Three poems

Gone Dark

Not Sydney’s harbour lights

where we dine at the Opera House

in Bennelong

who was a bridge, looking onto a bridge.

A young couple is engaged

taking the customary photo

of another sparkler, a woman’s hand

placed on the chest of a man.

I heard a friend has died of breast cancer.

People gone dark

in all manner of silences

not like this sunset

a natural bruise healing into holiness

but bullets to the eye

and bullets to the womb:

this is how you are also dying

and scored-out, muted, a civics of fear.

We feast in the belly of champions

as they are felled, gone dark,

each a bridge into morning.

 

 

Riverbed

    after Olafur Eliasson

 

Nothing is one

merely transplanted

 

yet all lines have converged

in this last month

to create a neat dissuasion

 

Many is one, and one is many

 

The riverbed

amassed inside the gallery

from discrete Icelandic stones

 

oppressed by the low

insistent ceiling

 

is still in situ

I am led to believe

despite something fetid

that binds the rocks

 

piss-stream sacrilege

 

I need to get into the garden

 

immanence of flowers

I have been cultivating

 

short-lived hungry variations

of what I want post-x

to be allowed:

 

to sit beside a watercourse

that is flowing

with my original face

 

nothing quick and comical and cheap

as the calendar closes

 

to enter within the dark

appearance of a mass

not a conqueror of names

atop a deceit

 

heralded by an arrow:

this way

to the next shopping centre

but beside the river

to lay me down

beside multiplication

to bird and glory and death

 

Barakat

My grandmother is in the arms

of my grandfather, who has given bountifully

this season. The mulberries in the backyard

bleed beautifully upon her fingers;

I catch her through leaves

her bent back, her face unwrinkled

the tattooed eyebrows surprised

like the first sour joy of a child.

The backyard is full of fruit trees

planted by my grandfather with his thick hands

that could swallow my fist whole.

I think of him when I have tangible problems

tangled in eight metres of fairy lights

in my own front yard.

Only the first hundred years of life are difficult

he liked to say,

who now seeds the mulberry

returning my grandmother to a scent

that rises through earth, Arabian summers

the heat of the Gulf, sacks of grain stored

in cavernous undergrounds

the stain of mulberry in the long afternoons.

She ransacks fruit trees

throughout suburbia

plucking persimmons under nets.

My grandfather’s body

is a placeholder in the ground, symbolic

of the dusty first ninety-three years

seven short of heaven

without the branding of war.

He sits on a crate now, in my dreams,

flanked by oranges, dates, watermelon rinds

and gifts us the rain, me and my grandmother

a gentle dew on the black jewel

of our togetherness.