JULY
(from “The Idyll Wheel”)
Now the world has stopped. Dead middle of the year.
Cloud all the colours of a worn-out dairy bucket
freeze-frames the whole sky. The only sun is down
intensely deep in the dam’s bewhiskered mirror
and the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear.
Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open.
Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater
this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly.
No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now.
Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon.
Now the world has stopped, what do we feel like doing?
The district’s former haircutter, from the time before barbers, has shaved
and wants a haircut. So do I. No longer the munching hand clippers
with locks in their gears, nor the scissors more pointed than a beak
but the buzzing electric clipper, straight from its cardboard giftbox.
We’ll sit under that on the broad-bottomed stool that was
the seat for fifty years of the district’s only sit-down job,
the postmistress-telephonist’s seat, where our poor great-aunt
who trundled and spoke in sour verdicts sat to hand-crank
the tingling exchange, plugged us into each other’s lives
and tapped consolation from gossip’s cells as they unlidded.
From her shrewd kind successor who never tapped in, and planes
along below the eaves of our heads, we’ll hear a tapestry
of weddings funerals surgeries, and after our sittings
be given a jar of pickle. Hers won’t be like the house
a mile down the creek, where cards are cut and shuffled
in the middle of the day, and mortarbombs of beer
detonate the digestion, and they tell world-stopping yarns
like: I went to Sydney races. There along the rails,
all snap brims and cold eyes, flanked by senior police
and other, stony men with their eyes in a single crease
stood the entire Government of New South Wales
watching Darby ply the whip, all for show, over this fast colt.
It was young and naïve. It was heading for the post in a bolt
while the filly carrying his and all the inside money
strained to come level. Too quick for the stewards to note him
Darby slipped the colt a low lash to the scrotum.
It checked, shocked, stumbled—and the filly flashed by.
As he came from weighing in, I caught Darby’s eye
and he said Get out of it, mug, quite conversationally.—