I came home after a long long time and in the hallway
I bumped into a seventeen year old girl.
I said ‘it’s me’ but she shook her head like
there was water in her ears and salt in her eyes.
I said ‘it’s okay’ but she looked at me blankly.
I said ‘it won’t kill you’ but she hurried past
and turned that dark corner.
In the room I grew up in
I opened a wardrobe and an old friend fell out,
the yearbook photos where we sat side by side
staring the camera down. Arrogant and eagle-eyed.
That year it rained and I wore his jacket
until it smelt like him and me and his hair
and my smile
I often think I left half of me
in my mother’s cupboard;
as a child I would inch open the ill-fitting
white-peeling wood and look at small dusty
bottles of coriander, vanilla extract,
cardamom,
bi-carb,
rosewater,
dye. I believe I thought of it as
all the potential of life itself
trapped within sticky-
lidded glass. An apothecary,
profound and intricate and strange.
I was so excited
by the one that seemed to be a vial of blood,
at the thought of dropping it
and staining the floorboards red.
I wanted to put all of it
in one of our heavy saucepans
with the handle Dad made of old piping
and boil it till it stung my eyes,
till some gr
There have always been hard, bright prophets
their words filling our mouths like
the tipping of sunlight
and wine.
There have always been Christs
placing two fingers under our chins and smiling,
blinking dust from kind and distant eyes.
We have always asked questions of the sky.
Someone has always tipped our faces up, and said: ‘Look –
look. There it is.’
This is what we find.
His parents were shouting,
and hated each other,
flush-jawed and aching across
the cheap table, the cheap hot rash
of kitchen air all filled with meat and
3 veg and everything else,
so the boy went outside,
where it was a desolate and bitter July,
with the paddock grasses of frost-slick knives;
went outside,
sat down,
drew his knees up to his chest
like a foetus
held loose
in the black coiling
womb of sky.
A mad neighbour shouted – a cow
lowed, a soft sad call.
He stayed sitting
for a while
kept small
kept his blood cool
until he'd lined his lungs
with winter, bright.
The men, they come into my home
loudly strung with all night’s stars,
all beer-glint, all roughly-bright;
they bring their heavy boots,
their boots and their heavy mud.
Their brassy, mirthful talk;
harvests and ale and golden things.
I have been in here alone,
excepting the dogs in their slumber,
husband,
husband’s brother,
and I have been spinning. And spinning,
and spinning;
spinning mice, and men,
and fates, and coarse
grey wool.
You clap each other’s backs,
the centre of your beings in the
largeness of your hands.
You bring the cold night’s mud
on to my floor.
I am the centre of your beings,
men,
I link you.
In Western Australia, it’s likely
that we have no prophets,
we have no damned,
there’s probably no heaven to be found –
only this dry and aching span,
roads laid down on burnt red dirt like tar-crossed,
humming brands. Only construction sites
laid open.
You know, this city, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t burn,
it only stands.
It is all, and endlessly, and only,
the slam of car doors being shut, the tradie’s
first cigarette, the mother’s
harassed reply, the toddler’s sticky
grasping hand, the tight and cerulean sky.
The freeway, the peeling tunnel,
the sloping oases of white sand.
To be content
with one night
is the hardest thing to swallow;
but I believe it may be possible
to look back on smeared stars
and softly smoke-spiced mouths
and accept all
for what
all was,
like the passing of a cloud
seen only once
by only one
young child.
In several tiny ways
I put my head on the block:
his head is heavy,
thin limbs drooped with sleep, and I don’t move
away like I should – there is a bright, beating second of contact,
then the train jolts him awake
newly born and blinking.
This is one.
Tired, heart-dazed, amongst all the stars of the city
spinning in all their roaring dark, I readjust
so that our shoulders
do not touch.