some artful galahs have me fooled
at three in the morning, or half past –
upended from my swag by their song
I cast myself half-sleeping
or better, I am cast by some higher
force that only fatigue can summon –
into the dark, sheet-lightning dashed
and vaporous, along a path
I know from last night to be the colour
of the hull of an old metal barge until,
caged light globe faltering,
I come upon the toilet and shower block
behind the empty stockyards –
at my entrance, startled spiders dart
up the self-flushing urinal trough
the metallic smell of which piques
my salivary glands so severely
that at the same time I sight my face
and those of countless moths on the Perspex
mirror, I taste iron, as though while I slept
I had been sucking on an open wound,
and I cough and my eyes water,
and something inside me leaves off
atomised, like insect spray in the sharp light,
to the jagged corners of the tin toilet doors,
the paperless dispenser swathed in a sheath
of love notes so thick
that the collected ink almost heaps
above the metal like brail –
the cane toad shit on the concrete floor,
the cane toads sitting in the showers,
the mosquito bite minefield laid
across my back and under my eyebrows
and inside my bellybutton –
the agony of the final hours
before sunrise for a restless poet
divested by drugs of poems to write
or rather, of words to supply them –
onto the ant-ridden patio
where before me the sleeping horses
look like stickers already used,
and the world the plastic contact
left with their outlines –
what I ought to do is collapse
into one of those shapely voids,
get bucked get kicked get nuzzled
by emptiness, real emptiness,
and logic hardly matters anytime –
the showground lights up tomorrow,
I wonder which woman’s strawberry
shortcake will win the gold medal,
what the name of her husband will be,
what sort of hairstyle she’ll have,
whether she dreams of cakes or other things
at night, and about the embroidery
on the table cloth
upon which the cakes are piled –
will its fringes be tasseled or lace
or will be it an heirloom quilt, crocheted?
what sort of clout the gold
garners around Clermont town –
I am ready for breakfast
but loath to conduct my small hands
noisily into the trailer
before the others are awake –
I am ready to be on the road –
to live and die somewhere
far away from everything that warms me –
I am ready to go home –
and then a little fox terrier
surfs the raging sets of its tail
towards me – I paw at its nose
and by the collar bring it closer
and closer and closer
until it lies upturned in my lap,
its cow print nipples tingling to the touch –
but then the engine of our only neighbour
(an old Winnebago) roars –
the dog goes running and I am left
with nothing but the scent of it
on my fingers, as a fingernail
of gleaming morning lifts –
and those artful galahs,
their sunrise song legitimated,
are the colour, it pains me now to see,
of my nonna’s bedroom.
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