Selected poems
Webster
Webster was much possessed by death
T.S. Eliot
Filling up the Webster-pak’s
a weekly exercise
designed to keep me vertical
with sparkle in my eyes.
Fresh from Chemist Warehouse as
my tempo wanes and waxes
my pills dispel my latest ills —
if not quite death and taxes.
With some water, down they swirl
to start their clever dances.
Half a Somac might slow down
aesophageal cancers.
For too much bluster in the blood
I reach for Candesartan.
It’s statins for cholesterol
and, clearly, there’s an art in
thinning back the flow to reach
a true viscosity.
Vitamin D tossed down as well
may be a kind of key
to keep the music box in tune —
and help me still recall
the day when, just ten years ago,
I took no pills at all.
Initiations
Surely I have written somewhere
about that first year out?
The high school west of Parramatta,
the uniforms and school assemblies
wilting in the sun,
the teachers with that cheery bombast
I had no talent for,
the first year class, still overawed,
offered as a boost,
the second year advanced delinquents
to show me what the world might be.
The wads they fired with rubber bands
were made from bobby pins.
They knew it was a zero sum,
their self-esteem for mine.
They tried to sell me crates of drinks,
fallen off a truck
but strangely still undamaged.
Why write about the trains
that rattled me through Granville,
the bus that grumbled up to school,
the Mini I contrived to buy
to half-regain an ego?
Why write about a room in Auburn
at three pound ten a week,
found on two days’ notice in
the Herald classifieds?
A room ironically supplied
with roomy double bed,
a doubleness for which all year
I failed to find a use.
Why write about that fellow boarder,
drunk and ruined by the war,
who passed out in the toilet?
One bathroom had to do for five.
Why write about the shirts I washed
and hung out in the soot?
It’s said that thirty tons of it
fell each year on Auburn.
But in that room without a desk,
I started writing stories
from what the day had left of me,
scything back the clichés
rising through the paper
like burrs on river flats back home;
Here, I read the twenties greats,
Scott and Ernest, William Faulkner,
relishing the sentences,
wondering how they did it —
the traction in the dialogue,
the narrative momentum.
And so the days went grinding by,
not all entirely unsuccessful.
My second year delinquents
continued with their japes,
winning by attrition,
not a word they used.
The senior classes that I clearly
didn’t yet deserve
were only five years younger.
An older colleague tried to cheer me,
saying it grew easier
as one’s hair turned grey
and always in the background like
a sour dream half-recalled
the Bond, that stark five hundred pounds
I’d signed for at the start
to guarantee I’d serve five years.
Later, things looked up a bit.
I managed thirty-eight.
Darcy
I have never read a novel in full. Ever!
Bernard Salt
Who cares, he says, what Mr Darcy thinks?
Our columnist prefers the world of facts.
Not for him those other worlds we carry
in our heads a week, a month, a life,
those solid phantoms whom we find we’ve come
to care about, whose inner thoughts beguile,
whose arbitrary fates delight or sadden.
Two women whom I once knew well would not
be caught in café, tram or bus without
a novel in their handbag. And who’s to say
that prim and distant aunt you haven’t seen
for thirty years has not somehow become
a character in Dickens? Not all novels, I’ll
concede, are good or worth the sweat. It’s true
I read less fiction than I did at twenty
but even so, just every now and then,
I need to leave this milieu of the given
and, while attending still to texts and emails,
silently step sideways into streets
and minds that Mr Salt will not admit.
It seems I need to know what Darcy thinks.
Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published 22 collections of poetry, two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include Gods and Uncles and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography.
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