Green Point Bearings

By Kathryn Fry

"The poems in Green Point Bearings traverse much wider geographic, historical and emotional territory that the collection’s title might imply. They exhibit a consistent, coherent voice and sensibility which are alive to beauty, to the natural world, to art, and to the joys and pains of intimate relationships. These are tactil

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ginninderra Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781760415136

Book preview

Green Point Bearings

Green Point Bearings

Kathryn Frey

Ginninderra Press

Green Point Bearings

ISBN 978 1 76041 513 6

Copyright © text Kathryn Fry 2018

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2018 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015 Australia

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Contents

Going One Way

Histories

Art Talk

Greater than the Sum

Here

Notes

Acknowledgements

For

family

and

friends

Going One Way

Ferry to Bobbin Head

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History is falling

from Barrenjoey, whispering from the bays

of Refuge, Flint and Steel, and the smooth lips

of their beaches: Hungry, Resolute and Eleanor.

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We’re enclosed by contours

of memory in the sandstone carved to cliff and cave,

in the hill-folds’ slow tumble to the stone-edged water,

and that tree, a bonsai on rock.

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West Head sits in shadow and late

light as we ferry the Hawkesbury swell. And I recall when

we first set course on our voyage together, and ever since,

the crests and the calm.

Under the Old Tangle

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No matter now who carried those seeds

across the seas from the prairie states,

from Red River valley, their lumbering trees

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prized by the Osage tribesmen to strike

into bows. Such trees, their large globes

of sticky-sap fruit with a hint of citrus.

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No matter now who stripped the land

to set the row for the boundary running

north–south, in time a line of overarching

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limbs in grey. I bend below the lurch

of branches, thorny and leafless and rising

from this relic in the bowl of green hills

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by the Hawkesbury. Wattle and bracken

blend with narrow leaf cottonbush in

the clearing of the black weathered breccia

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of Peats Crater. The ramblers gather, some

walk to the creek in light rain. It’s no matter

we’ll have gone our single ways tomorrow.

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Nature knows her reasons: curved low in

this hedge of Osage Orange and reaching

into the shaded earth, its wood loops

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in the colour of clean, clear flame. It matters

how an image flickers then into my mind

of eyes holding the glow of their own orison,

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the bright drive of their worth. Someone

who stands out in the