Small-time spectre

He located his fireman's shirt, Grandfather's herringbone jacket,
fisherman's hat and softly lantern jaw and while the lovers ran

backwards in their sleep, hailed a cab to practise losing himself
once more, parked on my street. And that's where I found him,

lodged in that many-pocketed place he goes while cab drivers who
speak of Islam keep the engine running and their gazes branching.

A kerb-side Russian doll with a cap of painted hair unpacking
the roll of fifty-dollar bills, the wardrobe changes, the footage

of kitchen ghosts caught like a draught between the window and
the sill: small-time spectres who never wished to be committed

to tape, managing as I hold the passenger door to slip down the back
of the seat, back into un-being where try as he might he cannot go after.

page 132

Ecce homo, smoko

There's a roomful of blokes
napping when she phones.
A chef, a dishwasher,
a few waiters and her friend
the kitchen-hand stretched out
on backs under chair & table
in the empty upstairs dining room,
unused linen floating above,
bringing melancholy biography to mind:
brute labour force in a foreign country
murmuring gently now at her introduction
on the line.

She can hear unseen space fold
with man-shapes defying addition.
It's ecce homo here he says,
and she sees him gesture at essence,
pronouncing as she has not heard
in Roman tongue, proud, abashed,
so that she forgets to remind him
that, at 34, he's just past the crucifying age.

He indicates the sound of sous chef
Mr Niroz stretched out on the coolroom floor
as cradling her to ear, he transports
her to the bins where they take smoko
the better to exchange birthday greetings.

If this is a poem, she thinks,
where's the fact checker?

page 133

Magnolia cloud

A woman in her yard
in a cloud of magnolia,
holding a mug of tea.
Her cheeks inflammatory
as she inches closer to the blooms,
hoping for immunity from human form.

It's a hopeless case and she knows it
but persists in her desire to assume
protective colouring
bleed out of shape, waiting
for the lacework of branches
the giant flowers to take her in.

She nods at me, embarrassed.
I savour her blush.

A woman

A woman when she got home liked to
stand in the mirror, watch the brightness
of the street fade in the dim. If quick
she might catch a trace of the one who
travelled in the gaze, in and out and through
the aquifer of others' skin. Other times

she would crawl through the underbrush
of day and in the door and there they
were, just the humble lineaments of face
her face only, signifying relief.