Dodo / Okay, so we’re famous for all the wrong reasons, / Our ancestors shed their energy expense & settled / On Mauritius – selection did the rest & our wings / Pared back. Portuguese found us, forest dwelling.
I haven’t really seen it, Caravaggio’s / Death of…but the saint holds his neck / with his right hand, his forehead / with the left / and it really is the dumbfoundedness of mourning.
I think: the sugar’s hit the brain / when she’s finished / she slurps the rest of her tea / and says / ‘australians only believe in fark’ / ‘what?’ / ‘you know, fark – that’s all they say around here: / fark fark fark why do they have to say / that / all the time for?
In ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’, the space of the page becomes receptive, vibrant, like a ‘sticky decomposition web’ perhaps, where words, images, sounds lodge.
What John Donne Would Say / Nowhere to purchase and nothing to defend, / nothing but malls as thin as morning dew / unrolling each morning each roller door anew / and burned by the glory of Commerce without End.
She said to him, When a woman informs you that she’s a little drunk / this is actually a warning that she’s liable to collapse at any moment. / And when she tells you of a lost happiness / she means that you’re responsible for giving it back to her / on a silver platter, like those knights in the stories of Caliphs / who return home with the heads of enemies on their spears.
my understanding of a nation is not abstract/ if america did not let off Ezra Pound/ it would not tolerate me/ no! I am not satisfied with my own country/ but that does not mean that I shall love america
standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in / the
hieroglyphics of grubby little hands pieces of antique chairs hang /
that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old coach,
Nobody in Rome cares / that I have begun / to devour you. / In the hostel this morning / and again tonight. / Even on the basilica stairs / while the nuns pray inside.
Four poems – ‘Pied Butcher Bird Flute Solo’, ‘Brush Turkey In the Cold Room’, ‘Death of a Cat’, and ‘Praise and Its Shadow’ – by Robert Adamson, a poet of the Hawkesbury River.
It comes back to me that I married K. because he whistled Bach perfectly – that was, as I remember, the reason I gave myself and others. It’s as good a basis as any for marriage and I was not disappointed.
