Poem: All praise the cut-off gloves
June 29, 2024
In cut-off gloves I can cup
my phone; the oblong light,
and message and swipe
just as I would with only
pale thin gloves of skin.
The poetry anthology,
just arrived from Adelaide,
can be flicked in cut-off gloves.
The flat white slowly sipped,
the essential bling displayed
on cool growths of fingers.
Those crops of pink asparagus,
embedded in the cut-off gloves
sprout towards the glowing words,
etiolated, and punctuated
by the warming medium
in which I plant them.
This very poem can be written
in what it seeks to praise —
woollen, orange, cut-off gloves.
And stuff these Canberra days.
PS Cottier
I know that the image doesn’t really fit the poem, but I like it so much that I had to use it. This is an old poem, from 2016, first published at Project 365 + 1 (Project 366), where I wrote a poem a day for 30 days.
I think fingerless gloves are also called Fagins, after Dickens’s character, but the illustrations I found of Fagin did not sport gloves. Here are the gloves to which the poem is addressed:
Poem: Colour in winter
April 22, 2024
Anyone who wears a black puffer jacket,
so sensible and restrained,
should be choked on their own down
— or that of the now-naked ducks —
and puffed up like a puffer fish, till they fly
away like so many clouds of doom.
Why add to bleakness?
Match yellow with aubergine,
orange and berry crimson.
Clash those hues like cymbals
in the smug faces of constraint.
PS Cottier
Now I could have revived the title of my series of "Nasty little poems" for that, as it's a tad cruel. It's not aimed at those with no choice as to what they wear, but at the sensible middle class. There's something about the temperature dropping in Canberra that makes people dress in black and grey. Way back when I lived in Melbourne I used to wear a lot of black, whereas now I tend towards the citrus and purple. I am reminded of Jenny Joseph's great poem "Warning". Perhaps we need to scream at the sky as we get older, like so many cockatoos. Or at least wear cresty jumpers.
Tuesday poem: Is it a haiku?
July 20, 2015
winter strawberries
nipples in snow
limacine dreams
P.S. Cottier
I was tossing up whether to have an image of a slug or a strawberry. Looks like I opted for perky and nice with this Deborah Griscom Passmore painting of a type of strawberry called Parker Earle. Planted in the glorious field we call Public Domain.
Don’t think about that wee poem too much, or rather unpleasant images may occur. By the way, there is no shame in having to look up the word ‘limacine’, which is not a kind of expensive car. I trolled around for ages before I found ‘as ovine is to sheep, X is to slug’. And the word is perfect, I think.
Being a poet is a tough job, but someone has to do it.
Read the works of the other Tuesday Poets around the world by pressing here.
Hats, ripples, paper
May 8, 2015
That sounds like a new game that rather old-fashioned children might play in the schoolground if Instagram suddenly crashed. But no, it’s an excuse to publish a photograph.
I took this last night at the launch of Janette Pieloor’s poetry collection ripples under the skin (Walleah Press). Janette is one the right, standing with Sarah Rice, another poet. You can tell that winter is really just around the corner in Canberra, skulking and kicking. (I refuse to say Winter is coming. That now has the coolness — !— of saying ‘How about this heat? or ‘Cold enough for you? Starkly uncool.)
And the paper? Well the launch was held in Paperchain Books in Manuka. One of the few independent bookstores left in Canberra.
I have dipped into the collection and found some very disconcerting poems, which is always a good thing.
Tuesday poems: [Mellow fruitfulness]
April 10, 2012
light slanting blinded
sun swoons into evening
winter comes to call
looks good: isn't.
winter cold as Karenin
clicking hard knuckles of frost
please take me to your railway
Yes, welcome to the wonderful city of Canberra, cold little capital town in a warm country. It was a balmy four degrees celsius this morning, and the leaves are falling from the trees in an icy wind. Just lovely. People go around in beanies and scarves saying ‘It’s a bit nippy, isn’t it?’ until you want a giant crab to attack them and cut off their blue fingers and red noses. Why, oh why, was Australia’s capital put here, rather than somewhere warm?
‘Autumn is so lovely.’ Thus spake the idiot at the shops this morning. No it’s not. Autumn is a disgusting harbinger of Winter, which lasts about nine months in Canberra, giving birth to a too short Summer after a dwarf Spring. Then comes another blood-red Autumn. And you walk around hallucinating about Queensland. (Ignoring the beauty of the native parrots and the huge flocks of cockatoos, nestled, perversely, in the introduced deciduous trees.)
Now, for a really lovely unfolding global birthday poem, written in a much more generous spirit than my little anti-Canberra rant, please click this feather, which has fallen onto the screen like a black Autumn leaf! Only birdier.
PS Cottier 