I've rewired these. They had fatal errors. This is what happens on a Sunday morning, hungover, with a black button for a postbox!
THREE POEMS
Driving, I find seven schoolgirls
standing at a telegraph pole
by the Great Western Highway, in the rain.
I am being precise
because I am listening to James Wright
who loved to name and count things.
The girls are leaning flowers
against the creosote-black base of the pole
where their friend had been
pinned to her death by a car. I know this
because James Wright¹s voice is frayed with dying
and she was my friend also.
*
I was danced into place by a Tallshipman
on leave from himself, and out
for a damned good Rogering.
He left me under a figurehead,
and as a steam train in the blue dusk
trails a smokeflower, this sailor pulled on
his Havana, and made for the dark end
of a watershed, one hand behind his back
for affectation, direction.
I heard him unzip from a wavelength
where a kneeling shadow
turned the head of a gull with its swallowing.
*
At the Gore Hill observatory, the roof cracks open
slowly, like lids over the distended eyeball
of a giant with a hyperactive thyroid.
Outside, on the grass below the bandstand,
a bridal party lights
the underside of a Moreton Bay fig.
You are ten years old the night you climb
to put your eye to the glass. You are too young
for extensive knowledge of astronomy
but old enough to see, in the flame
of a star, a white dress
being lifted from behind, by the wind.
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