waiting for water to boil

while waiting for the water to boil

I feel I am caught between worlds

my claim to either held in opposing hands

before, with joy, I start to follow

the peregrinations of a tiny ant

the colour of human ash

an inspirited speck of dust

along the marbled Laminex countertop –

it climbs into an empty tea light

perches on the now useless wick

like a statue on a decommissioned plinth

and is still, perhaps dead –

what takes place then is a series

of computations, ant-like imperatives –

soon I am in our vast courtyard

holding the polished casing to the sun

with a yawning eye and another tightly shut

as if to set a hidden message loose

as if to quantify the value of a jewel

as if to blind myself with hubris

seen or unseen, I conduct

the ant in the tea light through

our garden on the edge of some firewood

that’s rotten, half-liquefied like good meat –

the concrete wafers piled atop the clay

like sheafs of scribbled paper

the lilies and the cobwebbed terracotta

paver stacks – viral pinnates

ellipses full of caterpillar holes –

the bed the Mexicans left that night

of sucked-out lemon wedges –

brazen scuptures – old ovens

gas hose shisha pipes – witches’ hat

formations like albatross skeins

the swimming pool brimming

with plastic blue butterflies –

the terraqueous old aviary

origins unknown, and its cuttle-

-bone ramparts and abandonment

of space to time

of zenith to nadir

of deferent sense to senses

broken or inadequate –

          I am trying to smell sound –

the palm fronds, sharp as Japanese knives

sharpened and not blunted by decay –

the pilling on the bedspreads on the couches

arced around the old MDF table – pilling

so long and thin as to look man (or madman) made –

at I last I come to the hunk of Binchō-tan

left by a hang drum player from Minabe

that sits atop a milk crate/surfboard bench –

the faint chime it emits as I tap it with the firewood

ceases when the wood crumbles to nothing

         

             and, wick-down, the tea light falls

             at a lag, like water –

the water on the stove has boiled out

empty pot smoking, flames high

and greenish – they lick around and burn

the cheap steel sides – droplets cling

like egg sacs to the range hood.

scene in which the narrator walks to the tram stop

Kirsty Harding went to see her dad. Though I trusted her to her word enough to believe the hip replacement story, I had a hard time getting the image of a complete invalid who said ‘ey’ after everything out of my mind; an incredibly fat bloke with his daughter’s exact face – a beautiful face I now thought – stuffed into his beige Back Bay slacks and Fila sweater like wool into a burlap sack. Before leaving she had given me her phone number. For a moment I was sure she’d given me my own phone number as a joke because the numbers were exactly the same, only in a slightly different order. To clear up any confusion I pranked hers while she was standing next to me. It rang. Her ring tone, I noted, was nothing but a single beep, which I liked. She asked me how I spelt my surname. Then she left, but not before telling me sarcastically, as if I’d asked the question, that she was a graphic designer and environmental activist, a fossil fuel divestment campaigner. That must’ve been why she didn’t wear perfume.

I watched her until she disappeared from sight, the colours of the German flags on her sleeves lighting up occasionally, on certain swings of the arms. I gauged the pace she was walking at to be about medium. Then I stood kind of shell-shocked for a few moments, dead to the world, before looking up the sky and then down to the baseball diamond sand, which I’d started to walk towards. The cloud cover hadn’t cleared yet, hadn’t given any indication that it would clear, and yet I felt sure after looking upwards that the afternoon was going to be blue. By dint of empiricism, I guess. Soon I ducked under the metal fence and found myself standing right where the batter would’ve stood. The plate was missing, probably locked away so it didn’t get nicked between games, and the sand on that spot was darker than the rest. It felt more sunken underfoot, too. The plates on the other bases looked bolted in. Bending down, I swished my hand back and forth like a fishtail in the sand, maybe to see if there were any worms. It was fantastically fine-grained, clayish almost, like ochre dirt, and yet there was no other name for it but sand. I stood up and dug my toes in deep. In the corners of my eyes I could see a few people and even more dogs, some walking, some running. Next thing I knew I’d drawn four large, and impressively straight, cubes, around the shadow of the batter’s plate. I think I was smiling. I bent down again, grabbed a handful of sand and put it up to my nose. I found the smell to be lovely beyond comparison. The Brothers Grimm fairy tales, especially Hansel and Gretel, spurted through my head, as did a vague memory of running up and down mulch heaps at a humungous plant nursery, with shoes that lit up with every step, as did angels and all their aesthetic platitudes: golden coronets, haloes, clouds, trumpets, golden hair, Roman faces, white dresses/skin/teeth.

I’d only just put the tip of my tongue to the sand when, as Sarah’s dad might’ve said, the sheer fuckedness of what I was doing suddenly hit home: I threw it all over-arm into the air, watched it blow away, and started heading towards the tram stop on Plenty. I crossed the cricket pitch; it reminded me of Mckinley, the ponds, the boy. I passed the footy clubhouse, with its locked, bashed-in canteen roller-doors, and wheelchair ramp leading to the canteen, and change rooms that said Titans and Visitors, and its empty car park and its empty Albert G. Gordon Pavilion, and its scoreboard that still registered a comprehensive home-team defeat. The car park looked brand new but the still-gleaming cement gutters were in fact already full of little arterial cracks, which I found unbelievable. I was even mouthing, what the fuck, what the fuck, as I studied their unbelievably premature dilapidation. From the stitch in my chest I realised I hadn’t been breathing all that much. Then I broke through a thicket of yellowish bushes I didn’t know the names of and stepped out onto the footpath. Closer to the traffic, there was an even stronger stench of traffic. Of KFC chips, too. At the crossing I took out my Ipod; the song I chose was Moon Rover. When the light went green I ventured out slowly, catching the eyes of the drivers at the front of each lane; all three were trying to send text messages on the sly and seemed to react less guiltily to having been busted than pissed off, shocked and incensed, as If I’d just kicked open the front doors of their houses.

scene in which the narrator and Sarah watch TV

Probably, I could have summarised for my girlfriend Sarah, my sister Hilary wasn’t quite the cipher she used to be, but was still somebody who was living a life that was as bizarre as it was mundane and who, on top of it all, was – at least the last time I saw her – beautiful, so beautiful you might go months at a time without laying your eyes on a woman to compete with her, competition being the operative word. A goddess.

The sensor light on the porch came on, and my eyes came on with it. I’d been leaning forward in the seat and my head was squished not unpleasantly against the window. There were pins and needles in my left arm, buried under the weight of my body; the seatbelt was cinched tight around my stomach. I sat up and stretched. My cheek was cold and wet with condensation, its imprint and that of my hair still visible on the window but already starting to steam over. I looked at the sensor light; it flickered and it was full of dead moths, like a busted exhibit at the Natural Museum. Brakes squeaking, Sarah stopped the car inches from the gate and shut off the ignition, although as with most European-built cars the cooling fan continued to whir. A few rickety sounds escaped from the engine and the plastic on the dashboard seemed to creak. She took a deep breath, the breath of having completed a task, and on the exhale let out a cattish little sigh. From my pocket I took a cheap hair tie, made in China from defective condom rubber, and put it in my mouth as I opened the door to get out, taking care not to hit said door on the bins, which for some reason we always stored right where the passenger got out – in other words, where I got out. I shut the door and Sarah locked it. The smells of the food cooking in people’s kitchens I now found sickly and a little alienating. Then as she searched through her bag for the house keys I tied the hair on the top of my head into a fairly high bun, folding the hair tie over twice, cracked my fingers, and opened and shut the fuse box on the side of the wall a few times. When at last she pulled out a key and stuck it in the lock, the door didn’t open. It was the wrong key, of course it was the wrong fucking key, and we laughed about how new we still were to it all, upstarts in our own home.

Once inside, the first thing we did was turn on the TV, a full HD LED and DVD player combo, from Kogan, $199, made in China. There were commercials on every channel except Channel 31, on which there was a show about the latest video games. We chose the best commercial; I think it was for a bank or life insurance fund. Backed by a nice piece of Indie folk music, the commercial cut to a lot of different people, multiform, multicultural average Joes, doing nothing but exist in their designated environment – classrooms, foundries, gymnasiums, old folks’ homes – and stare down the lens of a camera moving slowly from left to right, as if each shot was a sort of miniature biopic of that person. Some of the people seemed close to tears. Others looked like Rodin sculptures. All reminded you of people you knew, and occasionally they were; I told Sarah, as the oaky male voiceover and product disclosure statement information began, that an old Greek guy who used to work with my dad had been approached by the RACV, because the RACV were looking for an ethnic man of his age and appearance, and that he’d been paid something like twenty grand to appear in a series of ads for home and contents insurance: did she remember the ads where the old wog guy lost everything in a flood or an earthquake or something? She thought she might’ve remembered. I think that’s the whole point, I told her: you can’t be sure whether it was the commercial or a family friend fitting that description who lost everything. Then after an ad for a new panel show about AFL, The Big Bang Theory came on. As it turned out, it was the start of a Big Bang Marathon, three episodes back-to-back. We watched all three; I don’t remember much except that at one stage the main guy was folding some of his clothes to uproarious laughter. When the last episode finished I scraped my front teeth along my tongue and swallowed. Then I went to brush my teeth, by way of the bedroom, where at Sarah’s asking I turned on our little electric heater, a made in China one called Monelli Turbo Ceramic. The air coming out of it smelt toxic, but kind of nice too, and the plastic on the casing bubbled in parts, the result of poor moulding.

morning writing: poem in which an office is flooded

water pools

the trip-switch has engaged –

who forfeits their power to kill

then but the frayed yellow serpents

to the cavernous three phase

outlets gashed into the wall

between photographs of her children

at too embryonic an age to have formed

any likeness at all to her –

century old clumps of plaster

career in white plumes down from the ceiling

to the carpet, wreck upon ruin, as she

covers her head and pictures a giant drum sieve

full of icing sugar – pictures cocaine divided

in dead places like this –

pictures icebergs falling from the sky

onto tracts of pasture covered cap-à-pie

in master-forged Japanese knives
pointed blades-up to the pale onslaught –

the portrait of her youngest has gone crooked –

not knowing what possesses her

she sits atop the sopping banker’s desk

which belonged to her father in law once

uses her feet to grapple the frame into order

while tearing reams of paperwork into pulp.

writing exercise: poem in which an old washing machine on spin cycle makes the earth move

mirboo planter box lips    

waxen with lavender

and eucalypt polish

start to quaver – grey lead-

flecked sawdust cascades

pools among acrid weeds

where rotten firewood

shrouded in the residue

of drowned fish tank rocks

flit hollowly into gnomic

shapes sodden with ill-omens

I can’t forbear transposing

over the withered mint

over the green sun

over Charlotte’s plant-like face

over my whiplashed whites

one leg of her tights hiked up –

her knee pit ribbed, and red

perforated – a dam in rain –

as the Buffalo grass blades

brushed their floury bodies against her

like the blonde hairs on my index finger

punched pleasure holes in my lips

that aperture opening only for parapraxis

the balled fist hung from my chin

like a sort of clammy Aleph

that ipso facto she hung within...

scene in which the narrator and Sarah have dinner

“I heard someone climbing the ladder to the top bunk, which was where I slept. It was my sister, Hilary. She’s four years older than me as you know, so at that time I guess she’d have been about nine. I was about five, obviously. Anyway, I couldn’t even tell it was Hilary yet. I remember being half asleep, and turning over to the side of the bed with the ladder. There were quite a lot of bite marks on the wooden railings; it was this really soft cheap IKEA wood and I used to gnaw on it as a toddler. When I was teething it was my favourite thing to gnaw on because I liked how the wood grain was porous…and how I could suck my spit back up through it…the sound it made, the way it felt, the woody taste my spit picked up in the process. I still have this vivid memory of holding onto the railings to prop myself up and my hand being right on one of the deepest bite marks, the grain of the wood, the little fragments of stuff breaking away at my touch. On the rare occasions when I think about that moment it’s almost as if the nerve endings in my fingers do too, because they start, you know, transmitting the sensation of the wood to my brain, to the point where I’ve even had to check my fingers to make sure there isn’t a whole heap of splinters in them”.

·       

A man and woman of middle age, definitely married, got to the door, which my chair was facing. They looked ostentatious but poor. It was a double door made of glass, with a menu and a couple of old Cheap Eats stickers blu-tacked to one side at chest height. The opening hours and the proprietor’s name – C. Hamet – were written in cream coloured vinyl on the other side, at a similar height. Only one of the doors was unlocked; the man chose the wrong one and, being thus denied, laughed and turned to the woman for a sort of acknowledgement that it was an amusing thing to have happened, that there was amusement in their lives yet, which she provided in the form of even more frivolous laughter. She had on a dreamcatcher necklace, no earrings, and a lot of turquoise eyeliner. I didn’t pay the man’s appearance much attention except to note that he was bald on top and that he wore a waistcoat but no jacket. Taking hold of the other door handle, he used the outside of his forearm to push. The door rattled but didn’t open. He looked at the woman again. She’d put one hand on her chest and was practically wetting herself with laughter. By this time our waiter and another waiter were eyeing one another off from across the crowded dining room, considering letting them in. A much younger man and woman had also arrived at the door. Noticing them, the first man finally pulled it open, exchanging mirthful glances with his wife; then he said something to the tune of ta-da!, then he looked at the others and beckoned them inside and said something else to which they responded with courteous laughter, and gave thanks, before the faintest of smiles settled on all their faces like rock residue over rocks of a different colour. Had any of the laughter been genuine, I thought, the transitions would’ve taken more time.

The man let everybody in before him. He and the woman commented on the warmth and beauty of the interior, pointing at the Buddhist shrine in one corner, the crystal chandelier, the gunmetal feature wall with a big Bacopa hanging from it, the fresh coriander growing in gutter-width wooden planter boxes along both sidewalls (which were beige), the open kitchen, the Mexican-made Bose speakers; pointing at and complimenting everything, basically. The male floor manager leading them to their table seemed appreciative but also somewhat lost for words. No longer flattered by the glass, I realised that the man and woman were older, by decades, than I’d supposed. The hair on the back and sides of the man’s head was dyed a ridiculous shade of dark brown.

Sarah wiped her mouth. She put the single-use serviette on her plate, arranged her cutlery, and then nudged it all forwards an inch or so. I reached over and nudged it back. She nudged it forwards again; I left the plate alone and took her hand and kissed it. She laughed and dropped her hands under the table and both raised and put back her shoulders. Then she took a deep breath. Her side of the tablecloth, even the edge, was clean. There was a smile on her face. From the scant amount of food she’d eaten, and the way her eyes shone, I inferred that she was hoping to fuck when we got home; from the way I felt I knew we wouldn’t.

“So,” she said through a yawn, “what happened then?”

“What happened when?”

As I helped myself to the last of the tamarind braised chicken and the last piece of roti, I told her about the incident I’d just witnessed at the door. I must have worded it harshly or something, because despite my laughter she looked at me with an unimpressed visage and said, I don’t know why you’re always working yourself up into a lather about weird things like that”.

The waiter came to take her plate away. He also asked if she was finished with her glass of wine, which had a drop or two of liquid left in it, and she surprised me by answering that she wasn’t. Maybe, though, it was just that the surprise I’d felt at being rebuked by her, at being given a hint as to her dissatisfaction with some element, any element, of how I thought and behaved, even it was the gentlest hint possible, had carried over into my processing of her next statement, because not once in our relationship, I later realised, had Sarah spoken to me like that. Not once had I heard her say, I don’t know why you’re always: the consequences of this moment would be good at first, liberating even, before becoming kind of good but also very bad.

“I’m not in a lather about anything,” I composed myself enough to insist. “It was right in front of me, that’s all”

 “I meant nothing by it, babe. But aren’t you going to finish the other story? The one about your sister? You seemed so excited to start it”. One of her hands gently gripped my right kneecap like a tennis ball about to be tossed for service.