Selected Poems by Dan Guenther from the magazine Poetry Australia 1975-1976.

In Gamoowea

The honey-eater gathers with the shrike;
and I drink beer with my pregnant wife.

Stockmen speak of snow and ice,
hoarfrost in Tasmania,
of harvest nights layered with a freeze,
sound sleeping.

September is a native cat moving westward,
is the curl of a lizard
caked-hard in a dry creek-bed.

I say north of the Macdonell Range
these rolling hills are my woman's lap. 

The stalks of stunted grass
are her underbelly's golden hair
sifted through the sand of the Barkly Tableland:

There are men opening graves in Queensland
and the Northern Territory, digging
for polished axe-heads of the long dead,
and there are chipped flints left unfinished
in Gamoowea, growing like a child's new cut teeth.

Flytime

Birds of the deep woods begin to sleep.
Cane toads grumble, waiting for a drizzle.
Across a river Queensland mingles with the smoke
of cooking fires,
and we await a storm.
Without a sound eucalypts shed their bark in strips.
February's flies are limbering young legs.

Late Frost in Early Spring

A frost is coming in
to shake the possum from a drowse.

Numb from the cold
adders tangle together under the ferns,
thick as human thigh bones.

The brooding adder revolves like a slow cylinder
to shed his skin,
and it awakes from the cold as a dumb loop
turned once
around the shaft of a sapling gum.

With a half-undone braid a thin girl is tickling
the slack edge of the snake's lip.

Over all the throats that snap and click
I can hear the bell-bird's whistle.

Sleepless

We are sleepless as the wind picks up speed.

A dog
drops a crushed starling at our feet.

This is fire season.

In my wife's blond hair there are yellow leaves,
and insects slip inside her shirt.

Through Wingham Brush

Picked up by a sea breeze
thin clouds spread inland over high, dark ridgelines.

A flying fox unwraps his wings in uppermost branches,
fanning the long leaves of a wild quince.

On the hard back above Wingham Brush
the moon is a child in dry grass, playing with matches.

Finding Africa on the way to Broken Hill

Call the black stump a lion's head.

For in the midday heat of the wide plains
small boys hear it roar.

Abandoned cars left on high ground
suggest rhinoceros at twilight;

And if you see tentative giraffes among the emus
crossing Nyngan's yellow flats,
you may have found Africa on the way to Broken Hill,
dust and dry water holes equal to the Velds:

I never saw the hot Zulu who broke my windscreen
with a stone, just outside Wilcannia.

Whirlwinds rose from a red salient.

Tire treads thick as elephant hide
were left in the footprint of a great truck.

Slowly Waking

Far out, in the Tasman Sea,
a thousand dolphins head south, under a full moon.

Across the street the post office is full of insects.

And grouped in close formations
lizards take command of the window screens,
are ready to advance:

This is Australia of the mile long beaches,
and tonight, as the parties end,
as the crowds turn out
the mosquitos are at the walls of the city,
the hibiscus explodes,
my wife turns in the empire of her sleep,
her stomach lunar,
slowly waking to a child's dolphin kick.

In the early morning schools of mullet move off-shore.

The glint of small fish massing to spawn
flashes like rifle fire in the moonlit water.