Not Just Another Game: St. Kilda Loses The Grand Final

Though the trend of the game
was turning against us,
it was the final siren that snapped hope.

Hearts heavy, we left quickly,
dazed with the intensity
of riding so closely each moment

of straining, concentrated flesh
torn from ordinariness by effort.
How brave they were, these men.

How forlorn in defeat's mouth.
Their collapsed bodies too hard to look at
I stared briefly at their agony

before turning my own sorrowing back away.
I, at least, had the privacy
of the escaping crowd, the subdued train.

They had to stand in the fading light
like prey knowing their fate: cornered,
already broken, finding dignity.

It was the rain falling as we walked home
that broke the spell: any lingering buzz
of contest suddenly cold and sad and heavy.

A woman hurried by under an umbrella.
Cars swished past on the wet street.
Already, it was becoming just another game -

except that this one was a defeat.


7 October 2009

Bringing Out The Dead

'Good poems and good funerals are stories well told.'
Thomas Lynch


for Alasdair

For one evening you were my brother.
We talked about poems
and titles for poems
and how the stars moved around the Earth.

You loved the woman
I loved from afar. New to this
I held my tongue
and as we waited for her

in my rented room
we formed a bond for life,
out of which you were banged
next day by a car.

I remember sitting on the roof with you
eating porridge; your beard and motorbike;
the reckless laughter
painting walls at night.

And, of course, two days dead,
when you appeared at the foot of my bed
all light, like some silent blessing.
You were my first Death.



for Melanie

I hardly knew you,
but your ringing voice
and pure musicianship
accompanying me on stage
cast some light to see you by.

You walked, I think, where Angels walk,
having to see the terrible bright face
of what was true: love and death
like hot wires round the skin.
Your scars were real.

And then I heard you'd made life simpler,
ending the tumult -
you'd died, hung
by your own hand.
I threw stones into the pond.

Now, I listen to your music sometimes,
grateful that your voice can still be heard.
When the darkness comes
the light of song is what I turn to -
your frail flame has not, just yet, gone out.



for Stephen

When they came for you, the Angels struck
with sudden fury
as your bashed head met the pole
the car wrapped itself around: your son died, too.

I never saw an emptier stretch of road,
nor one so desolate. Death, it seems,
finds its natural place. We found
your jacket in the boot, and saw the blood

that was yours still spattered on the car -
its squashed frame a tormented mouth crying.
Your red dancing shoes
were somewhere else - no longer moving,

no longer singing to us
of the lithe frame spun so casually
on those long, long legs. In all the years
since, I've not been able to swallow them.

This is how it is: a hard death lingers;
shattered hearts never quite re-form;
the limp and scar are visible
as our lives run out.

They say its time that heals, but I don't think so -
how do you heal Death?
Like the spider in the corner, it sits there
and doesn't move - we live around it.

The love that grew from your ashes
is gone now. Your daughter, grown,
I do not know.
I put a notice in the paper each five years.

And in the darkness of the longer nights
your absence is a living thing
inside me. Yeats said it:
all is '...changed, changed utterly.'


8 September 2009

Solitary

Flannery O'Connor
dying of Lupus
writing to the end -

the terrible certainty
of God's welcome
a lonely comfort.

There is one light on
to see by.


19 August 2009

Icarus Is Real

Walking the tree-lined path
they stop to watch King Parrots
roost and swoop
among the winter leaves -
their green backs shadowed,
the flame-orange of their breasts
only glimpsed.
One bird
falls swiftly from its perch
and, wings clutching the air,
glides to another branch
further down the slope.
This is done silently
but the man watching, jolted, gasps
as last night's dream
explodes softly in his chest:
he remembers
running off the edge of a cliff
and flying out over the sea
with giddy ease.
Now, with electric intensity,
he flings his arms wide
and, rooted to the spot, soars.
He's flying again.

He won't stop. Turning,
he nearly steps on a parrot
standing near his leg
and startled joy surges in his veins
as the surprised king leaves flapping furiously.
Now the park is suffused with singing winter light:
golden browns and yellows and streaky greens;
thick, dark, looming trunks; gravel grey.
The parrots flitter about one last time
in a flurry of random shufflings,
and the man
is off and striding
with cascades of words
streaming behind his eyes
and his chest somewhere out beyond the trees
reminding him that Icarus is real,
the Sun is weak,
and everything in him called disordered
is gathered up beneath the wings
he now so purposefully uses.

When he wakes, he hasn't even been asleep.


August 2009

Mermaid Tears

after reading an article by Richard Grant in the Good Weekend


Sitting on a rock, her golden hair
streaming with the morning Sun, the long
supple muscle of her tail glistening, alone
with the sea, she is taut with some inner grief
and keens a lonely song
that only the air can hear and the wind plucks away.
She cries salt tears.

Baekeland began the chain - making a synthetic polymer
copying what the Asian scale beetle secreted naturally
and using it to coat electrical wires: simple, innovative, cheap,
useful.
Did he know he was stealing fire?
Through the breach rushed polystyrene, nylon, acrylics,
foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, plexiglass,
and we ended up with clear plastic lunch-wrap.

Hard, soft, infinitely malleable, plastic
begins life as a nurdle: a pellet
of raw plastic resin. 100 billion kilograms of nurdles
are shipped around the world each year.
Some get lost - in fact, a whole lot get lost.
Dropped, blown by the wind, caught
in the currents of the sea

they find their way around the globe
in ever-growing clusters. A thin scum
of foreign matter joining all the other dross
we can't control: lakes of waste; beaches clogged
with thongs and balls and bottle-caps; pocket combs;
tampon applicators and toothbrushes; syringes
and plastic shopping bags; discarded fishing lines.

The sea's distressed. The nurdles, the little
hopeful balls that build so much we use,
have become part of the melancholy folk-lore
of the deep: they call them Mermaid Tears.
In the still watches of the night
the mythic ghost-ships of old, creaking,
sail again the haunted emptiness.

She's combing her hair. She's looking out to sea.
No man comes near. Scooping
a handful of water she sees the plastic glisten in the Sun.
A seabird, choked with fishing line, lolls
in the tired surf. She will not look at the land.
Sliding off her rock she swims for home. Her last sigh
is what we hear on the wind.


7 July 2009