In The Poetry

Deckard Was a Replicant

The forms of nature cufflinked through your life
Bring a sense of what Americans call closure.
The full-blown iris swims in English air
Like the wreckage of an airbag jellyfish
Rinsed by a wave’s thin edge at Tamarama:
The same frail blue, the same exhausted sprawl,
The same splendour. Nothing but the poison
Is taken out. In the gallery, [...]

Where the Sea Meets the Desert

Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh
In the clear blue shallows.
Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter -
No plastic bottles or scraps of styrofoam packing,
No jetsam at all except the occasional corpse
Of a used slave tossed off a galley -
And the shrieks of the dancing Queen as the hero [...]

Jet Lag in Tokyo

Flat feet kept Einstein out of the army.
The Emperor’s horse considers its position.
In Akasaka men sit down and weep
Because the night must end.
At Chez Oz I discussed my old friend’s sex change
With a lovely woman who, I later learned,
Had also had one. The second movement
Of the Mahler Seventh on my Boodo Kahn
Above [...]

Lucretius the Diver

Things worn out by the lapse of ages tend
Toward the reef, that motley wrecking crew
Of living polyps who, to get ahead,
Climb ruthlessly all over their own dead,
But facts like those Lucretius never knew:
He merely meant we can’t long buck the trend
That winds up hard against a watershed.
Horace had godly names for every breeze.
Ovid [...]