Display Home

This house is not to scale. The Sinatra has a powder room,

while the Columba has a water closet, he says, as if it means something.

I laugh. I am wearing my boots and a two hundred dollar dress

because we are pretending to be grown ups, but grown ups don’t laugh

and my handbag cost fifty cents and we don’t want a room

for our play-station. The man looks at us as if we come from

very far away, though it’s only twenty-five minutes up the road

and we do that every time we need to buy milk and bread and shoeshine.

Size is everything and the rule is you have to have three types of cladding.

Before we went in, we felt we were doing something dirty

like going to Club X, or contemplating swinging, or mixing our rubbish

with our recycling. At home our chickens have been cooped up

and one of them is getting pecked by the others, we call them the bitches.

We’ve built a new separate coop for Rosie who gets pecked and we made it

out of a wooden box and a stained glass window and she stays in there

all the time. She might die still, but at least she’ll spend her last days

in peace. I think about Rosie and the chickens and wonder what would happen

to them if we lived here. What would happen to us all? The backyard

is a sliver of green, with plants that were frightened into existence.

They manufacture the air you breathe because there’s not enough here

to sustain us, but that’s an extra, it will cost you.

Some nights

Some nights fall:
The chickens are fed,
The kids are in bed,
The dishes are done,
But the words don’t come.
Nothing at all.
The shadowy hall
The clock on the wall.
Nights fall. And some
Are like this one
The words don’t come.

Kinglake Sonnet

In the fire scarred, mist softened hills we stop
for hot milk and meat pies, shelter from rain.
A man considers the rolls that remain,
reflective bands on the sleeves of his top.
His uniform draws the attention
of my two girls. “Fireman? Police?” they ask.
“Paramedic,” I say, as he walks past.
The girls regard him with apprehension.

He cradles a large sized bottle of coke.
“Somebody crashed in the rain,” says Fred.
Una says, “Somebody’s dying, or dead.”
But girls, he’s mostly a normal bloke
getting lunch and a drink like us, just the same,
and the rain is the rain. Just the rain. Just the rain.

Breastfeeding

You wake crying

in the early afternoon,

In a sunlit room

I lie down to feed you.

Your eyes gaze into mine,

Light enters and exits you,

And we are twice joined.

At One

Hello? You okay?
You gone go inna car?
You gone go?
You okay?
yuh/yuh/yuh/
More? G'day. Hi. Yay.
Hey. Heeey.
Mumma. Dadda.
You okay? Okay?
Gone go?
Bye bye boowa.

Dreaming Sisters

each night
they sisters lie
side by side
on narrow beds

squabble fret
squirm protest
finally one
then the other
submits

two girls
breathing out
ink black clouds
pin-prick stars

private constellations

they wake at light
relieved
and irritated
to see each other
again

The manifestation of unnamed longing

Baby in the high chair

More? More? More?

We give him more

It ends up on the floor.

41ºC

As if he can’t believe the heat either

a crow, glossy as an oil slick

staggers under the supermarket awning

with his beak hanging open.

I shop for things we might require:

Arnotts Assorted Creams, 40 fish fingers,

5 litres of milk, yoghurt by the bucket.

In the carpark my husband runs the air-conditioning

the baby lolls sideways in his seat

and the girls play animal vegetable or mineral.

Una is a letterbox

Fred is a potato cake

Una is a pancake in the shape of a dead guy.

At the cash register I run back for dishwashing liquid.

A woman says sternly into the telephone

hooked up to the loudspeaker:

there is a Nissan Patrol with a dog inside

and no windows open if you are in the store

please attend to your animal.

I walk out into the sweltering carpark of the late afternoon.

This human world is melting into the hills.

We drive into the glare.

I join the game. They ask me: Are you an animal?

No. Are you a vegetable? Yes.

What sort of vegetable? they shriek

Mum? What sort of a vegetable are you?

Una asks are you crumby?

Laughing I look back at their laughing faces.

We drive past cows in their fields.

I am an apple pie.

The long day grows hotter.

Something is terribly wrong.

The Two Brothers

such wounded funny men such boys

such self-effacing broadfaced fathers

of dark-eyed sons such husbands such friends

with hands that dote that circled their aunts

that brush past at the sink with incidental touch

that hold each other aloft such men

such wounded funny Catholic boys

such tea-drinking on and off the wagon men

such country boys such eager grazers

of the night sky with one collective eye

such moon walkers hand talkers heart warmers

such tall talers such dream sailors

such brothers such boys such men

---

Month of poetry is on again and I am participating. I treasure the poems I wrote last year, capturing daily life with a six to ten week old baby as well as the older girls. The above was inspired by our company for New Year's Eve. We spend a lovely night in a rambling house in Drysdale in the company of very dear friends and some of their extended family. These brothers are two of five boys, and two of the genuinely kindest and most interesting people I have ever met - I am fascinated by their whole family. The kids had a ball, romping around in the gardens in a massive tribe with two dogs, even Avery had the company of four other babies. It was a wonderful night and a magical start to the New Year. The men got the big telescope out and we all lined up to look at the craters on the yellow edge of the moon and dream ourselves up into the timeless sky.