None are more familiar with dew
than professional footballers. From early
grades they are used to running through
practice drills and hurling their burly
frames through rucks while the moist chaff
of wet grass under the winter lights
softens their fall, accustoms the half-
back to the slippery ball and writes
green cuneiform on wet sandshoes.
And they fear it in the morning,
1
Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’ s abstract particulars,
while football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.
Someone will push the house over one day,
Some spacedozer give it a shove,
But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard,
These are a labour of love.
All winter we set these cobbles in place,
Or was it the summer as well?
Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers
For ones that looked suitable.
The old house decayed – along with us –
Will a strange new resident
Admire the patio made in joy
Wondering what we meant?
to come away with Hesiod
and leave the rock as though to rocks
the tree to trees and dwell on other things
imagine the injunction
to leave the mint to its own devices
among the dust & stones in the shadow
of rocks or tree-roots hard as rocks
imagine poems left to their own devices
as poets gorge on air & airy thoughts
& figures – the thought sobers me
to the bone of a sobriety earned
at the expense of the airiness Hesiod
was commissioned to name
Tell the truth of experience
they say they also
say you must let
go learn to let go
let your children
go
and they go
and you stay
letting them go
because you are obedient and
respect everyone’ s freedom
to go and you stay
and you want to tell the truth
because you are yours truly
its obedient servant
but you can’ t because
you’ re feeling what you’ re not
supposed to feel you have
let them go and go and
“Feed Fred and sit with him
and mind he doesn’ t walk about.
He falls. Tell him his ute is safe
back home. Thinks someone’ s pinched it,
peers around the carpark all the time.
His family brought him in it and
he thinks it’ s gone.
He was a farmer once...”
I take the tray. The ice-cream’ s almost
melted round the crumbled orange jelly
and the soup’ s too hot. I know
I’ ll have to blow on it.
Bit weird at first,
That starey look in the eyes,
The hair down past his shoulders,
But after a go with the ship’ s barber,
A sea-water shower and the old slouch hat
Across his ears, he started to look the part.
Took him a while to get the way
A bayonet fits the old Lee-Enfield,
But going in on the boats
He looked calmer than any of us,
Just gazing in over the swell
Where the cliffs looked black against the sky.
When we hit he fairly raced in through the waves,
Be precise
authority is magic.
When you think you've got it straight
wax wane declination
feel the movement under your hand
one summer morning
as you observe it set
then rise that night.
Always use a well-sharpened pencil
followed by a good eraser.
Watch the white emerge.
Someone said
that working through difficult equations
was like walking
in a pure and beautiful landscape –
the numbers glowing
like works of art.
And in the same crowded room
a woman I thought I didn’t like
was singing to herself –
talking and listening
Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbourstheir reception.
Outside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors
the exception
of city from sky, hills snug with houses
and a glass of water standing on the railing,
half empty or half full. In the failing
afternoon light
brightening buildings counterpoint the darkness,
glinting upside-
down inside the glass, and the newly-weds,
seen from outside
joining hand to hand for the wedding reel,
glide under its meniscus, head over heels.
