Bush Wanderings

Of Anubis, jackals, dream, trample and stamp, looking for 

the amphibian that moves, through a glass darkly

His armour shines, amid croaking sounds

An attribution to the burrowing frogs

The audience unaware that I in my studio, am aware of

the soap opera of species, the teeming life force out

there, neurotic nerves, out there in the bushland habitat.

Some realization smacks of growling koalas passing by

But speaking in tongues, grammatically, I am connected by many earthshattering sounds and shrilly trilling cicadas, heat

No reprisal but many signifiers of Australian summer

A flaming bushfire and screaming of foxes in dark night

A jangle bell ringing, a visitor to my living room

No protection from wildfox, still and wary, flees as I move

He assumed danger, the thumping kangaroo presence

Floristics and pattern of bird flightpath through

A hornet’s nest, alive with buzz, the house a curious shelter

But never-ending life teems, growling geckos, part of 

an evolutionary cycle and spiders always spinning webs

An axiom, true to collections of carcasses and carapace

The banality of beauty, of slithering silent snakes

My garden of Eden, flowers dried and deathly, overcome

with drumming, thrumming, I immortalize with paint

A mixture of pigment and oil, the slothful bluetongue lizard

A reproductive cycle, I remember them always

am isolated, lonely, respectively aware of them

Fresh inexperience in bushland, lives lived and over

A talisman and luck, I immortalised by dehydration

The magnetic and attracted, remembered by preservation

Hot savagery and raw stealth, my fascination and a 

Totemic sculptural mass, enquiry gives them a 

knitted woven approach, a reason for having lived,

A creased brow, wondering, do we live to be?

Quizzical, enquiring or remembered, to find out

All lost and wondering, who we are? Eternally searching.

This poem was originally published in Artist Profile Issue 49, 2019.