Poem: The pool
January 16, 2014
The pool
Time is swimming in the same lane as me.
Lapping me, laughing at my leisurely, languorous crawl.
He churns up the water, rude rapid muscled butterfly.
He should move to the lane marked fast,
And get out of this one marked slow.
Now Time swims slower, I have him at my shoulder.
I am still crawling, lazily elegant,
But he has broken into breaststroke, cloying and contained,
And so we swim side by side, companionably.
I am suddenly breathless, but way out in front.
Time dog-paddles, inefficient, no kick at all.
I can’t help winning.
I’ll soon hit the wall.
I can’t tumble turn.
P.S. Cottier
As the temperature in Canberra was 40 degrees celsius yesterday, and feels about the same today, I felt that a poem about swimming was called for. Swimming and death!
I went swimming at the Australian Institute of Sport pool earlier this week, and was quite pleased that I managed to do a kilometre (20 laps) as I haven’t swam in a proper pool for a while. Most of my water immersion activity (ah, the beauty of unnecessarily complicated expressions!) is undertaken at the beach these days.
But in 40 degrees, the pool seems the place to be, and one risks serious sunburn swimming outside in this weather, if one is as slow a swimmer as I am. Hilariously, a tourist one filmed me at the AIS, where the Australian swim team trains. He must have thought I was a proper swimmer. Given that I really can’t tumble turn, or dive, he must have a very strange idea of Olympic swimming!
‘The pool’ was first published in the Hand Luggage Only anthology, (UK) 2008, edited Christopher Whitby.
Tuesday poem: The research scientist discovers snow
December 17, 2013
The research scientist discovers snow
The first time she saw snow
she thought it must be a film,
perhaps that old Christmas flick shown
in forty degree December heat
— that’s celsius, she’d explain
to bemused Americans,
wearing bright badges
of innocent face —
year after turkey-stuffed
mince-pie jammed year,
as they lay on the sweating couch
too whale-like to go to the beach,
full of cold-climate food, rendered
into puddings themselves,
leaking custard from pores.
Somehow the grainy surface
of that dreadful sentimental
drifting narrative had been
projected onto the sky,
and she ran outside to greet it,
overwhelmed and underwearing.
It was another language, this snow,
as weird as a marsupial to old Europe’s
bemoused science. It was harder
than she thought it would be,
not cloud-thrown confetti
settling in pillows, but
much blunter than sand to her splayed feet.
It is not a reversed beach
at all, snow. It is not a soft bunny blanket,
or a white towel to lie on.
She felt it for the first time, this dinted
elemental heaviness, as if water had collided
with steel, a sky highway pile-up,
and felt her heart melt, for the sea throb,
and the sharp sprint to water
when sand cuts like glass, too hot for flesh,
and light spears eyes with shards of clarity.
She was suddenly blue, as she stood in snow,
shivering, clamouring for that biggest island,
crouching, sunning itself, languorous;
the world’s big browning bottom.
Her first white Christmas, and surely,
she swore, nervous bikini clutching
chickening skin, her last.
P.S. Cottier
This one was included in my first collection, The Glass Violin. I didn’t see snow myself until I was quite old, and remember reading about an Australian studying in the United States who gave herself mild hypothermia from running around in the snow without sufficient clothing.
Cool.
I was reminded of this poem by the snow on my blog, the snow in Christmas cards, and generally everywhere. Meanwhile, the Australians are beating the English in Perth in 40 degree celsius heat. The visitors are melting like oddly clumsy snow. It’s a game of ashes and snow.
Thank you to everyone who has read my blog this year, and particularly to those brave souls who have commented.
May peace and love be part of your life in 2014.
From an early age, his abilities in slip were manifest…
I can’t resist the combination of Christmas and cricket…
Click this feather for more poetry:
Busy-ness unbefitting a poet
December 1, 2012
What a lovely present for a launch speech! Yesterday it was about 36 degrees in Canberra and unusually steamy, and I gave my first launch speech for the pamphlet In Response to Magpies. This was organised by Hazel Hall, Australian Poetry’s café poet at Biginelli’s café.
Hazel Hall
It went quite well, and the readings by the poets included in the collection were enjoyable. Here I am looking up in the air, as if there is an invisible magpie swooping:
Fortunately I am wearing my special invisible helmet
I am hoping to write up the speech for publication. The wine remains intact, as it is gin weather.
Last night I went to a poetry slam, co-organised by fellow Triptych poet J.C. Inman at The Front, and it was so steamy and hot we were all like pieces of tofu floating in a laksa. Here is a piece of poetic tofu, also known as J.C. Inman:
J.C. Inman
(my phone was fainting from the heat)
I realised how exhausted I was when I read a poem before the slam and my hands were literally shaking. People must have thought I was a very sensitive flower, but that was not it at all. It was: half heat, half gin, half gym. So what? A mathematican I ain’t.
Canberra: freezing one day and Brisbane the next. If only I could afford a pankawallah. Or another gin.
Now I’m off to be languid. After the gym.
PS Cottier 