BRICK Through The Window
Poems by Trevor Poulton
(published 2018 + others)
(Selection drawn from BRICK Through The Window + other works)
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CORAL AND ME
Picture a white-faced Celtic woman with a scroll of black hair spilling onto shoulder blades, a body stiff and eyes that are round as those of a quadruped. Imagine her standing next to the doorway of her lounge room. My head is placed on top of her shoulder, with her back sticking to the red brick interior wall. She swivels like a compass to her left, and then I hold her against the door. ‘You prefer wood?’ ‘Yes,’ she replies. I put my lips to her earhole, and chew on a banana; she likes the sound of blood rushing under the roller of my tongue, close to her tightening throat. We separate and move downwards to the centre of the room where we exchange vision and connect again, touching feet and then fingers. ‘I want to show you my bedroom,’ she says as she uses her legs to elevate herself, and her poetry hands which appear small and crooked, and are painted with red varnish, elevate me to the level of one of her floating hexagons. I submit to the mysteriousness-- a black and tan cattle dog with its acute face parked on a couch in the dimly lit room, its eyes tracking her bare feet; and a sheep dog with manic eyes attracting anything that has life in it. I am inside its pupils. She opens the door to the bedroom. There are several lit candles all the same height; painted photographs of elders sidled along the skirting board, and a sleeping bag spread out on the floor. Picture me, placing my hands on top of her shoulders, applying a little gravity, and we are down on our knees with the candles flickering, and she is just pivoting on her base, rocking backwards and forwards whilst I am trying to get her to straighten up, or flatten out, and her body has lost all elasticity and has become monosyllabic. ‘I think you should leave!’ she says. So I walk out the front door, out into the Collingwood night where houses are just houses and the streets don’t have much to say. She is a breath behind me as I exit the short square black wrought iron gate. She says, ‘I’m just putting out the rubbish.’ I look back at her. Is she talking about me? The Yarra River bends my Mercedes home to Hawthorn. Picture me in my bed penetrating white sheets. I am in love and imagine her. Imagine now, a decade of love and torment set to burst on the scene. SCULPTURE OF IDEAL (Lynne E) A sculptress deciphers white from true white in a rough-hewn limestone block. With fall of fragments, a bulbous woman disrobes. Rubenesque thighs, reclining voluptuously between gum trees within hand’s reach of tools to smooth her hair. Surfeiting on H2O and stone, she’s a rock eater brimming with whiteness. Contrasts with her maker - petite, vulnerable. This other side of art has absorbed the grief of stone, ascends the rubble of falling men. FENTON DIES Life is an accumulation of deaths. Bodies enter and leave this untimely world. An Australian terrier leaps through the damaged window of home, a jagged ring of broken glass that comes with another whiff of after-life, following his concentrated dream to a ring of green pellets glittering beneath the neighbourhood rose and its carapaces of snails. He eats the poison and flings himself back through the glass, into this last house that protects him from stars, his face flinching on one side, a throat given to tiny vowels - running out of living northern walls telling Fenton to straighten up, his body unleashing itself until the snails and the garden and the stars shut down on us. READ THE KNEWS 2-DAY Planet spinning, listless and god-lost, days of conglomerate deceit, of electronic new age lies, smiles of crashed Vishnu and rising seas, images of men and women dying on polished factory room floors, high-rises piercing acid skies. Read the knews 2-day - extinction, extermination, expiration, elimination, evisceration, all end-words, harsh alliterations or revelations, nerve touchy - pleading climate exchange. Least thoughts on an expanding concourse, life’s mixture dulled to spume, insuperable engineering of emptiness, the world in its death throes with no place to go, call it climate change. 6.00pm Tuesday ‘No denying it?’ GETTING YOU INTO MY STAR SYSTEM Blackberry hair branching out across the lands, she’s falling from a star with only a compass of bones to determine which way. She lands at my feet. ‘I want to make physical contact with you,’ she says, touching my forearm. She documents her discovery rising like water about my waist, rocking gently at my sides till darkness comes. Black rings inexplicably withhold light. I walk with her through blocks of buildings and books before the sun sets on Brunswick Street, stalking her doorway to doorway to clarify the dimensions of her world, strange to me. She is anointed princess of the poetry scene. Her sycophantic new earthling friends tell her to be wary of bastard men. She looks at me with her eyes turned on. She speaks of flower essences and of karma, and the passage of birds whose names exist in intergalactic books, and of pages of the day turning over, and of her star dogs diving at airborne Big Bang sticks. Critics corrupt the atmosphere outside, looking to jam her star, me, us. She’s from a galaxy called DESIST! On the beach at Somers the sky light cracks the waves. We run for cover as it starts to spit. I confess. ‘I want to love you forever.’ She offers me affinity instead of infinity. Sea-birds disembark the sea leaving an impression of our absence as she determines to take me on a voyage into deep space vacating Earth for the winter. (Dedicated to poet and artist Coral Hull) LETTER TO A COUNTERFEITER (Long Bay Prison) The light would be unbearable forfeiting a generation of skin, sandstone corridors with peeled paint steering your convoluted mind. So far to the sea that bangs the eardrums. Eventually you’ll overtake the corridors, to once again pedal the rocky seas beyond the sandstone walls; out into the years of light halved, manic over lost projections, more bitter. I remember you arched on the edge of a river mirror, your wet hair chanting to Vishnu, joking with the refracted sunlight that higher powers are really bent, and that India is the cock of the world. You returned home rejoicing in theories of the Big Bang. Such was your artifice, to make psychic shifts: stolen bicycles manifesting in hallways of your several addresses. The prison walls tunnelled with little squares of light shape the air. When you get out we’ll have a drink - even if it’s no longer to pedal along the edge of society veering towards vast truths. ROYAL PARK (1993) We enter Royal Park with otherworldly dogs, Binda, Kindi, and Fenton, chasing away stalkers, misogynists, psychos and (my) superficial truths. Stars give birth to the night. The giant park to ourselves we interweave our aloneness, wrestle over a spread of grass. When too much space intervenes, your brown eyes with rings of green topple over me. 
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DRESS CODE
(Diptych) (i) Dress Code In Gold Street Out of the finest light, the great skin of day hitched to sky, a child skips onto the street-- barefoot, gravel-toed, speaking to birds and flowers, weathering passers-by. She hates the coming of darkness, knowing its outward motion, its habit of taking things away; but when it visits she cannot deny its power. Her face sets with the setting sun. All grown-up-- her body screwed to her brass bed, a sheet shrouding the bridge of her nose, an occasional headlight or a siren passing outside. Inside her wardrobe, her body of clothes dressed in black. (ii) Her Horizons Where did you get those lips, painted blood-red, outlining a wall of teeth? And those sunglasses turning minute muscles to stone, your black hair brushing back in thorns, arms hovering like black cockatoo wings, carrying you in direct flight across floors to come to rest in stone. Tough as a wound, each shadow of you leans against the next, drawing others to your immobility. Following you home, we lie side by side in candlelight, your lipstick melting between two horizons. Your naked face arising in measured light.
ETC ETC
PIC OF FRONT & BACK COVER .... |
Trevor Poulton 's poems - several have been published in Redoubt,
Verandah, On the Page, and the like. Several were read on invitation to two Melbourne Writers Festivals.
Verandah, On the Page, and the like. Several were read on invitation to two Melbourne Writers Festivals.
Brick Through The Window
Copyright © 2018 Trevor Poulton
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:978-1986991797
ISBN-10:1986991792
[email protected]
Copyright © 2018 Trevor Poulton
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:978-1986991797
ISBN-10:1986991792
[email protected]
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Click on link to buy copy of book through Amazon.com.au
https://www.amazon.com.au/Brick-Through-Window-Poems-1990s-ebook/dp/B07FCN25G1 |
