speculumannorum

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment.

You need not die today. Stay here -- through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Last time my stanza breaks but not my line breaks came through. Let us see.

Iris

I was told experience mattered.

This is a lie, at least when it comes to light.

I’ve drunk decades of it

and still I cannot describe the taste.

Let’s say the study is drenched in lemonade.

I have lived here for most of a year, writing or more

often not-writing. We have held each other

this room and I, through sweat &

dust, storm & gold, the strange

severance of sleep. My wife,

though she used it less, knew better.

She unrolled a curtain above the window

I had never seen, not the beaded rope near

the open, nor the grey lid waiting

to cover it: that day she added to my world

a new kind of fuzzy shame.

I thought I was present. I thought I knew

how to occupy a space. To understand it

intimately, if not possessively. I fear

to have not known one part is not to have

known it at all. The implications for my life

are too terrible to host given

my fondness for secrets, and forgetting.

We could all be strangers all the time.

My God, the joy of that. The terror.

We’re not ready to love each other that much.

I was told experience mattered, damn it.

How many years of looking do I really own?

How much of what is seen do we retain?

The myth of being observant haunts

the writer as reverence haunts the priest. Truly,

we don’t see more than the next person

or racoon: we invent detail in the face

of a staggering, overwhelming rejection of what is

or was right in front of us. At least I do.

The sun is streaming through this window. An awful line

yet now your gaze is diverted and I can try again

to drown, or hope, or weep. The sun

is 149.6 million kilometres away.

Is the light of the star the same as the star itself?

Put another way: are we what we say,

am I streaming into your skull or is it a clamber?

Imagine taking language as seriously as light:

hunting for speech-soaked apartments,

driving for hours to find a mouth

to lie under & be bronzed by metaphors,

a slick colloquial tongue, or where you knew

if you didn’t protect yourself from it,

it could fucking kill you. Imagine what we say

can travel across worlds to either give

or destroy a life. Here I refuse to provide

details of the slurs I live through

as a burst spleen, a monsoon, a knife in an iris

and so forth. Sometimes choosing not to see

is a survival tactic. Sometimes I am in love

with oblivion, the startlement of world

in the eyes of the rat scooting

across the neighbour’s fence outside,

or the blank circles of unrendered faces

making everyone both guest & ghost

no I won’t put my glasses on this life

all of it is a brilliant distraction

from the wound, O to be the light coming out

to love the room, to make clear what’s beyond it,

to invent a wife kind enough to reveal what I missed.

Ashes in November. & the fanatic

burgeoning of a bushfire, the hush afterwards

clean as amnesia—its onslaught

demarcated by the retreating birdcall.

Each spring, through the changing light of the valley, there

falls the wondrous rain. Green gowns strew the

gnarled roots, sewn with sprigs of

holly. Seen from a reverent distance, smoke

issues from a rustic cottage

jagged as the torn veil of a jilted bride. Over the bald

knoll, a choir of clouds uncoil

like rumours passed between tongues. In devastations like this,

memory becomes the aftermath. The soft-bellied sun

nuzzles the lush summer sleeves of the resurrected

oak. Imagine the intimacy of two

people lying under such oak, wearing nothing but their

quivers. Such trust. They must’ve bathed in the same

river, long before the quieter one

said anything to the other, before they even

touched what must’ve been forbidden to them. Autumn

ushers in undeserved grace: wings returning briefly to the

v-trees, crowns of berry-strung branches & familiar

warbles. The earth forgets nothing. To gather

xenoliths after the test of lava, to

yearn as the leaves do, stirred by a swell of

zephyr. May the fire teach us.

Meanjin

It has always been like this: I slept in a pack on your belly, wanting

to knit myself into your lobe and herd. I needed to get down into you.

Born I drained our mother’s very teeth. For months my dewy infant head

refused to grow, refused the silver rope of cleaving cells, unending surface area

of other and other. But you: you are the surefoot, knotted to your own

tender oil of trees. I have not given any teeth, sister, only wander.

My stomach never calmed; it marked me with its milk and chew.

Already the arrow blasts against my forehead: I should be going on,

fruitless as I could be unwritten, written out. Each day my mouth opens

on that disunion, a brilliant cleft of air. You must know something

of the same rupture, so where is your face when I turn to it?

At this point I’ve lost the story, am looking for a sister ship

half-buried in someone else’s snow. Still I take on the edges of your lake

as my child oath, shake all that I know into outlines you recognize.

I lean my open neck against yours. The miracle always returns with a hunger.

Guernica

My last few poetry posts imported with crappy formatting, let's see how this one goes.

I ask the new migrant if he regrets leaving Russia. We have dispensed already with my ancestry. He says no. For a time, he was depressed. He found with every return he missed what he left behind. A constant state of this. Better to love by far where you are. He taps the steering wheel of his car, the hum of the engine an imperceptible tremble in us. When he isn’t driving, he works tending to new trees. I’ve seen these saplings popping up all over the suburbs, tickling the bellies of bridges, the new rooted darlings of the State. The council spent a quarter mil on them & someone, he—Lilian—must ensure the dirt holds. Gentrification is climate-friendly now. I laugh and he laughs, and we eat the distance between histories. He checks on his buds daily. Are they okay? They are okay. They do not need him, but he speaks, and they listen or at least shake a leaf. What a world where you can live off land by loving it. If only we cared for each other this way. The council cares for their investment. The late greenery, that is, not Lilian, who shares his ride on the side. I wonder what it would cost to have men be tender to me regularly, to be folded into his burly, to be left on the side of the road as he drove away, exhausted. Even my dreams of tenderness involve being used & I’m not sure who to blame: colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, queerness or poetry? Sorry, this is a commercial for the Kia Sportage now. This is a commercial for Lilian’s thighs. He didn’t ask for this and neither did I—how language drapes us together, how stories tongue each other in the back seat and the sky blurs out of frame. There are too many agonies to discuss here, and I am nearly returned. He has taken me all the way back, around the future flowering, back to where I am not, to the homes I keep investing in as harms. I should fill them with trees. Let the boughs cover the remembered boy, cowering under a mother, her raised weapon not the cane but the shattering within, let the green tear through the wall paper, let life replace memory. Lilian, I left you that day, and in the leaving, a love followed. Isn’t that a wonder and a wound? Tell me which it is, I confess I mistake the two. I walk up the stairs to my old brick apartment where the peach tree reaches for the railing, a few blushing fruits poking through the bars, eager to brush my leg, to say linger, halt. I want to stop, to hold it for real, just once but I must wait until I am safe.

Academy of American Poets

Now raising children as a lifestyle

we look so much like American poets,

except they had more Dexedrine

and less automation.

Amazon, for example, brings Richard

Brautigan to my door, and I tell him to leave;

I had ordered Tom Raworth

in a sling. What did it mean to dally

in Denver anyway? I hear they never even

spent any gambling winnings.

Not a lottery ticket in Hell did they buy.

These useless Americanisms

tarnish my name anyway.

What nationality do I appropriate

to naturalise this saturnine

but saturnalian turn?

The West is in a state of Brexit

and we are boarding the rocket ship

as a family!