Poems
Night music, the mall
Same night I saw the moon move,
my shadow spoke to me
(thought I was lonely)
Wojtek evaporated
and the c.d. in the mall
was opera avant garde:
some Dame, but skipping,
a phrase of violins,
a burst of song vowels
repeating,
repeatedly skipping
ad infinitum.
and
at ten pm
a cloud of gulls
in silence
surrounds the mall.
Circling quietly
no-one speaking
the distorted singer sings on.
When the c.d. is stopped
all as one
the gulls began to caw.
The Canal
The canal refills:
soiled water ripples through the stone walls of the old golf course
the moon moves, the canal unfills
again, the tide is never still;
styrofoam cups float out to the harbour, circumnavigating the island fort
without pause the canal refills -
oil slicks and sewage spills
from the Quay, fast food wrappers and a flotilla of beer bottles from every place east of Concord
remain as the canal unfills.
Koels and channel-billed
cuckoos scream in the darkened trees three hours before dawn.
Restless, the canal refills.
Street sweepers and their ilk
rattling bins, dumping crates, flick their cigarettes and depart once more.
The canal unfills.
Early golfers arrive and fill
with secret knowledge of how every trap, ridge and fairway performs;
the canal refills.
The canal unfills.
Night music, Parramatta Road
street machines practicing
for next Friday night’s performance
and the next, and the next; the newborn downstairs
squalling in its illness, waking up its parents;
across the intersection the petrol station
attendants with their love
of the loud hailer system that hails into our front room
and the flicker of band bill posters
exhausting one more roll of tape in the vain hope
someone will show.
When the baby Kyle wakes two or three times
his shrieks get so fierce, so severe
you’d think he was being born again, or tortured
and can understand why his parents scream back
though I hate them for all their noise.