Poems
A dappled curve, fringed with
wattles to the left,
though the right-hand path, solid
rock, was the one.
A gang of cones hangs before me, long and cylindrical,
neither dark nor light – the colour of Milchkaffee.
One would overfill my palm. Last night the field
reinvented itself as one of those beds we lie down in
I stood in the hidden holding with my keys safe from judgement in my leaving he asked me to stand back it wasn’t worth explaining me to his ex my brother-in-law preyed on me relentlessly I held the baby in my arms it was happy in my arms healthy he said it was only once I looked at the baby called only once
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Freaking twice, in real life by a grey-green beauty
with sapphire eyes;
their rockpool laboratory ankle-deep under a headland
in a state of collapse.
Someone has left the day wide open here
But no one ever comes to mow the grass.
A man stands out of earshot, just a flash
At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.
Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant battering
and steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.
Life shivers between yourself and us: help us to stretch
toward the kingdom of our burrows in the earth: we’ll never occupy
again the silk-soft that was a womb, but we wander the night grass with you,
searching for a tenderness, an innocence at birth: until the quiet winds cut
the quiet breath from your mouth and your hindquarters stamp, Quickly, I must go —
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Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit
quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting
only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold,
to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
A citizen of a difficult
memory, I travel at the full speed
of sleep. In my coat pocket: a fruit knife
to peel the sun, a wine
And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.
Ovid via John Dryden*
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