Les in Real Life

Les in Real Life,

The book of Les’ s poetry just fell off the desk

onto the polished wood floor.

At 783 pages it created quite a bang.

The millipede on the wall twitched.

The fluff sausage dogs in the corner jumped.

Les in real life was as hefty as his ‘Collected’.

He wrote poems celebrating the fat, his tribe,

including Quintets For Robert Morley,

the bushy-browed, triple-chinned English actor.

with the plummy voice.

There’s nothing plummy about our Les’s poetry.

It is wide of girth as Les himself, capacious,

containing jokes, puns, outlandish rhymes,

skew whiff metaphors., and clever insights.

It is written in Aussie English.

I bent down, picked dear old Les off the floor.

No need to go to gym tomorrow

lugging Les around.,

Fork

Fork.

There’s something special about a small wooden fork.

Small, slender, artisanal.

Things just taste better with them.

Apple and cinnamon muffins, for one.

Strawberry shortcake.

And this explosion of a pavlova my daughter made,

the slice I’ve just eaten,

mango and whipped yoghurt

which gave this poem its prod.

Sea Slugs

This world — we’ll never see the end of it.

So much beauty, above and below.

And just when you thought you’d seen it all,

up pops the Photographic Exhibition on Sea Slugs.

Slugs! The very name invites disdain, derision.

But these are something else: an artificer’s folly,

a frolic of design and colour, of quirky geometries

and improbable beauty — and there are 3000 varieties!

What practical use, what purpose, if not to delight?

Later I trawled through the depths of the web and emerged

staggering, reeling ; & that strange word, ‘nudibranch’

• pic courtesy of Wikipedia

Like Mary Oliver Did

I’ve failed.

I got my sea slug poem

but not the one about yr cataract

how when it was removed

& the dressings came off

you went out into the world

like Mary Oliver did

amazed at all you saw.

going Wow! Wow!

yr little expostulations of beauty.

Gleefully Unhinged

I suppose I should be getting ready

rather than hanging out here in the garden

drinking G & T’s

reading an ode to the art of ‘goofing off’

which is sort of like Jenny Joseph’s

‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple’

which she wrote at 29

& that pic of Bill Murray at Cannes in his short-sleeved

psychedelic shirt, baby blue shorts & panama hat

looking ‘gleefully unhinged’

• pic from Style in ‘The Age’

Love on the Wing

When I was a kid I used to wander down the park and watch dragonflies flitter over the pond like tiny, restless angels.

Later I wanted to write poems about them the way Monet would go down to his garden at Giverny to paint water lilies.

The only difference is that water lilies stay still. They don’t dash and dart about the pond at 100 ks an hour. Even when they have sex they’re on the go, coupling like planes fuelling mid- flight.

I almost got one once when a dragonfly dawdled on the front doorknob one drowsy afternoon, after summer rains, then saw me and took off, its gossamer wings flashing rainbows.

Perhaps I should turn like Monet to waterlilies. He got 250 paintings out of them. I haven’t got one poem though I reckon I’ve made 250 trips. [ pic by loriedarlin on pinterest ]

The Best Exotic Mongolian Beanie

What sort of wuss wears a beanie around the house?

It’s not Outer Mongolia for f**’s sake

But it looks exotic and it’s warm and woolly.

A tower of a hat from Ulaanbaatar, the trader told me. A beanie fit for Genghis Khan.

I could see him storming through the steppes wearing it proudly like a crown,

I had to have it with its burnished reds and browns and black leopard spots.

But I look a proper Charlie wearing it in the mall or library or on public transport.

In restaurants people just stare.

So I wear it when gardening or on evening walks along the esplanade before disappearing

into my yurt where I cuddle up with a copy of Sonomyn Udval’s ‘Collected Short Stories’

which everyone should read.

• what’s the strangest structure you’ve slept under?
• have you read any of Sonomyn’s wonderful stories?
• do you wear beanies on cold, wintry days?

What Moves You, Moves Me

the musky glow of the candle bowl

the frisson of flesh on flesh

the cinnamon zing of Venetians

crosswords over coffee

Joaquin Phoenix singing Cry, Cry, Cry

the ineffable sadness of Jackson because we both

know people like that

the voice of Johnny Cash, proof that there’s a God

Rick Springfield on Gospel Radio speaking to the sky

& those blackbirds, after rain, bless their untidy little hearts.

Nice Bag

Nice bag, she says as I place it on the chemist’s counter.

Thank you, I say.

Yes, she says, admiring it.

Good looking.

Compact.

Square-shouldered.

Sturdy.

Not likely to topple over.

A bit like me, on a good day, I reply

She smiles, the sort of smile that says, I better humour this guy, he might be dangerous.

Okay. Well, that didn’t work

I have a very bad feeling.

Tell me I’m wrong.

That I have written myself into obscurity.

That I was too clever by half.

That no one knew what the f*** I was writing about

in the previous post ‘Not a nightingale ode’.

It was a glass of red wine.

But that’s what happens when you put up a post

while you’ve been drinking

while you’ve been rhapsodizing about a glass

of red wine