Selected poems
Blues
( blue (Austral. sl. ) argument, row)
We rented behind a block of corner shops, rooms like gloomy cells one side of a narrow hallway abutting the next shop, parking space, entry, from a back lane. Beyond our kitchen’s locked door our landlord the butcher weighed chops, sausages, sexual innuendo, for women eking out housekeeping days. We heard cleaver thuds, saucy laughter.
That summer we argued again, as the poor who toil for the dishonest do, heat, need, itching under our skin, voices muted by butchery until temper betrayed hot secrets. I stamped off, drove, half-crazed. This was when Donald Campbell attempted to hurtle Bluebird across central Australia’s aridity for the land speed record. I hurtled my blue Volkswagen through Melbourne’s southern suburbs to the cool pub.
Returning, contrite, I clipped the gate left ajar, and a plastic toy. Inside, darkened rooms echoed, as haunting as distant Lake Eyre. After phone calls they came back, each of us subdued. We tried in our cyclic way but damage dug deeper each time. I hammered out my Beetle’s dent, resprayed the panel Summer Blue, its paint shop colour, but patch-ups bear scars.
Campbell, born wealthy where I lived as a boy, died chasing the water speed record three years after Lake Eyre, his body located in Coniston Water’s deep decades later. He could not foresee death so soon despite risks taken, and perhaps I am still alive because, born poor, I drove a Beetle instead of the Bluebird.
Under summer’s brilliant night sky, alone except for ghosts from the unshakeable past, mind a weft of loss, wonder, my age now unimaginable then, I am driving that hot day of misery again, not quite making the tight turn from our back lane where love’s guttering light found the fraught future hard to penetrate. I scan iron galaxies for shooting stars, blazing blurs hurtling across stellar space so briefly glimpsed.
An incarnation of chiaroscuro
Almost September, winter’s end, broke but free, hooked on a movie, I mutter, hands like moths fluttering in my familiar docks’ rusty halls. A foraging dog prowls the remains of a fire on stained concrete. I breathe the sharp smell of tar, break bylaws of trespass but blend in, here in the ‘fifties of my strange lonely boyhood, after escaping from school and home to the Port of Melbourne’s brick and iron bowels. A barge hoots near Constitution Docks’ dark sheds. Place intertwines with wan