by Emma Neale
for the twelve-pack of fresh bread rolls
we’d had to walk past him to buy—
with our conscience burning holes
in the sleek, fat satin of our well-fed hearts—
and then some big old drunk Sally
came swinging past with her plastic sacks
and as she sang up a rough happiness
she’d scratched together somehow
she knocked his collection cup over
so all the loose change spilled out
with the faint jangle of lock-up keys
and a two-dollar coin shot away
like a panicked animal,
light ablaze on its skin
and another man chased it
into the traffic
where a courier van blared its horn
and the pursuer’s toe tripped it as it spun
so it seemed to lunge sideways to dodge him
as it plunged through the grille
of a storm drain;
quenched like the flame
of a tiny Excalibur;
small miracle of compassion
withdrawn.
The Appointment
In the hospital’s eye department, there are two identical art works framed on the wall. ‘Why?’ asks my seven-year-old.
‘Perhaps it’s like a game of spot the difference,’ I answer. ‘Or an eye department joke about double vision?’
‘A super-bad one,’ he says, giving me The Look.
We wait ages. Our books get tiring, so we start a game of hangman.
On the third round, my son finishes the gallows just as a young handcuffed detainee is ushered in by two cops. My son’s hand freezes over the paper as the trio disappears behind a partition.
‘J?’ I guess, pretending all is normal, so my son won’t be afraid. He draws a blank head.
The men reappear. ‘FUCK that,’ says the jailbird.
‘Language,’ warns the short cop as they escort the prisoner to the men’s, where they have to wait in line.
‘Ps and Qs,’ I whisper. ‘Mind your Ps and Qs.’ My son looks puzzled.
‘I?’ is my next guess.
He pencils in another small circle.
‘An eye for an I?’ I ask. He throws The Look again. Then, in his clear, piping, piercing way, he asks, ‘Are the police here ’cause justice is blind?’
I glance at the tattoos that flick like blue blades up the pale skinhead prisoner’s neck.
The room plays deaf.
My son’s name is called like a lifted sentence.
Removal
The bloodmark has been there for months:
like a bootprint tramped in by sadness,
or, as on a mariner’s map, a small brown outcrop of loss.
Yet it cleans away so rapidly—
just a stiff brush, cold water, soap froth
and it evaporates like fog scrubbed off by noonday sun;
a pencilled problem quickly erased
when the debt worked out too great.
Those unkind words, though,
grind in their own red stain;
envy and cruelty spill bitter oils
that ruin the delicate barbs and barbules
of memory’s once buoyant plumage.
Slander
Just say that for today, there are no have-tos.
Responsibility sets down its tools,
heels off its shoes, soaks its ankles
in the long, cool grass;
treads to the bed of dahlias, their pinwheel carnival,
lifts the invisible shutter from its inner ear;
lets the garden dot-dash the air’s translucent sheet
in chords that morph with the breeze:
an earthy but elfin aria
on the edge of recorded language
like the songs of an isolate tribe
with no concept of covetousness, envy, or pride—
stop. Wreck the dream there.
If we knew such sweet, supernal music
how would we ever fully return
to our own clan’s self-righteous jury?
Grief would be mind’s lifelong quarantine.
Turn
It is so hard to be a good human in all the ways.
Time to go out to talk to the sunflowers, still visible through the white morning’s mist. Close in, against the dark soil, each bloom gleams like the fired gold of a baritone sax inside the velvet lining of its case. Jackie says she loves the French for sunflowers; a phrase which travels two ways, like the word itself. Tournesol; flowers that turn towards the sun; flowers that turn the sun into flowers. Tournesol, they stand as a turnstile between seasons; between looking too far inward, and turning out to the city shivering in its thin, bright fabrics.
It is so hard to be a good human in all the ways.
Listen to what the sunflowers have to say. There is wisdom in their quiet faces.
My aunt says her grandson names her sunflowers: Tom, Tomasina, Little Tommy, Little D. So perhaps he agrees. He waters and waters their dark hearts, as if water were love and there could be no drowning in that. My own quiet sunpeople turn and seem to gaze this way. One is a black and watchful eye fringed with golden lashes. These others bow their brown cheeks, humble and furred as bees, deep in the meditation of plants. See the fingerprint whorl in the tawny deeps of this one; the curled petals of another, as if it retracts from some sting, a spurned child nursing itself. This other, a mother, hip-swaying, with diaphanous skirts whirling, as, with the hours, the sun leans lower through the mist. Here, a green, spiky little sister, still no bigger than a locket. There, a grandmother who might exclaim, ‘Little rays of sunshine!’ as she flings a meal’s unused cutlery back into the drawer, the blades and tines spinning light to the ceiling as they fall. Yet another, a solemn grandfather, eyes cast down to his broad hands rough as emery boards as they worry at each other, their green veins delicately fuzzed with white prickles. And this one, cartwheeling on its leggy stem, like a seven-year-old allowed to rough it up again, now his arm is three weeks out of a cast, joy whirling his ragamuffin hair in a shaggy corona.
It is so hard to be a good human in all the ways.
The sunflowers cluster. They say gather the lustre of yourself and each other. They say burnish and finish and gleam, one to the other. The air around us now is ticking loud with late cicadas and crickets. All my sunpeople and I are the toothed cogs in a shimmering clock, letting time turn us, turn us, together.
Swarm
We heard our first bee swarm
in a stand of native trees
before we saw it; from the road thought
the thorned hum to be
the churn of a boat’s engines idling.
Deep in the woods there were
single golden bullets whirling,
a twister of sun-dipped gravel,
and a massive, detached propeller
whose dark vibrating atoms
became a ghost’s slung-off pelt;
then the melt of bees on the new hive
was living electric snow.
Your uncle said we had to fear attacks
only if the bees could sense our terror
so we clasped our dread tight against our skins
like diamonds, passports, cash
and as if they bought our forged innocence
the bees’ swarm let us cross its border
to your uncle’s hut where breath
rushed the honeycombs of our lungs.
Pivot
A skink swims its cursive over the gravel chips, vanishes
two dragonflies arabesque mid-air, are gone
cicadas disentangle from jasmine,
ricochet like chips of smashed green glass
The clouds in their mobile glyphs concur:
don’t stay as you are
don’t stay as you are
iii
Selected Letters
Underneath the Fridge Magnet
Dear Fartypants and Coffeebreath
Dear Doodlebrain, Bumnuts,
Dogsbollocks and Spottyface
You never really loved me
So that’s why I’m gone-burgers.
Please don’t worry about it
not that you probably will
the kid in the middle
should come middle
or sometimes even first
but in my point of view
it’s only mostly last.
I’ve got my backpack and my drink bottle
and a couple of books for if it gets boring
not that it probably will because runaways
have to think on their toes for their living
and there might be wild van-pirates
so I’ll have to keep a constant look-out.
I’ve taken the one-eyed binoculars
that broke on the beach trip
and a warm layer like you always say.
Don’t be angry but I’ve taken some of the cake
and I’ll eat it too ha, ha.
Don’t try to find me when I’m grown up.
You won’t be able to because my alias
will be amazing. I’m making a list of cool ones.
If Julie or Tom go into my room, don’t think I won’t know.
Even if I die, my soul will know and you better believe
I’ve been practising karate in the park
so watch out because if they mess with my stuff
I could still come back—that is, if ever my ghost
gets done with running away.
Goodbye and thanks for the days
when it was good to have forgotten
I was once upon a time your only son.
Affidavit
He said, epistolary novels
sound like they should be about cowgirls.
Or at least, set where cowgirls shop—
like in a perfumery, or a dispensary.
An epistolary would stock a range
of compact fold-away travel guns
in multiple colours, with red-tipped slim-fit ammo
and the serving staff would be older, wiser cow-women,
whores with hearts of tooled leather, copper-jacketed lead.
You know, he’d always wondered,
once you could buy guns
that fit inside a handbag
why did women still let men
get away with so much violence?
She cocked
an eyebrow.
‘What?’ he said.
She licked her lips
as if some words
are swigs of strong grog.
She whispered—
Pistol-whipped.
She whispered—
Calibre.
She whispered—
Silencer.
Shit, he said.
So triggered.
Put your hands
right back
where I can
see them,
she said
.
Letter from Hamelin
The rats have moved into the attic; they slide inside the walls tricky as humidity. They have ignored the peanut-butter-laced traps, the cat, the poison bait and even the supersonic frequency device that’s meant to Pied Piper them away. (A silent-to-humans security alarm, an opposite-to-dog-whistle, it’s set at a pitch to call them off, like Mahler blasted out over shop doorways to repel loitering teens. Only these rats have settled in.)
The sound of them nags and sickens like a guilty conscience over everything we’ve left undone. They tap an audio memo that the whole globe’s a boat fast-sinking because the rodents have had to come inside, to shelter from the non-summer. Sleet, hail, snow and rain fall all year round, every storm weather-bombs the records. The word unseasonal already seems obsolete. These are the chills of a planet running high fevers.
The sounds of munch, crack and thud in the ceiling are the earth’s timbers breaking, the ice cap melting, the bones of all the endangered, bright and fearful symmetries collapsing to the ground.
They are at it night and day, this nibble and gnaw, an anxiety of rats, a fret of rats, a hazard, a startle reflex, a fright and flight and flight of rats. So hyperactive it is as if they’re knocking back coffee beans on top of pseudoephedrine.
Freakish thought about vermin who do their animal work 24/7: not exactly the eating and breeding, though that is repellent enough, but the possibility of psychotic episodes induced by sleep deprivation. Not mine, though I do lie awake feeling more and more 1984, but theirs. What would a rat with disordered thoughts do? Might it think it was an elephant, a wrecking ball, dress up in the kids’ Batman gear, Darth Vader mask, would it try to fly? Or would it find a keyboard and try to type a tonally wrenched, discontinuous but mainly frightened letter to the world about the end times, while the end times keep on creeping on, as the rats slip in, the rats slip in, the rats slip in to the attic?
Letter from tomorrow’s tomorrow and tomorrow
Dear time-mother and time-father
you gave us roars of wind spin, ice needles falling, blister sky. We think the small survivimals must store your voices, they cry out and they cry in, they cry out and they cry in; your names, do they keen them? For the survivimals sound even when first they are born as if your cinder-bones were red inside them and so early their spirits long for the leaping.
The light calls in dry splinters, burning. Stones on stones set scraping and rocking, rocks rocking, rocks rocking. The raw wind wishing, the boughs whipping and breaking, the sea rushes up rushes down, air forcing and pouring through night-dark waters splitting, how do we find our way to beforetimes?
When the bough downquakes hey hey when the baby wakes humma humma when the sky at last slants quiet and the day soft-croons in place, sudden times our skin-pulse wants—tihei mauri ora!.to pick up sticks, flick flax, knock bricks broken, beat hollow pipes rust-coated. Wants us to jump the flash jack, gas, gas, gas, la-la-la lay, lady-ay, sweetmusic-sweetmusic—bidda, budda, boom, bidda, budda boom
dit-dit-dit—dash—dash—dash—dit-dit-dit
Dear Friend
Dear friend I never see
but still think back to daily
often at the sun’s draining tide
or now, say, when the poppies
on their long green wires
hum like an iPod’s earbuds
and those small, dizzy gillespies the bees
pipe as if burning with the bluest blues
and my hands are in the tangled grasses
yanking hard at the roots of the undesired
until something inside falls so quiet
it is as if the mind climbs down to peer
deep into a still green pool of time
and wonder can gently wend its way to
—is it enough, that you’re still there,
deeply held, all the sliding colours of you,
and the gestures like something
the packets of light choreographed
even deep inside the flowers’ furred purses,
the seeds’ foetal-curled sleep?
And when, not your words precisely,
but their slow, warm register burrs again
as if a breeze stirs an aerial,
or a man hums low in the past’s far-off rooms,
as the inlet of memory flexes and fills,
flexes and fills, is that enough to go by?
Or shall I try again to write, to ask,
does this silence have anything to do with
sorry, I didn’t, I never truly wanted,
that wasn’t what those straw-gold
poppy-sway blue-barred days
ever betrayed at all?
Dear Adversity
I’m writing to ask
if the separate sorrows
we will give both sons
could be just enough
so when the large griefs come—
as we know they must come—
they can each take in the blow
not like a fist, but like a traveller
they see sodden in winter showers;
lay down the warm beds
of their hours;
withstand the toss and turn;
sweat and sleep off
despair’s bone-deep wrack
so just a few pock-marks, pale lines
remain on the psyche’s face,
as traces of when loss came
to run its course;
memory’s red cells
already immunised
by today’s small, live doses
of childhood tears.
Unlove
My friend who says her mind has frozen
My friend who says her mind has frozen—
My friend whose mind has frozen
sends me small gifts she says to keep her sane—
a cornflower blue watch;
a box carved of light with a green latch;
a grey egg she says will one day hatch
a small, exquisite monster, its teeth sharp as love.
‘It will mark you for me,’ she writes,
‘Tiny cat nips, bee bites, gin stings—
its mouth filled with time’s nettled patch
you would not pluck safe for me.’
Couldn’t, I have to say to her, each time.
Couldn’t. Body closed as a sugar snap pea.
Mind the silk-sheathed pulse in that body.
This love that thrives only in sun-winds pocketed
by cacti, rocks, hooves, scales:
in the feral thirsts of the near-alien,
not rippled mirrors of rains, lakes, streams.
Blindsided
C
up
id ne
eds contact le
nses and to reorganise both his belief system
and his physiological response to attachment relationships
by seeking some appropriate intensive therapeutic intervention
amirite?
Long Distance
Dear Dearest,
We dared it,
didn’t we,
this nearness?
In its own way
