Ways of seeing

If you'd never seen a map
you wouldn't know
how a road can look like a vein.

Today I saw a woman in the carpark
wearing my t-shirt,
not literally mine
but an identical shirt to one I own
and I thought how nicely it hangs at the back.
No matter how I twist my head,
how I distort myself
in front of the mirror,
I could never see myself like that,
as something whole and fluid,
moving inside a piece of cloth.

solid burn

she wonders how many people
in this suburb
have killed someone

she has this theory about carports
and serial killers

she says I like cheese
I say I like cheese too

wow
she says
we're connecting
on such a deep emotional level.

Urban Forest

She has a pocket in the front of her dress

a map a photograph a silver key.

The wolf beside her has forgotten it’s a wolf.

It thinks it is the shadow of a wolf.

Here stories are the fingerbones of stories,

a mother sets her child on the forest floor and disappears,

the father and the grandfather

attend to the antics of a small white dog

the child scoops dried leaves into his lap.

The shadow of the wolf is disguised as a dog.

He pads along the path, looking left to right.

Everything is exactly as it seems.

The Dog

The dog’s got the jitters.

He tells me he’s worried about the fireworks

Someone’s letting off in a distant suburb.

He paces in and out of rooms,

Smiling, frowning, wagging his tail.

The creek is overgrown with weeds.

We walked there today in the midday sun.

An old woman was feeding the ducks,

The shops are closed till the end of January,

No one round here seems to be young,

Old men in their gardens frown when I walk by,

And a Ute drives down Darling Road,

honking its horn the length of the block,

though mostly there’s not much traffic at all.

Summer is something that happens to other people,

Somewhere away from here, the dog tells me.

It's the fireworks, getting on his last nerve.

I tell him, make the most of it kiddo,

It’s the only summer we got.

Things we said in the car on the way home

We look out the window, saying nothing for a while

This is more than everything, this drive,

Through the wide and tree-lined streets, we smile,

Shadows shifting and alive.

This is more than everything, this drive,

The words unsaid between us grow

Shadows shifting and alive,

So much for memory, I know.

The words unsaid between us grow,

Like summers when we were young

So much for memory, I know,

I can’t make the shape of language on my tongue  

Like summers when we were young

And there was nothing much to say,

I can’t make the shape of language on my tongue

It doesn’t matter anyway.

And there was nothing much to say.

Through the wide and tree-lined streets, we smile.

It doesn’t matter anyway.

We look out the window, saying nothing for a while.

Field Guide to Outside

Then, for the first time really,

My aunt has nothing more to say on the subject.

I had a long walk home. A line a mile long.

Something is always far away.

Friday afternoon a messenger came up

from the darkness of the movie house.

 Socrates said you can know the unknown

because you remember it. He was in a dangerous mood.

I was hardly awake. I took out a clean dish towel.

For a while there, I thought I was the only person in the world.

A 'found' poem, with lines taken from SE Hinton, The Outsiders; Paul Zindel, Harry and Hortense at Hormone High; Rebecca Solnit, Field Guide to Getting Lost.

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New Year

First I set out to retrieve the things left behind

in the old year: my purse at one party

my sunglasses at another.

No, first you make spaghetti from scratch,

feeding pale dough into the metal machine

the flattening and the lengthening

and then the separating, strand and strand and strand,

a mess of hair.

Later I carve the earth around the lemon, the cherry

and the miniature Bay tree, turn the soil over.

A new garden

for a new year.

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