I should be writing,
So of course—
First I ate a ripe mango
All by myself, juice
Dripping down my chin
Spoon sliding down skin.
Then I admired my own thighs
For a hot minute.
Then my calves, hips, shapely
Rear like an apple
Rounding me out
Because we should all be
Well-rounded.
Soaked the roots of my
Flowering orchid—
Even though I’ll have to cut it back soon—
Lavender finely-veined, shot through
With ripe, exquisite blackberry.
Mystical colors glowing in the late summer’s
Evening, grown long and heavy.
Danced in the kitchen, baked
Pie,
Thought of you with a grin
On my face and then
Wrote this poem.
The mosquitos sucked on our legs and told us
you’re going to have a heart attack someday.
We chose our palms and our shoulders and
the combination of those two and we went for
groceries and a tin of gravy for our littlest one
behind our tucked away door the garden of
our youthfulness like wine going dry going
smoke in curves hitting this point and that
setting off all our alarms and we tire we rest.
We hand over our bodies once again and it
is the most born healing we feel besides the
dam failure laughter proving that yes life has
a way and yes we find our way along with it.
We put our heads together and for once the
crickets stop and we are a mess and children
again doing the only thing we know how to do.
What exactly is there other than that.
The mosquitos told us we would fall in that
maze due to exhaustion and the flies would
get too much we would be overwhelmed
swatting at once-there shooting at guns at
dust in the bushes again like they want us to.
All that stuff under the skin roots when it does
the same good stuff day and then day and then
day and keeps doing the same good stuff
for a lot of days and that is pretty simple.
The mosquitos didn’t count on the almost
unconscious crawling to traction then breathing
just breathing then talking then leaking then
touching then fondling then folding then
sleeping then winning then standing after
a victory seat on that bench and a precision
swat pinning the whisper killer to the public
wood to be scoffed away like we
scoffed it away.
Fans of hot air
assail and accost us,
as we powerlessly sleep,
trembling in the hot,
sticky from the heat.
I do not want to touch you.
I want to cry and thrash about
and beg you to close out
any oppressive light.
In the cool shade
I will clutch you, and lick
the salty sweat from your shoulders.
Summer is unkind to lovers,
who cannot kiss in feverish days,
and only lie still in the flu of night,
while cicadas hum,
and moth’s wings flutter
against the street-lamps
someone forgot to turn off.
(the sale of fireworks was outlawed in Victoria in 1982)
What a shame
we can no longer
celebrate Guy Fawkes night:
build a fiery mountain
in our back yard;
set off penny bangers,
skyrockets and jumping jacks;
make a letter box explode;
blind a mate in the eye;
blow off one of our fingers.
The sign says ‘no jesus no hope’ —
plastic letters in June sun wilting,
stretching as if in prayer, a sad
salutation to the earth amened by
a woman watering dirt near her trailer.
In grief, the ground refuses to drink &
a stream divides the bank to join
the river in murmuring confirmation,
all hope abandoned because no man
ever rose the same as the sun;
all hope dispelled by graveyard dirt
& roots, the hydra’s tongues & teeth
sunk deep into a moaning vowel,
lacing the stays of generations with
telephone line, hands cupped
& colored by dishwater & blood;
hope unrecoverable in the rough
valleys of age cut by fields & parlors
& spring dances, at once young & old
& same as the last; nothing more
pointless than the agile fingers of
daughters who sewed flowers
into their petticoats to be found
by lovers needlessly sowing
tomorrow’s fields; no hope
in blooming & rotting, in becoming
like every other green & vibrant thing;
despair like the water that cuts the hill &
divides the ground that cannot hold it;
unheard like prayers spelled out in plastic,
meaningless as any other words
if we were only intended to grow
these bones before giving them up.
He smoulders over perfidy and putrefaction. My brother,
back from saving the world. He witnessed children
made to work like slaves in emerald mines in Brazil,
forests stripped and water polluted, while hired thugs
‘keep peace’ for multinationals. Poison, he tells me,
gets papered over with silky PR, policies and promises.
Soldier of no fortune, he calls himself, bringing his fervent
crusader gaze to my small orbit of life and compromise.
We were raised country, with church on Sundays
but I haven’t been for years. The old stories seemed
suspect when it came to women: Eve’s bad rap;
and how about Lot’s wife? Turned to salt, but all she did
was look back to check on friends, a home she cherished,
the hearth she had kindled to a household. All left instead
when angels took her by the hand, to a rain of burning sulphur.
So, it’s his talk of hellfire and brimstone that shocks me
more than his bearded pallor, the weary approximation
of the easy ways we used to have. The new processing
plant down the road he calls a boil on the county’s ass,
a festering furuncle. Hyperbole to make me smile,
but his eyes are animate with righteous blaze.
He wants to cut losses, says the township’s in ruination,
like the planet. Little worth in our old home, just four walls,
gnarled fruit trees and fields gone fallow in nursing home years.
I see green on the farm pond brilliant as gemstones, while he
sniffs the fetid stench of scum, another scourge on the land.
I’m the one who’s taking the house in hand. I sweep
and scrub, wash walls and light fixtures, haul junk
to the dump by the truckload. I walk the orchard, ponder
how I might prune the topiary tangle of his intensity,
snip it back to the shape of the brother I knew. This farm
is our legacy. I can’t hover at an auction, watch alone
as our parents’ treasures sell. I guess I’m becoming
sentimental; I need us both to take just one look back.
Your eyelids make for shelter
and the expulsion of sound
from your vocal chords
remind me of the evening
I swore that your breathing
was the one alarm I looked
forward to waking up to.
I can’t tell what keeps you warm
on evenings where mattresses
seem four times larger
but the only thing I want
wrapped around you
tighter than your beads
is my arms.
I want to trade
your nose ring
for the front tip of my lips
so I can feel the heat
of your breath on my chin
and know where to flow from
when I decide to find out
what flavours of lip gloss
you have been trying out lately.
I send my mind on voyages
as I yearn to stumble on ways
to get around the diameters of you,
there are no memories
out here to attempt
confusing themselves with dreams
but I reach out for any
faint images that would
grace me with an idea
of what it would feel like
to get lost in you while
searching for gold in damp places.
Slow breathing, grabbing,
incoherent tones that speak of discovery,
Torsos learning the art of symmetry,
Colliding pulse rates, indicative
of hearts that won’t mind being in sync
toes finding space to
stretch across each other
Oxygen traded for units of carbon
eyes engaged in rendezvous
with just enough room
for sweaty noses to fall in warm embrace.
These days I find it hard
to tell what is good for me
or what is just thorns guised as pineapples
but I can say for sure
that I know where my head
craves to be
under bulbless rooms by 11.52pm,
and when the world stops
leaving my mouth agape
as my hair brushes the clouds
I am fully aware of
the two brown rocks
that I want to be seen clutching
solemnly in my final hours.