... and here's my poem:
white
most
places I’ve been on Earth
there
are people called White
regardless
of skin
every
language has its own bright version
but
unless somebody brings a prism
white
hangs invisibly in blue sky
the
perfect mixture of all other colours
morphing
when it likes
through
phantom shapes of aerial water and ice
which
may or may not choose to fall
to
fill Lake Eyre with fish and pelicans or salt
surge
spume along a reach
make
the friggin sand for chrissake
the
Ninety Mile Beach
deposit
the limestone Mallee
or
smother Antarctica with ice
white
concentrates in clays too
so
clean it’s good enough for paint
and
in the precise intensity of barite marble and talc
and
the zillions of microscopic oysters
that
make the cliffs of Dover
and
the moist bright chalk of Chablis
somehow
the oyster sucks the whiteness from water
and
hardens it for a home
one
dark old town in Japan
knows this
the
householders hurl their empty shells
onto
the grey midden in the square
fifty
feet of oysters towering over a waist-high fence
post
and rail
they
scratch the cured ones from beneath
hundreds
of years they’ve been there
grind
them up with boiled pig glue
and
make exquisite faces for dolls
beyond
pearlescent
pure
white
in
Australia
you’d get a bag of fresh ones
take
them up to Ashton Hills
guts
them on the veranda with a Riesling
and
hurl the spent shells into the vineyard for calcium
so
your white from the sun via the sea
enters
you through a glass of crisp austerity
leaves
the teeth and attitude a-sparkle
and
heads off through the black gizzards
and
the porcelain to the deep
to
eventually worm its way back into the blue
dance
the whole crazy move again
it’s
called pissing on
this
is where the colour thing comes in
my
black mates giggle when they call me Whitey
like
a brother from Yothu Yindi mob
siphoning
great reds into his silver pillow
in
the Victorian Italianate apartment I could not afford
watched
by a spellbound wine critic from London
on
whose behalf
I
put it all down to morbid anthropological fascination
and
got on with the business
passing
the guitar
having
a schluck
my
girlfriend had a fluffball maltese terrier called Oscar
he
called it Ggurrrrnnnnakkk then said
White
Cockatoo
he
liked the contrast when he wore their feathers
them Yolgnu blokes could tell you a thing or two about middens
with
love
philip
white
My beloved brother and teacher Jardine Kiwat at George Grainger Aldridge's joint at Glen Oak on the Druid Range, Flinders Ranges, South Australia ... photos Philip White
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