Jo Gardiner
Three poems by Jo Gardiner

8 am, 3 February 1967

Piled into the station wagon,

your sweaty skin sticking to vinyl.

Seven hot bodies: three in the front,

three behind, and you

in the back with a book.

“Norwegian Wood” on the radio

I once had a girl …

Travelling a thousand miles

north from Victoria.

You’re thirteen.

Same age as Ronald Ryan’s

daughter. Inside the car

the sitar

falls silent.

 

We interrupt this program …

Outside the bluestone walls

of Pentridge

the crowd falls silent, too.

The trapdoor

opens. The pigeons rise.

 

You will remember

the way they say

hanged not hung. The way

the suitcase tied on top

of the car twists free of its ropes,

drops from the roof,

hits the road,

and breaks.

 

  

Jon

There are no seasons on Ocean Street,

just the house you lived in,

and it hasn’t seen you for some time –

 

just rain coming through the oaks

washing dust from the leaves’

yellow wings.

 

Now, you speak to me only in dream.

I lean forward to listen:

no adjectives, no adverbs,

just verbs and nouns meeting

 

in sentences that end in tips of light.

 

Wherever you were, a house party.

The star clusters you courted,

countered – star fuckers, you’d say.

 

Even the magpies on Ocean Street

sang to you tongue in cheek.

 

Then you embarked on a shipwreck

with a boatload of deli goods

and a bottle of Scotch.

 

At the church on Ocean Street,

rows of black silk, heads bowed.

 

Dim cello notes,

strangely bereft,

floated out onto Ocean Street.

 

Never one to outstay

your welcome,

you finished on that note.

 

 

My Mother’s Comb

 

Long after the funeral, among her cheque-

books and accounts in cursive script, neatly

recorded details of my birth,

                                   old knives

and forks and spoons, her eggbeater,

the cheese board, the pink and white

 

towels saved for guests – the tortoise-

shell plastic comb from her handbag,

its scent of thick dark hair

                               combed over

shoulders. I used it for years, and from time

to time, it shed brittle teeth on the floor

 

of some hotel somewhere in the world

until it was as toothless as she was that day

in Meeniyan – the sky

                             dark ash, wind

sweeping the country bare as a pale winter

gleam on the street – reeling on bone   

 

from the dentist who’d just pulled them

all, when old Father Kelly lifted his hat,

stopped to press

                   her hand and say hello.

Her lips closed on red shadows of bloody

gums, her mouthful of stones. Robbed

 

of her fire, her grace, and shy as an eight-

year-old, she nodded her way

through the conversation,

                          a pale hand caught

at her throat, round tremors of her eyes’

wild pleas on my grave, upturned face.

 

But without the music of her voice, I stood

pressed into the soft moss of her good coat

and its scent

                  of damp wool and orange

peel, unable to loosen words, as mute in her

defence and toothless as her comb is now.