Festival Poem 3: Swimming

today she has worn her best

and most transparent bra, and removed

the diamante from her navel –

she has whiled away the cool morning

smoking the last of her ice,

steam cleaning the blackened pipe

bumping a little ketamine that wars

with the Times Square hallucinations

behind her eyes –

tonguing the big gap between

her front teeth, swimming with me

in the turbid Murray, and searching

for softer words to describe

her ‘molotov cocktail childhood’ –

gum leaves have begun to hail,

sucked downward so urgently by the wind –

we speak of bricks and feathers falling –

I prefer the leaves to hailstones

but she doesn’t, nor does she like

the silence, but the slime

on the deadwood outcrop we’re on

and the cottage cheese clouds,

trellis of vapour trails and the chill

of greenish mud on her skin,

the sepia tear mark on my left sclera

and gravel pits and wombat holes

full of drugs – giving over

to glib pleasures, and Iceland, and Turkey –

the current sluices through her toes,

leaves duck shit behind her nails –

dogs fetching sticks are swept downstream,

ferried back by their dreadlocked owners –

black nail polish now the flecked

pattern of a cheap men’s business shirt,

she is picking at a white head

on her knee, a spectacle too savage

for me to watch, too savage for me

not to watch, and presently I think how good

it would be to fuck in some hidden corner

of this huge canopied bush,

to sink with the creature before me

to a seabed and garble out jagged

ills freely – to wait for her twitches to cease

and love until love ensconces us like a pelt –

but she has sun burn

and isn’t at ease – the nipples I can see

through her bra have softened,

the phone number she leaves me,

I discover a few days later, belongs

to her dad – I am not sure if this

is a bad or good thing.