THE STINKING MANTRA

THE STINKING MANTRA

THE STINKING MANTRA

I lay her under a camellia bush by the stone Buddha,
where a cherry blossom scattered its confetti karma,
where azaleas flourished and minah birds convened.
Her pelt had been tattooed by a powerline. Night fell.
I almost forgot her because I was exhausted,
because I couldn’t sleep, bypassing all attendant
thought of mourning. Outside the brushwood
stirred with native ghostings: her kind, not the shape
of hunger but death’s apprentice slipping through trees,
their wire fingers scuffed against sky. The mist paused,
as if it were autumn, the trees were bare tightropes.
By daylight there were catkins, magpies broke the dawn,
the sky pinned back its rain. Leaves were floating carp,
wisteria festooned desiccated gardens. I walked past lilies
with elephant ears swaying in the sun, a stop sign pulled
out from the ground by schoolboys. All this to slake me,
to dress my grief: these things with names to keep or to speak
as if articulation made of thought a substance.
Words, falling softly as feathers or pollen. How many words
might a woman discern? And what of a small marsupial
shocked by current, mid-climb, lit-up in free-fall?
What made me crush a blossom of wisteria to sprinkle
over the small, dead thing? Away I went to read the day’s
diffuse paragraphs, to bluff my way through colouring-in,
a daughter’s grammar. She ties toys with paperclip chains,
devices infinite to bind or to banish. Cars flew by,
a truck with a skip-bin, birds scavenged from the tarmac.
Up close, the possum smelt like rancid butter. I sat with
her and smoked, hearing nothing. No pity, no slight
for what I’d named her, Sweet Shadow-Playing Funambulist.
What was the harm? I might call her a crumpled stocking,
a ripple in the field, or a girl’s dismembered evidence.
The swing tempts her back. Trucks pass rudely in the valley.
Soon her mouth began to fizz, filling with a residue
creamy as boot polish and everything pregnant with heat.
So the riddle of days, walking from doorstep to driveway
then back to school. Disgusting, my daughter said.
For at last the maggots came, teeming in the possum’s
stopped, burned mouth. The air smelt of stewed semen,
the tongue like a black orchid, half-severed, dangled
and torqued. So the tongue swayed and in the fraying sleep
of my fatigue I could hear the quiet vowels, rising from
wisteria, from the hot ground, and falling back into silence.