GERALDINE McKENZIE'S first book, Duty, will be published by Paperbark Press/Craftsman House. Her poems have appeared in Meanjin, Island and Jacket, among other journals. She lives in Australia. (snare the heart-footed man) snare the heart-footed man where he limps by roses impeaching scorn fasten your darkness your deepness into jet the game's alive raced gold and trail the harvest home wagons bells sequence over hills sometimes I wish the landscape would just refrain from comment (stumpjackt) stumpjackt blaggardly so'n so retch and bawdy could you in the quick of it fuel eyes and torch the slash and burn dumb beasts returning to the shambles where they'd stand as men with a mind to you will not see me fail though fall full fool agendas vary it's a deep seem and rives a rosy past repast and rapid demolition of the meets pouched and eager for the splurge token of the real and havoc psyched up tricked out and rampant all cards concealed laughter off what passes as a joke exiting to the usual slash in the toilets and hardly the thing hardly what you'd want to here and now without blinking or blinking perhaps but dryeyed and grimmer with it my blood's a celt and musters to the dark with dark return the savage comeback or sizzle on the grid clamour over trifles newly sick for sweets and rolling from the table flunked animal passed on magnificence lost the plot the poetry of it buckling under a great part or cleft more like though liking moved and swiftly down winded puffed out bright bubble this vacancy unpeopled and the cut as fresh as ever throttle clutch and brake for no one as progress its maw and might have been silky persuasion in the manifest and wished down river withered in a word it was just love unravelled retrospective rape (into the throttled wood) into the throttled wood. sweating meekness like a glove. her                 next thought will be branches. disinterring the muttered bread-note.                 new money for bird-built palanquins. headless in the market place.                 stacked occlusions trundling appetite. its many colours purloined from the                 broken crate. we have come with our voracious hands to feed the                 city. openings, like openings. she starts up again. if you could just                 here, just in this place, set down. precis of sky mute between advertisement.                 fished out fleshed out, a sort of poetry crudding a blunt nose to the warp.                 can you imagine it - words like thumbtacks. bullets, no, not bullets. I wish                 that I had died he wrote than lived to see. this blueglazed chip                 a palace, pocketed. tears like tears. blood like blood. I have found my                 life in such rubble. and a sound like metal hungering. who's this angry                 stranger struggling with the language? mired in mud                 walls. palms incisors poised. up close rats. meticulating nails the                 wooden floor. as you'd long suspected. Rosa Luxembourg in prison was                 extraordinarily happy.                 lived to a deep river.                 applecored into the sandbox. sometimes feet, hands for caves. .