Bird sampler

The birds dropped
from the air
their sound fell later

I saw my ornitho-phonologist
neighbour with cassette
recorder crouch at the gutter

mike held low to catch
perhaps a sparrow sibilant
some starling vocalics

they don't even care — it's come to this —
if they're natives or exotics
extinction doesn't discriminate

he smiled meekly sampling
the soundscape

he still had one or two
articles in him before retirement.

House

In the windows muslin falls like water formal and sad.
The gull’s flight tears the fabric and the hole sings.
The gate hangs pathless —
like a screen with memory behind it.

Someone’s cast a local paper here
in the mad kikuyu grass.
Propitiatory offering to the ghostly reader.

— It was always a mean little house, my companion says.
And now she’s gone you can see it.
Anyway, no place for tears. It’s a demolition culture.
— Oh you have a way of spitting on —

We pause for the sea to rush in between our lines.
The dunes are marching.
— I spit on nostalgia. On wound as epiphany, he says.

Behind the shredded muslin
a possum face appears.

Neo-classical

Your family moved into a pale blue rendered house
sort of bent deco with railway station stretch
it had rounded bits and the portico
with wrought iron staves on fluted pilasters
played its own strange music to the spongy buffalo grass
and single weeping willow.

Gone the black-green leaf-language
at the Ghana windows where
like A in La jalousie the book
you’d begun to hum the songs of Africa
way beyond your family’s ken.

Futures flickered with your stories
under the willow. Your eyes were huge.
Your urgent voice transported all your friends.
You told us how we’d age and drew the evidence.
Now we’ve become those drawings.

Then a man who wore his scars
like proudflesh and drank his vodka straight
came in. He knocked you back and breathed you out  —
in a fire-eater’s whoosh!
Just like that.
We rolled you in wet towels and willow light.

For weeks you held your arm across your chest
like Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad
and pillow-propped stared blankly at
your reproduction de Chirico.
His fire had tempered you though.

You’d hold the summer latent
in the bulb-strewn garden beds
let perspectival ponds erase
like magic writing pads
the billowing baroque of clouds
where you had flared.

Next time you’d have a list, a pedigree
CV built into his DNA
forget transgressive energy
sobriety, a certain gestural elegance
the rest would come.

Limpidity and patience beat all your Sturm
und Drang. Let others wear the ravages of excess.
You waved your mascara wand at my reflected skin.
Capillaries burst and constellated on it.

But from time to time you broke
your neo-classical reserve
to flirt with local boys at suppers
laid out in fabulous marquees.

You glowed like potlatch
hummed a tune we couldn’t catch
and flew their hearts just like the kites we pitched
over the darkening river.