Flirt

a mango rests curved
in the palm
as if born to it
 
flaunts itself to nose and tongue
as though entering your flesh
were its one original desire
 
spreads its tenacious stickiness
across your cheeks
drips down your forearms
 
anchors itself between your teeth
like it just
can’t bear to leave

__________________________

The changes

Kissing Louise was a bell. Unlike
the chimes of the genteel drawing-room clock
it gave no warning before it struck.
 
It was more like the shock of the extra-early
morning alarm
on the day of the journey.             

Or the sudden shrilling of a schoolroom bell,
calling me in
to a strange new lesson.
 
It rang sweet as a tardy dinner gong
summoning me to a meal
of scent and heat.
 
Resonated like a great church bell
calling the villagers over fields
to christenings, to benedictions.                                     
 
My throat sang my body  
swung my skin shone
and my old life shivered and fell from me
 
and lay like the sweat of the ringers in the tower.

__________________________


Proof

I think, therefore I am,
said Descartes, but
 
while he thrice denied
the body, his neurones
 
pulsed with electric
solutions, his blood
 
pumped iron and the
bellows of his chest
 
dragged from
the protesting air
 
molecules to feed
his ravening lungs.
 
On his slow days
(when perhaps he found
 
the proof of his existence
less convincing)
 
I imagine him
looking for reassurance
 
to his face in the glass
oblivious to
 
the fingerprints
and mist of breath
 
that proved him
as surely as his reflection
 
or what his mind
made of it.

__________________________


For a man who loved brute force

you had
a delicate way with food.
I watched you cook baked apples,
your blunt nail-bitten fingers
pressing brown sugar and spices
into the centre of each
cored green apple, large hands
gently lifting the ladle
to coat them in honey-butter sauce.
 
I learned from you the secret
to perfect cannelloni (the best
beef mince, the neatest way
to stuff the tubes). Took notes,
perched on the kitchen bench,
your necessary audience.
Poured your whisky, privileged
to have you to myself.
Like the time when I was five,
 
and Mum was away (perhaps having
one of the babies that did not live).
You brought home rump steak.
Showed it to me first: pure red
muscle on a plate.
Grilled it — you told me —
to perfection. I see
on a bread-and-butter plate
my own small portion. Tender.

__________________________
 

Fuel

oh I
remember us
 
parked in your ute
out the front of
 
the night-lit service station,
ten metres away
 
the highway, silent
we kissed
 
some slow time later   
your fingertips
 
described two arcs
of muffled touch
 
charting a periphery
defined by
 
an untouched centre
puckered, pink
 
behind the training bra
and the beige rib knit


______________________________

Love was a slow-burning fuse

with you, it didn’t
catch me in the heart
like a punch
and leave me spreadeagled
like last time
 
no
 
it snuck
it crept
it stole
like a gentle rain
like a fine dust settling
or a creeper growing
 
until I saw it
glinting from
puddles
 
lying smug as dust
in the crevices
of my days
 
twined tight
as ivy roots
round my foundations

__________________________
 

   
Eat my secrets

Once we have carried out
our parts of the bargain
 
my secrets will be
safe, in the dark
 
vault of your body.
You alone understand
 
how I’ve ached
for the slow caress
 
of digestion, craved
to be held within
 
another’s cells.
You will pack me away
 
in plastic bags, against
the coming months,
 
against your own
peculiar hunger.
 
You will relish me.
What could be sweeter?
 
I want to be known.
This way
 
you can taste me
all the way to the bone.


Note: In 2001, Armin Meiwes placed an ad on the Internet for a willing
person ‘to be slaughtered and then consumed’. Bernd Jürgen Brandes
responded, and Meiwes killed and ate him as agreed, meantime
storing the body parts in his freezer.

__________________________


Making pipettes

Rolling the hollow rod above the bunsen,
blue flame glowing orange where fire embraces glass,
turning it in the fingertips watching for something
almost ineffable, the particular shine that denotes
a particular malleability.
 
Then taking the rod from the flame
and in one swift motion stretching it,
six inches for a pipette (if making
capillary tubes, the full arms’ length
as if to say This far! to a sceptical crowd).
 
If attempted prematurely, it will force a sluggish length
that cramps up again too soon;
left too late and the rod’s slack belly
will droop into the fire, irreparably deviate.
 
Once the tube is cooled, take a file
and make a nick
at mid-point where you will snap it, rendering
two tiny mouths wide-open; fitting to the other end
a rubber bulb, a lung, to draw up some solution
that mustn’t touch the skin.
 
Patience, narrow observation and precision are required
to forge this least precise of measures.
A certain dramatic flair merely adds to the pleasure.

__________________________
 

Come in, lie down

I’m new to you and your let’s-get-to-it.
Flat on my back that first time
not five minutes after the front door
 
snicked behind you. New to this
excoriating tenderness, passion
that leaves me stubble-scraped and scabbed.
 
The shock of those minuscule nipples!
The lean hairy thigh that met my palm
and made me laugh out loud. Later you asked
 
was it OK, for sex with an alien?
Women are sea-creatures, you said,
one hand curved at the soft swell of my thigh.   
 
Like seals. And men are goats. I like you
inside me, when I want it. I like how you held my hair back
that first time we stood there kissing. You come
 
so close to sating me with touch, stroke into me
relaxation I rarely know.
Round up and banish ancient threats
 
whose names I’m beginning not to recognise. Still —
I miss that brine-lapped cleft, the way that sealskin
glides on sealskin. One day I must
 
go down to the seas again.  

__________________________


Second skin

the black that billowed through here
from next-door
settles still on the kitchen cupboards
 
splashed by the washing up
the paintwork drips in sooted runnels
 
the fuel he tossed onto your body
ran in rivulets that spread to sheets of fire
shearing off all sensation, stripping you
of the surface that meets the world
 
when I saw you curled at the bottom of the stairs
you were not charred but shiny and mottled
 
by now you’ll be sheathed in
a pressure-bandage chrysalis
which some day will be peeled back
to reveal you
patterned with the scars of multiple grafts
 
in my house, the aftermath still settles
 
washing up, rubber-gloved against the heat,
I think of you, pressing against the world
your fire-new surface,
feeling nothing

__________________________


Everything we’re made of

comes from earth; we cry, returning
borrowed salt; we give our bone and muscle
 
back to the earth to suck, as ash,
as rotting flesh: that calcium atom in your skull —
 
star-fired, congealed to rock, dissolved
by rain, passed on to you, breathing blood
 
in your mother’s womb —
will settle in another’s bone some day
 
when your atoms range over mountains, rock
in the currents of distant oceans
 
no matter how steadfast, stock-still this life,
one day you will travel the world



__________________________


3 - Publication details

‘Flirt’ first appeared in Meanjin Vol. 69 No. 3 (2010)
‘Come in, lie down’ appeared in Southerly Vol. 67 No. 3 (2007), and in The Best Australian Poetry 2008 (ed. David Brooks, UQP, 2008)
‘The changes’ will appear in Australian Poetry since 1788 (eds Geoffrey Lehmann & Robert Gray, UNSW Press, 2011)
‘Eat my secrets’ first appeared in Cordite Poetry Review No. 32 (2010)
‘Proof’, ‘For a man who loved brute force’, ‘Making pipettes’, ‘Second skin’ and ‘Everything we’re made of’ are from my first collection, Frankenstein’s Bathtub (Interactive Press, Emerging Poets Series, 2001); ‘Proof’ also appeared in Gender and Justice (ed. Ngaire Naffine, Ashgate, 2002)
‘Fuel’ and ‘Love was a slow-burning fuse’ are unpublished.