How Canberra 

Parking at the AIS, pink imps called to me, or rather, grey imps wearing pink floppy hats.  Gang-gangs opening gates in the sky. Walked to the pool, touching the bronze Guy Boyd woman poised on a plinth, the magic saint of all bad swimmers. Crawled through my twenty laps, more snail-stroke than free-style. Back to the car past groups of kids, past a well-known former athlete, past the memory of Covid marked by a discarded mask. Coffee at Tilley’s and more cockatoos, swinging below powerlines like avian punchlines, yellow fringes tickling the clouds.

PS Cottier

So a little translation for those who don’t live in Canberra; the AIS is the Australian Institute of Sport. Tilley’s is a venerable cafe in Lyneham, a suburb in the inner north of Canberra. And gang-gangs are a type of cockatoo. They are the faunal emblem of the Australian Capital Territory. An absolutely beautiful bird which can be seen quite frequently in Canberra, but which are overall becoming quite rare. Unlike the cocky in the photo.

Tuesday poem: Sandpit

May 4, 2023

So I wanted toy cars and trains, but was never given them. No matter, the boy over the road had plenty, and we’d construct paradises of zoom in his sandpit, trucks and cars jostling, even train carriages illicitly removed from inside model tracks. I remember once, sick with German measles, spotty as a Dalmatian, that a book about trains was lent to me, and I read the pictures, fever-driven, transplanted them to the sandpit by pure will, where my friend continued to build roads and water-marked tracks, temporary maps to a place where time stood still, and red vehicles bloomed.

PS Cottier

Poem: Plains-wanderer

April 3, 2023

Plains-wanderer
Pedionomus torquatus

Someone took a quail
and put it on a rack.
It hasn’t stopped being surprised,
and looks around comically,
this tiny survivor, this left-over,
balanced on gum-boot yellow legs.

Or perhaps it is shocked
by all the sheep, the cats, the fox,
the foul apparatus introduced
by recent arrivals, cockier
than any cockatoo?

Plains wanderer likes the quiet life;
endless stubbly land it punctuates
like a soft bracket.  Last of its kind,
all it needs is space unruffled,
except by herbs, and the female’s
russet red, blooming like a tiny sun,
as she calls to smaller moon of male.

PS Cottier

JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This year I was lucky enough to see the Plains-wanderer in the wild, which is truly a unique bird. The female is much larger than the male in this species, a bit similar to some birds of prey. But it is a truly harmless bird, and it was quite moving to see it hiding in the grass.

Poem: About swimming

February 23, 2023

counting each lap
mathematical strokes
fifty metre groan

PS Cottier

I’m just getting back into swimming. Unfortunately I don’t have a man with a rope to drag me along. I swim very slowly during the public access hours at the Australian Institute of Sport. Once, some years ago, some people filmed me swimming, probably thinking I was a proper swimmer from the Australian team. If I was, Australia would only win participation medals at the Olympics.

This is a poem, not a listicle.

It tastes like leather.

If you listen you will soon note that it speaks bad French.

It has never been to France.

It bought cheap steroids in Bali.

It would like to contain the word 'roseate', but can't.

It read itself out loud just last week and was well received.

It just watched the film The Brain from Planet Arous.

It keeps reciting 'After I'm gone, your earth will be free to live out its miserable span of existence, as one of my satellites, and that's how it's going to be...'

It can't translate that into French.

This is a poem, not a listicle.

PS Cottier

A poem dating back to 2015, published here once before, which shows that I was watching too many old science fiction films! I will be posting newer, even new, work here again soon.

But first I have a launch of the book V8 (written by Sandra Renew and one PS Cottier) at Smiths, Alinga Street Civic on Monday 13th, 7pm. Sarah St Vincent Welch will launch the book, and there will also be an open mic before readings from the book. In case you’re wondering, V8 is about cars and other vehicles, and is a poetry collection published by Ginninderra Press.