Poems

(for the siblings)

they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour

of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a

background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,

and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.

I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen

moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness

owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds

sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’,
from Ploughshares, Winter 2006–07

Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud
with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps,

was all it said

just a tiny message

to let me know

that all the way over there

where she was

I was given to this body as haphazardly
As the monster of Frankenstein.

Lightning is a man’s metaphor,
But like fire it provides

A force alien to question.
Perhaps I am only this, this flesh,

The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, and a lyrebird was opening the day,
volunteering to be a bell. We were watching an egret

1 preface
I could, if you prefer, create a list
like a birdwatcher, concealed
in a reedy hide, with binoculars,
field guide and record book, a mnemonic
of migration lines, our lines of sight,
a cladogram of our evolving past.

They change colour

before your eyes,

i.m. Bettina Gorton

i.

When I drive through freeway towns I look for you
in the sealed front doors of houses, turned away.

I look for you on the couch-grass lawns of February suburbs
between the privet hedge and standard roses with your back to the street.

When I come home from winter holidays I can tell you have been there
drinking window after window of light till it is emptied and grey.

I think once I saw you walking the curve of a disused rail line
where the track shrugged off its sleepers and climbed into the heat.

This is the time of day when the light runs down the sky
like bluing and meets the bay, when whip-birds set acoustic
flares along the trees, when I’ll stand and listen to the yachts –
a sound as if cutlery were being replenished on table-tops;