for Catherine Parer
…woke
up to a green sky full of jellyfish
streaming in on a south-easterly swell,
tentacles
flapping
election
posters on heritage chimneys
in
Sydney Park like summer curtains
invaded
by a southerly change.
Far
below the sound of popping
bacon
and a crackling bushfire
of
eggs divided the morning into two
horizons:
the frantic and the surreal.
Punters
dashed from breakfast to vote
on
the horses, voters to bet
on
the politicians, while cruising
over
pollarded trees hedged under the shallow,
inverted
bell-curves of overhead wires
the
jellyfish drift north-north-west, their shadows sinking
whole
suburbs in rippling eclipse. A pod of humpback
paddy
wagons wailed in ragged pursuit.
Out
on the tiles
of
the sky’s swimming pool
others
followed on foot, eyes fixed
on
the trembling medusae, decapitated
heads
trailing ectoplasm
out
to Windsor, towards the dead
centre,
nerveless, dangling disasters throwing
spanner
after spanner into the works
of
polling day. Risking the fluffy
mines
of cloud-fields, riddling
watery
topaz with gelatinous confetti,
the
jellyfish sent shudders
through
a nation caught between
the
choice of more of the same with less fun
or
less of the same with more boredom
narrowly,
by preferences, in the marginals.
In
the capital, old jellyback himself quivered
over
the question of their legal status,
scrambling
the air force, invoking
the
spectre of revolution by unreason
while
on and on the jellyfish nudged
and
surged serenely into the wind, imperial
at
their purple core.
All
this I saw
on
election day, promenading my lobster,
with
blue hair and mixolydian eyes…