Burn Mallee Transcript
And went down into the Mallee
And fled the contemplative Aegean
And threw soft bodies among grass
And fell into Grecian doldrums
And swept away messiahs of the flatlands
And drank out of dirty bowls, english memories,
pantomimes of Aeschylus, the fallow fields
broken against the log of holy present,
describing the arc of the sun on hollow days,
pitching against creekbed horrors, allocated
to men slipping under the dirt like trapdoor spiders,
crying quietly to themselves in eucalypt coffins,
beating off to the form of a wombat,
fashioning amphorae from the bill of a platypus,
filling with quandong to ferment harshly under grey fields,
disgracing themselves beneath winedark ozone absence,
crawling winewise through southern aztlan,
carving dodona into the red mallee whose branches
crisscross the sky like the hatching on hermes cap,
the agnostic ocean pouring inland and through the bitter
rolling hills, carrying a homeopathic taste of peloponnese
fruit, of the dung of boeotian animals harnessed
and whipped and beaten across the base of the mountain,
slashed and maimed through human pastures to human
evils, to old fashioned christs and newly wrought gods,
necks split and blood poured on hearths to protect against
bytzantine rituals and elephantine gluttons, a taste of
the known flesh in this distant apoikia, the ships long ago
blown apart by foreign winds blowing in from foreign pressure systems,
pottery broken against the backs of mutinous sailors,
melted down and blocking captainish ears to complaints,
oxen flailing under the foreign sun, the great yellow negative
unknown sun of the mallee, so protective of the great
lumbering beasts in islands close to the heart
but made evil sometime in our journey, some invisible
line crossed and time gone strange, navigation eaten
by ill skies and one hundred of us crawling through
the grass that irritates us and plucking quills from
the dead echidna against the advice of the body
of the earth, scratching our antique script into
the antique stone, crafting visions against the wasteland,
stacking cairns in feeble mimesis,
bleeding too easily in the afternoon heat,
the wisdom of disease stalking through the cold night,
and cried out against the fauna,
and lay down in the clearing,
and went up to the—
ASGOSTINOS: The weary dove bleeding in the eucalypt
Looks down at me and smiles with weathered teeth
Breeding sleep in his mind, twisting my heart
Beneath crooked foot and evil tongue.
Bastios! Rise from your stone bed and greet
the bright and mild day, the long grass tickling
Your feet, the stream bubbling against the grain
Sweet silence all the day for us, as for every last creature
Blest to ride here beyond day and night, flying
And slying, here in the land of bush and tree,
The ever-burning plain of the Mallee.
BASTIOS: (Groggily) Asgostinos, evil host of our tribe,
Did you not watch my slipping darkly into revelry this last
night? Did I not eat of the berry that wakes the sleeping
mind? Did I not drink the river of the waters of Lethe?
And you ask me to eat the lotus this morning? I will
not say again, your leadership of us here does not give
you leave to bite down on my brainflesh, to sally against me.
ASGOSTINOS: Hidebound and desperate though
we may be, downtrodden and doglike Bastios, hideous
though our situation is and plucked though we are,
divine justice still flows through my seablue veins
like the trout down the dark river, like the heron
across the desert sky. You will go down to the Mallee today.
You will go down to the Mallee today, and you will search there
amongst its many evils for libations and for goods.
Every dog will have his day Bastios.
BASTIOS: I will not go down to the Mallee today Asgostinos.
No Asgostinos, today I intend to lounge, and no word of horror
or impudence will make me different. Today I will not go
down to the Mallee Asgostinos, and I am not to be
persuaded otherwise. The Mallee destroys Asgostinos.
I will not go down to the Mallee today. I will not go
down to the Mallee. Make your mind up some other
way Asgostinos, because I will not go down to the Mallee.
ASGOSTINOS: Bastios. If you will not go down to the Mallee.
Today. Then other arrangements must be made. For today.
BASTIOS: Why does the drum come hither?
Bleeding greeks:
Make greeks bleed evil
sweet open god wound
plas- tic sick bird
make work open wide
world blow force man
man force world back
eat dog feel mess
slip god east meant
fish plan male slug
end creek gully plug
This is God’s country.
The sky opened up once we passed Rockbank.
Shoals of slivers of blue appeared through the cloudbank,
sending shafts down to touch the road ahead of us,
marking further distances. Silvio’s mannequin hand
brushed my thigh as he squirmed like a snake
stuck in a rock crack against the contours of the middle-seat,
jamming his foot into the wells on either side, pushing
his slick black hair against the roof until Silvia cracked
her hand against the side of his leg. Calm down.
In the middle of a paddock an island rose as if from an ocean
a tree splayed across it like a reclining Calypso, deadened
by the reaching night.
I crawled out my window towards
it, the sky crackling with electricity, cicadas swarming above,
lesions rising on my skin, maps without territory. The woman
spat disdainfully, spreading her branches until they covered
the field, the road, the ocean. I writhed against the grass.
This is God’s country.
Restitution is never given. You never asked. Why should I have
to? Why shouldn’t I be entitled to it? It’s not about being
entitled, it’s about asking for what’s owed to you. And if I ask
and they don’t give? What then? I’ve shown my hand, I’ve made
my play and I’m stuck. Well what other option do you have?
I wait it out. I wait them out, until they see the damage they’re
doing to me. They can’t just ignore it forever. I think you
underestimate how much these people can ignore.
The grey squawk of the seagull.
The ancient hatred of the cow.
The bloodfeud of the kangaroo.
The twins stand outlined against the bulging stone
of the bathhouse,
the wicked building of a cracked future.
This is God’s country.
I am the Echidna, crawling along the lazy corridors
of the bathhouse,
my mating song ringing
like a drone through the endless walls and steam.
My back erupts with spikes, and where the weary tips point,
I follow, long knives as arrows, arrows as long knives.
The sounds of chanting pealing in the bathhouse.
I am the Echidna, lying on my back
in the cloister
of the steam,
washing out my brain,
the elevator voices of the patrons swinging
through the wooddark areas.
The outraged dirt rises up through the cracks in the floor,
the black spears of bark blink in the face of approaching cougars,
the tan glowing men swing bottles back to blot out the sun,
the blasted areas turn back into ground,
the sky above the sea lets loose a waterfall,
the biting beast indicates the western catacombs,
the western catacombs sink weeping deeper beneath the turning crucifix,
the Hunter travels from Dodona to the island,
seeking growth,
seeking the red and the blue,
seeking reaching fingers,
seeking natural ships,
seeking weeds that save,
seeking burnt churches,
seeking revenge.
I am the Echidna, peeking through a crack
in a door
of a low-lit room,
seeing the two lovers
Silvio’s hand
across Silvia’s,
two indistinguishable faces
swapping places.
I am the Echidna, seeking roots in the dark
flicking my tongue
along the sick dirt,
rolling my eyes back in my head
to see my brain
pulsating in its dark nest,
vibrating in its slick core.
I am the Echidna, crawling up the back
of the Hunter.
The car trundled across the stone of the parking lot,
the five passengers sitting in silence, the man with
the darkest hair sitting at the wheel, gripping it with
pale knuckles, his teeth set and dark circles under his
eyes, the woman in the passenger seat slipping
into sleep, the woman behind her staring at her hands
resting on her knees, the man beside her, sitting in the
middle seat, passed out already, a smudge of dirt under
his nose, a dark red cut beneath his left ear, the man
beside him looking out the window, his eyes not
focusing, taking in the whole landscape, the parking
lot, the gum trees that lined the parking lot, the
grass fields beyond the parking lot, the cows in the
fields beyond the parking lot, menacingly chewing
the grass beneath them, glancing up with their wide,
black, hollow eyes, and beyond the cows in the grass
fields beyond the trees at the edge of the parking lot
the mountains, standing cutting a soft curve against
the red sky, red as the soft red fleshy inside of a mouth,
and as the car exited the gate of the parking lot
the sun finally fell fully behind the wall of the mountains,
the cows slowly lowering their high heads in reverence,
and the sky fell long and black over the endless tracts
of the earth.