smuggler’s bonnet
the place my fingers gladly guard
snugglers’ cove, my cloven hoof
woody and strong, it toughens me,
a stain that’s impossible to shift
the long chain of life lies down in me
space station that soothes the hemless sea
and the cat likes to sleep on my little headland
this crook, the limb that invented home
this narrow fissure in the bone
above a private beach, and others like it,
domesticate everything within reach
to make a country of myself I swim
but my strokes never stitch the grieving water
albatross wings follow me
like flies tied to a flock of strings
for years I’ve worked my passage home
with the sounds of the sea always chafing the shore
when the moon relinquishes its bone
I lay my eggs above the tide
a country full of strangers
the sleeper cell awakes in me
a dog stiffening on the leash
a meerkat, a ferret could have me now
collapsing the wet sand into the sea
for solitude reproaches
my heart approaches again and again
with charcoal fingers its inbuilt cousin
pushing a flower of soil in my mouth
lining me with humus
like a grave turned inside-out
dreadnought
.
Europe is a frozen sea
where I have walked on water.
Clumps of folk, like barnacles,
disturb my landscape, like graffiti
but I hardly see them.
This is my terra nullius.
The river belly is invisible beneath me
and it strikes me that from up on deck,
the world is flat.
A ship’s a hemisphere. The mast, a stolen tree,
an infinitely tall flagpole and cross
combines the heresies of government and god.
Woollen to the eyeballs now
I skate like an Australian
writing in my head postcards: The sky
is white. The trees are white. From here the world
is white. God must be white.
Each a Southern hemisphere
the first sweatshops were ships
overcrowded with workers
gold and spice and sweet timbers.
Overseers commissioned by their God
to walk on water
with their three sticks
gun and flag and cross
privatised entire nations
like cheeses of the world
shown on a board.
Carving the frozen water with my blades
I make a map. The globe stretches in front of me
bare of any footprint
as far as the eye can see.
My breath evaporates as guilt
evaporates, like exhaust. A flag
like any flag, indicating piracy.
I have come alone here
from the far Antipodes
teaching myself how to skate
and with the sheep’s back riding on me.
I will strike entitlement to freedom’s ingenuity.
Like a scarf I lose my fear
without knowing I’ve lost it.
Terra nullius must be Strine,
I think, for I fear nothing.
the hunt
.
I want a seed to grow me fat
to push my belly into the world
before me, like a pram into traffic
making me big from above, like a hat
I stink up my blankets, roiling, mute
any man a father who pauses to roost –
sprinter, guest star, Gastarbeiter
dictator rapidly deposed. I am young, almost:
they throng my shore
fatherhood is a range of shoulders I climb
to scan the horizon for my home:
gathering, polishing my sharp stones.
He will pass; I will flush him out.
In the ribald empire of my waist
I will reconstitute bean from sprout
motherhood is a crown in a tree
my landscape will reorient to portrait
in childbirth, nature’s aristocracy
in my dream I fall like you
in my dream I fall like you
dividing for a second or two
the stacks of poste restante water
which flow round the piers like ice
I have revisited many times
the scene of your crime against us all
for suicide is a punishment
and we have suffered
that dismal repair of corrugated iron
tacked across the shipping shed roof
on the wharf, where you probably didn’t intend to end up
which swallowed you slower than water
coughing you up on the rebound
broken open like a cup
and lying, like a statistic,
spread out like a public thing
even those of us who never knew you
have lived with the patched roof
and your name,
which must never be spoken
driving across the completed bridge
I always talk to you
I’ve two fine brothers –
weren’t you curious?
did you farewell your wife, a woman sometimes cruel
but newly delivered of a son (my youngest uncle,
three weeks old. Still lives alone)
when Dad’s immediate maternal progenitor
as our uncle called her
lay dying, I visited.
Only once.
Watching your widow sink among pillows
right in the centre of the bed,
I began to cry. Vehemently nodding,
‘Good,’ she said.
The last words of your generation for mine.
room service
2am: sleep has not come for me.
Bells thresh against the double-glazing like wheat.
The air-con whispers of towels in a drier. I lie
stacked beneath layers of strangers
like eggs frozen in ice-cube trays.
In my mind’s eye a numbered ball
slips pipe to pipe from floor to floor
down thirty-five floors to the city’s sewage.
Another hairy, farting, scab-nosed child
has scorned my offer of mortality. I am a bag of feathers
lying still, reading the pillow menu.
I wanted you to embark on me; climb on my shoulders
with your sandy feet; make me the stone in a rich stone soup.
Hours pass. Again I conduct myself
over the white tiles, cupping a hand, and crouch,
confiding my hinge to the ear and dark throat of the drain.
On this chock-a-block earth I am an ill-planned city
that has built too many tower blocks
for industry that never comes.
Along both sides of the street houses march, denuded of gardens,
piled like debris in the forks of trees
years after the last flash flood has passed.
I’ll give you something to really cry about
i.
O Cleopatra, darken your eye. I loved you how you were.
You are a cell. Whittling while I work
you shovel fingers down your throat
in the camp with the million dollar views:
a silk to stain the moon by day.
ii.
Every time an egg lets down I lie awake all night.
It took me years to find the pattern in this sleep.
No book engages me. I’m unengaged.
This latest round child, fretted slightly
spurred with its impending age
lets go –
a sigh – a whisper –
and commutes to the city centre.
iii.
The after-dinner binges
I transliterate with costliness
to because I’m worth it from self-loathing.
Buying the expensive tub.
Buying the organic.
Standing in the hall of mirrors naked
as at some reunion
This is what I have become, I say.
Laying out the cloth for one.
iv.
I’m tired. It’s tidal.
Love is a black bear rarely sighted.
v.
Childless celebrities
who can never retire gaze wearily from their pages. Everywhere
a campervan can go, a moon can follow.
I wrap my woundedness in towels.
I have cake. I’m a psychologist. My kitchen drawer
a door cut in a glacier. But
though I don’t eat standing at the sink
and though there’s silverware involved
this is not luxury. It’s barely sensuous.
I’m tired, it’s tidal. The remoteness
of the stars and moon and all seems to me at such times
quite unremarkable.
vi.
I wish I liked chocolate.
It’s cheap, it’s always available, it’s legal: it’s a cult.
A solitary habit wiping masturbation’s loneliness
it’s duty wrapped up as a treat
lace trim, pole dancing; mascara.
Such poor copies of girl power. Like a bride or childhood’s Arab I wear
tea towels on my head. Scissoring
beauty spots at great expense
from glossy magazines. If I freckle far enough
I’ll be brown all over.
These are my thirties, this is love’s
sad second honeymoon’s dry hollow
where I rest my hand.
In the master bedroom
I am mistress to my fate. The striped
with sunlight sheets embrace me
like a visitor. Lake Eyre, Tasmania.
I wear a placemat on my head.
vii.
Upstaged by death
and hopelessness – and hope –
I toss, grinning in my sleep
with sly humiliation.
The Last Post plays again outside –
a long, drawn-out farewell.
I am slow and strobe the sea
labouring, like a soothsayer, to please the always-visiting man.
Meanwhile across town somewhere
– on the internet – he sleeps.
Oblivious in sleep.
He heals himself in sleep. He’s going to leave his life
who doesn’t understand him like I do.
viii.
As I peel the ceiling back and the ceiling on top of that
the stars are pearls who freckle the night sky
my hair curls in the water
this bath is my bed until soaked skin
reveals my sixty. Candles rim the tub.
In so black, so restless an untrod world
the firelight flickers on the can of VB my intended holds
catalogues floss the slumping fence
and intermittently, Christians knock
like the 360 days of Christmas. Soon enough
midnight feasts on me –
then 3am. –
then dawn.
I rustle at the liquid sheets.
I sight up the streetlight’s moon.
ix.
Fucking might have saved us, if we’d done it long enough.
But we used imperial for a sum so wretched small
it could only be counted up in centimetres
if at all.
x.
Put your hand here, put. The lizard pulse
of reproduction’s tawdry old tired old art form
rises and falls like France. My red-stained palm grasps the pillow
I’m a mess, I’m a disgrace, and at my door from India
telephone salesmen offer plans
the way swards of India-rubber trees used to offer
India-rubber bands.
xi.
Crumbs on the sheets
keep me awake, for I am sensitive.
Until ten months ago
I was mistress to my fate.
And years of needling pricks
have pierced me
threaded but not awake. Now like childhood’s Arab
I wrap tea towels on my head.
Lake Eyre. Tasmania.
The straw scatters and sinks.
xii.
Sometimes I’m angry but there’s no mileage in it.
xiii.
My grandmother’s Christian name
– shortened to Aud –
meant ‘I have studied.’ She had studied,
she was bored. Her porn name
if they’d had prom night in those days
might have been Winkie Cawmore.
I turn and turn again. Give me the keys, she said,
and shut the door. A child’s abstraction of a bear
worn thready at the ear, I did. All the little trees
along our road were polite like soldiers. We tore apart the family home
for good, just having fun with it.
Happiness is hereditary
(she said) and I’m not done with it.
reaching for the remote
Come, the mighty, slumbering under your hill
no giants sleeping but goodwill
inside of us
a corporation’s a body still; a company is of people
to turn them inside-out reveals
as ever the wavering sea-frond steeples
even the spray dissolved in peaches
is a kind of love, speaks
the dream of keep this safe:
death is organic. death is ungloved.
though the trees seem such unnatural greens, and lit at night
and placed around us while we sleep
as if instructed to keep us in sight
and all the matter that’s the matter
hulls in cities and the soil; the work we do is making
everything worse yet nothing ever spoils
though sleep, a bumbling Creole now
mows across a billion screens
the zeroes, the ones, the zeroes, the ones
that all mean ‘I just want to go home’
every purchase has a rope
leading up to it and a rope
leading away. carries sweat,
carries knots, carries a hill.
who mined this.
who made it. how are their lungs & eyes.
the water. waste. offgas. freight.
knots uncounted slipping hand
over hand into the filth astern
are a rosary-coloured tell
and we know it
struggling, but not very hard
to make right the wrongs our fear
our loneliness
and causeless isolation do
in his bulb of peace as in a cage
philosophy devises
pilgrims come to the carpet’s
edge and say, and then turn their backs,
You’ve inspired me.
bishop has the actress
on his talk show on YouTube
she played ugly outside Delhi
Bollywood blares that love and war
are the romances
for women, and the romances for men
to keep us partial O
Your Wholeness, she tells, nuzzling:
all my darlings are stones –
lamp-eyed with starvadoration –
standing in platinum prongs like an Emmy –
you wanna know where I keep my Oscar?
in the loo
adopting mantras, daughters, can’t give away no satisfaction
harvesting the genetically modified seeds of compassion
like Prada, the Algonquin, anti-fracking legislation
seeds from Big Pharma, manna mamma, gazing
moonfaced from the fence
a god with an addiction
it turns out, no kind of god at all
they contemplate the third-world projects
funded by her five-earth footprint
‘In every child I see myself ’ –
‘You ought to make the effort
to remind yourself of them’ – o, Father,
you are awful! she frolics in such floral aisles
pharmacy in the dell
in the dark World Bank the lights
are left on all night but
in deference to Earth Hour
management have closed the blinds
they & the cleaners
only want to retire
in time to spend time with the family
meanwhile, alone. 2D or not 2D?
I blame logonhorrhea
behind the screen, the window
where forgotten in the curve of the earth
the arc of banished animals
the only living creatures other
in the universe
eternity is here
and we ignore it. if you’re lost in the bush
and you’re looking for water
don’t go uphill.
everything real is modest and near
and not being told
all the water rushes
all downhill, as water always will
too much attention on too little life
and stores as far as the eye can see
like castles: take your envelopes, take your gold
it’s as if none of our foodstuffs can die
it’s as if neither can we. nor live – no time –
as if the glossiness of things
extends its personal guarantee
or quarantine, for we will go on wanting
that thing nameless & not marked down
for we are little gods
at heart, and cannot keep ourselves
from reaching for the remote
the bristle and thrum of buildings
marks a creche of hollowed hills
and under it all and through it all
the song of Country sings us still
Come back, singing
Come back
Come back to me.
©Cathoel Jorss
Comb the Sky with Satellites, It’s Still a Wilderness
