Issue 27: NAME
Out of Doors
after Fiona Hile
Thinking this morning of you turning slowly voice stirring
up from the underside of the wattle, that without asking
or even thinking really we hesitate through the greenery and
musk
of the condition for reading poetry, curled like small and
glittering snails on the path to speech. These fingers
and toes our witless banksias look out for interminable
satire. These poor feet, they ventilate, muddy my
effusions and the bark of most—trees. Opinion on enjambment
the paperbarks want fertilizing, the brain burns
sloughs all attachment to an over-ripe but heartfelt
thought in
reality totally unable to explain the difference we’ll feel
creep in tendrily tomorrow—
Cultivated by the idea of poetry, howling like a kangaroo paw
in the windy air blue and plastic like a spade
whose swaying green underside does belie
the vaulted whites that change and change again
you, a visible hand in the garden
paddocked in the scrubby abstraction of
courtyard. Sunning within the particulates
of the hour, you historicize
yourself and fronds of earthly multitudes
overwhelm me like the benefit of conclusion
after ambitious intention. In lieu of your death
and rebirth you promise to your surrounding soil
“strengthen such puny things as remain for I have
defaulted on the ending and begun the intentional
entire integer of mildewed forgotten business”
Afterwards the hair of trees peeling down the sky to the footpath
was all I could concretely say of
the garden from which
we had been reading so well our fingers and toes filled with the sighs of lilly pillys
And all of my bones were rebuilt with the welcome of dirt
Out of our this or that humanity you translated a slender line of honeysuckles basically
songs that I learnt by means of my hills-hoist brain
and lungs pleated as the ever-remembering and quarrelsome textile
of thousands of truculent bull ants whose sweet and biting protestations
had become organized in informalesque pockets
of social fact. Then the disobedient rhymes
of the treetops sentimental in which haloing the silky small possums
came to mean doing nothing to the air at all
Calling up to the cockatoos was scant footnoting on the level of shrub
ruffling young king parrots closing our eyes in the big morning of chartered insects
unreadable understandings, spelling out the sheen on the wallaby droppings dappled
articulate marsupial mice ruminating amid a tessellated fresco of handmade leaves.
Enlightening. Blue plastic sky. The tiny house went nowhere at all, driveways of march
flies parking their lost earnings of mischief in the glittering mica of bitumen. Of the poem,
the branches were holding on. Elbows poised for the inevitable like a satellite dish
bolted to a roof. Imagining the insufficient theatricality of mold
aghast with the big picture quality of rioting sunshine
your bower my roots, are pleasantly parallel suspending through the layered
world signaling the undertaking: your love of gardening
Open the gum trees and they’ll explode
Tendency to amorousness bittersweet as reason. Forgive the mind of the mind
still indolently expanding the archaeology of poetry spooned as sandy topsoil through the hollow
of the red gum. Magpie’s photographically perfect nest and hatchlings substituting
for any other backyard topiary scene or weekend memory. Fences cancelling the hinterland
into tempted sophistry. Emendations to this or that patio of the garden of the free-floating
idea of ancientness bricked into the flanks and shoulders of certain quasimythological family cars. Eucalypts ferns and every ornamental stencil of lichen
each felted mossy growth as if from actual loam, transparent in feeling now
Claire Nashar is an Australian poet resident of Buffalo, NY.
Copyright © 2022 by Claire Nashar, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
