Poems

How will they remember us, the dead?
As a cause – a just cause – or simply an end?

Grennan sucks in air along his gums and yells
again to Davey who is filling the trough
of the gunwhale with scrabbling crabs. Far off
lightning slips down the sky like a forkful ...

He sang of old coins buried beneath the dunes,
to the north of the island, near the old artillery battery.
For forty years he rowed for mullet north, and south,
where the war epic motion picture was shot recently.

To the north of the island, near the old artillery battery
we played hide and seek as kids in acres of bladey-grass.
Where the war epic motion picture was shot recently
no one was allowed within a thousand metres.

Then, there were spires in every landscape
Tall, tapering fingers pressed together,
The supplications of early sainthood –

Those that the early painters made
To teach the unlettered, while the spires
Called them to listen and to pray.

A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –

Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;

a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap

closes another deluded seeker of asylum

behind barbed wire; civil liberties

are spooked by terror; girl children

trafficked to sexual servitude –

and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,

the great-grandmother of my children

dead in another camp, another winter, another story,

can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –

although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart

is dry as yesterday’s crusts.

By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.

for Susan

Between non capisco and dimentico
we learn to speak a little: our history
always taking place in the present tense.
Between mistranslations
you’re still not sure he meant it.
                           ‘I mean it,’
he said. ‘I want to work in Canada.
I have a nice face – why won’t you marry me?’