Cracked avenues (Ismene)

Cracked avenues (Ismene)

Cracked avenues (Ismene)

You live in the cracked avenues
arguing and warming a kitchen’s generations
Last year wept but now the harrowed road

Moths eat the library, huffing past
The best went flickering through folding birch and sycamore
Last year was but now the bladed veil

Once sunset chipped in your hair, farewelling the universe’s inhabitants
Now clouds stop in your frozen cemetery
your wine-dark car turning in the drive
Advertisement flags serrate the 7-Eleven’s pediment, the streetlights set like spoons
Graves dust the hill and the ruptured gums
that whistle your instructions

———

You take the opal moon for granted
the marching cypress, sunset’s bolt
the street’s green strip neon selling food
at every calamitous funeral red car lights map like lava
Gold kalashnikov’s meted sorrow, an orb, a card

———

New Year’s Day shines on next door’s brick wall and chimney
as photos turn the marvellous gardens’ First Communion
writing your doctorate on the pillow
whose chains and sigh have passed
I pull the hearth rug\'s Martha and Mary into my caul

A golden hypocrite reassembles in the Arch of Federation
You, who were always with me, remember how bright the stars
above the ti-tree and eucalypt

We sat out in the fallen landscape, severed from what was
colouring the yard as it had been
She says you’re running now in the gold paddocks of your youth
who never reached her age
We lay the falcon china
Above, the hilted Southern Cross