Two Poems

toast

i say let’s open a new jar
of the fresh fig jam instead of
scraping the bottom of the old:
in this respect i am my mother’s
daughter, not like my careful father,
tenacious to retrieve the last crumb
or smear or drop, the reconnaissance
soldier driving that tank through the snow
of the libyan desert –

my mother’s daughter’ a phrase
i would have baulked at once
glows off the fig thick
on the toast with its small
golden seeds, ‘royal fig’ the label
says the ache of memory
the morning’s heart round
and juicy as bottled fruit: that
tall venetian vase she dazzled
me with at the age of four or five
that sat on the lounge room
windowsill, my mother’s treasure the
genuine thing she showed me the proof
the glassblower’s twist and snap
under its base; the deep red decorative
vase with those fine white grapes
stood like promise, like aladdin’s lamp
from my ‘tales from the arabian nights’
(retold by enid blyton), this venetian vase,
suburban antique waiting in front of
venetian blinds the lounge room mostly
bright as a twilight filled with the spoils
of my mother’s adventures in antique
land in the early fifties scouting
round sydney with blonde aunty sunny my
step-grandmother – whose real name  was
beryl, she had a great laugh – in her big
black jag – and i vomited once by the side
of the road somewhere near mosman – a
spaghetti sandwich in the heat; we nearly
lost the lot one night a year or two later
when my father gave all the antiques
away to some man, a mate, he
would have said ‘cove’, that he’d met
in a pub, brought home to grog on with
while my mother and i were deep asleep;
he retrieved them next day from the
wife at their home over the bridge on the north
shore or up the line, as they used to say, bringing them
back in a taxi cab      the thought of that time
stings like a blow to an ear the ring of a fine china
cup and saucer smashing to the floor on a sunday
afternoon a big sea gale coming over the cliffs
and down the hill  –

now this vase sits in retirement
on a shelf in my home out of harm’s
way looking placid enough – not
venetian I’m told but ruby bohemian,
a small shift in tone but que sera sera;
it  lives without flowers its frilly lips
open like hibiscus bloom, mnemosyne’s
ruby – and i see my mother pointing
towards it this vessel with her red peggy
sage nails her red rubenstein lips this
long language of blood

shrug

the flattened
dried out
pea
from under
the couch
looking like jade  (birds eye brand)
in the early light –

the goldfish pepsi
bumps into
her double in the
mirror glass of the tank
would she try to eat herself
for breakfast we could
play her the tape of dorian
gray

       the soyboy swimstar
       dives off the digital jetty
in pursuit of pearls
for his south sea cereal
a box in every home by 2010

in spanish class i
said i’d have a
beer for breakfast
in exercise 17 at
the cafeteria doria
(and   a chorizo sandwich)
a cerveza   because café con
leche sounds like a leech;
in the textbook they use pesetas
no euros i have trouble with
spanish numbers and i thought
pasta was on the breakfast menu
but the word was ‘pastries’ i’ve
been sitting round sydney too
lo-n-g –

outside this window
the trees and sky look so
there their thereness makes you
feel you’re here when you wonder
if you are   and when they lopped branches from
the trees last week bringing the roof  of
the power substation into my room the screech
from the grinding machine was like a

long sound sample from gehenna     by a stroke
of luck the sky stood up well to the noise
the good thing about the sky must be the way
clouds eventually move along   no
intruders to cut them down       when you’re up
there flying among them you recognise
their beautiful indifference    if you can see that
far