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Sport 4: Autumn 1990

5

5

So why can't their story end happily: sticky yellow
auslese, wicked sinsemilla, taste of rosehips, high country
April? Secreted in an armpit
vanilla essence violates the pomotopic Natural!
(Meaning, in any less private dialect,
I never saw you before in my life
& what's more, I can forgive you for that if I
concentrate.) Why can't they stay out of trouble?

This could be the triumph of dissolution —
the dream, they would like to say, dissolves
like the mist dissolving,. rolling off the riverflats,
like sugar, bubbling in their blood.
Sometimes they think about the cabbage trees in
flower & admit they can hardly believe their luck.
Just when they thought they were going to have to
hump it, they tin-assed a ride with the poison truck.

*

Everywhere the cabbage trees are weighed down with blossom.
They say that means the summer will be happy, she says.
This might sound like the beginning of something
if it didn't have its head still buried in the past.
But is it really too much to hope for, they
Wonder, just sometimes to be wise after the event?
Couldn't they demassify that breasty-looking
permafrost, & actually get on with it?

page 8

Or do they back themselves to let
go of the idea somehow, brown as a berry, fit as a buck
rat, gold-tops, rosehips sunning their nipples:
do they think they're going to find a way back to
beyond that? We last see them trit-trotting out across
the walkwire, edge-wise on their horny little billy-goat feet.
Spiny pink biddi-bids star their ankles.
Merrily they sign the intentions book.