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Dorothy Porter
Dorothy Porter (1954-2008) was an Australian poet, author and librettist. She won numerous awards, including the 2006 Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2001 FAW Christopher Brennan Award, and the 1994 Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize. Two of her verse novels were shortlisted in the Miles Franklin Award: What a Piece of Work (2000) and Wild Surmise (2003). The final publication before her death from cancer at age fifty-four was El Dorado, a verse novel that was nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2007 and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards.
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Waiting.Starched hospital gown.Frozen present tense.Why am I smellingtigers?
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In living there is always the terror of being stung
of something coming for you on the unavoidable wave.
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In living there is always the terror of being stung
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Until this morningI’ve been woken upby a red wattle birdflinging himselfat the glassof my half-open windowcalling throatilywith raucous cheekas he prances the woodof my balcony rail
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This six a.m. momentin the cool-blue coolof early morningis not eternal.
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Waiting on a reeking strange railway station –then the dead-quiet but crowded night ferry.
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We were never married, Dido.Cease weeping, let me leave and agreewe both knew real spouses.
Even as the ghost of my precious wife passedthrough my clutching arms like mistI swear on my soul I could taste her.
O the scorch of lost Trojan morningsin our rumpled bed with bread, figsand, yes, honey!
I could taste honeyas if every bee in Troyhad made her phantom its swarming hive.
Of course I will ... (read more)
It’s the silence. Even by the river, my ears are straining. It’s the silence. At this moment it’s a warmish humid silence with the grass outside lushly mesmerising the eye. Then there’s the drone of a fly. And the hum of the fridge. And down by the river at dawn, where I sat watching this morning’s mist melt over the water with the poet Judy Beveridge, there was suddenly from the far ban ... (read more)