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ARTS AND CULTURE

Past the letterbox, to the cemetery

  • 06 July 2010

A measure of flying

'I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph' –Jack Gilbert, 'Failing and Flying'

The ironbark fringed the sky and scribbled our pool with leaves. In summer we dived down, determined to rescue the blue.

I remember the tree, the rasp of bark on my legs, I tore soft jewels from the trunk. They broke like unpicking a wound.

I'd shinny up a branch with a book or a balloon on a long leash of string: I'd play it out into blue, wait and then tug it back.

Sometimes I just sat on the rim, my legs hung in sheer edge eyes strung to that place where the sky melts into sun.

I had my own path to sky; a silver river on top of the sheds. I ricocheted down the ripples, measured the fly of my feet.

Always that leap off the end, the sharp jar, and collapse in deep grass, standing, earthed with a seed of obstinacy —

knowledge that I had really glimpsed flying. I grasped it as though wings and fell, unfeathered, again and again.

–Susan Fealy

From the front door, past the letterbox, and to the cemetery

The gate jumps forward; stops shut against her white heel, silent as a skull.

Through the knife thin gap she sees envelopes, paper, ink, and no letters.

On the other side of the sweating, blue-tar street, a car guards a house.

A red Commodore sits suspicious in the grass, begging for a key.

Miller's yawning porch appears; paint scabbed and shackled, in dirt pots and debt.

The Golf-Spot Motel's twenty-four doors are blinking, crying, 'vacancy!'.

A bald man croaks 'fore!', his dimpled ball disappears into gum clusters.

On a brown oval, a small girl kicks a Sherrin to her dead brother.

An arthritic lamp stands bent by the street, next to an arthritic lamp.

A truck breaks her way, overflowing with sick pigs, packed tight as a fist.

A shopping trolley cradles a bladder of wine, dribbling on the path.

A man on a roof waves; hammer between his legs, nail in his mouth.

The iron gate whines; winged-children frozen in place playing quietly.

A cracked grey angel shadows a snatch of brown weeds in a Coke bottle.

A marble stone reads: 'our loving son, died too young' he sleeps, snug in clay.

–Jamie King-Holden

Susan Fealy is a Melbourne based clinical psychologist and poet. She is the winner of the Henry Kendall Poetry Award 2010. Her poems have