Admiral John

How is your elegance? Your front gate?
It’s no longer yours or mine
and I miss your colonial-style salute
your brooding stories, your habit
of granting each side of battle equal victory
as if war were a genteel duel, less dangerous
than a twisted game of chess.
My eyes are still dazzled by your medals
how they burned against your suit
the buttons—brilliant billiards—polished
ritually for your afternoons by the fence:
Hello children. How was school?

How formal and famous you were:
behind tilting decks, your neatness;
behind neatness, an expanse of blood and death
that Bundaberg, taken neat, could not erase—
any child worth a toss could see that.
           But wasn’t I old enough to shoulder
the word? Intuition is an accurate language
when the verb suicide is learned obliquely
from bed, listening to voices in a kitchen.
They said that you died accidentally
shooting blackbirds
down the back of Thornleigh gully—

but were matric waves rising that day
from the deep stew of the bush;
were lizards drowsing like young men
on steady, sun-drenched rocks?
Did the gunshot startle sleep-drunk spiders
from the swaggie’s nearby cave
and consume forever the sea’s hot, bad scream?
Do the green years in your eyes
drift, still, like anger fish? Are you euphoric
or tinder-dry with expectation?
Reflected in your polished shoes
do dragonflies glitter over the past’s ashen pools?

Nantucket

They stood in groups along the sandy tip
of the ‘Little Grey Lady’
with lighthouse baskets of cane and oak
clothes ribbing in the wind.
           The blue fish had schooled
and for the first time in twenty years
children pulled in laden nets
as breakers softened the ivory beach
and from an eerily copper sky, the June sun fell.
           Driftwood fires were burning
as gulls swamped the slate Atlantic
and squabbled over piles of ragged gut.
             More bicycles arrived—utes and trucks—
and from old North Wharf, from Brandt Point,
from moors thicketed with huckleberry scrub,
came fishermen and ‘townies’
until hundreds sat in the smoky dunes.
           And the tide immersed women
who,shrieking and laughing,
scooped up fish with bare hands
their dresses billowing like heavy weed
gold necklaces floating as they swam.
           We stayed to feast, to drink rum,
to gut-and-fillet the local whaling songs
fiddled beneath a scrimshaw moon
and all the way home,
as we lurched along the beach in sand-ruts,
twice bogged and running low on gas,
the sea-ache felt good lashing, as it did,
through our great white bones.
           All the way home
waves were chuckling: how lucky how lucky
their phosphorescence licking from the stars
both the pristine light and the gloom.

Note: ‘Little Grey Lady’ is a nickname for Nantucket

About the Poet
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