Poem
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;
Listen, Lesbia!
Surely you can hear.
Shake off that silly hangover
while I part the curtains
just slightly.
Our landlord’s man has let us off this time,
We’re not expelled.
Victorians liked their mortar made with lime,
Our walls have held.
The Shorter Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus by Gaius Valerius Catullus, translated by A.D. Hope
Hooded eyes, eyelashes thinning, she tailgates a semi,
keeping up with him in case she breaks down.
The truckie has her measure in his rear-view mirror –
In the beginning he’d herd people
clocking up the hours in apartments
above and below him but they heard sink
and shower sounds and turned on washing
machines that spurted later while he was
on the job he’d reconsider part one of
his partner’s apparent lack of funding
proposal paperwork a black mark