Coal and Water

A. Frances Johnson

Now the last line won’t irrigate

Dog-jawed ministers pant on camera

wan half-rhymes

filling dry channels

like droplets shaken from a child’s flask

In tour-of-duty heat

a neat tie

may be a metaphor for resolution

If only the lack of a definite article

before ‘country’

didn’t make them stammer so

Meanwhile the press’s compound eye

hallucinates a Chinese-invested coal station

mid-stream, when mid-stream is simply an illusion

of a liquid past

something the doctor asks you to save

in a bottle

 

Some poets have forgotten

to ask what it is

they are burning in the grate

On a cold night I am one of them

– the coal-fired heart

the pathetic revenge of the powerless

bringing paper fuel to the table

to burn and burn again

Is this all that’s left?

The restive recitals

the pained nostalgia for trees and rivers

that comes after trees and rivers?

Contemplating this dun catalogue

makes me tired

as if I had walked

the salt bed of the Murray from north to south

dragging my plastic pen

through the silt like an ape

 

There is nothing I want to save in a bottle