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John Gascoigne
YARRAVILLE
The houses are slugged,
stunned in the wake of a punch,
peeling flyscreen and paint,
settling into their plots
corner by corner
as if elbowing into a grave.
In Yarraville the buildings might be
gathered up and put away:
down every street
there looms a
crane or raised motorway.
The shops all huddle together,
close ranks, bluff solidity.
The barber grips
his razor
behind a screen,
while old men slouch
into his faded magazines
and a club
that takes the light
like a green, abandoned swimming pool.
They look at me
with bellies
and splayed thighs,
as guarded and
enduring as lizards.
They alone will remain
when the toys
around them are
picked up and put away.
The cranes
blunder in like lizards
to end the
coddled childhood
of these
little residences.
DOG
Dog
With you gone, the stitches
sustaining our image
are pulled a little apart.
Threads withdraw –
the veins that snaked through
and joined it
to a beating heart –
from the
puckered white
of canvas
drawn out on a board.
Air whispers
in and out of holes
through which threads pulled tight.
You are what draws it together:
you are the flight and the fibre.
Without the ground
of your regard
I scrabble for my days,
staving off the shapelessness
that presses in around me.
What am I
without your love:
as buffeted as Scott,
whose best hope was admiration
for sticking it out.
There's a dog
that twitches in its sleep
for love, and
howls in an empty backyard.
There's a dog
that crams its head in
the gap between
gate and garden path,
listening
for the sound of brakes
and
scratching at the dirt,
ready to be anywhere but here,
where your absence is a certainty.
There's a dog
that splinters bone after bone,
waiting for you
to come back home.
THRESHING
If any ordinary boy he
would be due for the office
and a kindly remonstration,
but it was always assumed he would fail.
They put in a minimum
of effort,
as if
cooking a meal for children –
you know they will not enjoy it
and so throw together
something blandly palatable.
His father has a garage
gleaming with cars
and yet
who could love his shoulder,
pressed forward and over
like a folded pair of wings?
Who could love his sprouting mole,
his home-sewn velvet jacket?
He is an affront
to good health, well-turned limbs
and voices raised in hearty cheering.
So he clucks, plays up to it,
becomes an eccentric,
passes them grunting
so he is not only odd,
but awesome.
He becomes a cherished idiot.
Maybe among the schoolboys
who close in knots
against him -
like buffalo sensing faulty genetics –
one will regret
the taunts
and guide him in.
Maybe he will be tolerated.
Of course we value every human life,
of course no-one can be made
to submit to the knife,
but we are of course entitled to dislike,
to engage in threshing.
Copyright © John Gasgoigne
