it's a shame (about ray? no, just the way the sunlight hits the window's triple-glaze revealing all your childrens' fingerprints & you thought you'd cleaned it yesterday that pristine pane never stood a chance anyway (you mutter to yourself, leaning in to some andante (or was it al dente? never! solo piano courtesy of a faraway classic fm station you never knew existed (until now . . . you realize the smudge marks are also on the outside of the glass (& that hurts, too, you're powerless against it! shine on, ray! or was that roy (drop the toy (a little soy? oh you beautiful (grubby (radiant little boy
Category: Poems (page 2 of 73)
As of October 2011, I’d posted over three hundred poems on this site, including many sonnets and search poems, as well as numerous poems that didn’t make it into chapbooks such as Abendland and Morgenland. I then ceased posting poems here, choosing instead to distribute them via my poem of the week newsletter. Then I stopped doing that too. Every now and then I post a poem here … but not as often as I’d like.
(for Bruce Beaver)
surfacing breathless
in the peaceful domain
from the tunnel like dogs
a sax's sporadic coughs of sound
beneath these great figs spread their roots
like fingers digging into sand or dirt
or a bridge sinking into memory
now the cars come out
green water sloshes -
a bell rings suddenly
in alarm
then stops
another grumble
Jazz
you stencilled it on the page
i saw eternity written on the floor in chalk
as the train plummeted towards the city
the lines looped, joining like belts
my buckled notes & letters
Cars spluttering
shade & sunlight wavering
in the astonished green water
like your words
& Jazz
domains of sound
a moving ferry
& someone walking past.
For Bruce Beaver
& the poems having been found your poems radiant as manly’s hi-fi stacks above & beneath us all the memory of your mother her house demolished & rebuilt old stormwater drains’ insides sewerage outfalls yearning off malabar bluebottles slobber in the shallows small boys build beige sandcastle apartments the pine trees twist & rotting eggs dislodge electric memory sheds its leathered skin away in a chamber reserved for you & francis webb just like janet frame you two are gone to cry is to miss the point that rilke made on lamentation & its twin celebration when will it end? your third letter on the same sky blue stationery its colour of the wind above your house on good days those socks you dreamed there will not have amnesties reunions of that chain gang smoke & blisters the heat’s sleepers fused in blood it is difficult to think of you as a radio DJ now but you spoke to me in light once my night in ultimo splintered unwilling to drop the subject of an atom bomb might have looked good in my biography but beneath it too your pain poems huddling in ditches shore the moment of literacy & a poet was born out of zero comes this split name & your shared mania so victor bruce what else did they do to you in a hell the psyche flinched your future autobiographies like daguerreotypes etched in golden lacquered hairstyles matted with perspiration an awkward nervousness down behind a couch or lounge we hear a radio’s shrill lorikeets auckland’s dinosaurs lowing you saw them for remainders forever poetry’s noms de plume rise & backfire on two-penny novels a name is assumed but this plotline’s fragmented & blasted through a hole we’ll call it time not you bruce i’m certain of very little else now the database has catalogued every first line you pinned like moths beneath glass this case has now been sealed how the beached wire gnashes at your whitened knuckles you hear the sea’s blue roar or a fist’s victory bruce smashing out glass it’s life & as the sharks tumble out & the attendants debate symptoms legionnaires or avian SARS for my mind you knew of cages filled with dirty brown birds arthur conan doyle was there & in spare moments whistled what was tricked into being before your eyes melted paint the floors of aquariums with a littoral memory wash flood the animals two by two global warming or literature lapping at the shallow end of hope stand death’s detectives finding poems in drains or bea miles’ mad eyes show us what was in your fist bruce the tight seal loosened for a page or two as a drum begins its journey to the bottom of some harbour & simon & garfunkel testimonials build a bridge over your sleep to stacks of manly’s hi-fis swaying the radio keeping us all awake i hear the final pine signing off
years since the gap first appeared between the teeth of a little girl picking raspberries from her mother's hand by the poisoned stream a toxic tale of porcelain has traced its tiny fingers round the lines on contour maps (& their bedroom walls they stick our portraits & sit up for haircuts while you look for lice (quivering blue & the stream's ghastly handwriting etching metallic notes each time it rains the flow oh-so milky-white like a daughter's teeth it's nothing or a politician's grin there's nothing to be done we can't vote (can't even see the lead lies prone at the bottom of the gulf between where we end & everybody else's first-world problems begin
1. Make broccoli delicious again.