All Events: Poetry

we looked away,
just a quick glance at a passing gull
was all, and you were gone.

we could look away
because our little craft was wide,
steady and sea-worthy, most reliable.

silence except for a slight swoosh of water
a sighing suck, the softest noise
signifying your leave-taking.

we thought about you of course,
joyful with mermaids on daring dolphin
rides through effervescent white caps, bubbling.

no fish took our bait or tugged
at slippery lines; nothing disturbed the anchor
chaining us to the rocky seabed, but

late in the rippling afternoon under a soft sun,
a slight tremble broke the surface near the shore line.
clams opened, lobsters scuttled and we knew

then we knew, without a doubt that
you had joined the mermaids singing and sirens luring
men to watery depths. in our wooden hull
we knew then
that you were playing near watery seaweed fronds
and had joined in games among the pearly oysters.

perhaps when the cusp of the moon
sits low and stars jewel the waters, you will visit us.
we won’t look away, we promise.

it’s hard to remember summer.
The wind is a baying dog. It lobs next door’s bin
over my fence—the TV’s on the blink, Rick Stein’s head
flat against the sky, jaw stretched below his chest.
His teeth, piano keys.            Autumn was best,
my cheeks rust-red like when my sister bitch-slapped me
when we were kids—I was a sitting duck for her rage. I’d try
to cut and run before her next cold front moved in—hide
in the tangle of wonga wonga vine, its
bell-shaped flowers and honey-musk
a balm to soothe my open wounds while
they scabbed over

stained to the sea
of papertrain throughfares
and thoughts of a felling conscious
we drank a cold keirin, and
bit back the slow buzz of summer’s night
tune into radio.i96.4G a backburn mirage of cicada’s, citronella, cackles of cockatoos striking the
first dark lights
before the dishes were done,
before the spat of olive oil,
or mel’s laundry was wrung,
we married the simple straight limbs of chopsticks
kimchi ferments
and oolong tea,
quiet in the corner, as the orange bloom
peeled behind Mt keira
and tuned into the night
do you hear the crackle of their speech?
behind powerlines and swatches of roofs
tangled in the underblanket
of Wollongong suburbia
people, just like bats,
becalmed to the blue

The earth is wet leather, heavy leather
Smacks of voices, calling for the ball

Big oval lights and physical
contest After a long, fallow
season

The ridges of my shoes clean, un-mudded
With heel held to cheek of buttock

Maybe stretching
Maybe killing time between feeds

Legs not slender but powerful
Heavy with a fatness I can’t cure

After the long, dry season:
Wet shoes, flying earth, exhaustion and pain

In the year of my pregnancy
Her limbs grew so long they wound

Under my body and turned purple
She’s born helpless

In the beginning, there’s no
beginning Because we’re awake and
outside time

Now I persuade my stride
open As if running were easy

I slipped on your memory in the kitchen last week,
caught my ribs on the edge of your absence,

you split my chest with slick fingers,
parting hot muscle like a ten-dollar chicken

skillful with a carcass, you clambered out of the cavity
shaking gristle like it was stuffing.

I gripped cold marble as you crunched across boneyard tiles
to grab a mop (you were always practical), then

passed the silver bucket like a silent reproach,
left me holding an empty question; buckled in half.

Mother, how long must I sweep?

No claustrophobia in the cushioned casket
below on the freight deck
lying cold as the surrounding black sea
oblivious to the rhythmic engines
intoning a heartbeat for dad’s return voyage away
East from Port Jackson and us.
On that last leg he missed Neptune’s appearance above decks
crossing the Equator, where he previously roistered,
Sydney-bound, in late ‘41.

Sailed past tarnished Liberty’s sputtering torch
to a familiar New York dock
& trucked upriver to the Mohawk Valley
as forests swayed, robed
gold and red in ceremony.
He was laid in his childhood ground
where an Iroquois stone arrowhead turned up
and later a deerslayer’s musket ball,
as the diggers opened his destination.

Our shattered family, like Morrrison sang
“never never never wondered why lord!”,
that his proprietorial aunt persuaded mum,
before her six months in Callan Park,
that his remains must remain
half a world away…
to placate her family ghosts.

Rudderless, we drifted on:-
a devastated widow’s weeping memories,
a daughter’s infantile recollections
& my “Boys’ Own” reminiscence
of his nine years with me until,

twenty years on, this scribing hand
rested on his cool granite headstone,
in lieu of a handshake.

I remember at six
salivating for the
thin layer of flesh
lining the shell like a silky membrane.
The green coconut cleaved in two,
Dad’s cane knife dead in the grass.

I remember at eight
swinging on a tyre
at an evening barbecue,
letting the darkness hide
the shame of sucking so deeply
the bone and flesh of another animal.

I remember at 10
licking in secret
each steel lock latched on
affordable holiday Bures
lined up in rows;
a hankering for iron in my blood.

I remember at 25
lying in bed listening
to heavy rain squeezing
through plaster and paint,
the release of sweet contentment after making love, then
then     pure terror:
salivating licking sucking squeezing all at once;
my power lying still by my side.
The truth about a family friend,
buried deep in my 16-year-old soul –
this empty feeling of being
at childhood’s end.

At 54, I remember it all, every detail, and I don’t want to

but
the memories – they
arrive as they please
like waves of nausea.

*The title is taken from the first line of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, ‘Little Red Cap’, 1999

If it can ascend from the sea floor
like a postcard from the deep
to wrap thick thighs around the skull
of the fastest shark in the southern hemisphere,
pierce the mirrored meniscus with its mantle
and graze its cheeks
upon a swift and sweeping sky;

If one vagrant mollusc with three beating
hearts can hitch a lift
mutiny the sea for a ship
with top speeds of 50km/h,

form a fellowship of muscle and cartilage,
navigate nothingness, uncamouflaged,
dissolving blue borders
like a wet page;

If an octopus can reach through a screen,
pull me upwards like a prayer; then

what might surface, next?

ⁱ In response to * Watch an Octopus Hitch a Ride on a Shark—an Unusual Duo Dubbed the ‘Sharktopus’

Last night’s full moon, a white-ink well,
overflowed its spill onto the sleeping sea
which woke this morning, seething,
stirred from some disturbing dream,
beneath a smeary blotting-paper sky,

feverishly foamed last evening’s lunar slick
into strokes and curls of cursive scrawl
to scroll across the restless spread,
its warnings rippling to the deckled edge
and cast in scribbled notes upon the shore.

All along the sand the tidal etchings
left by ragged rims of angry waves
with empty, broken shells, dead fish,
seagrass heaps, beached whales—
all traces of the sea’s concern

for its escalating temperature,
for its perilously changing life—
are left unread, trodden on
by countless barefoot soleprints
of heedless people strolling idly, while

the ocean booms its tidings ceaselessly
in reams of rolling ink-frothed waves
like some relentless printing press,
and hurls its diatribe at edging rocks,
throwing white-ink slogans to the sky,

seizes land with raging thrust and drag,
deleting its neglected sand-scrawled messages
then retreats, exhausted, spent,
all its white ink gone; sunk, it seems,
like skeletons of dead bleached coral.

remember when she tottered, sand swayed away, how
we hawkeyed and leapt in sinking seconds to reac
legs up and belly roll, her head awash with waves
my heart a cavity in shock

short arms like bouncing buoys and finger aerials
we lifted her from air-less-ness, drowning a brief
moment of splutters and our cries

we rescued our fears for hopes: but how lives echo,
any future embrace is another toddler’s stagger
and to fall into the failing dunes

our lives in subliminal blinks, replays of frame
on frame of peripatetic lifelong glimpses
of any future survival panics
~~
for splashes into fate’s intentions on my thoughts
I watch you dress your dressing on the left breast scar,
on a soft snare drum skin, you pat

like slow strokes on a sick kitten, when fingers dwell
on the right your eyes fix on mid distance, ready
as if to guess the time to come

you say hands are silent rescuers a future
when you hold the doctor’s confirmation, only
scar tissue not breakout hardness— (let loose in soft tissue ducts.)
yesterday washed away like the failing dunes