O God I fell for you
  --Patti Smith

Family snaps in leatherette albums prove
'nothing lasts forever' (thanks Mum) as shadows
crawl on their stomachs, the sun
sinks in the West you never won. Looming 
into the tedium waiters understand 
the way nostrils understand incense, you
drop your glasses onto Carrara marble
polished by butcher's cheesecloth. 

Bees boil your Siberian crab-apple as a bellbird 
curtsies its branches. You yell
Gidday to the red dress next door: she
fumbles her keys. Her tongue is dry
like a thornbush after the nor'wester
and her glare invents the end. 
 

2

With one word she strips sinew from bone.... 
Hardly - if an arbitrary past arbitrates our future
your lover stutters over a cracked teacup.
It takes her forever to get dressed, 
each button and hook resists the way 
she resists the day. She is bitter as the tobacco leaf 
between these lips. Her prolonged maybe 
a tangental no you find 

time to talk with her sister but never with her....
So what if that 'never' is theatre?
You want your bodies to generate 
the light neither of you feel - but she wanders
off, thunder in the wild blue
yonder.
 
 

3

The roadside apple, the arbour's pear
ignore the condensate from a horse's nostrils -
what are blood and sweat to them? All the same
you'll tether your mare, collect windfalls....
Or you'll rest where riverbanks
loosen to an estuary
a boy fishes at dawn, his father calling
to the heavens mackerel clouds swim. 

Plenty of time to tell stories 
now, bulging like summer plums, 
your eyes size up 
the tractor on that hill, the overalled tomboy
swaying through the swaying grass
towards you. Hi, I'm Eve.
 
 

4

Breathless, you push through carping grass.
These midges appreciate you are naked to the waist -
they pay you the attention she never did.
She attached significance to every thing (a sign!)
as the spider tied its web to a fruit-tree, naturally.
She believed and because she believed
God, you were a good man. That last afternoon 
she was hanging out the dirty linen, 

she was whistling Elgar for the bellbirds, she was
well on the way. Your memories dark as those 
cherry-stones she sucked ten summers 
back, still you hanker after her laughter.
You close the door just like her; turning 
the sleeve catches a vase and flowers fall as if on your coffin.