Bone
Crack my knuckles and feel the jolt of recognition
beckon down into the fleshy crust,
the ancient soil, the earthen floor.
Uneasy summons, life-to-like:
sinewed-and-skinned to whittled bones
that stir, remember, rumble.
They dance at the summons of the mothermilk.
Hush! Come hear them rattle.
Strings of yellowed teeth-on-twine find femurs
crushed in bobcat jaws.
Mammoth tusks and bobbin reels clip
trilobite fossils with Cheshire-like quills.
And sea critters clatter in caverns below!
Once waterlogged,
now bordered, glued
between calcium slime and a sediment bruise.
There are girdle supports and arrowhead shards,
igneous microbes in bogbody bits,
skullcaps (trepanned) under paleo-flutes,
and a click lodging deep
in my clavicle.
Here! And hurry now –
Boil the neck and skim off foam,
suck the marrow from its golden trough.
Cleave the wishbone from a carcass-breast
and slurp
through chipped front teeth.
For the spongiform gaps in my cancellous spine
are widening, breaching the spaces-between.
And the ache in my back will soon spread
to my thigh and
these ankles will roll
and the pelvis grow weak.
Crack your thumbs and feel the shudder
jolt into the seething rock,
as these living bones grow tired, aging –
soon for dancing far less oft.
The River
spills forth from the mouth of the sea
and wends ‘twixt the foothills
that rise from old scrub.
Tea tree-dark on the outgoing tide
as her floodbanks take form and
slide
into fresh mud.
Slip beneath the shallows
and trace my mark on sandy floor.
Clutch at minnows in the fray
and cut small feet on barnacle-
encrusted rocks that loom en masse,
in shadows and in fishing flats.
River running down my spine,
cleansing land and marking time –
soon you will start to ebb and clear,
and I will try to soften here.
carnations
“The clovey scent rose up in the stale-smelling car, and smote Meg Hogben, out of the reeling heads of flowers, their cold stalks dusted with blue. Then she knew she would write a poem about Aunt Daise and the carnations.” [1]
Tendrils reaching for the dome:
prehensile, knowing, lively.
Sensing worm and soil and the gleam
in your eye – from the sun, off the gnomes
in my mother’s back garden.
Pollen spools into the southerly
and my woollen socks begin to squelch.
They’ve come early this year, Daise.
Blue-dusted fibrils in the undergrowth,
unfolding like an April secret:
the ease of your invitation,
the warmth of your spreading veranda.
Stamen and style // peduncle and petal,
spinning in the weight of the wet.
The carnations are early, Daise,
and I don’t know how
to gather them.
My borders are out of joint –
fleshy axes off
their North,
without your narrow hips
weaving through scrubland.
Then how should I begin?
With the green-grocer's bag in the crook of your arm,
the seeds in your left muslin pocket?
A glint in your eye,
in the dew,
in this freshly-tilled earth,
on the spores in the flush of an old moon.
Not so frozen, you.
[1] Patrick White, "Down at the Dump," in The Burnt Ones (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 162.
Breton for Breakfast
The moon hangs in the sky, pale and heavy
liked a peeled mandarin
in its webbing.
Submerged in a fever dream, lucid and sweating
I wait for the wash of a soon-rising light.
New sheets and old fears cling to the curve
of a night-time headline - Girl Still Awake! - and
I peel them off me one
by one.
(Another lies beneath.)
Sleep slips beyond the asymptote
and my throat cries out for citrus.
I reach for that moon in the shivering sky -
it scuttles away
from my ravenous eye.