Dance steps: For Reuben
Life, for you, is from the ground up. As, perhaps,it should be for us.For some months now you have felt freeto walk, confident in your balance, your legs,your father's ready arms.When I last saw you, still horizontal, interrogatingthe floor, you'd begun reversing Kafka —undertaking a slow transformationfrom beetle to vertical human.
Powered by a new locomotion, you steeryourself towards the stereo, put into practicewhat you've practised back home:CD into tray, a button to close it — a pushto help it along — and a button to make it play;a laser, not a blunting needle, workingits magic for you. A magic alive & well:music erupts into your world, is takenentirely for granted.
You make me remember a boy — older, then,to be sure — hanging on every fabulous notefrom a wind-up gramophone, hardly believinghis luck. Transfixed by the music and its source,I may not even have moved my body, thoughthere would have been no one to see mein my blissful version of trance.
Now I hear you mimicking a song, followinga blueprint, improvising a dance —your head translating time, your feetjackhammering the carpet, a flooryou don't know is spinning.
Michael Sariban
Aqua
Eating a mangoover the sink, her skin is this goldbecause it's summer.
Inside a coat pocket, two cigarettesare crushed halfways.
A clock's tick inside her wrist& the day is slow.
Bathwater dried in book pages,the kettle singing by itself.
Beneath the table's shade circle, the small white dogsleeps deeply, sides stuffed outwith breakfast.
On the street where magnolias flower indecently,children are drawing a hopscotch mapin pink & aqua chalk.
Their voices carry inside,like the neighbour's telephone ringing.Its stutter of bells, just once.
Jo Langdon
the long ago
in the slow cat's bowlsoaking days
wild bird seedon the porch
you wipe down a kitchenwhere you are now finally dominant
heavy days ordering joyin wild bird flight
& a cat too well fedto chase, & a son
at one end of the tablehow tomatoes tasted
in the long agofrom a mother's garden
Rory Harris
Michael Sariban is a Brisbane poet and reviewer who has published four collections of poetry.
Rory Harris won the 2008 Satura Prize. He teaches at CBC Wakefield Street, South Australia
Jo Langdon is completing a PhD in literary studies at Deakin University. She is joint winner of the 2011 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, and chapbook of her poetry will be published in early 2012.