The Divorce Papers
I see no sin:
The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.
- Modern Love, George Meredith
Eschatology
Sorrow/Is its own place
– On a Deserted Shore, Kathleen Raine
And that was all he could
remember of the night:
walking into the last
of the empty rooms,
looking out the window
at the white picket fence
and making a promise to
himself to fix the unhinged
latch on the front gate
first thing in the morning.
Hangover
I do not know myself without thee more
– Modern Love, George Meredith
And like the times you had one glass too many
Your marriage didn’t know when to stop.
For years you drift into unconsciousness
Then wake one morning with a hangover
To find the furniture and the children gone.
From habit you take two aspirin,
Surprising yourself with your circumspection.
You don’t know whether to eat or not,
To sleep or stay awake –
And when wept-spent you want to rest
You find there is no peace, no quiet.
Your “friends appear like paramedics”*
Administering advice on the therapeutic
Properties of Time. But for now there is no cure.
Somehow you go on: composing a villanelle
In Coff’s Harbour on an autumn morning;
Reading at a Yarra Valley winery
Late one winter afternoon.
Every evening you return to a silent house,
Pour yourself a drink, allow ice to melt
As you would anger… Then wait for night to come,
For stars again to blink and break
Into countless shards of hardened light.
* Quote is from Andy Kissane’s poem Rising and Falling
Bouquets
Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination
– Immanuel Kant
Bouquets are not cheap tricks.
Such gestures no sleight-of-
hand to make you reappear
to where you vanished from.
I cut you in half, he made you whole.
I’d do a David Copperfield
if it would bring you back again;
play Harry Houdini
if you would have me back again;
perform the sad clown routine
just to hear you laugh again.
Then when the crying’s done
and love returns (as if by magic)
I promise to clean up my act
And never make you bend again
to smell the artificial flower on my lapel.
Envoi
In thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes
– e e cummings
There are no love poems;
Only lyrics on love gone,
Or going, wrong. I know
No sonnets written in
Celebration of your beauty
(Just blank verses of cruelty);
No lines to your eyes,
Limericks to your lips,
Similes to liken you to
One thing or another.
These days I find myself
Lip syncing to songs about
Trying to lose those
I’m-losing-you blues.
The days write themselves.
Driving lesson
And, of course,
life goes on:
ignoring the signs;
indifferent to the stars;
deaf to the conspiratorial
whispering of the wind;
blind to the stranger
beckoning by the roadside;
declining the personal
invitations of each
and every roadside tree
to meet a woody end.
Half Moon Bay, Black Rock, Circa 1972
Every hair is numbered like every grain of sand
– Bob Dylan
The signs were already there
If only we’d bothered to look:
‘No Standing’ on the road,
‘No Boating’ by the sea.
But, desire knows no prophecy
Nor listens to rumours of rain.
Beneath the cliff face storied
With middens, mirror bush
Shimmering with water and moonlight,
We defied the weather and the gods.
I sat you on a blanket
And opened a book by Baudelaire.
I remember you asking what
Fleur de mal meant as I leant forward
And let down the dark tendrils of your hair.
Some thirty years later as I drive
Around Red Bluff I can feel the bay
Bending again to my will, see your face
Flashing past Rickett’s Point
Like a stranger’s on a reel of super 8,
Witness West Gate Bridge deconstructing,
Watch the waves retreating in slow
Motion to the Cerberus, and our love,
Like a breakwater, holding back the ocean.
Snap shots
Not sorrow breaks the heart
But an imagined joy
– On a Deserted Shore, Kathleen Raine
On those mornings you always seemed to wake before
The alarm, as if your biological clock was set to some
Troubled time that startled you from sleep
And started you on a chronological journey of grief.
Around every corner, along every road, down every highway
Every house you passed seemed blessed with domestic bliss,
Every room in every house holy with conjugal joy, every line
Of every love-gone-wrong song written just for you.
“Are we there yet?” You remember her tired attempts
To explain that desire can destroy any notion of distance
While imagining Lawson asking Wentworth the same question
And a gobsmacked Blaxland before mountains of blue.
And she – one of three sisters – turned to stone
Amongst Blue and Scribbly gums of the spur,
The Great Dividing Range a blur on the landscape,
The children like birds foraging in leaf litter at her feet.
Sometimes I caught her in those holiday moments, but couldn’t
Hold her – and now regret I took the offer of a second set
Of prints and not another roll of film. Those photos are
Somewhere in this house, and – to this day – remain unframed.
La Belle Dame
she wakes and/begins to weep//as he cries himself/to sleep//
to dream/of nightingales// when blackbirds/are warbling//
in the morning heat
– Ray Liversidge
Sans merci I put her to the sword
seven times no less, equalling the effort
of that Disney mouse who slew seven giants
in ‘Mickey & the Beanstalk’. Of course it wasn’t true –
the slaying of the giants that is –
but that didn’t stop the suspension of disbelief
in the village. It was a time of innocence; a time
of fear and loss; a time for heroes. And so
I galloped into her teenage dreams –
not on a charger, but valiant nonetheless!
I was homesick for something I had
never found: a Pre-Raphaelite beauty
in Post-Modern times. And that is why
I come back into these woods:
to kiss her in four places;
to silence the nightingale;
to make sure the blackbird never sings.
The Divorce Papers was runner-up in the 2005 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize
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