poems written while N.M paints my portrait

we agree to meet at the Merri Creek to write

at an hour perhaps put to simpler use on dreaming

perhaps put to simpler use on being in the arms

of somebody pulling theatrical poses and sounds

like birdsong under lightening blinds, bed sheets

never quite so warm as in those moments

instead of under the cold sky, the wraparound sun

dialoguing with water-sound, vaudeville willows, magpies

and simple is a fiction I’ve read a lot of lately –

when I get there, I wait for twenty-five minutes

in yawning and in vain – my friend never shows.

what would I have written about anyway?

then, too alert to return to bed, I walk.

schools of shadows belly through the water

so near to the turbid surface that I see them outlined

I see them as shadows of carp and not freshwater eels

so near to that painting, in mud, of the nothing sunrise –

gathering flecks of the reeds that look freshly combed

dirt between roots like skin between parted hair

my boots reach a ditch on the banks, where I notice

a bed leg, a wooden, nail-ridden bed leg, golden-

lacquered, doodled on in Henna, identical to

the sceptre on the wall, among notes and pins

of my friend the missing author’s bedroom.

why do the bubbles in the silt now bend what I know?

*******

metal caps on drawstrings come to ground

ground veined with dust like running ink

why is she tearing up all the appendices

to the clothes that keep her body from me now

why is she tobogganing where the snow

is thinnest, where the thinnest footprints of ardour

can blow off like coconut sprinklings into streams

which turn hair as young and red as hers to white

only what we all have can lay claim

in the spool of tactics loosed by a world enraged

in nature, that bookish phenomenon

to the only ardour masquerading as true –

then she trails off while I’m down on all fours

looking for the brass, smelling for it

my footprints run, my knees hurt, my toes slide

my body is as high as it is low –

aware that the thanks I’ll never receive

would only make me laugh, or cry

and either so close to bedtime would be bad –

I find them – I might have found them earlier

flick them under the couch like errant marbles

feel around, feel around, feel around

the air the smell of one too many breaths

no windows good for sun, excessive sleep

whatever those stupid caps are to her

they’re too small for the meaning they house

maybe, I think, it’s just that the ardour is there

and nothing had by one is had by all.