Summer At Carcoar

Robert Adamson

The painter enters         time through the Belubula river,

draws out long             bodies from poplar trees

drenches the air            a naples yellow hue, polishes water flow

to a waxy sheen           until it sings under glowing light

he turns a bend              a joyous curve and quick line

then moves over               paddocks back to the place

where he was born              to embrace ideas of chaos, the accelerating 

particles in his head,              paints original county         as a garden

over scars, sketches notes           on the edges, a wren flicks its tail up

and brush strokes freeze blue           feathers onto surface

the willow pulses salicylic acid            through his idea of pain

the shape of particular hurting             just under skin

on a rock where a currawong            becomes larger than it was

in life and running under                 tissues in a burrow where flecks

of the past gleam through                a green subterranean light

from the Hades of                        childhood’s fears 

a crumbling                            ground of families

here we notice                         the absence of  human figures

and intense English                    trees glow

squat under bird song                   the sun new pain

rabbits hint at movement,                   twitch in grasses

details load themselves                     golden paddocks

made up in the mind,                 river, memory spilling

its ballast onto                       hard  discoveries, the ground opened

though intricate                 eddies in tides of grass

the ten thousand              brush strokes and branches

of thought                   etching themselves under the small sky

feathers               counted each leaf folded

wild                  patterns so right  you believe the painted world

then                  sense an open field believes you    while under ground

around                  the boiling core  Whiteley’s scars

indicate mining                 around 1905 they discovered

uranium here the                  local paper called it ‘the parent of radium’

we sense in the painting’s               glow    stains of undertow

a lash in the black highway                 as it curves outside the frame

we too sense the instinct of                    marsupials, to tunnel down

and glance flowers, mauve bells                  ringing their soft trumpets

then a bee’s arc describing flight,                 a thought becoming amber

Robert Adamson (NSW) is the publisher of Paper Bark Press, one of Australia’s leading poetry publishing companies.

He is the author of seventeen books of poetry such as The Clean Dark, which won the Victorian and NSW Premiers' prizes and Australia's National Book Council 'Banjo' Award in 1990.

Summer at Carcoar was written by Robert Adamson in response to Brett Whiteley’s Summer at Carcoar 1977 in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery collection.