A pocketful of pigeons

The pigeons that roosted under the eves of the great library found a book,

a blank book all potential and undreamt dreams

all orphaned and abandoned, face down they

turned it over, and cooed and coaxed it back to life.

In a matter of months the book was more bird than bound volume

spoke the language of columbiforms, knew the secrets of the skies

alongside its avian fosterlings, pecked pocketfuls of seed strewn over Garema’s grey ground.

The pigeon-book does not tell the pigeons how to be pigeons

the pigeons tell the book how to be

and the pigeon book, tells tales of tailfeathers spread taught to tame the air that is up and up and up above mount Ainslie and higher.

The pigeon book sneaks past security, squabs down to the vaults of the library,

below lake level, lest the library books’ breathing quicken and hasten their demise.

The pigeon book it whispers feathery secrets into the bindings of austere old volumes of stories and facts and letters and lore.

And inside their paper hearts, a stirring

a straining and a flutter to feel that hint of breeze

from the airconditioning vent.

Pages fold into wings and spines crack as they catch the spell of flight.

In the centre of the canberra, paper passerines pour forth into the light,

and the cooing coddle of the under eve pigeons weave among the columns before soaring,

wingtip against paperflap they wheel and twist so close that you can’t tell where book ends and bird begins.

And the people of canberra can only look up

The people of Canberra they can only stare at the skies

as their little cache of knowledge is dissipated and evaporated

and all that was left was a few torn out pages and a feather.

 
~

~

Blackberry Wine
bottled whimsy
from a bright and flimsy
happygolucky
summer time.

I thought by now you’d be mine.

Autumn leaves fringe but
the night sky is already winter and
the first splinter
enters the heart.

Sun set spills red, each day my head fills
with what I don’t quite want to know.

Past dreams: where do they go?

And the moon, she flies and then sets
and yet, and yet
Inside a tea chest of hope
bucket of bubbles, best before, or, marinating miracle
will you ripen and unfold
long past your season
and into the time of cold
giddy wonder as, outside of reason, stories are told

black-as-winter, blackberry wine.

I used to be enamoured
With all
those evocative London placenames
Wanted to live
Where the streets were built of time
And coalsmoke,
Wanted to breathe the history of English
In every syllable of my city;
Took to the Canberra streets
A one man army
With placenames for ammunition,
Made streets called after
Birds and dreamtimes
Into Pall Malls and Park Lanes,
I would not stop until I could play Monopoly
With the White Pages,
Walked across a dozen pedestrian crossings
In silent southside suburbia
Christened each one Abbey Road,
Turned the High Court into Earl’s Court,
Kingston into Kensington,
Griffith into Greenwich and
Made the Molonglo a Thames
Before dawn had even thought to break
And then danced back into bed.

But when I woke up
I found that Garema Place was still in place,
Parliament House was clocktowerless
And no masked man had tried to blow it up
Because desperation and the times had moved his soul,
There was no river under the bridges
Where Exeter and Drake had sailed ships
So heavy with gold
Their bottoms dragged on a millenium of
Silt and secrets,
No Bard had proclaimed of time and blood
From the planks of Canberra Theatre
And as I walked our planned-and-planted streets
I found that roundabouts marked the graves of architects
Where I expected flea markets and
Alleys so awash with gin
That juniper twined there from cracks and loose cobbles.

I took to drinking:
Ale from as British a pub as I could find
Refusing to meet the street outside the eyesocket doors
As spring turned to summer turned to autumn and the rain
And roadworks swept away all my edited streetsigns
Leaving a Canberra fresh as a dewdrop.
The ale ran dry, with the last golden drop on my
Parched tongue I went outside,
Stumbled in Panadol-white sunlight,
Fell and
discovered:

That I was wrong and young in my leather pants and
Ricepaper skin to be enamoured
with all those evocative London placenames,
That I have been built by Burley Griffin,
The Brindabellas brought me up
On their blueberry and smoke backs
Lost in the Cotter I made dinosaurs of cow skulls,
Caught my first butterfly in Tidbinbilla
Wings shivering in my sweaty palms
Ripped my knee on a Kingston sidewalk,
Snuck from school and smoked my first cigarette
Defiantly coughing my innocence away
In Telopea Park, long and green as a cucumber,
Ran away from home and walked all the way to Civic,
Broke my mother’s heart and came back,
Fell in love
And fell in love
And fell in love
And rewrote each time
What love was and where it happened,
Took my bike in the night and biting rain
Through the failing Griffith streetlights
To see a girl in a bra for the very first time,
Sat on a car roof in Queanbeyan
Throwing gravel at the stars
Until they gave us wishes,
Drank butterscotch schnapps in abandoned council flats
And shoved a desk through a window
Because I’d never broken glass before,
Because I’d never been a teenager before,
Because life was new and glorious,
Because love was new and glorious,
Lost my father on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin
And saw his ghost in every old man
In Woden Hospital,
Grew up, broke up, broke down, defined the map
Of my life in Burley Griffin’s blueprints,
I was as planned as this city
And as silent as this city
And as loud and new and young as this city
And went to London, watched my dark eyes in the
Mirror of the Tube,
Became enamoured
with all those evocative Canberra placenames,
came back.

These are two poems about lakes.

Lake Mulwala
Sometimes the world is too
big; on the stillest
brightest day
the sky shifts,
slips off
old bearings
and with a murmur
(too loud for us to
even imagine)
falls to the earth:
there we find it
without meaning to;
propped up
(like by a clumsy child
playing with his brother’s Lego)
attached to dead trunks,
the Velcro scrub of mountains
flopping like skin in lake water
where the fish come to nibble at it
till it is light enough
to rise once more
airwards,
pulling the paper parade
flags of its birds
back into
flight.

Lake Kangaroo
Having confused
Geometry and geography
In high school (an easy error)
I set off west
On a day like the Euclidean plane,
Leaving the complex formulas
of Canberra roundabouts
I came here
To understand width.
Here
Where tracing my own circle
With sunscrunched eyes
I see nothing but horizon,
Where water and land and sky are
One, where the rules of
Mathematics break down,
Where joy and loneliness and silence
Are all expressed ∞.

I wish I was an asylum seeker.
Asylum seekers have it easy.
Here, at home, I have problems I can’t solve.
I have to pay rent. And to pay rent, I have to work.
And to work, I have to talk to people in offices.
And to talk to people in offices, I have to walk there.
Or take the bus. My life is pretty hard.
But if I was an asylum seeker…
If I was an asylum seeker I’d hop on a boat and I’d go where the wind and the currents take me.
If I was an asylum seeker I’d leave all my problems behind. I’d say I’ve had enough of those.
I’ll just leave. There won’t be anything holding me back.
If I was an asylum seeker I’d sail my boat to Australia. They’ll put me in a detention centre there. I’d get free food. I’d get free accommodation. I wouldn’t have to pay rent. I wouldn’t have to buy groceries. I’d have asylum seeker friends. We’d stay up all night long, talking about how lucky we that we don’t need to worry about our lives anymore.
I wish I was an asylum seeker. If I was an asylum seeker, I’d have such good stories to tell. I’ll tell how they came and murdered my family. How they came and murdered my friends. I’d tell about the poverty. About the hunger. About the floods and the wars and the way nothing ever got better. About the people in power who didn’t care about us.
But if I was an asylum seeker, I’d sail my boat to Australia, where the people in power care so much. I’d say, Mr Abbott, you’re a good man. I want to be in a detention centre, Mr Abbott. I want to live behind bars, Mr Abbott, I want to be confused and scared and I don’t want to understand what’s happening to me. And he’d say, I care about you. But I don’t like detention centres any more. I’ll do something different. I’m going to sail my navy, my big expensive navy, and catch you, and I’ll be really nice. I’ll fix your boat. I’ll fix it for you. And I’ll send it back. I’ll send it where the wind and the currents take it. I’ll make sure that you get home safe.
Oh, I wish I was an asylum seeker.

Winter & Withering
A Tale

Dedicated to Danny, Emily, Sasha, Nate and Miles, for their words.

The city of Rhyme rests on the banks of the wide River Spine, and across two hills. The larger, Type Hill, can be seen from almost anywhere in the city. Its brilliantly white mansions and wide streets all but sparkle in afternoon sunlight. The smaller hill is often forgotten, for it is less of a hill and more of a hump, and the old houses which cover it have, over many centuries, lowered it further into the ground with the weight of their collected lives.
Nevertheless, if a pale and unfit man were to make his way up its cobbled alleys, by the time he reached the top, he would be quite wheezy. The weather did not help matters — the morning had been dark and rainy, and the foreboding clouds hanging over the man’s head made it hard to see clearly, so as he reached the level top of Tumble Hill, he slipped on a smooth protruding cobble and fell to the ground. Cursing loudly, he picked himself up. The knee of his pants — his only good pants — was ripped, and there was a dirty gash on the ball of his palm. He looked around, but luckily, nobody was in the narrow lane to see him stumble. The man took the chance to steady his breath and sucked folornly at his burning palm. All in all, it was not a good start to the day. His morning tea had tasted like soup, his egg had been laid by a miserable chicken and did not want anything to do with him, and his last bottle of ink was as empty as his pockets — though less full of lint. As if they were matching his feelings, the clouds above his head grumbled with the promise of rain. The man squared his shoulders, did what he could about the tear in his pants, and walked up to the squat brown door of his destination. The sign above the door proclaimed, in blocky capitals, “A. B. Withering & Son, Pawnshop.” ‘& Son’ was crossed out in faded chalk. A smaller handpainted sign underneath said “All Weather To Be Left Outside.” The man shrugged off his clouds with a small despondent sigh, and walked through the door to the sound of a bell. His clouds drifted up the alley, where they sat brooding above a pub.

The pawnshop was as dusty and dark as the space behind a wardrobe — with the difference being that the dust there is made of dead moths and household arguments, while the dust in the shop was made of poverty, forgetting, and regret. The man did not know which kind was worse, but he felt immediately like walking back out. Clamping the feeling tightly behind his teeth, he trotted over to the high counter. There did not seem to be anyone around. The man wondered idly if pawnshop keepers themselves had been pawned off by disappointed wives and busy children, and never collected, which would have gone a long way to explaining why anyone would choose to be a pawnshop keeper and why they looked so very forgotten. He was interrupted in this promising train of thought by the appearance, above the counter, of the pawnshop keeper’s hair, which was wispy like dead mayflies, and which was followed before too long by the rest of the pawnshop keeper. He had a face like the moon, grey and pitted with memories, and wore a waistcoat made of pocketwatches.
“Yes?” he said. His voice fitted him, though the man could not say how.
“H-uh, hullo,” said the man. “My name is Florian, Florian Winter… I have an account.” He said this with a great sadness in his small, quavering voice. Nothing could have made his embarrassment greater. Nothing could have made his regret less painful.
The moon-faced man peered at him. “Ah. Yes, I remember you. Are you collecting?” His mean eyes added, “I very much doubt.“
“No,” said Florian, in confirmation. “No, I need to sell.“
The wispy hair disappeared momentarily behind the counter, and returned with a large ledger.
“Your account isn’t very good, Mister Winter,” said the pawnshop keeper, scanning a page. “It isn’t very good at all.“
“I know,” said Florian. “I know, but I can’t make rent. Please let me sell. I’ve got good wares. And I’ve got a story in the post. It’s a good one. A mystery. They’ll pay me for sure. Ten crows, and thirty more when it’s published.“
The man leaned in closer.
“You’ve been pawning here for four months, Mister Winter. Four. I’ve not seen a crow from you in all that time. And I know for a fact that before you came here, you were pawning with Mister Durlew in Wending Lane. And he never saw a crow neither. I don’t mind, Mister Winter. I’m not saying I mind. Time’s running out on your old wares already, a week more and they’ll be sold. But I’m just of the personal opinion, Mister Winter, that the more wares you sell, the less chance you’ll have of ever getting them back. If you see what I mean. It’s a-” he glanced down at the ledger. “A vicious cycle, Mister Winter.” The mean eyes met Florian’s.
“I need to sell,” Florian repeated, lowering his.
The man clasped his dusty hands over the edge of the counter. “Tell me.” Florian felt small and eaten.
“Verily,” he said, shuffling uncomfortably in his shoes. “Obstruction. Frippery.“
“Verily I’ve got,” said the man. “I can give you a pilcrow each for the other two. Any more.” It wasn’t a question. He knew Florian had more.
“Verisimilitude,” Florian continued. “Augury, mannequin, periphery, paraphernalia. Sarcophagus. Derelict. Winnowy. Tincture, lucubration, lugubrious, sallow.” The moon-faced man scribbled in the ledger as he spoke.
“A pilcrow apiece for derelict, tincture and sallow, half a crow for augury and periphery and sarcophagus. Hmm. Two crows for lucubration. And two for verisimilitude. I have the others. More.“
As the words were written down in the ledger, Florian felt them being drawn out of his head like the river mosquitos drew his blood at night. He no longer remembered what he had said, and felt empty and crushed and as if he were betraying his very tongue. He racked his brains for more words, but none more came. He thought as the man’s gaze pinned him to the dusty old floor.
“Despair, despondency, desperation,” he intoned. “Poverty, beggarly, insolvent. Hollow. Hopeless. Desolate. Void.“
The pawnshop keeper cut into him with pitiless eyes.
“Oh, Mister Winters,” he said. “I already have all of those.”