Poems
To be alone in the wide room
in the house’s crooked elbow, turning point
for extensions as the family grew
and grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room
nobody needed now, though it might be resumed
like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,
without notice (and that was part of
the appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place) to play the ...
Not since I was four or five at most
and in the first of many striped tee-shirts
have I been this close to the flavour of safety.
I’m walking into town again, the child of hills.
You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own
adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans’s
tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways.
Waiting on a reeking strange
railway station –
then the dead-quiet but crowded
night ferry.
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
... (read more)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.
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
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
