My Collection

My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Contents
Painter Of Antwerp 1

Young Girl at a Window 2

Wonder 3

Traveller's Tale 4

Cock Crow 6

Ghost Town: New England 7

The Tiger 9
theresenguyen.0607@gmail.
com
My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Painter Of Antwerp
by Dobson, Rosemary

Plod homeward, peasant,north-bound from Italy

With head full of slow wonder, pondering
On frescoes at Venice and all the odd adventures
The bear in the way, the painter at Padua
In a great plumed hat, full of queer notions,
Ships in the harbour at Naples with a new rigging
Strangeness enough to empty many tankards.

Plod homeward, Brueghel, Painter of Antwerp.

At the top of the Alps he paused perhaps,looked backwards,

Rejecting the fanciful, and took for a painting
Ploughman, fisherman, and moon-faced shepherd,
The furrow cut cleanly, the sheep contented;
Put thumb to nose with neither pride nor envy
At soaring wingsa Southerner's invention
Icarus sprawling, two feet out of the sea.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Young Girl at a Window

by Dobson, Rosemary

Lift your hand to the window latch:

Sighing, turn and move away.
More than mortal swords are crossed
On thresholds at the end of day;
The fading air is stained with red
Since Time was killed and now lies dead.

Or Time was lost. But someone saw

Though nobody spoke and nobody will,
While in the clock against the wall
The guiltless minute hand is still:
The watchful room, the breathless light
Be hosts to you this final night.

Over the gently-turning hills

Travel a journey with your eyes
In forward footsteps, chance assault
This way the map of living lies.
And this the journey you must go
Through grass and sheaves and, lastly, snow.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Wonder
by Dobson, Rosemary

Turn the page of the book and enter, marvelling

(Jan van Eyck was here), a soundless room,
The windows open, a little late sunlight, the mirror,

Two figures, a dog. Remember, five centuries after

The paint splashed on a sleeve,the flicker of brushes,
Steps unheard on the stair.
(I, also, wordless, was there.)
Wonder is music heard in the heart, is voiceless:
Lazarus having conversed with angels was dumb,
Brushing the questions aside with a gesture of
dreaming, Still dazzled with darkness, turning his face
to the wall. So Cortes returned perhaps to the Old World
after
So many years and his eyes still brimming with
sea. Without ovation of guns or trumpets and
pennons, Wonder is lastly in finding the Pole, with
only Amazement flowering in a waste of snow.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Traveller's Tale
by Dobson, Rosemary

It was confusing, sir

All those damned cherubs hanging in the air
Tangling their wings against the mizzen-mast;
And then the mermaidstrouble enough we had,
Such crowds of creatures tumbling through thewaves,
The crew agape in round astonishment.
And Triton always blowing up somewhere
Sounding his conch-shell trumpet-like at
us;
And whales that stretched the length of continents
And took us twenty days to sail around.
And all the scrolls, sir, mixed up with the clouds,
They made the voyage very troublesome
The same again, sir, thank you very much.
You know the pictures then, the maps and prints?
Those were the crowded days for voyaging,
The things I've seen I doubt if you'd believe,
But this here jack-knife proves I've beenaround
It's slit near thirty heathen at the throat,
You'll know, to feel the edge, sir.
That there's Columbus at the Isle of
Pearls, I and Columbus, sir, we stride the
deck, His name in letters written round his
head.
The waves like that, all fixed and ribbed withlight,
The naked Indians in the foreground here
Are just as I remember.
Thank you, sir.
And not a space unfilled. Three-mastersthose,
I just forget
How they got mixed up with the Isle of Pearls,
Boarding and gunning with their sails square-rigged
And puffs of smoke that, staying in the air,
Blot out a toppling Spaniard but his
leg. Aye, that's the Gold Lion, too,

With ten dead Indians swinging at the mast.

De Bry's the fellow, sir, that done the prints
And got it very accurate.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10
I said to him
Put in a cherub, Will, to blow the wind,
And showed him how to draw the mermaidsso,
And very lifelike, too.
Well, thank you, sir.
Yes, the first turning, thirty paces down, That's
the best way. You'll not mistake it, sir.
One for the road? Your health, then. Down the hatch.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Cock Crow
by Dobson, Rosemary

Wanting to be myself, alone,

Between the lit house and the town
I took the road, and at the bridge
Turned back and walked the way I'd come.

Three times I took that lonely stretch,

Three times the dark trees closed me round,
The night absolved me of my bonds
Only my footsteps held the ground.

My mother and my daughter slept,

One life behind and one before,
And I that stood between denied
Their needs in shutting-to the door.

And walking up and down the road

Knew myself, separate and alone,
Cut off from human cries, from pain,
And love that grows about the bone.

Too brief illusion! Thrice for me

I heard the cock crow on the hill,
And turned the handle of the door
Thinking I knew his meaning well.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

Ghost Town: New England

by Dobson, Rosemary

The grass is bleached by summer sun

The dry pods rustle underfoot,
On quartz-bright rocks the lichens creep
Like frail anemones betrayed
Still trembling towards an unknown sea.
Up the steep shoulder of the hill
The wind goes scattering seeds of light.

Here at the edge the mind goes on,

The eyes go on, though steps must stop
At plunging scarps where dizzily
The plumes of haze shroud and unshroud
Knife-edge and scree; and down and down
Still sight must drop, be cut and grazed,
To find at last the dry creek-bed.

This is no landscape for the eye

Cupped by a hand to shield the mind
From earth's most naked cruelty.
Who looks the longest must take on
The fierceness of the eagle-hawk,
His hungry thought, his still intent,
His burnished, undeflected eye.

How fared they then who built and lived

Beneath the shoulder of the hill,
Who planted with their hopeful hands
The oak, the fruit, the sheltering hedge,
The store, the church, the bakery
Where still the letters are discerned
That here for man is meal, his bread.

The houses lean against the wind,

Their eyes are scarfed with sheets of tin,
I heard in all that stillness once
The cracked complaining of the bell.
A door that shut on nothing scraped,

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10
And with a turning, sick unease
I saw a child's discarded shoe.

Was it on such a summer's day

They gathered from the bakery,
The store, the church, and, beckoned on
By the compulsion of the fall,
Plunged to those knife-edged silences?
His mind, as mine, will veer away
Who lacks the hawks' unwavering eye.

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My Collection
From Australian Poetry Library, 2017-10-10

The Tiger
by Dobson, Rosemary

The tiger paces up and down

Behind the black bars of the page,
He pads on silent angry feet,
His heart is smouldering with rage.

Captive within the lines of type

He seeks, and yet can never find,
The world where he was free to range:
He is the poet's furious mind.

His are the unblinking eyes that stare

Into the gold heart of the sun,
He rakes the sky of stars and hunts
The darkness down, and is not done.

His was the world to roam, who now

Is captive to the black-barred page.
Reader, unlock the lines and face
The splendid danger of his rage!

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