Poetry
She trawls through reams of paper pinned in files,
stacked on shelves, heaved into the corners
of this study and other, larger rooms;
wades through spilling, perforated sheets
of printed data she cannot decipher
that concertina on the wooden floor,
stained with jam, sprinkled with old crumbs
and marked with tags that indicate some pattern
to his vanished thought – pained, slow research
that saw two hundred articles appear,
three or four a year, in august journals.
She knows the faintly sour smell of absence
that rooms so often hold after a death –
even a lonely life sweetens the air –
how furniture seems fixed when someone dies
Networked Language: Culture & history in Australian poetry by Philip Mead
The train to Leura early Sunday morning
and our compartment full of total strangers,
Russian-speaking hikers, boots and shorts,
and four Americans, I’d say, late sixties,
calling out the stations as they pass:
‘Melbourne was more interesting than this’,
‘The trees looked better across Portugal’,
‘I want to see a kangaroo today’.
And midway through the first course
of pickled fish in the restaurant
by the river that night
slid a black on black
barge
under the brilliantly lit
bridge
I’ve been woken up
by a red wattle bird
flinging himself
at the glass
of my half-open window
calling throatily
with raucous cheek
as he prances the wood
of my balcony rail ... (read more)