BETHLEHEM REVISITED

“We’ll have to change the place
for our Christmas do,” Sharon said:
we’d planned for a restaurant.
Sharon’s my niece:  I asked why?
“Shane can’t go out,” she said.
Shane is her latest boyfriend
so was he ill or freaked by crowds
or fresh air, I asked?
“He’s under house arrest,” she said.
“He has this thing on his leg

that beeps the cops if he steps outside.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He’s on GBH remand
for beating up my husband,”
she explained.
 

I thought I should change the subject
so I asked who else might be coming
to celebrate the birth of Jesus with us.
“His five kids and my four,” she said.
“Well actually only four of his because
Zoe is a material witness
and allowed no contact.”
I rang off and poured a drink,
well, three in fact.
 

So let’s say shepherds came:
they’d find chaos
like the stable in Bethlehem –
a manger and a wise man or two,
authorities keeping track – and the child?
I think he’d do just fine.

COMING OF AGE - I

“You are old when you’re born,”

Stephen Simpson* said,

speaking more as biologist than philosopher

though like a stem cell

he’s pluripotent and could be either

neither or both.
 

So much living and dying

during those nine months:

clefts, gills and neural ridges

thrown up, filled in, torn down –

a time-lapse drama of evolution

played on the foetal ocean floor.
 

Your cells by nine months

are wearied by wars

have forged truces with alien forces

built machines underwater

visited palaces drawn from fine tissue

played parts in evolutionary dramas

relaxed briefly on now sunken islands.
 

By birth your genes have had their day

your destiny set. I've heard

earnest clerics say we should

be born again. Terrible penance

surely to go through that once more.
 

 

*Academic Director, the Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney

DO NOT FAWCET

He passed me in the push on Pitt
a strong determined stride
a yellow fluoro shirt – good fit,
and on it metres away, I read

in bold black letters

‘INFANT FEEDING.’

 

Yes, you can hire a man discreet
to pay your bills and cook,
walk your poodle down the street,
but infant feeding made me look

how could this man

do such complex work?

 

In his bag did he have cash
and toy-lets to distract,
gavage tubes and milk, with dash
of brandy , bribes lest they react,

books of instructions,

sedatives for fathers?

 

Now closer to me I could tell
his sign I had misread  –
‘INSTANT PLUMBING’ – very well:
maybe he is a Jack of Trades

able to feed sprogs

while repairing taps?

 

 

 

 

NAIL IN THE HEART

A cardboard box of personal office goods was delivered to me a week after I was fired and escorted from the building.

  

First I peel the Sellotape

skin intact, pull back two abdominal flaps –

one to the right, other to the left –

peer into the dark guts

of a box of an old man’s chattels.

Where is this metaphor leading? 

Is the box me or is the stuff in it me?

I feel as I felt sifting sorting tossing

stuff from my dad’s wardrobe

weeks after he died. 

I could be dead –

all those emails of eulogy –

hundreds of them keen to say

how much they admired how

I had done the right thing.

I weep over the pathetic mundanity,

of my possessions in the box

left after my execution –

a nail hammered

through my heart.

INTERCHANGE

I remember him as a small old man

quiet and happy in his bedside chair

A repat patient from World War I, watching,

never a trouble to anyone

with his light brown beret each Tuesday

when I did my morning rounds in the late Seventies

of long-stay patients, usually with TB,

in the upstairs ward at Rankin Park.

Our meetings were always brief -

few words, the stethoscopic ritual,

the laying on of hands -

then I was on my way.

But he did not have TB

and no-one could be sure

what he had, or indeed whether

he had any illness at all.

The folk who ran

Rankin Park thought this place

as good as any for this man to live.

The ward opened to a verandah that faced north

so in winter he would sit

in a rocker outside.

One Tuesday I saw he was in decline.

Nothing to be found

and nothing done.

Next week he was in bed:

he had something special for me to hear.

I bent close. "They shot them all," he said.

I pictured a fatal moment

in the trench. "They shot them all,"

he said again for emphasis.

"The bloody British shot them all.

The horses. Our horses.

The horses we brought back

to Britain at war's end."

Now as I drive along the M4

past Wallgrove, where the horses trained

I see the plumes of emu feather replicas

worn in the hats of the Brigade

atop the regiments of poles red

with blood and poppies

on the mile of median strip

at the Light Horse Interchange.

I recall my conversations at Rankin Park,

with the man, with his economy of words, his beret

and not much else. 

I think of his love for the horses

a love that sustained and troubled him for six decades.
and I feel bereft and impotent.

NO PANE NO GAIN

Last week when I returned
I found my desk
covered in dust
family photos dispersed
other documents damaged:
(no prof should have an empty desk).
I had been away
and wondered if colleagues
had enacted a cremation
scattering my ashes
with a light but disorganising touch.

 

So four weeks is all it takes, I mused,
to incinerate the idea
of me, my work,
my modelling clay, my canvas.
Then through my jet-lag
I saw a pane was missing
from my window. Robbery
on the second floor?
But when I looked outside
I saw it dead and broken
on the ground.

 

So much for my paranoia,
but at my age when time
runs backwards towards dependency,
when the diminished locust in me
seeks its spent chrysalis
as a refuge,
anything is possible.

 

Well it’s not, actually –
and that’s the problem.

TIPPING POINT

Large cappuccino please.
Quatre dollars the barista replies:
this is Le Grand Café
on Clarence at Alliance Française.

 

When transferring coins from pocket
two slipped.  Bien attraper!!
the barista smiles. They do not
hit the floor nor are they in my hand. 

 

My custom is this: order morning coffee
then to the loo while it brews.
When I open my fly two coins fall
into the bowl, glint with a watery smile. 

 

Who knows where money has been
my mother said, urging me to wash my hands
before eating after touching coins –
and certain other things. 

 

Back in the café my coffee beckons,
Christmas decorations on the lights and wall –
goodwill in tinsel; the season of gifts –  
today I leave a two-coin tip.