Poems

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 …

Only the young can wholeheartedly love ancient music.
It is fancy-dress, sound pared to its bones
As if the naughty flesh were simply the prop
for the idea of fabulous costumes, or sackcloth and ashes
Such as we never dream of today.

On Little Bourke Street it’s the bewitching hour
of winter dusk’s last riffs playing
long mauve shadows down the blocks,
waking the neon calligraphy, its quavering script
mirrored on the warm sheen of the Noodle King

where a man slaps and pummels the dough
into a pliant wad. He takes a fist-sized ball
and starts his noodle magic, stretching the bands,
the sleight-of-hand plain for you to see,
weaving a stave of floury silent music.

The wild White Nun, rarest and loveliest
Of all her kind, takes form in the green shade
Deep in the forest. Streams of filtered light
Are tapped, distilled, and lavishly expressed
As petals. Her sweet hunger is displayed
By the labellum, set for bees in flight
To land on. In her well, the viscin gleams:
Mesmeric nectar, sticky stuff of dreams. 

Saturday. The usual 9 a.m. flight.
The man beside me hefts a Gladstone.
‘I haven’t seen one of those in years,’
I say, this being sociable Saturday.
I recall a worn one from my twenties
owned by someone else. Always empty

A doctor with a face

worn and grey as his cardigan

calls my name

in his rooms

he asks about the book I’m reading

I tell him