Bottles in gutters, alley cats on the slink under streetlamps that crystallise in the corners of my eyes — shopping trolleys gliding by like giant legless ice skates — this brittle night taken out of the fridge — it’s spring but cold still, still as glass. Sobering up, a breeze … Continue reading
for my father; and his Sucking dentures, whistling ‘A Boy Named Sue’, my father constructed cold frames, terminuses —one metre x one metre x one metre, four facets, and a crown, hinged and flat, threaded with sparkling wire—of the dark Goliath dwarfing his father’s orchard since seventy-seven. Come winter they’d clack like men across a … Continue reading
The oranges made a gorgeous, swollen pile. —Fiona McFarlane, The Night Guest 10:15 on a Saturday night: my housemate’s asleep, Tiger Coils roil an air wet as whelps (a bitch yelps), Mulder’s chest hair exposes itself like clockwork. Grindr trills Bud what ya into Familiar thrill. in general? in bed? Whatevs HAHA proving his youth. I … Continue reading
even sunstruck the ribs rise from Bennelong Point like Arthur C. Clarke’s black slab I storm the frets, stopping only to whirl when your aperture’s cocked at my spine this hair’s a tornado of sand ridiculous, you needle, a blond gothic no licks of laughter (Father, Son, Ghost shedding Prozac) my Scorpio sting: fuck off, … Continue reading
for Michelle Cahill Some evenings are this fragile. Rainbow lorikeets court baroque chords creaking in my nest of bones. You wrote to wrap my limbs. Morning will sprinkle the conifers, Which of us abandoned the other? We cannot answer with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth? Some days we trust more than desire, … Continue reading
(in memory of Val Plumwood) The sound of crows is known to us for its mournfulness, its insistent black edge to a bright world. There was a day when she stepped into a clearing and surprised crows at their other speech, the cheerful joyous rapture they know from time to time when no one is … Continue reading
Hanging upside down perched in its own Heaven the cricket sings: “I have eaten and am full. This is good.” Does it sing for us? Possibly. If we too have been touched all over by fire If we have balanced for hours on the infinite porosity of earth and know what it’s like to be … Continue reading
Apologising to unicorns is problematic. They rarely understand our purposes. Tenderness will often be seen as the manipulative gestures of a fear that seeks death – for itself and others. Unicorns sleep most comfortably in heavy traffic where the hum of self-absorbed commuters leaves them invisible. To find a unicorn in a forest is like … Continue reading
Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits. What does it matter that I … Continue reading
Anyone who has died that I knew: I can feel their essence. Still here. It’s not a thought or a memory I am having. It’s a feeling. They are here, with me. They are abiding. My grandmothers, my grandfather, my dearest father. Even the boy who fell off a cliff when I was at school. … Continue reading
Was there ever any way This plump and comely assassin— Named for all knowing and unknowing—would not know how To meet all prying with a look both tender And intense, both Peaceful and implacable, merciful and savage—sad, Yes, but by no means sorry— Surprised but not unduly— Across the threshold of her forest lodge? … Continue reading
No one is going to come and save you. And because of this you must fold your clothes at day’s end despite the urge to abandon them to the backs of chairs. You must shake the crumple of sleep from the sheet. You must clean your teeth. Wash the teaspoons. Fold your pyjamas too and … Continue reading
We thank the clouds that come and go and sometimes linger We thank the cumuli for the brooding that arrests our busyness our preoccupations We thank the storm clouds for our passions and the lightning that splits the dead stumps our hearts had become, opens them to the rain We thank the quills of cirrus … Continue reading
They are a stand of bitter wisdom trees eyes revolving inwards like moons beguiling faces smiling down upon us. They don’t mention (or only in passing) the ways the world is slipping from them: the deft departure of the boyhood friend, the driver’s license routinely revoked, the inability to leave the bath without resting —shamefully—on … Continue reading
for Germaine Greer after the Festival of Dangerous Ideas In the cut lip of the coliseum within its raised arches of white I came, in twenty-twelve, to see you fight. For every man who loves to loathe is a woman who loves to love: my mother made you our household god. And I believed she … Continue reading
In the abandoned hours, I can hear The boorish sibilance of garbage trucks On their rounds. The shy, nocturnal air Builds a brittle nest with strands of fear. Insomniac crickets tick, like manic clocks, In the unmown expanse of the vacant lot Where, last week, on the razor grass, A young woman was raped And … Continue reading
Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets we wear at the edges of burial plots. I’ve read stories of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher to an inch of rain. For weeks, I’ve watched you plane the sky’s bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes into a straight-cut … Continue reading
She looked so pretty in her blue jacket and shoes. Colours make me happy, she said. And you make me happy, I said. Or I wish that’s what I had said. All the colours have passed out of her now, like blue leaves drifting down from the trees. © Richard James Allen “Explosively powerful … Continue reading
For Chee and Stephen Who I was in the past, Who I will be in the future – What distractions these are From who I am now. Who I am now, Here, with you. In this moment, You have rewritten my past. You are rewriting my future. What I don’t understand about Who I was … Continue reading
of course the trees are my friends they are like me ~ busy busy bees growing in slow motion they embrace me when I enter the garden they remember that I water them they teach me how to be still they teach me how to be busy busy busy only very very slowly they teach … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 