on morning hugs

Steam from the pears tossed newly in to poach

woke you by degrees, your mouth before your eyes

you were pale and hadn’t shaved in a long time

the hair on your head was falling out too slowly

something, perhaps a breeze, had unseated your courage

you hadn’t cut your toenails in a long time.

That was when he sauntered up and hugged you

from behind, although his hands didn’t seem in it

almost tetchy on your figure in fine cotton

pyjamas, finger placement oddly imprecise –

not a tactile impulsion, not really much of anything

but sometimes love was a duty and that was alright –

Leaves had scuttled in through the open side door

the one inlaid with leadlight kookaburras –

dead, they broke underfoot as though deep-fried –

the radio news broadcast streaming on your Macbook

warned of Melbourne’s subway caving in – last night’s

pumpkin peelings mingled like ice with the leaves –

As a modern building sways with a storm, you swayed

with that colour of a single embrace that never ended –

the everyday show of friendly affection that featured you

now in the kitchen, now in the bedroom, now outside –

your head might have fallen in to the poaching liquid

when you realised the sense of duty wasn’t his at all

But that for you to receive the love of someone you loved, even

petty love, was like crawling through a crucible filled with lions

standing upright, lions with red lips and human spines

tails like braided rope to climb upwards on –  suddenly

your whole being seemed riven by a strange hatred

and his hands and his morning breath seemed almost holy.

lost and pinned

so many pavers aren’t broken

but missing along the wayward path

from the disused stables to the house

flanked by weeds that look edible

aloe leaves all bled out, past transfusion

soil jet black and rich but also arid –

water in the blow-up pool found

in hard rubbish pulses with tadpoles

and a warped laminated print

of a painting of the back of a boy

crouched panting on a Black Forest path

sinks, floats – the painting’s title is Lost.

·       

by night, the tall aluminium cone

a colander the size of a boy

is lit from within by a tea light

the patterns it casts on her walls

show Siamese cats eating stalks

of curling grass, and quenelles

of shadow in pointillist clouds –

mice, it seems to me –

mice with pinned tails trying to run.

grizzly bear

don’t you know those hairs on your feet are a sight unseen

unseen when opinions are formed (well after the sight)

that the angles of your face in sunglasses aren’t spoken about

by the men selling polarised portals at Aussie Angler

and if asked they’d say, perplexed, that it was normal

everybody looks through the water for fish the same way –

remember when we’d go to Sugarloaf reservoir and catch redfin

while dad drove golf balls and looked askance for cops

and mum gave the water treatment plant the third degree –

found errors, usually misplaced apostrophes, on its imposing signs –

and barbecued onions would sluice through the summer air

to our flimsy camp seats by the shores of that flash of brocade?

room so dim that the hat on the rack is a spinning black disc

and the elephants embroidered on my bedspread have faded to brail

I think that maybe I haven’t cried for you enough this week

I think that maybe I need to make you cry and cry out that you’re alone

I play music that used to be catalytic in a way it no longer is

I play emotionally defunct music and pop pills and feel dismayed –

moonlight looks jaundiced against their immaculate skin –

those women on the sides of the septums of whom I’ve found

hair longer than your eyelashes, and yet it’s you who can’t leave

aloneness without first cutting them down to size

who sees people as only the compound of all of their problems

who in a couple of months will be twenty-one years of age.

an afternoon, airborne

an afternoon, airborne

that rambling asphalt artery never met you

its pawprinted footpaths never touched your feet

nor did the pair of blue hang gliders scudding

as the crow flies, to a bower by a river

a rope swing with a shrine to a headlong diver

glide pin high for a time with your paltry flesh –

they were outright losers in the fickle index

of the heart, beautiful jolts you couldn’t adjust to

spoilt by a perceptual double standard –

sweeping difference hums with the knell of the sacred

but minor difference heralds a fatal skew

in the world, the crooked stain of a monster

a menace –

you walked on.

croquet club iron gates lachrymose with rust

the only boarded-up bank in Melbourne metro

suitcase piles on blessed op shop stoops

bald men’s heads speckled with coral spots –

sudden inclines beguiling your untrained stomach

at bottom, women brightened by airborne leaves –

Italian social club flanked by plinths with busts

of certain saints you’d never know why they chose

street crossings too wide for the time it took to cross

cars that kept on going in spite of you – acorns

that kept falling – your face a debutante at a ball of suns

spider webs strung between streetlights and marooned trees –

the hawk of a foreign dialect and good perfume

blew as you looked to the parking lots behind

businesses gnomically solvent, and behind them

the crème de la crème of outer suburban zoning

factories boxed in Lego lots with pretty eaves

next to hollow houses, a supersized sign writer’s dream –

sidelong and sweating

you walked on –

opposite a store selling home wares and Polish coffee

the yews in a cemetery whispered that you weren’t still

before you did halt to pick up a piece of scrap metal

that looked like the scuffed fuselage of an old warplane

the size of a model but worn as though flown in combat

and the cold in the air seemed to come out of hiding like tears –

amulet in hand, you fell back into motion for hours

until from nowhere a place appeared, already in your index –

a sprawling tennis centre landlocked between spastic highways

where on the windows of the little pro shop

you met yourself for the first time –

how the tracksuit zipper’s placement could transform your being

what your long hair did after hours of shaking around

how wide were your calves, how tanned your forearm skin

what the other ten year old boys wore under their shorts

the badges of excellence embroidered on your sleeves –

ripple of your name on the glass as it rang from the speakers –

where on the thirty courts you learned what competition was

to a life – where you cheated and swore and threw your racquet

and won trophies and plaques and ribbons and even airline tickets

where your parents called you the best because you were

and the smell of the synthetic grass sand, freshly cracked cans

of balls, sports drink, titanium, restringing machine grease

and rebound netting were your chorus, handing you

triumph and mourning in a single swallowable package –

without that chorus a win, a loss would have seemed

as bizarre a notion as warmth on an unfamiliar street did then

walking through the time lapse of floodlit rows

paw prints in the sand, a poodle ahead, the sky pale and empty

as skies often looked on the morning of long-haul flights.

Incident 67

Incident 67

Oliver was stirring a vat of molten fondant when incident 67 took place. According to the log, the time was 6:05. While no more than an estimate, it made sense because by then the production area window, an oval of frosted glass spanning the entire rear wall, had taken on a milky but not yet sunlit glow. Any earlier and the window, daubed in steam, not without a certain menace, loomed like a sparkling icon of the night over the brightly lit kitchen. Any later and it shone with such intensity that it sometimes seemed to Oliver as if the frost on the glass was real frost and that at any moment it would melt away to reveal the giant padlocked waste bins outside, and beyond them the small employee car park fenced with barbed wire, and beyond that the houses on Davey Street. Also, the first trays of bread must not have been out of the proofer yet, since the only smells his memory could ascribe to the moment of incident 67 were those of fondant and yeast, and scoured metal from the bowls and benches. That, at least, was the logic he employed when filling out the log some three days later.

The bakery belonged to Oliver’s father, Max. A butcher by trade, he could have more fittingly been described as a food entrepreneur, having done very little in the way of butchery during Oliver’s lifetime. There were the odd training seminars for a technical college in the city, and, thanks to his burly, likeable panache, demonstrations of German smoking and curing methods for culinary TV programs. But Max’s true passion was small business, or more correctly, that form of alchemy which conjured success from failure. Still, were it not for the tailored suit the man looked every inch a butcher; hairy forearms that bunched at the elbow like bulbs of garlic; huge hands; a reddish complexion; a grey moustache that was halfway, quipped Oliver’s friends, between David Boone’s and Nietzsche’s; iron bones; short hair combed the old fashion way; a chest and gut like a monolith.

Every food business, according to Max, was essentially the same. To a large extent the product was a front, a cosmetic variance. This was evinced by the number and variety of establishments that he had taken over and then worked to prosperity: “run one,” he would tell his young son on the way to the pizza shop, the fishmongers, the private school café, the biscuit factory, “and you can run them all.” Thus, well before he knew how to articulate it Oscar had thought of his father’s existence as both absurd and fundamentally manly.

Like the bakery, those other businesses were in the outer northeastern suburbs of Melbourne, where Max had settled with the mother of his five-year-old daughter, Maren, nearly a decade before Oliver was born. The rolling hills of the Yarra Valley reminded Max of Bergischesland and certain parts of Bavaria.

new love after surgery

new love after surgery

soon she’ll roll onto the side with bath tap burns

big veins, sketchy pigmentation, big pores

and that side won’t exist for you or her –

soon she’ll be floating in the centre of your wails

her other side, dark as roast dandelion tea

peppered with dark hairs curling like herbs on ice

hairs scattered over paper bark skin in ritual

scattered to summon the gods of your hanging fortune

shaped like a chipped protractor vainly trying

       to trace a perfect arc for a corner sun –

       that’s the side you’ll answer to all night

those are the hairs that will cover you by morning.

oxycodone an anti-compass, giver of a grudging warmth

while she’s ensconced in your able side like language

charting your beard line, pressing the ice pack down

by the muslin cosy you cut from an old bridal veil

and you find that your groove in the bed has mutinied –

two halves of halves coalescing in the salt lamp light

wreathed in your wails, and footfall, and the ceaseless gnawing

of the rat who raves like a poltergeist in the ceiling –

dishes washed in a basin of black mud are clearer

than your mind after three days of pharmacological healing

       and yet it’s enough for her to remain afloat –

       is it because of you or because she’s young

you think, scissored by her legs, falling to heavy sleep.

in the spa

riven by a pack of water jets

black ink of a Big Oil conclave

pen around her dewy lips

bleeding – in the wood grain

underneath the table

                                 – white plastic –

on which the pen and an empty notebook sit

there’s a mass of flickered faces, protuberant

mirrors of the moles on her shoulders and back

and steam scuds through her nose ring

through the discs that make her ears yawn

and her mien seem unreeled, unpacked, a mess

and the faces aren’t looking at anything.

two percentage points away from rain

a few down lights from total darkness

the water ristretto-thick and sweet and gold

when the jets go off she turns them on again

but not before your fragmentation fires you

into realising that cold and quiet are the same.