1.
These days poetry’s all about extravagance:
like the way a string of sausages
impersonates an approaching train and
promises
a full belly for some, lateness for another
and for others yet again that they’ve missed
the same old, same old and discovered
instead
the tail of everybody else’s head —
like how dawn in the west means darkness
in the east; or it’s like a guitar
of harbour ripples, two overlapping
pennies mourning the passing of another
super tanker; or like how a fart
makes castanets of buttocks or a pool table
reincarnates Heraclitus, even if
we are not gods, or at least, not yet
2.
despite the enormous coat-hanger pegging
out a highway between two pylons and hanging
empty air, or the scattered dice of selfish
waterfront apartments, remnants of a god-
sized game of ‘Room-with-a-view-to-die-for’
that’s been
played to death. And no one is laughing —
rats
among the chandeliers flash gold teeth
and their leathery wives wrinkle slitty
eyes.
Only their champagne bubbles burst with
laughter,
but don’t let that fool you. There are
other,
less fun games: trains are incompetent
games of billiards, cannoning but never
scoring
and out of the corner of my eye the city
plays hide-and-seek with the back of my
head.
But these are distractions only, like all
games
3.
where winning can be dismissed as an act of
grace
and losing an unnecessary annoyance.
It’s a bit like knowing it’s all bullshit
but doing it anyway. Or is it like you,
Thalia,
reaching out a crook from stage left
to pull off those acts past their use-by
date
and peeking cheekily from the wings,
mouthing,
“Did you like that? Should I do it again?”
If only you would do it more! And give
something to the over-confident skyscrapers
to
think about, if the novice acupuncturist
of the city skyline can be said
to think at all. The sky receives the
therapy
it needs and arches its back gratefully
above us,
mood heavenly. And we’re thankful: indolent
4.
days are better than dies irae — except when
you abandon us, Thalia, pack up your mask
and leave us with only the laughter of
politicians
(an
oxymoron, I know) and the sideways anti-
clockwise D, or upside-down smile
of the bridge. A slowly swaying yacht
recovers its silvered mast from the water
and casts it out again. The harbour is full
of blue beer and the sun is an extra
whose wages have been paid by the yachties.
It’s the end of a long shoot. Seagulls
interrupt the afternoon’s rehearsal
of autumn with shrill asides; they’re a
gesture
stolen from a cocktail party, let loose
in the sky to their own wheeling applause.
Ferries circulate through the bloodstream
5.
of the port, commuter-positive
and a computer crashes into the sea
of information and sinks without trace.
But there is always a trace, isn’t there,
Thalia, to remind us of the other
selves we’ve become and even without
you, there is still your Cheshire Cat
smile. In the distance a child’s mosquito
whine starts up and those tiny muezzins
siphon off my happiness, erecting
fragile minarets up and down
my bare legs and arms. Somewhere a baby
is crying with a mouth like a torn scone
and it still seems vaguely funny, like a
miracle
cut out of the back of a Cornflakes packet:
because these days we’re accustomed to seeing
God only in the heads of our beers
6.
(Bernhard) and rainbows cause tooth decay
(Garcilaso de la Vega). I’ve had it
with this city. It’s all sneer and veneer,
isn’t it Thalia? That’s why I have to write
to you, because you’re elsewhere. And
there’s not
much choice: Canberra is a hospital
with the roof taken off; Adelaide’s the dark
side
of the moon, a regimented folly (Bail),
and Brisbane, well, it’s not much better
than steam
on stilts —too hot but not as far away
as Perth and less unspeakable than
Melbourne.
But that’s no reason to fail to choose
another
city. Each one has its shitty gems,
a
camel sniffing at the rail with a resentful
nostril (Brodsky) or the rotting fingers
of Walsh Bay’s piers gloved by the harbour.
7.
That’s the reason why you were last of the
Muses,
Thalia — comedy must saunter in
behind the rest and mercilessly take
the piss out of history and hymns,
of tragedy, erotica, the lyric
and
astrology, of music, dancing
and that clunker, epic — please don’t baulk
at being told by me what you should do:
just do the opposite (bravado’s the key).
That’s the reason why you should be here:
last
continent, first city, chock-
a-block with gritty charms like sluggos
clogged with sand after a savage dumping;
and, in the distance, there’s a gum-ringed
field
I could
buy after decades of nine to five
and then fester in more bald than alive.
8.
So here I am on an Erskineville verandah
under the airborne moss of a jacaranda
floating above my head at night — and still
I keep returning to the harbour, jagged
wet caiman snouting the humid plain
of Sydney because I can’t be anywhere else,
Thalia, I’m snookered in this dumb city
of brilliant hazards and dull comparisons
with Rio, San Diego, etcetera dice
me with boredom. But one of these days
you’ll come waltzing in through the heads
of my imagination (Krishnamurti)
and that will suffice to slay them in the
aisles
and flay the cured hide of this city,
unearthing at last its pink nascent
laughter.