Poem: Eggshell garden
November 10, 2022
Half an egg, hidden in a drawer, a tiny half-skull among the socks. She gathers dirt, careful not to leave a tell-tale trail, fills her tiny cup, waits until dandelions are blown into wishes, wraps a seed in tissue. She puts her garden on the windowsill, a promise behind the curtains, which are printed with pink roses and stringy effusions of lavender. Sprouting towards the light, a tiny green finger pokes into being, and the eventual flower is more dandekitten than anything fierce. It purrs in her mind, her flower wattle-like yellow, punctuating her bedroom with a freedom of glee. PS Cottier
Somewhere there’s a photo of me as a child holding a plant which is growing inside an eggshell. That memory inspired this poem.
Poem: When I turn 100
August 5, 2022
When I turn 100 After the cake, sprinkled with patronising remarks She’s doing so well! She’s so sprightly! I shall manoeuvre myself outside, whether with cool cockatoo-head carved stick or wheelchair. I shall pour a whisky (large) and light a cigarette, my first since 1986. How sweet it will taste, my long-lost friend, abandoned purely for health those many years. Maybe they’ll be illegal by then, but there’ll still be outlaw motorcycle gangs, willing to supply the demand of a gran (will they ride a whisper of e-bikes then?). I’ll suck the smoke deep into my lungs, and anyone who moans about cancer or emphysema will get a chuckle. Age will free me from responsibility. I’ll clutch my carton like a prize. PS Cottier
Tuesday poem: Faith took a holiday
November 16, 2016
Faith took a holiday
He hitched down the Hume, or up;
he didn’t tell me. Faith has no fear
of murder, or everyday sleazes
and their boring imprecations.
It’s the ones left behind
who tend to fret. What if,
we say, and perhaps…
as if perhaps isn’t Faith
flipped like a decisive coin,
standing on his head.
As if as if isn’t
closer to for sure
than some might like it to be.
Faith rang me from Melbourne,
(so it was down the Hume)
and said he wanted to look around
a bit longer; catch the trams.
He too remembers
the excellent days of conductors,
with their magical brown bags.
Even Faith feels regret
at the passing of old days;
the spinning of so much
towards the expansive sun
of interconnected drivel.
There is a grace
in not knowing too much,
he said, though Faith would say that,
I suppose. That’s his job.
A kind of conductor
unseen in any tram,
on any route, whatsoever.
Faith will return soon;
I can hear the jingling
just at the edge of thought
and the tune is one
I almost remember.
The brown bag of my
restless, overloaded brain
awaits his presence,
and will sling itself, eager,
over his patient arm.
P.S. Cottier
Like a lot of the world, I’m suffering the post-US election blues, and almost didn’t post this week. The clever amongst you will have noticed that it is Wednesday, not Tuesday, and the weekly schedule has been disrupted. But poetry is fairly unstoppable!
For my overseas readers, the Hume is the major highway linking Melbourne and Sydney. Canberra is just a wee drive from it.
I have no idea why Faith is male in the poem. Perhaps it was some association with Christ? And my phone has just died, which has me longing for the ‘interconnected drivel’ which I decry in the poem, even if I’m avoiding news sites at the moment.
Tuesday poem: Heron’s formula
February 8, 2016
Heron’s formula
A lesson in trigonometry,
the white heron forms triangles
with legs as she inches forward
< obtuse, acute, obtuse >
and reeds write the shape’s third side,
grass and leg linked by my needy eye.
Each retraction from stillness
seems a matter of regret;
a fall from Greek statue
into hungry, stalking GIF.
Silent as a wish, she moves
towards the modest,
root-dwelling fish.
A split triangle
wedged into head axes down,
teaching the dumb water
a critical formula: working an equation
on softer bodies.
Heron swallows, then cries triumph,
and the noise is the croak
of a thirty-a-day frog
krarkkrarking imperfection —
a broken kaleidoscope of notes —
a pocket full of clashing change.
The breath of the eager teacher
who tried to show me the
dubious wonders of triangles,
to draw them on my brain,
swings into memory
with a scalene sharpness.
Sound conjures smell;
ear and nose separated only
by a stretched vinculum of years.
Angel microbes swarmed
in his every exhalation,
armed with gleeful mallets
for playing smell croquet —
sulphur tapped through nostrils —
blunt, yet sharp and jangling.
He could not know that
he was Alice with stink flamingos;
heroic feathers tickling
before, and after, each own goal.
How could I breathe and think
under such an unnumbered cloud?
A limp fish, I soon failed.
The elegance of herons
undercut by noise;
the perfection of mathematics
negated by disgust.
I paddle off, towards firm ground,
away from the sharp, white assassin,
and the chopped pools of recollection.
P.S. Cottier
This poem was just commended in the World Wetlands Day Poetry Prize, judged by Sarah Day, so I thought it would be nice for people to be able to read it. The winning poems are posted at the link, and very good they are too. The site itself is as cool as a rockpool and thrice as pretty.
This is an unusual poem for me in that it combines the natural world and memory and mathematics. I am innumerate, so the maths is the most freaky part. The poem recalls someone being turned off the so-called Queen of the Sciences for life. Sometimes the division between authorial voice and real author is pretty swampy.
Heron’s formula has something clever to do with triangles, I think. Personally, I am satisfied that the sail on the swanboat in the picture above is a most definite triangle. I passed Shapes at kindergarten with flying colours.
Click this link to see which other poets are Tuesdaying.
Stronger than coffee,
the memory of the mandarin
segments the air with tang.
Smell is better than taste
(no pips to spit and
punctuate the saucer…)
Orange air flips a finger
as I sip staid warm brown.
P.S. Cottier
Perhaps I should write a book of poems entirely set in a café, called First World Beverages or somesuch. I just wrote a prose piece, soon to be published, about how annoyed I get with poetry that seems to reject all the world except for the poet and his or her feelings, as if feelings have no connection to the society in which they are felt. Mmm, I must order another coffee and have a think about that…That is my world, I suppose, but there is the occasional idea as well, floating around like the smell of mandarins. (They are healthier than madeleines, too.)
I do quite like the pips as ellipses though, and the hint of concrete poetry as the brackets form a saucer. Poésie porcèlaine sounds so much nicer than concrète, don’t you agree?
I must contact the Trademarks Office.
And just in case you haven’t yet had a coffee:
Enjoy!
Read the works of the other Tuesday Poets around the world by pressing here.
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Lastly, my pocket book Paths Into Inner Canberra (Ginninderra Press) is now being stocked by Book Lore in Wattle Street, Lyneham (that’s in Canberra). It is on the front counter, so go in and buy one for $4. Keep this deserving woman in coffee!
Book Lore is a fantastic second-hand bookstore, located between two cafés. In one of these establishments, a poem about mandarins and coffee was written, just today. The photo in the helmet was taken outside the second of these places, by a Mr G. Dunn, after wine was had, and is one of several in the wee pamphlet. The pocket book can also be ordered on the publisher’s site using Paypal. (I am number 3, she said, mysteriously.)
For one doesn’t live on coffee alone, and even mandarins may fade.
PS Cottier 