Lit.-Mag #36
Home & Homecoming

A million years of patience and dust

Brood Sow

for Christine Lavant

The neck. Sour. I brood above it.
Sparkly in the tree. Tap of hammers.
Men at my gate swing God.
Over the fence. I keep on farming.
To drown the icon in goatseed.
No bank accounts here. Stunted.
A pen for misery’s river. Joy.
It takes a lot of observation.
Through windows the fact of moons.
I bend them to be always full.
Brooding. Mystery is a spirit.
Conserve it. Men’s feet go high.
Doesn’t mean their tongues matter.
My neck has kept me thin.
Filled with indiscretion. Crows.
I live against the door that shuts.
Brood sow breathing sacred words.

The Driest Place on Earth

a million years of deserts

a million years of patience
of rock and dust

a million years of collecting dew

until nightfall, the world
passing my lips

then night, a very short march

thirst

the moon falling three times
before the crack of dawn

three times onto the sea
fighting to rise
into the imagination

a little fishing village
surrounded by nets
of fog

divers falling into a fertile sea
free and unarmed

climbing only the mountains
what they have

sheep dying for the flowers
of the pastures

dressing the heart
while it beats

dressing it in leaves

millions of years of oxygen
of copper and punishments

millions of years of shock
and eternal spring

wine and preserved skin

a desert comforting
the toenails and skull

bodies like rocks
with their encrusted hands

jewels, time

other ideas

but a million years of numbers
falling, drops

only measured particularly
the numbers of octopus
pulled from the rock

every thirty-one years
enough water to ask
if anyone felt the rain

and your lips, the driest place
on earth

a million years of patience and dust

of my lips collecting dew

My Mysterious Home – To Be Happy

In my mysterious home
the lighthouse spins its light
in search of me

A fisherman laughs with his boat
He’s caught three stones with a flower
and has come looking for my oven

When his knock falls at the door
like an old tree
I gather together my capillaries

It’s been a hard year
in my mysterious home

Sounds have been circling
Doing the rounds like children

Watch-me-birds dive
for the tongue and the wrists

They’ve dragged away the fresh flesh
I was storing in my thighs
for the visitors

There’s been no lovers, no dogs

Not even silent dogs from dreams
where I don’t want those people
with less to smile about than me
to smile

The managers

The truly true

Always in the light
when they want to be

First time the light fell on me
in my mysterious home
I forget about how it actually feels

I might not even have been alive then
but did see a fish flip
to be happy

I Am Lost

I am lost in magic and it is real.
What is the possibility that you are honey?
What, a cherry blossom
or Chinese characters fluttering
like blackbirds down a white canvas?

When I see you drinking a glass of water
your throat is like butterflies.
When I watch you dressing you disappear
into what you appear to be.
I say yes to you all the time.

I am completely lost in my second love for you.
My first wandered away and did not come back.
On days when there is no magic
we look at that first love, far away
at the ends of the earth.

It is possible it returns our gaze.
That its dread of being seen
is like a small mouthful of wine or dew
that is savoured but unable
ever to be swallowed.

It is possible but we do not worry.
We are buried alive in each other
and the caves and mountains and worries
of this world are like distance to us.
And we are here.

Like dogs with long tongues
we drink and gambol and sleep as if dead.
Our only longing is to see the other’s dreams.
You, you.
And me, me.

The Proper Grave

for Fernando Pessoa

Is filled with too many other people’s words.
But that is where you should rest
as you cannot with your own.
You little vegetable – in love with vegetables!
Shall there be given you an ear like a potato,
a tongue dreaming like a blind poem.
You little book sprung from roots
and welcoming the falling leaves.
Shall there be given you the fine layer of earth
that will make you sleep.
The proper grave where you cannot speak.

We All Live in Exile

As we live, it is always different.
Wind surprises us.
Our houses shelter us and provide targets.
Your shoulder is a poor shoulder.
It has many necessary fights to fight.
The fight of poverty. The fight of the full sea.
I recall it intimately. Shaking with laughter.
The only completely fearless thing is humour.
Love has no fear but is not of this life.
Remember the path and at the end of it?
Summer’s room, a world we never left.
That we could not leave even when taken.
Without our luggage. Without effort.
Taken from the table where we sat.
Like an orchestra, sitting as one.
You were my 420-year-old cello.
My hand always disappearing into the soup.
It was only a whisper that took us away.
A little cobweb from the corner.
We live and immediately live another life.
One far from here where we don’t know.
We don’t know who we are.

Lit.-Mag #36
Home & Homecoming

I live here too

Borrowed Landscape

Paddy Maguire’s Pub, near Chinatown, Sydney

The trees, that do not belong to me, on the hill,
that does not belong to me. This is my premise.

The people in a house that grew like a mushroom.
But with shattering noise! Oh yes! Look across

at us as if we have always existed – just like this.
But indeed we have not. And will not. No.

When I call on my airy familiars, they come to me, more
insubstantial than they used to be, but still. They come.

With – lightsome tread. Through landscape. Sometimes
in the guise of an animal or bird. Sometimes … sometimes …

… exactly what is about this city that I cannot
quite – quite – quite – dislike?

They are looking at me! The people! As they pass!
I can’t grasp, even with exhaustive intuition, Asian

postures, ways of being. I can read the Australians,
some with an Asian cast of feature. Some not.

A grandmother – I can tell that much – a grandmother
trots past flat-footed, the baby jogging on her back

stealing the look of me. All saved to file, on her hard drive.
The woman in the beer garden in the black hat … scribbling …

… scribbling. As she steals me, so I steal her.
The man (with his bitter mouth) has gone. Up!

And left! Taken his chance, picked his time.
So I would not notice him going. Although

I notice him gone. He is gone out as far as I
can imagine to the place where he lives his life.

The place that intersects with this. I am bold today.
I am imagining lives. Lives! Three whiskeys down!

Writing a poem – as if it is allowed! – thrumming with
the courage to impose – and claim – what is always mine!

Castle

O forgive me but I forget my name.
It was a long time ago when the men
came on horseback with their swords drawn.

I was a boy. Not a man.
There were plenty like me.
We did what we were told to do.

It might be to carry a plate of food
up into the light of the hall
where the people were.

And then, that day – I was underground –
I heard the noise and went upstairs
to see all the people killed.

The men – on horses – O
white and black and bay – drinking blood.
Nothing to do with me.

I sat all night on the bottom stair. I was cold.
And nothing stirred. Everybody dead.
At dawn I understood that they had killed me.

I got to my feet and walked away from the castle.
As I walked across the meadow towards you
the ones like me were waking from their sleep.

This is the house I find myself in

These apartments are all beautifully maintained.
One of them is in my husband’s name.
I saunter away along the top floor & see the old woman
with grease baked onto her gas cooker.
I did know other people would be living here:
it stands to reason. She does have a window &
she gazes out at the brick wall, stubbornly.
There is a much better view from the other side
of the building.
I don’t remember these stairs. Pitched steeply,
winding back on themselves, leading nowhere
purposefully. Likely back stairs for servants
But there are no servants. Any more. The old man
takes a shower in his jerry-built bathroom.
His haunches twitch. He soaps between his legs. Why does everyone
leave their door open? I don’t want to have to see into their rooms.
At last! The main staircase with that insolent, laconic curve.
& this friend of a friend
strides past me, three treads at a time – before I can find
breath to speak. Or lift a hand. He has come to live here:
found this house. He doesn’t seem to know I live here too.
We all live here. Well well. We’ll meet in the rose garden
adjacent to the fountain. Or he will reach for the knocker
to let it fall & boom inside the entrance hall as I approach
the porte-cochère.
He’ll turn and say – It’s you!
This is the staircase I have been looking for.
A cunning flight of stairs behind a secret door.
& here is my room after all. Four walls. But –
When I wake up I still believe in this house
my room: I plan to furnish it. & what to write.