HER CLEAR MIND
Seeing her he realised
her mind was clear;
even he reflected there
for only a few seconds
and was gone.
Clear were all the facets
in her life — her career,
the child at the crèche,
the upwardly-mobile husband,
the volunteer work.
And this is how she did it:
a mind of elastic sanity,
where pure action rose like
a spring and glided over
ordinary everyday fears.
Not for her a divided self, the
stain of little bruises
left by the inheritance of
the irreconcilable.
FROM WHERE I SIT
From where I sit I can see
the morning suburb,
edge to edge in autumn sun,
grey roofs like beached whales,
a patchwork of lawns, concrete paths,
scarlet and mustard rings
beneath denuded trees,
blue canopy of eucalyptus.
The job, cleaning the gutters:
on top the newly shed leaves,
then the smaller thatch,
sitting all in a rich mucus
of leaf and twig.
It is clotted
where the down pipe falls.
Two hands pull back the tile.
The deposit comes out like a nest
oozing black juice.
With a hand made as a claw
the choke at the bend is cleared.
The cat arrives, sniffs,
measures the intrusion
in his aerie for watching,
possuming, strange rites,
(evidence of defecation).
He smooches, doe-eyed,
nibbles a hand,
paddles with bravado,
the thin lip of tile
above the twenty foot drop.
In silence and fellowship
we finish the job, then rest;
enjoy the remoteness from
the comings and goings,
the shuttling of kids to sport,
the two-job wives to the supermarket,
the late season mowing,
the frail couple
on their morning walk.
STAGNATING
You run into an old friend
in the department store, she
distilled from the lees of losing
touch.
“What are you doing now?” she asks.
“Stagnating” sprouts from startled lips
and then plumbs back
resounding on some bone of truth.
She had a new job, looked handsome,
been to Italy - she had always led
an interesting life.
Why couldn’t she have passed ten
seconds earlier, remained a memory.
Now where that memory was
STAGNATING flutters on a pike.
TWO POEMS THAT BELONG TOGETHER
At eleven
Even he at eleven
can see the absurdity;
the pose, the locked-in life,
the essential powerlessness
of life past prime.
We represent nothing
really; night watchmen
prowling empty premises,
mice nibbling in our stomachs.
Father or mother, there
hasn’t been either around
for a long time.
Hence the back chat, the cheek,
the urge to demolish.
Cultivation
Save your breath.
To talk about Beethoven
to an eleven year old
in the same sentence
as that music demeans
the very thing
you believe in.
He can’t see it and
no amount of rhetoric laced
with calls upon musical
experts will make him see.
Beethoven doesn’t want him,
at least not for a long
time.
Only you have that
tenuous claim.
FRIENDS
You see them quite often,
the old friends;
like old books, they
sit on the shelf of
past life yellowing,
acidy, unread;
like the one I saw
the other day in the
bookshop; we glanced,
but choose not to
open each other.
ONIONS AT CHRISTMAS
They were planted in the community garden
midwinter as little slivers of green with
white wispy ends. I had watered them
and watched them swell into plump
reddish white bulbs handsome
in their bed of sun-kissed soil.
Too nice even to pull up, to end their
repose, to amend that special relationship
between the grower and the grown; but
one hot summer night at watering time
they were gone, those little ones removed by
a felonious unthinking hoon to grace another pot
or sliced into another Xmas salad.
It is much safer to buy them at the markets.
