TEXT poetry

Dugald Williamson

Elegy: The studio’s true colours

Start with the sky, you would say.
Clouds shift across a series of sketches.
Improvise gulls, the way they turn.
Airy impulse fills sails, baffles kites.
You didn’t harp on it, just mentioned one day
That rheumatics and oils don’t mix.
Still, you kept your hand in. Shadow laid
For the table, and a jest of summer spoils.
So what, as we say, is unfinished?
Through your light-blue curtains
The light comes in like a drifter,
Circles a canvas or two, pauses,
And makes riotous jars hold their poses,
Then go quiet as vases without flowers.

Three haiku

Window muse Carlton
streets are dumb with metal tracks
and a few locked cars

A moon Giotto
could have put there cypress casts
in rounded shadow

The fields in winter
the sky a lace-maker
the earth a quilter

Night walk from the library

A book of student days,
Cancelled thirty years.
On a path to the river,
A fray in pines subsides.

A pin drops in the dark.
I feared their angelic
Lexicon. Bow of memory.
Stars’ more fragile volume.

Dugald Williamson has published poetry in Australian Poetry Journal, Meanjin, Southerly, Social Alternatives and Westerly. He is professor in film and writing at the University of New England.