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J E N C R A W F O R D |
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keira st1 and letters come, rain, the poems like a mouthful of salt and some like a room or a drawer filled with precious tickets, strange coins, the notes of a quiet hand. in the garden a cat collapses to an ecstasy of sunshine and scoria while sun rolls its burning, weeping bones to the far side of the house. where is there shade against this? – the single moment stretched across a lifetime, the way dailiness shivers in that moment’s long heat, threatens to disappear, and then won’t like a mouthful of salt and a dry wind persisting even now 2 let us say that something as beautiful as – a plastic bag, caught in air currents, opened, laughing – was once touched by the merest fingernail of a flame which was eating something, hungrily, nose close to the ground and out of frame the bag is dancing is gone your son’s friends sit on the floor, their hair dyed bright as grief, their hands working open and closed, palms gasping and your body as you speak is larger than your body the word ‘body’ no longer sounds the same 3 someone’s deaf aunt was quavering in the foyer asking too loudly about sedation. she and I didn’t know that you could stand and release your voice to touch every torn tissue, every cell, whole words coming to you like rain to render these gulfs of air as nothing but humming connection, to touch even there, beneath a too-thick shirt, the weakened shoulder of a broad, unspeaking man in the second-last row, to say yes my hands are empty 4 the boy is digging sand. from the dunes you imagine reaching to check the temperature of his skin; can you give him your long-sleeved shirt, will he come back beneath the tree? but he’s found the point where sand gives way to water like magic, and never fails, and the shine of it keeps you returning like a warm-blooded creature of the sea to the rare, deep pool of light where an image may hold you, weightless, as you rest 5 now, after mountains and deserts, you come again to the house with his name on its laundry door. two lines mark six month’s growth – the span of an adult’s palm. through the wattle the works flames shiver but are constant, quiet at this distance, as subtle as a cat stealing onto your lap, again, kneading – night is composed of broken threads of light pulling free of a needle which falls in the lapse of breath, hope, memory something we could name as a god who yet fails to be returned whole– and minutes will pass with you in the garden motionless, your eyes caught in a well of blackness made by chance in the loose stacking of rocks. some days light touches on a web in there, some days it doesn’t and months will pass to the sounds of honeyeaters, thunder, windchimes the boom of slag hitting water of pounding-heart boys burning out tyres of welding, of weddings, of rain– in leaving I hear it again: the mute and crying world as it receives what you have given; this echoes, and is not lost. |
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