#337 - cicadaly loud and look back far enough

 

4.xii.20

337

two poems

cicadaly loud

 

like the country between ears

day spilt here

an age of falling bark

jacaranda strew to top

guesses

and tricks of the way

less more

seasons of vanish

cicadaly

 

haven’t they been wrung from the heat?

don’t they tell out breezes?

rhythm though singing

 

no, all is otherworldly now

 

imagine a silence in the after storm

webs swept

 

I know they are building

their world on ours

it’s tilted

they shell out for this

 

veined wings

proud squat

come out of their so soaring

sit and spit

 

heard

but what you see is an absence

 

they come with a simple message

to deafen

oh when will we understand?

 

look back far enough

to add to a book of mother

 

almost to before I was

and a kind of Christmas to come

 

view from the backyard

step round the side

goanna tail gone, was it?

under the house

who knows?

 

other side was the legend of the rooster

died of old age because nobody could

overgrown and under rot

lived where the mildew was

we went

 

and centre of the backyard

next to the 44 gallon fire

uniform exhumed

so to commit

forget the war

 

there was time before we were digging to China

top of a bank

and behind that, what?

Percy, I believe

blue over

harbour summer stillness out there

 

look far enough into yourself, who else?

back there are things you can almost see

wild wind-up toy

so much of the action lino-level

 

laundry where mulberry wine blew

ceiling as purple as dad’s office shirts

line under the silk worm farm –

how we did patrician then

was it a Hill’s Hoist

 

came round

bob a job

and letterbox bungers

some lost their eyes back in the day

you could see it coming

all this legend

then decimal day – hope dashed

in the possum shine of a cent

so tiny and run up a tree

 

Uncle John took his brows off in the war

making a bomb in the laundry

bushy ever since his little war effort

boys will be

 

where was I?

round round

tickle you under

 

eyes at their clearest

in through to the kitchen

where my brother did the harbour on cupboards

remember a simmer

and out of doors

down by where the tram lately

 

bottletops, splintery rails

grimey bob and diesel choof

no one would swim in that harbour now

 

and later cot at Mrs Monaghan’s

was forty winks

and ran away from once

right past there to Calypso St

 

buried the lettuce sandwiches

in the sand at Aunt Basie’s

that was hysterectomy

or so I later learned

no one would ever do lettuce to me

 

through palings to the next door kids

can’t think of a name

 

Uncle George had those beetle crates for cubbies

splintery but did

and he had me up shoulder high

once on that scary bridge was enough

have I recovered?

you ask yourself

nor praise nor blame

 

that was all elsewhere

let’s have the backyard back

slope with pigface

and the garden furniture I still see

we took it with us, painted it later

was it yellow then?

 

but round a sort of corner I think

and must have been a pantry

big cupboard, was it, at the back?

 

telephone there somewhere

black, letters and numbers

I was ringing information – find out stuff

height of a mountain

I was ringing the Patent Office

about the pom-pom mobile

 

must have been a room off to the side there

what good humour everyone had

so many steps to the letterbox

rough stumbling too

and underfoot consider then

 

Wince – a – Lot and Charming

who was  taken by cockerspaniel thieves

or might have been King Charles

 

later Cappy who would irrigate dad’s trousers

home from the office

so happy to see him

 

have I mentioned Mr Murphy?

mongrel  stayer

who caught the ferry to commute

and one day sadly…

 

up the back was, you remember

Percy – curmudgeon

codger botherer

turned off the water to us

just because he could

 

I remember writing out the letters

from the newspaper

on the side of the newspaper

that was on the floor

in front of the telly

on which JFK was shot

 

the other competing first memory

being that plumber coming in

when I was sitting on the throne

(invention of mortification)          

 

was that Memory #1

or just what I was told?

(the way a pet’s attributed thoughts, opinions)

 

gunbarrel hall

and dad with the samurai sword defending

burnt my bum on that stove

 

planets all mote-afloat in a beam

still in bed

till pancake

 

looking back, hard squint

it’s not as if you come to a wall

not life to flash before

this is out of endless time

the years until dinner

you’d think you could see further in

but days were seasons then

weather supernatural

 

all bets set my head on a certain track

a thread and carried it

round with me

 

the typewriter of legend

high on a desk in the growing out view

on which I am said to have played

 

what a distraction I was am and will be

not least to myself