Duet
A two-man crosscut saw
rips its brusque path
through the sprawl
of an ancient sycamore
in the Craiglockhart garden
where Owen and Sassoon
spent shell-shocked leave.
It's a standard operation,
midwinter, before the sap
starts to rise —
a judicious sacrifice
for the benefit of the tree —
the heavy limb
roped, then slowly cradled
to the ground. Split,
its dense pages fall
open like a book:
one, for the younger man,
to be worked from sup-
ple greenwood in defiance
of traditional technique;
the other must wait
until seasoned — fit
to capture a darker tone —
when the luthier's steel
will once more nurse
mute wood's recuperation
into song. Now they form
a new alliance
as comrades in peace —
two violins unburden-
ing the tumultuous years
within their shared
and sculpted grain —
even as the world
tilts ever again
towards the pitiful wrath
of war — that bleak
underscore
to the melodic weave
of what is spared,
incumbent, but free.
The Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon violins were made by Steve Burnett
in honour of the two poets and their lost generation.
Temporary Resident
I wormed my way in
to a niche, nourished;
an interloper tolerated,
humoured, excused;
a compliant cell in the gut
of the body politic,
gorging on sunshine, even
in the dark; quarantine
endured in the proximity
of bliss; my days numbered
by a malignant algorithm
I failed to decode
in the complacent slide
from snug
to smug
as I paced the limited
measure of my cell,
such locomotion
forming the symbiotic
drift of my demise.
It was worms that
turned on me with
visceral indifference:
they burrowed to my core,
hollowed
me out
until I was pure alien,
my comfortable niche
a mortichnium —
the pre-fossilized dom-
ain of my crawl
from grace — my heart-
beat a real-time death-
march drummed
with my own blood...
... a stay of execution,
and in the fractional
moment before I was
gone, I had a glimpse
of happiness — no more
than a brief intensity
of disintegrating dust.
An Artist's Studio
Sydney, Spring 2019
You stand in the sweat-
box of your studio, glazed.
The concrete floor
is a layered spatter
of paint
from the days
you could still hold
a brush in your limp
wet hand. Paint oozes
from fat aluminium
tubes — paint like butter
that unclouds, loses
its emulsified tint
and disappears
into the grain
of what, today, is too hot
to eat. Cold beers
from the thundering fridge
will only make you more
thirsty. The industrial fan
struggles to create
the illusion of a breeze;
air more like a clamp.
Wasps don't know
what's hit them, each
curled
like a devilish embryo
on the windowsill,
cradling its death,
the sweltering studio
now a morgue —
the very thought
of making art here
utterly inert,
an undepictable lull
before the random,
rogue,
bone-numbing ice-storm
to come — the freeze
that will take your breath
and force you to witness it
unravelling, useless, erased.