In contrast to the mood of ‘River Bend’ is ‘Lichen, Moss, Fungus’. (21) This is a detailed examination of the tiny world of living things which “flourish on this rock ridge”. Wright is obviously delighted with them, and describes them as if they were the most valuable specimens in a garden (which, of course, in a way, they are). Wright acknowledges the microcosm of the fungus world, its place, and the miniature beauty of the plantlife within it, as if to remind us that all is not obvious that is either beautiful or useful:
Slow primitive plant-forms
push up their curious flowers.
Lichens, mosses and fungi -
these flourish on this rock ridge,
a delicate crushable tundra:
bracket, star, cup, parasol;
gilled, pored, spored, membraned;
white, chestnut, violet, red.
It is a colourful, complex world, and easily crushed by human indifference. Wright uses the fungal eco-system as a symbol of the broader environment, as delicate and readily damaged as that which dwells on its rock ridge. An active leader of campaigns within the environmental movement in Australia, the poet here is also acting as social conscience (which Wright so often does), reminding us of the vulnerability of our own eco-systems and the fragility of the myriad life-forms which depend for their survival on humanity and its interventions. Wright reinforces this by her descriptions of the fungus as things of beauty, challenging our normal responses, and underlining the important part that they play in the decay and regeneration of forests:
Over the wet decay
of log and fallen branch
there spreads an embroidery, ancient
source of the forests.
Similarly, ‘Caddis fly’ (22) is a celebration of a minuscule part of the river landscape and its vulnerability. It is the story of a caddis fly which lands in the poet's glass of wine, from which it is rescued only to suicide in the flames of the campfire. Simple, perhaps, but it is a story based on vivid descriptions such as:
Small twilight helicopter,
four petals, four skins of crystal,
veined taut with chitinous fibre
which breathe life into a creature most of us (besides fly fishermen) would not notice. Here, also, Wright celebrates her river bank, enjoying it in a peaceful mood far removed from its history as the scene of a murder as she did previously. Now it is a relatively quiet evening scene:
I sat under leaves, toasting
a simple moon, a river,
the respite of an evening
warm as the hand of a lover.
Although the caddis fly does its best to disrupt the reverie, it adds to it:
I finish my wine and dream
on your fire-sermon.
Another recent series of poems exploring similar themes in a different, more exact, form is ‘The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals’ (also from the Phantom Dwelling collection). The poems in this series are based on the Persian lyric form, the Ghazal, in which Wright combines the precision of couplets with a mood of gentle reminiscence, perhaps even melancholy. Again, many of the poems concentrate on a particular aspect of a landscape as a focus for the thoughts of the poet, using the solidity of a boulder or the underwater action in a rockpool as symbols of, and juxtaposition to, the passing of generations of people.
‘Rockface’ (23) begins with all the weight of ages contained in this rhyme:
Of the age-long heave of a cliff-face, all’s come down
except this split upstanding stone, like a grave-stone.
Having established such a serious symbolic link, and beginning an almost mournful tone which continues throughout the piece, Wright goes on to display the rock in its many contexts; as part of the topography, home to “sun-orchids bloomed here, out and gone in a month”, and as the dauntingly powerful symbol with which she has identified. It is part of an historical and geological movement, and has survived the “age-long heave” to become a contemporary monument, known to the poet as well as to the traditional landowners.
In the days of the hunters with spears, this rock had a name.
Rightly they knew the ancestral powers of stone.
Jung found in his corner-stone the spark Telesphorus.
Earth gives out fireflies, glow-worms, fungal lights
She teases the reader with all the many interpretations of the rock, the meanings given by myth and poetry through the generations, finally deciding to reject all interpretations. For a poet who has so carefully constructed layers of symbolic landscape (in this, and in many other poems), it is an important statement:
I've no wish to chisel things into new shapes.
The remnant of a mountain has its own meaning.
The poet will not mould the world into her own interpretation. She is confronted by the reality of her environment, accepts it as it is, and will defend its right to remain intact and impervious to all attempts to co-opt it as a symbol.
Of course, in the next poem in the Ghazal series, ‘Rockpool’ (24), there is no such hesitation in using a symbolic landscape to represent the poet’s concerns. Wright uses as her central metaphor the movement of waves and the life in a rockpool on a beach. It’s an often-used and obvious symbol, particularly to represent this theme: of looking down on the microcosm and watching the change, death, growth and decay, and the waves which wash over it all. However, Wright uses some images which liven up the cliché:
At night on the beach the galaxy looks like a grin.
Fascinating creatures inhabit her rockpool and their activities readily reflect the “dying” generation, but are described in such lively language that the cliche is forgiven:
I watch the claws in the rock pool, the scuttle, the crouch -
green humps, the biggest barnacled, eaten by seaworms ...
I hang on the rockpool's edge, its wild embroideries:
admire it, pore on it, this, the devouring, the mating,
ridges of coloured tracery, occupants, all the living,
the stretching of toothed claws to food, the breeding
on the ocean's edge ...
As in the previous poem, Wright raises the issue of acceptance, in this case of change and regeneration (“the irresistible / clean wash and backswirl”), and the expansiveness and possibility, as well as the pettiness, of the human world.
‘Eyes’ (25) features many inter-related symbols, of seeing, leaving tracks or traces, the introduced animal in the landscape, signs and signals, cause and effect. There are many “eyes” involved here: the poet’s, the reader’s, the fox’s, the flower, the headlights; just as there are many ways of seeing and understanding, of knowing and giving meaning. The fox features again, this time both as predator and prey, and as an example of animal instinct, rather than human intellect:
There's altogether too much I know nothing about:
my eyes slide over signals clear to the fox,
but what I do see I can fix meanings to.
There are connections, things leave tracks of causation ...
The fox's two green eyes echo his universe.
‘Summer’ (26) is another attempt to convey the ways in which the landscape acts as witness to human activity and recovers from the impact of humanity:
This place's quality is not in its former nature
but a struggle to heal itself after many wounds.
Upheaved ironstone, mudstone, quartz and clay
drank dark blood once, heard cries and the running of feet.
Now that the miners’ huts are a tumble of chimney-stones,
shafts near the river shelter a city of wombats.
Like the history of the place, and the wombats, much here is hidden. Amidst the stones, ruins and old mines there are lichens, bent saplings, wolf-spiders and lizards, “shadows of hawk or kookaburra”. The poem is devoid of light, and creates a dark atmosphere which denies its title.
The past abuse of the land (and its slow, painful recovery) reflects the lack of understanding of it by the Europeans, who have obviously tried to grow rich on its resources while the land itself is left destitute. Perhaps it is beyond the understanding of those who do not belong here. Even the poet cannot understand it:
Scabs of growth form slowly over the rocks.
Lichen, algae, wind-bent saplings grow.
I’ll never know its inhabitants
for they are either long dead or, like the lizard, in hiding.
Wright suggests that even the language we need to know and describe such country is beyond us, that we are constricted in our understanding by our preconceptions, and in our descriptions by our own languages which have not arisen in the country we attempt to describe:
In a burned-out summer, I try to see without words
as they do. But I live through a web of language.