after Helen Johnson (partially),
                                       & for Leah Jackson

 

Each leaf, square, thumb
(flower)pressing
                                   (as though under tissue
                                                           paper   clouds)
what begins, this
becoming

—doubled, pitted;
            embedded

irrevocably—‘the mother, a figure’
that figures, that does.

October on the balcony
where A builds ‘a castle
for the rain to live in’;

paving towards what D dubs
Easter Beach, good eggs
egging

each other on—hatching
ice-cream plots
          for the ‘hot day’.

Each street, glare, sun:
possums leave
all kinds of litter                     —little shits—

amid the cockies’
confetti shook green
from the (golden) elms.

Each sweep, lair, hum
of wing, looking—like
Clare Vaizey—‘at people,

weeds, traffic, flowers
and clouds’, before

be/witched hours, breathing
‘darkness, grass, trees and sea.’¹ 

In their layers, the polymer-paint
caterpillars evoke

tender impressions, even
as I might mistake them
for turds

given generously
to garden beds.

There visibly, the latch: engagement
onomatopoetic, lifting
‘nerve-thoughts in the blood’²

(The baby
neither gate nor door unlocking,
axiomatically

irrevocable, going
only onward.)

Each screech, tear, run—loose
stitch of syntax
bringing worlds afresh:

like the oyster that left
such an impression
but now evades me, its

mouthful of
cream & seawater, 
source-text elusive…

Arriving at
‘a glade in the language’³,
101 Unfinished Conversations

but never lacunae, no—easy
interlocutor, A aloft
over pansy pots: ‘Hello! Tangelo!’

To the admired cat: ‘Who’s
your beautiful name?’

& overheard
          through ply:

‘Someone fell over.
It was Djuna. So I gave her
a tissue to dry her tears. Kiss
            kiss
kiss                  kiss.’

In gentle progression
‘a plum falls on a marshmallow’⁴;

every body given
its own sun, shining
in chalk by D              —this season / of sequins—

Each sweet pair become 
-ing gaudy lepidoptera, they/we are

                       insatiable,

                                                 opening—

 

 

1. Quoted lines from Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1966/2012), pp. 83, 152.
2. From Lorine Niedecker’s ‘SPIRALS / Promise of Brilliant Funeral’ in her Collected Works (Oakland, University of California Press, 2002), edited by Jenny Penberthy, p. 24.
3. Quote from Inger Christensen’s poem ‘Light’, in translation and edited by Gordon Walmsley, Fire & Ice: Nine Poets from Scandinavia and the North, (Cliffs of Moher, Ireland: Salmon Publishing, 2005), p. 51.
4. Niedecker, p. 24