When he gets up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, she’d be there or on the way back to his room after pausing in the kitchen for a glass of milk, she’d be in the hallway.
Passing ships in the night.
He’d look at her, and she at him, then both look away.
After eight years, off and on, they were still a mystery to each other.
Her cat. Not his. They’d never bonded.
And I know there’s a supermoon out tonight
& all i have to do is go out and look
above the treetops
and exclaim, Wow! Wow
& the stone dog will be pissing on the pavers again
& Mad Meg reeling ’round the birdbath freaking out
the other chooks
& the thoughts in my blood skedaddle like a cat
over the page
& I can barely keep up
& I know I’m going to be crucified for what I say
but hey! it’s Easter, the season to be crucified
but a rebirth is coming, a renewal.
I just don’t know what it’s going to look like
on the other side
What’s good about it? he says.
Christ died on the cross.
Everything’s closed.
You’re not supposed to go anywhere.
Not eat meat !
Be morbid and morose.
Good Friday. Huh!
What moron thought that one up?
It’s the stupidest oxymoron in the language.
You see polio.
You see the boy down the street locked inside
an iron lung.
kids in callipers.
You see the abducted children from your home town —
Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon from the Adelaide Oval
and the Beaumont children taken from Glenelg Beach
on Australia Day ’66 who are never found
& the parents who die not knowing
& you witness the epidemic of fear that keeps yr children
in lockdown
& your own daughter whose boyfriend is taken off a suburban street
and killed by an infamous child abductor
and there are more: the Truro murders and it never stops.
And Debbie Anne Leach who you taught in Year 11
murdered at Taperoo Beach after school with her dog.
And the drug deaths and the suicides
and that lovely Year 9 girl who found her inner poet
And the darkness that swept the world after 9/11
But you’ve seen nothing like this.
We’ve come to a quiet place
a harbor
beyond the squalls and storms
of yesterday
where nerves frayed
we tore each other’s hearts
away
a quiet place
a harbour
to berth our frail vessels
a good place to stay
The world can be divided, the philosopher said,
between two groups of people: those who leave
pegs on the line , and those who don’t:
my first wife was a clearly a proponent
of the second school & I the first which might explain
why we split
even two marriages later
I am hesitant to put the pegs in a tray in case
my new partner is an adherent of the first school
though the presence of a peg tray clearly indicates
the second
I pause
between the two schools
but my old self reasserts itself:
a leopard cannot change its spots.
