourselves truly shown is only,
like that of our own ghost, in an
after-image, seen from behind;
as we come into light suddenly
out of the shadows and light upon
an unexpected candid mirror we
suddenly see a true picture
of ourselves, of our times.

If these moments are now
only to be found in detail, the
small details such as the Law
goes to in the Fence Act, for
example. where actions on, say,
fences for the Melbourne region,
were just several hundred for
the long passe' decades, it is not
because we do not care or believe
in worthy causes like whales or
coral reefs or poverty in Africa
or eliminating the sex-slave trade

but because our public and lauded
espousal for generosity in giving
is not the same as our private
religion of desire for personal
space and power which has seen
new uses of the Fence Act balloon
tenfold, to the several thousands
of daily legal actions now taken
against our immediate neighbors
by us or our own in our want
for fencing the others out.


- Wayne David Knoll, 17 Dec 2013

It’s CORELLA ! Forget the paper Cockatoo

It’s Corella: - Forget the Paper Cockatoo:


Forget the cutdown monicker Cockie
And leave off the nickname of Cockatoo
It is your sulphur crested’s unsung cousins
The Corellas that are the farmers, those daily
Ground-haunting weather-eyed watchers of the sky.

Call them Bill, Long or Short Bill, if you look
you’ll find the unassuming blue-eyed birds grasping
at grass, their claws protruding from the trouser leggings
of their dirty white overalls, nightly cleaned,
then soiled by day in faithfully picking out their field.

They go at digging without makeup in the pick
of the full facial of dogged intention, their cheeks
flushed with the intense rose thread blooming up
of the country air, ignoring distraction, with a shrug
of no-nonsense get-down attitude, willing any can-do

to seek opportunity, find a crop, make a harvest
of what the blood and bone graveyard of this earth
might yield up, as if a commonsense of root and stem
and its short provender of bulbs and seed-heads
were for all the world the last and final intelligence

of a whole economy, and the open secret they protect
behind the pale blue shades, spectacles worn as they work
out the gold threads from the ground, while roots of pink
age-creases grow out of the blue below their eyes as if
twirling threads loosed from these artisan’s lost tapestry

woven out of the wild’s open liquidation. What corellas
mean is as difficult for us as what they are: a day's ordinary is
extra-ordinary, the mean-seeming: special; a common or garden
culture of this vast uncelebrated reality is worth attending
for its five-star thrift of providence in the grass, blade, root.


This world is as no theory is; but is as it is -in the tough-shy
nitty gritty of the corella birds’ day of empirical grassland
and never so much as you or I might find it in even the best
of textbooks let alone as any file, any film or documentary
entry in our archives and marked for long life ‘Cockatoo’.

...offside this human world are many corellas.

Camel Man

Camel Man

Camel Man:
people
called
him that
after

he,
so pained
by people
calling

him
potbello,
barrelly,
pig gut;

that
he
sucked
in

his
belly
that hard
he

grew a
low hump
out his
back.

VIRTUAL GOOGLE INTERVIEW - (THE MYSTERY OF WEATHER INSURANCE BY THE CLIMATE CORPORATION)

Virtual Google Interview –

by Wayne David Knoll – February 2011


What, essentially, is Google?
A virtual dot.com search engine.

Is their business real or virtual ?
Both virtual and real.

How real?
Its Sponsored Links are Ad’s.

What is their virtual business?
Purveying information.

Old or new information?
They cover both.

They just repeat old information?
Yes, but they multiply it, broadcast it.

What sort of information?
Facts of history and biography.

Is that all?
No, they’re encyclopaedic: geography, climate.

Didn’t we know all this before?
They search out, and increase the knowledge.

So, they’re experts in old information?
Yes, but they also publish new.

What new information?
Virtual Celebrity Biographies.

Oh, spare me! Is that all they do?
No, they cover Climate Change?

Google purvey the belief in Climate Change?
The whole debate, but, for a good part, yes.

And they make money from the Ad’s?
From the very first dot.com boom.

So, is that all that the Google people do?
No, they have a cutting-edge real business now.

What business is that?
WeatherBill Incorporated.

And what is WeatherBill?
A Global Weather Insurance Company.

And what do WeatherBill purvey?
Total Weather Insurance –

And who would buy that?
Businesses, fisherman, farmers, events, governments, anyone.

They insure totally against the weather?
That is exactly what they do.

Does total mean extremes of weather?
Yes, people are apprehensive of that.

But why might that be able to be a success?
People fear bad weather caused by Climate Change.

Why would people fear Climate Change
Because it’s been broadcast far and wide.

Broadcast far and wide, - by Google?
With everything else of current interest, yes.

How, then, can they insure, in the light of this new information?
Ah, maybe you forget.

....... They also have old information.



p.s. this web log is brought to you by Google

The Landscape Begins At Night


Prone clouds bottom
in valley floors
below me to make passing
odd unlevel seas.

A vapour eiderdown,
warm after-rain,
drifts as dreamers do, lost
in their bedding.

White-night germinates in
this long land’s nod,
like sleepers gradual in
gravitating to rest.

But the time-worn hollows
of this bed are
our ephemeral maps, where
yearn-landscapes form.

From which we of course wake
as if to pass through,
for more than mere stirs of teapot
in any gulf of hills.

In disdain agendas for any climate
curled at our step.
Only the plants, poets and animals
remain winter-stilled.

W.D.K. 10 June 2010

In Aching Mist

-

In deep aching mist

columns of cold-stripped

poplars quiver up each

rebranching finger, pointed

like blunted lead in pencils

unwriting birds off the sky

then, as shrunken felt tips

they offwrite the air in wait

of a whited emptiness.

-

Wayne D Knoll, Upper Yarra Valley, June 2010

TILL THEIR FACES ARE OFF

Defacing and Mistake


I made a mistake ...
Think racial prejudice ...
I thought the headline read
"Eight Die in Korean riots" when
What it really said was "Koran Riots"
It was my mistake.

No. It was not North Koreans
Breaking out of prison. It was
No planned massacre by
Us Powers, or by a Brutal Regime.
No challenge to the status quo.
No real threat to our peace.

No News! It was just a bunch of
Christians...who got killed in Gorja,
Some blot in Pakistan, just a mistake.
They shot two, burnt the others
Till their faces were off, after someone
Spread rumours, true or false, about
A defaced Koran.

No, it was no racial prejudice.
No defaced Korean. It was
Just some Christians.



3 August 2009 © Wayne David Knoll

Parliament Plaza


A Tuesday in Australian
Melbourne,
In sunny early autumn,
it is lunchtime,
And today’s people gather
like scrutineers
Of grass at public statues,
many of them
Children, eating on their
retaining walls
A gallery in a governed street
parliament


As if the antipodes world’s-end
generations
had grown over the old enmities,
longing into
this Australian limpidity - as if
learnt from
its landscape - and fought into
the builtscape
Like any sunrise in a daily
renewal of vision
Lived for this, against all mongering
of peoples.


School children gather, native
fledglings in
The hen-shade of a great
Canary Island palm.
No security guard here but
restraining decency,
No men in camouflage, no Kalashnikov
to be seen,
no evidence of shade-wearing
watchers,
And the warm sky long since
a friend…


As long as the people are on
their guard.


© March 2010 - Wayne David Knoll

OI OY


As to the trite old oi!

Once oyed is enough

And still too annoying.

Looking
To Extreme Action
For Cache


Today, I
base-jumped from
The Neck,

sea-cliff
jumped at
Second Valley,

skate-boarded
down The Museum
roof,

then imollated
myself at
Federation Square,

as I spilt my
guts by harikari
in a poem.

Didn't matter,
no one noticed,
people just

don't
see poetry
no more.


W.D.K 22 Feb. 2010

MAKE USE OF IT

(poem after Raymond Carver)


Make Use Of It

The secret-sore, is it
your kick-bruised foot?

The cricket’s song
in the rim of darkness.

The bad-breath of radio
chitterchat. All of
it is yours, yours just
as Ray Carver said.

Yours to make use of.

The restless tapping
of your inane feet.

That bump of pain
in this worn hip.

The blanch ink spill
of fluorescence
under the metred lights.

Make use of it.

The articulated bent
long-legs of a huntsman
spider on the wall…

that invaded feeling
of your home world.

The feeling of grit
under barefeet on
the unswept floor.

The unshed tear.

Make use of it.


15 Feb 2010 © Wayne David Knoll

OUT OF THEIR DEPTH


Out of their depth

in the universe,

and come up

to sheer edge

to admit it

(that is, their

need for God)

might just be

the definition

of the Christian.


15 Feb 2010 © Wayne David Knoll

The Jealousy Of The Air

( A response to the film ‘Avatar’)

"The hope in 'Avatar' is like an idealist feeding baby eagles on vegetables in the hope that when they grow up their carnivore natures will somehow be changed so the urge for meat via death will cease and the sharp eye dim from the skies." Wayne D. Knoll




At the Five Ways Lookout on Mt Dandenong,
where
the earth bowls out below like a yawn into
open air
I stopped to drink vistas in gigalitres east
to distance,
to dine on shapes of far Baw-Baw mountains
as a meal,
as if this kingly landscape was my meat
and draught
and a birthright, a rightful largesse to skull
and skull,
and then refill upon in squander
as my share.


Therein appeared a wedge-tailed eagle,
a sky pilot beyond
all navigation codes and out of any air traffic control,
like an avatar,
an apparation out of ancient myth and iconography,
a stillpoint
of wing-held forces that kept to ancient codes
in its sharpness of eye, in the edge of beak,
in the duel talons
poised above this earth - an earth taken to
this spring’s
fashions in the latest robes
of vegetation.


But like tradesmen with chisels,
three
territorial or jealous magpies
hammered
up the sky by dents, belting with wings
at the air,
and bluntly chisel-pointed their business-end
right
into the face of that visitation of eagle
aboveness,


attacking the ease of the wind-riding
larger bird
set above yawning space, as if the
restful equanimity
of that great heart-pumped-life with the elemental
forces
was too much for mere magpies, as if
the great eagle
in its uber-priority had some interest
in their lot.


The wedge-tail saw them from far off,
but waited
for them to bear up nearly that far,
then simply
slewed away down one of its vision-paths,
following
its own great-weaponed prow as its pinioning
wings
shrugged sidelong, and billowed off like
a self-strung kite.


The eagle arched out to the ridges
beyond sight,
and was no longer there, outstripping
the bothered
chisel-heads by airy miles, it soared
into absence,

away from every magpie in mere
locality
and left them to claw back to their
perching tree
and there to cast down to the shopping
bags
in their daily vegetation trudge

as if that could somehow be
enough,
as if the eagle soul was quite
immune
to all territorial grasps of earth as
any adequacy.


15 Jan 2010 © Wayne David Knoll

K. RUDD IS A DUD


If U voted for Rudd,

U now begin to see the folly;

But if U’re still chewing Ure cud,

Sure, he’ll give U another lolly.

BEING HUMAN for THE SIRENS or for 'THE IMAGE'?


The panic alarm
is touched off by a button in your will

A decade back
it was Y2K -so what’ll it be this year?

The Moon’s cold,
the stars align, the sky’s gone enviro'mental

Yet in being human,
one only fears if one decides to fear.


January 2010

READING FACEBOOK

Please remind yourself that this is facebook,

Not any kind of book, in fact, no book at all;

No novel or history and no biography, but look

At what I wrote on the world’s biggest toilet wall.

The Hand of Novelty In A Natural Death


By 1943 his hand was never held, always wringing
as no gripped thing in lack of anyone to answer.
So he grimaced with them and clutched at armrests
with white knuckles making snow-capped peaks
above the Hindu Kush on that Aeroflot Flight
carrying O Mighty One to touch down in Teheran -
with his escort guards of just 27 fighter planes….
Stalin did not want death not ever…ever,
And on return to Moscow he never flew again.

Yet that hand could still sign death, violent
death more regular than his use of toilet paper.
What was a Politburo apparatchik here or gone?
or a Commintern Chekist come to full term?
That hand could waive lives at Beria or Malenkov,
his obedient killing dogs, so that Jewish artists
like Mikhoels were run down by Cheka trucks out
smashing down the launch-champagne of Russia street.

And then, the hand…prescribed his own doctors.
The Chekist, Yagoda, was of course, executed.
All Gorkyists! doctors dealt in death by course;
failure to cease it was capital crime against the hand.
The hand, clutching for the water bottle, for Pravda.
And the fingers like eyes imprinting the fact that his
Doctors had all been waived to torture in his prisons.
Even Vinogradov, his personal physician was
In irons when the unseen hand made its stroke.

And after that last Stroke, as he choked, he woke -
“It was a terrible glance, insane or…angry, full of
the fear of death…suddenly he lifted his left hand
as though he were pointing to something up above
and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was
incomprehensible and full of menace.” So Svetlana
Stalin said. And Martin Amis* adds. “What was he
(Stalin) doing? He was groping for his power.”

Here's the dexterity plague, active force of the evil hand,
as us that go at wringing hands, like new troglodytes who seek
out crafty novelty. The Novelty? Unlike most all of Russia
violated, this was Stalin dying a natural death.



* Martin Amis - Koba The Dread

THE WIND FROM SOMEWHERE?

Or GOD'S FAN




This high wind
will skin trees inside out.
Its hand
will part the gum trees like a barber
Looking for
loose limb-lengths to throw down

It will pick
up one improvident white-anted oak tree
And toss it
down for rot, even the solid branches will
Go down
the border like bodies after territorial war.

Anything loose
will be rocked till it breaks away.
Everything weak
be pulled from its thin belief stem
All that is
on the loose will be spun off into chaff.

This will be
on a day after the equinox, or a day else.
Neither flood,
nor yet a fire, just an increasing inflatus
Just a winding
wind to take that afflatus out our sails.

Then leaves
of our books will take to the sky as fast
As autumn’s y
ellowed poplars, the popular text on
Each page
will turn over and over in unread ozone.

Till this wind
eats the atmosphere, and throws down
The wires
powerless outside of the melodramas like strings
of a lolly puppet
blowing in a Judy-punched world.

And when the Some
where wind has spintered, has gathered
Has blown
our heaps and heaps of rubbish and rubbished it.
The where-going
wind will stay a little while as a fan…

for a flame.

SUSTAINABILITY IS THE DRONE OF OLDER MUSIC


Creed or creedless, I
walk the Urban Ore-Body
One of the people consuming or
non-consuming, consumable
Laying down or not laying down
extractable disposables
Out my globally unrenewed
or renewable mind.