Poem

Always an afterthought, last thing left
in that mad dash to spit and polish
before visitors – rare here, so I forget
how others might read you if they looked up:
weird residue of disuse, proof of slackness, antisocial.

   ‘It’s something like learning geography,’ thought
       Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able
       to see a little further.
                   Through the Looking-Glass

Our mob was fond of Tweedledee
Because it was cutely seen
That he would rustle up the tribes
And thump the old Red Queen.

Taken as Required

by Ynes Sanz

An age ago, ill-matched,
ignorant but willing,
we set the rules.
‘Step by Step’, we said. ‘No Bullshit.’
Today, thinking of something else
I stumbled across the grey metal bracelet
you looped over that stick of a wrist
where your thin blood stained the skin
to resemble an antique map or a bad tattoo
(like the one they inked on for that photo shoot in the ’50s).

Wait. Sometimes the waiting seems interminable
But that is the trick with water. The dark
Gathers up your apprehension and you seek ...

He polished his car to a shine, he kept
a ‘clean machine’ inside and out, but down
from ‘up north’, the red dirt would stay
in the seams of doors, around the fittings.
A detailing of distance. A truth unto itself ...

It continued snowing.
The furniture hadn’t drifted away in a removal van.
We kept Sam. We didn’t catch a taxi
to Heathrow. The hi-fi kept going.
We didn’t fly twelve thousand miles.
We stayed at home.

This is the dangerous time, sky clouding:
lifesavers on the alert, intermittently moving the flags,
shoals of swimmers still keening the fray.

A pause for thought and you lay down your pen,
Then have the inspiration to look up.
At first you’re scarcely able
To lift your focus past the coffee cup,
The paper-cluttered table.
But then the window gathers you again

My office! My office at the Judy! The Judy
at the head of Fortitude Valley – Happy Valley! –
the ex-tea and -coffee warehouse, but reformed, reformed!
The industrial brick carcass full of arty bees,
sphinx of a building couchant on the crest of the hill,
the infra-red elevator mysteriously redolent of cloves,
restaurant smuggled into one corner, café in another,
and the whole dipped in chocolate and tile.

Where the mind comes from,
where it goes,
when the moon rose,
where among the stars the light was seen
as you were born:
if it glistened in the tracks
stamped on leaves across the park
where we walked the early afternoon, alert,
listening up,
hearing how the plovers
pipe back and forth across the grass …