 |
Two poems Poetry |
Early Morning, Forecastle
The house is being painted and the new wardrobes are in
but everybody knows we won't get the money back.
There's wild approval in the ring tones of neighbours
whose dogs will have free reign over the green patch.
Occasional timidity doesn't fix the chimney, we all agree,
especially when you're selling. Which is why the scaffolding
has been wrapped like a double helix of our group DNA…
the need to fix and/or move come as quick
as the cherry blossoms in the park. The builders
have only been here for days, but you've been following them for weeks.
How you carry your hands in your pockets
like a brickie, says the brickie. In these early hours,
your mother and I are indulged in mundane amours
when the two of you, two stories up, peak your heads in the window.
The land recedes like a memory… but a memory of what?
There's the possibility that no invitation to a new life will come,
that we'll continue to watch the dogs raise their legs
on the trees long after the white flowers have fallen,
full and thick as cream. You take your coffee with the others
on the roof, looking out to sea; like us, already longing
to return to a place you’ve never been.
Augury
'So remarkable are [the whale's] mystic gestures, that I have heard… them declared akin to signs and symbols.'
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Elected earlier this month into the college of augurs, you direct us
not to the sky but to that part of the ocean where there is surfacing
a great school of whales. We watch
filter-feeders rub up against the toothsome and listen
to the repeated song of the humpback, but soon the purpose
even to you seems unclear. There was the sea-battle of Drepanum,
the battle of Lake Trasimene… the birds ignored with disastrous results.
When the Admiral-General moves in, we're fearing for your safety.
But now there is a swooping and a lobtail and
it can only mean one thing – for which we are grateful,
since you can now remain with us, at least for another day.