Ghosts of Paradise
 Pitt Street Poetry cover
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Ghosts of Paradise was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2023. In this new collection, three clusters of 14 poems are threaded together to conjure a thought-provoking array of people, places and moments in time. On this page there are five new poems from the book — two as author’s readings (audio) and three in text form.
There are also three video readings by the author, at the following links.
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South Head, a Wild Surmise
(Author’s reading)
The World Within
(Author’s reading)
The Ghosts of Paradise
Once out of nature…
All history fades in time to little more
Than fable, and, when even that time fades,
The shadow of a fable, misremembered.
How many, basking in the view that they
Have summoned, senses flaring as they brush
And merge with one another, would believe
The scandal of those stories was once true?
A hand no metaphor, but five hinged fingers,
Printed, each one, just once, networked with nerves
And blood. The heart no symbol, but four chambers
Pumping in concert night and day. The mind
A hostage to the synapse and the skull.
Such ancestors. Who would acknowledge them?
A rattlebag of bones that staggered upright,
Wrapped in a flimsy envelope of skin,
Seething with unknown reasons, wanting more,
Looking through the world they were looking at—
Those swimmers rising through the wave, the dash
Of parrots frisking in a rain-washed tree,
The bedside vigil shocked in the window light—
And seeing things, until the pictures ceased.
Who would acknowledge forebears that would die,
Tainting the future like a damaged gene?
And yet it’s true, that they would walk, would place
Their weighed and numbered footsteps in such settings,
Landscapes, cities, swept by the Rorschach blots
Of cloud, outbursts of sun, what once was weather.
Traces of them, it’s claimed, may still persist,
Translucent holograms adrift at twilight,
The ghosts of paradise, as they’ve been called
By those who still believe in history.
Frieze Frame
In summer on the hallway wall
The western sun hangs Japanese,
Exquisite prints, as shadows fall
From neighbouring trees—
Well, no, not prints but films in fact,
Shot by the shifting light of day,
Their every detail clear, exact,
As branches sway,
With leaves that overlap, then fan
Apart, forever swithering.
They almost seem more moving than
The real thing.
Another time, a winter light.
My mother’s house. How similar
The scene displayed, and yet not quite.
Slightly ajar,
The sudden door of retrospect
Compels me back there to relive
My stay, and watch the sun project
Diminutive
And perfect shadows of the trees
Flexing against the wind-bent sky
Onto the wall, a tiny frieze
Mere inches high.
We’d sit there of an afternoon,
Over a cup of tea, and chat,
Or sometimes silently commune,
And puzzle at
The strange trick that the light would play
With a ventilation grate, as though
The scene it cast was far away,
And long ago.
Second Circle
Diamond Beach
Heads down and shoulders hunched, we set off, trampling
The footstep-gripping sands of Diamond Beach,
Into the flat refusal of the gale,
Squinting into a distance we would fail,
Surely, ever to reach,
However far we trudged, like Charlotte Rampling
In that French film—what was it?—Sous le sable,
Running, and yet not getting anywhere,
Towards the yearned-for phantom of her dead lover.
Massed clouds that seemed too ponderous to hover,
Depending on thin air,
Loomed over us, like sculptures made of marble.
The wind, as though inhabited, howled past,
Like history re-enacted in blown scraps
And moments, formless figures and events,
With the grand claims they make in the future tense
Even as they elapse.
And fictions too, with their invisible cast.
Francesca, clasping Paolo, came to mind,
Whom Dante looked with pity on, and wept,
In turmoil, whirlwind-driven round the second
Infernal circle. And she told when beckoned
The story that had swept
Their souls away. A tern zoomed from behind
And past our thwarted progress with a flair
And effortless finesse, as to rescind
Without a sideways glance all trace of those
Phantasmal settings and scenarios.
The wind was just the wind,
The air the wordless and inhuman air.
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