Stuart Barnes
Woman
the real sea snoring half a mile away
the scrubbed brick walls of the double lounge and its
samples of african drums flood the speakers
Is that your shadow, weightless,
a smudge of grey dust
in the black trickery of the she-oak?
the ...
... it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
—Sylvia Plath, 'A Birthday Present'
Here's some activity you may have missed:
pompadour-lure hung three days after I
disentangle.
'It misses me.'
The fourth: A ...
Nan's budgerigar,
cat fed squeezing like the morning
fog between oxidized barbed
wire and gorse
with an older cousin
with a slug gun
booting sheep skulls
stripped by gusts, our fathers'
1950s snares swooped by plovers,
daring: 'yellow spurs! forearms
up!' shooting star-
lings for laughs
From his ebony eyrie
the moon is salubrious,
round as the white lotus' root.
The desert's his adversary.
The moon is salubrious
with his godly left eye.
The desert's his adversary,
spiteful, like a hippopotamus.
With his godly left eye
the moon is neither ossuary,
after David Brooks
Red-
tailed Bedouins
of Poetry, black
cockatoos embroider
the sun into us,
seam-rip it asunder.
*
On the Fitzroy's
bank at midday,
cracking seeds of eucalypts
that outrank Council, a hundred
Banks' black cockatoos,
a paroxysm of commas.
*
With their subtler
comp ...