Poems
The Sioux, believing ponies should be pintos,
Painted the ones that weren’t.
When they saw the Iron Horse
They must have wondered why the palefaces
Left it a palimpsest.
Bruno Schulz said an artist must mature
The statues in the ancient museum
The ones of young women, the kohl
Dripping tears of the centuries from
Their luminous eyes, smiling that
Detached ironic smile never doleful,
That’s what gave her a gift for it.
This six a.m. moment
in the cool-blue cool
of early morning
is not eternal.
‘In Jamaica , we have a saying, that a person
should take the sour and turn it into sweet.
We took the sour and we made lemonade!'
Rita Marley with Hettie Jones.
No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley
A man remains in his car while his mother is buried.
What I know of them is unreliable, a cousin to truth.
A master bedroom, a stripped mattress
dead centre of the floor.
Plastic dishes in the kitchen sink,
soft toys kicked against the wall.
Ikea furniture flat in boxes,
I assemble you without a key;
no need for Swedish instruction,
these hands know your symmetry.
Finished with bedevilled edges,
hewn from raw blonde pine,
inner suburban by desire,
Scandinavian by design.
I build a little house where our hearts
once lived – remake rooms I cannot find.
with its east-facing rifts and cliffs
were visible; as though the full-bodied waves
that blow over it, freighted with kelp,
tidewood, and the bloated bodies
of dead seals were thermals,
sideways tracking and printed with spirals
that mark a slow convergence
of warm and nutrient-rich, cold water. ... (read more)
galah world, this is not wordplay, or deathpuns,
until the sun goes down, shocker, blood-letter,
hit and run make-over, splatterfest and gore show,
a ‘laugh-a minute’ partner wandering about in a daze, ... (read more)
Straight roads, built for driving fast.
You get out of winter in a day.
These paddocks so like thoughts you travel past,
strung out beside your asphalt purpose.
You get out of winter in a day.
Cattle fat as history watch you pass,
strung out and beside your asphalt purpose
in these vast effects of corroded light.
How do you bury a poet?
Surely not
how they buried Baudelaire
thrown in with his parents
like an infant death.
It stretches
to a ghastly irony
Pasternak’s remark
that poets should remain
children.
