(after Ern Malley)
In the thirty-fifth year of my age we elves
find ourselves waving not droning, allergic to
dairy and trolls who never run short of oases and
having despaired of obsessing a little too gently
over our make-up we are content at last to be
a soloist uncorking its morphology. In the year 1981
I resigned myself as collateral to the living
imagos of other men, their sad right to alienate
my multipennate tail. In the same year
I said to my life (who is also my lover): Dreary,
we should make a verb of the word peach the way gums
burst into flame, weep and drop bears; as in future
Frankie and me when we knocked some frazzled cherubs
out into the bright world. Ding! went their heads
and in the face of my fear for theirs I continue to live
and sleep carefully, like an arachnid spinning
freesias around the bends of a banked-up bloke swamp
whose shirt-fronting’s the same old chilling Reich.
My feet still get stuck in the clefts of my tongue but
it is something to at least be mouthing a no-man’s lingo
ague even if knowing all the coordinates of existence
would mean also knowing how to reverse an explosion,
so I trace along my exes and why axes
and in conclusion implode back into my pelvis. I
who have lived in a shade that throws down skyscrapers
can only now emerge between the puff and shrivel
of each new season as spilt infinitives. Beyond
is almost anything, which isn’t everything
it’s cracked up to be.
Toby Fitch is currently poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer at the University of Sydney. Books of poems include ILL LIT POP, Bloomin’ Notions, and Rawshock, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. A new book, Where Only the Sky had Hung Before, is forthcoming with Vagabond Press.