Maribyrnong
(or When Light Becomes a Character)

fruit-bounce of basketballs
against bitumen
punctuates linseed sun
sliding off us—
when light is like a body
like a wall that blocks
the very light it throws
with alarming consistency

how can we speak of light
of its mortar and coils so
tirelessly the heat spun on our
faces targeting sight targeting
what it allows wiping out
vision so we head into
the black of light
exploding our heads
the river like a skin besides
whose breath imperceptible
shivers and throws off
its own garment of honed light.

fathers walk their babies
speak to them in that
exotic tongue of parenting
dogs sniff and collide,
mocking the very-human earnestness
of their blundering keepers.
the light is a hand on your face
a palm to lick and bite
we hold our faces so still
gazing out over the river
four figures teeter
on the cusp of diving
off a bridge through light
into that giving skin of water
calling in voices full of fright
and peaking thrill.

a couple hold hands
appear to smile
but you pass them and she says:
why are you never sad?
and he really replies:
because I am tough and their
close bodies bounce
through the cradling light
calm in the fatuity
of thorough explanation.

you would eat light
but for the likelihood
that you yourself would be digested.
you have no explanation
for its bundles rods cogs or hives
but know it steers you hand and face
back home
through its liquid body.

The Widow

At eighty-three
her husband passed away
and so
unable to stay home alone
she goes with them
to the restaurant
on the thoroughfare.
There, among the tables
she takes small steps,
with her yellow cup
and circulates
in fleecy trousers
grey like her hair.
The latter is cut
squarely, simply
to frame her face
which seems not old.
After her constitutional
on the tiles
she takes a table
facing the door
and watches patrons
squeezing through
with their companions
and containers.
Her daughter works the till,
trails a nail down her cheek
under the eye when asked,
while the widow, straight backed
and certainly smiling
looks out past neon
into soundless lights
that veer and tack
breaching night’s
confinements.

Driving

this is a poem for you, dad—
your driving us on those afternoons
for ice cream and from memory to
triangular parks
in country towns
with swings
and dangerous
straight-edged slides

now I drive this city
with wheels' gravity
tugging at the taffy-road
one eye on brake-lights, the other
shunting tape into the player
that’s making words slip and groan
guitars going funny
little cheap cogs spinning too slow

but sometimes
she plays at the right speed
and I fly around corners
looking horses straight in the teeth
and fence posts and Barbed-wire
(who was this “Barbara”?)
while an epic of love
or reckless giving-way
works like ear fuel,
like engineering’s oil in me

and I understand why
you’d head out on those trips
skiting number of kilometres
from obscure-location
to unheard-of-place
fucking your back
(making the chiro rich)
sitting in the shuddering
driver’s seat alone,
but also not so

since there’d ’ve been
paddocks full of chlorophyll light,
sun squeezing hot
like mercy, like grace
through the horizon gap
blinding you to
any limitation, to scepticism,
to caution, to fact

I called you this morning
after your latest trip—
driving the coast in all that driving rain
asked you what you had planned for your day
and you replied – sounding
something, sounding tired
– that firstly you’d ponder
where you fit in the world
then later, weather permitting,
mow the lawn.

Eight Thousand

Today eight thousand
(she writes it in words)
people were turned away from safety.
This number is bigger than we can cope with.
A tree probably has fewer leaves.
She tries to imagine those conditions
– on the boats, in their brains –
and cannot (bear to)
feels ridiculous and ashamed.
Checks her phone.
Watches a couple smoke around their child.
Instead.
She wants to write somewhere:
let's not only allow them in
let's treat them better than wonderful.
(Where would she write it?)
It's called Hospitality.
Religions knew it, before God died,
and the 'I' was split in two by time.
(Philosophy’s fine, but you have to remember your manners.)
How about a counter-intuitive approach?
Do what seems to make no sense in this moment – now and here.
Be extravagant.
Jean Valjean received the silver, didn't he?
(Don't theatre crowds understand that plot twist?)
Do something that Cannot Even Begin
to be explained.
Practise extreme kindness on large numbers of people.
What you fear
is not certain.
The fear flies away like pollen.
Leaves you yellow and dusted.
Strewn among togetherness.
We’ve been mistaking what counts, what is urgent.
It is urgent that we stop counting.
Revise your logics.
In the face of urgency, slow every gesture.
Numbers need
to be returned to their beauty.
In the face of fear, recall
it's not your life
that matters particularly.
Recall being frightened.
Give it that name.
Be clear and audacious
Be soft.
Cultivate considered
(not brittle) boundaries.
Invent a way.
What if a number of Serious
and Set-Up People
agreed to have them in their homes?
We could call it 'House Arrest'.
The government might buy it?
—The papers?
Unused bathrooms could be dusted off,
spare sets of Villeroy, the guest wings.
Those wings would unfurl
like the creaking limbs of angels.
There would be ripples of unruliness.
And condescension. Sure.
Domestic strife,
alongside moments of accidental grace.
Super complicated.
But what's not complicated, these days?
We can't seem to think straight.
Our thinking has all curled up,
like the snares on wire.
I fell from a roof at four,
onto a fence, and bled.
Wounds from that wire stay forever.
And when you touch the calamari scar of it,
weird sensations wake in your body.
How many memories do we want to make?
They wake in bodies
to make new worlds
that may not be able
to take us in.

Blue Days
after Louise Bourgeois

Our heart lies
within neither of us,
within no one.
We orbit around
its independent body
like a close sun
which we
do not catch
out of an eye’s corner
throwing fruit-red light
across all dishevelled
knowns and resolutions.

Always there
even when other orbits
pull us towards
vertiginous whites
where maps
or tiles or stitching
are required.
(Clothing holds certainly
the dust of constellations
more articulately than words.
I’d bury my head,
my face, in yours.)

We hang there quietly:
breathing planets
reaching speeds of light
despite deceptive stillness
at surface of skin
to discover finally
what’s orbited is
a rhythm, not a thing.
Were you near, I’d place
an ear to your chest,
and beyond the crystallised
hoops that contain you,

listen to your galaxies,
your originary hum,
your interstellar momentum.

that part

the way a clock and I
didn’t notice somehow
the way the bodies
held night against
the table legs
(with a shelf, it had)
that part of the bird
that processes anger

we discussed pudding and
this definition of a cold sweet thing
was misplaced by me
— small shoes, small shows of
brown and grey and the pale blue
we collected in Berlin

that part of the animal
that collects feelings

a drizzling day beneath a heavy tree
following a drive into amplitudes
we knew then the membranes
and everything rested
drew out a sigh
from what till then
had been a mother of a mix-up

she will read a poem
and that cousin
will stand nearby
on certain occasions
glass turns to water and sky
to sand and we watch

blades cutting up our
height as if it could
dispel a saturation
we refuse to answer for
always tired
always tired
the part of the human
that processes the iterable

grabbed
at thighs that remember
everything
finger tips going
slush-slush
in a stream of

do you remember that day
that screamed-yellow day
walking feet bare
in the cold creek
near the house of Bertolt
Brecht?