Poem

The answer could only be yes. Or,
(as James would have it) it was a question,
the way she turned back to him
seemed to say, that deserved

You’ve always associated the two terms together
partly due to your reading of Schiller; partly due
to your watching of Kimba. Kimba sublimates
his mother in the water. You’ve always thought

1.

Port Phillip rucks & tears in the wind
and where the creek joins the bay, the lace
is tattered marl. Wild gulls pick

Dietrich Bonhoeffer woke up in a plane
to Australia, next to Kevin Rudd, who flew
from India, still astounded that Julia
Gillard was selling it uranium

Late afternoon. Another forty degree day.
Sick of ecological talk I decide to meet it,
take my book into the park,
not sure how far I’ll go with Against Nature.

Head tilts to strings
beyond setting –
cross-notes of talk,
gallery folk

Cheerily inquiring, I came to Heaven’s gate open to a simple throne,
the sky perforated with stars
and Jupiter’s two-faced moon trailing its orbit
‘Teach my walking soul’

Night’s the ground beneath my feet
since I learned to walk with you.
Scented guide with birds and flowers on your breath,

Our competing lifestyles lost us the Australian double
that semester. And couldn’t we then arrange
to do the other, and was the desert that limitless,
and why not say so? You see, griping comes naturally

The ice-cream headache has you seeing double
as Goody Twoshoes calls by your table to arrange
some kind of smooth-talk conference full of limitless
possibilities, lots of cocktails, two naked men and naturally