Michael Farrell
RED HERRING
Dark cloud obscured the view of the mountain
Look, I said, where there was once a mountain
there are now clouds
But then I heard a voice in my head saying
that whether there was a mountain or not
whether the clouds hid them or not – wasn’t
the point; it was the possibility of there being
a mountain that made the poem
A pink fish died at my feet, but that
was some time ago
A pink fish with a memorable face
but whose did it remind me of?
Behind the clouds is a giant statue (of a city?
of a mountain?)
What kind of clouds are these, that do not
move: will the wind not appear without being
invoked (or praised)?
I have never fished in the sea, but have
stood on the beach in a strong wind
My mouth shouting god knows what, as I
breathe in the spray
Clouds block the view, as if to suggest there
was a visible land mass beyond the sea
If you were with me you would’ve
seen them too
When fog comes it displaces the world, but we
edge our way forward down the path as
if everything is normal
As if it wasn’t a screen for destruction
on a massive scale
I am looking at pictures
I am reading a book
I am talking to you as if you were there
as if you were one of my readers
while you are on a stage, dancing in a yellow
costume
Which thoughts are positive, and which are
negative?
Which are closer to the truth?
If I came from that direction it means I
came from the mountain, and if I came from
the other direction it means I came from the
sea; and if we work backwards from this
hypothesis, then we will know what the clouds
are hiding
How can I position myself?
How do I decide where to look?
There must be something darker or lighter
beyond the clouds
I imagine you saying something
mumbling, actually, so that I will have to ask
you, what did you say?
I imagine you shouting, as if trying to
be heard by the mountain, or the sea
WE DON'T TALK ANYMORE
In the forest, the leaves are thinking
aloud
The forest is a strange place, a book place, say
An equivalent might be an
underground car park or a coastal
caravan park during winter
Unknown phrases and formulas
growing up in a town with a river and a hill
and a wide street
The allegory differs depending on the tree in
mind
You see someone, press your nose against
something: a chain of error rises up
It was mostly strange at the time
Everything was verifiable, or at least
the lies were easily explained, with hindsight
or sympathy for the liar
Our dog protected us, therefore he was
good
But it was a world I lived in only to exit
Luckily, I had more than one method
Press the button and the little plastic cogs go
around
The dead were familiar, it was the living that
were obscure
Or were like cattle playing football, in
gowns
I have so many trees imprinted on my
brain
They have a different tone, depending on the
site
Some kind of mystical way of looking at things
it sounds like it comes out of Patrick
White
I’m trying to say there was a culture
there and I was educated in it, and everyone
will deny that, just about, like a night parrot
coming back to life
To me it’s not a forest at all but a place of
listening, or paradox
CANADIAN JOURNALISTS
When I went to that beautiful country, or countree, it was
only for the weekend
I had read their newspaper songs, and thought to
myself, those songs come out of bodies
It was like a hot day in Chicago; I saw them
working away, shoeless, in dark rooms, and bright fields
hard at it like gumtrees after a bushfire, making frail red
flowers and sap and facts and truth
Inside their heads – or it could be mine or your
head – a shrinking piece of New York or Mexico
Their writing is climbing on a table, it’s singing the 70s
was a place on earth
Journalism takes cover in the early morning when there’s
nothing happening, it relaxes and its workers rehydrate
They are at the diners, they’re hiding in the mounds of
fake snow at their manager’s houses, they are trying on
sunglasses in the all-night chemists
It’s a long off-season for news, one told me, the
season’s getting shorter every year, and their eyes were
hollowed out from being once desired
And when it’s on there’s no down time, no
reflection, excuse the punning eyewear, no recourse to the
classics, however you want to delimit that notion
I was just a visitor, I had no right to say I loved it
there, loved the papers, certain blogs and columns; nor to
tenderly eroticise the fingers that wrote them, that were
connected to brains in a network of intelligence that
wanted peace, respect, generally, whatever the story of
the day
I had no right to fetishise Canadian desks, or pens
or laptops: producers of, and props to, sweated for
meaning, like mirrorballs and hash would be, in another
context
If I carolled like a magpie as I was leaving, don’t
assume you can attach anything to that (just
because I’m usually so moody)
Copyright © Michael Farrell 2018
Michael Farrell was born in the small town of Bombala, New South Wales, and now lives in Melbourne. He has published poems in Shearsman, Snow, and Tears in the Fence, and has a chapbook with Oystercatcher, the thorn with the boy in its side. His recent books are A Lyrebird: Selected Poems (Blazevox), I Love Poetry (Giramondo), and Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan). He edits Flash Cove magazine: [email protected]