Poem

It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
       The all-pervading dark of space,
       But not meant for the world of men.
                    It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you.

Past the final service station
into the green beyond of paddocks
soon to be carved up, quartered,
then watched over by streetlights.
In the post-work haze, nostalgia reigns:
lonely crossroads, abandoned weatherboards,
paddocks stretching down to the sea.

There are no lions to whelp in the street any more,

and conversely

the Council by-laws forbid

the keeping of the pigs and chickens, goats and cattle

whose prodigious multiplications

could serve as an adequate metaphor

and there are only so many burgeoning plants

you can squeeze into a one-by-three-metre courtyard

but the possums have come back,

and the daylight moon

There’s a sleechy smell here, grey frogs on the bank
like slurried earth, rotund toads hopping across lily pads,
grunting like sultans trying out cushions. Fish mouth
the surface with so many unsinkable O’s, and the larval

She trawls through reams of paper pinned in files,
stacked on shelves, heaved into the corners
of this study and other, larger rooms;
wades through spilling, perforated sheets
of printed data she cannot decipher
that concertina on the wooden floor,
stained with jam, sprinkled with old crumbs
and marked with tags that indicate some pattern
to his vanished thought – pained, slow research
that saw two hundred articles appear,
three or four a year, in august journals.
She knows the faintly sour smell of absence
that rooms so often hold after a death –
even a lonely life sweetens the air –
how furniture seems fixed when someone dies

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.

by the radio:
I mishear the news and sports presenter
say ‘the latest in nuisance sports’,
outside the light is green,
the lightning frightening      stay away 
from windows       but the storm            
takes no notice of me and my black Bic biro
here at the kitchen table

And midway through the first course
of pickled fish in the restaurant
by the river that night
slid a black on black
barge
under the brilliantly lit
bridge