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Bronwyn Lea:

Seven poems

These Gifts

Days like these — cool afternoons
in late summer, a rain so delicate
you can sit in the backyard and let the mist
drizzle your face. There’s no grass
of course. A late heat wave has bleached
the lawn, burnt off the last of the tree ferns.
Just last week children and the elderly
were suffering from heatstroke. Yet
these gifts that arrive late season —
an apology you hadn’t dared hope for,
a rush of poems, an impromptu patience
with the world. You rest your head
against a silky oak, and by your cheek
two butterflies coupled in flight
sex it up. And the day has charmed you
with ephemera before you can object.


The Chinese Foot

The bandage wraps figure eights
around her heel, across the crest
of her foot and tightly over her toes
(which are black and pressed
to her sole) so that her arch breaks
magnificently with the steep pitch
of a temple. She lets her husband
touch it. He uses the measure
of his thumbtip-to-first-knuckle
along her lily foot and counts one,
two, three and smiles. He brings it
to his lips, inhales, and thanks
the ancestors, who also smile
and wish him many sons. He has
loved her since first he saw her,
swaying in the courtyard like
a little tree, her long braid blue
under the moon, her lily feet
dressed in green apple silk shoes.
His mouth fell open at the sight,
but he was careful when he
exhaled not to blow her over
with the white cloud of his breath.


Antipodes

In this lifetime, antipodes must be
my word, my home or anyone else’s.
Anyone who lives at opposites, or knows
what it is to be contrary, to deviate. Like
disparate continents. Like the holding of
Europe and Australia in your blood.
This, I find, is a feat. And I recognise, as I age,
that my apogees are elongating,
my reversals are rising like the swollen
belly of a frog storing water in its sleep.
My friend feels it too and wonders
if she can ever love down to the lonely
and beyond; beyond that rocky existential
space that women like us, so schooled
in ricochet, retreat from with the
swiftness of a silver-capped bullet.
There is a man I know with sand-heavy
eyes that are sometimes sullen blue
like the haze of the eucalypt grove
that makes you remember all the f-words
you never use like forgiven and forever.
He has grown on me like an embryo
until without him I feel thrown
into being incomplete like the wintering
rose bush deleafed and out of bloom,
like this falling apart mountain,
a mountain that all my tying together
won’t mend. Then just now, lying
in the low light of afternoon, I saw
it is the movement more than the man
that I love, the movement in and out
of me, framing the sweet falling
of lilac pollen, falling soft upon his back,
my tongue.


The Nightgown

Reason is dream turned inside out
so we see daylight’s other side

or is if the other way round —
dream is reason turned inside out

as the Japanese woman in her desire
turns her nightgown inside out

to dream of her absent lover —
constructs of seams and loose threads

facing the world, the seeming seamless
elision of silks against her flesh

in daylight she watches her body age
(the long rains are falling)

commits to a life of dreaming —
whether the lover appears or he doesn’t

whether their meeting is fruitful or isn’t —
the black shell of night is a nut or is not.


A Place

There is a place I like to go
that is behind language

I like to go there and wobble
like a melon on a table

or a spoon that doesn’t care
if it is chosen or not

I also like to come back
and slip into ‘myself’

like a pair of silk pajamas —
ornamental and cool to touch


Christmas Day

                    Cuzco, Peru

Even the bells of San Blas cannot wake him.
Nor the smell of gunpowder that lifts
from the streets with the rain. Nor Camilla’s crying
at dawn, Feliz Navidad! Nor my breasts
as they press into his back. He is sound asleep,
and I am practicing detachment. His neck
is scarlet, sunburnt from yesterday’s siesta
in the Plaza de Armas, and already his skin
is starting to shed, to roll at the edges
like the pages of an old book. Underneath,
he is brand new. I take a piece of skin
and carefully peel it down his neck. It detaches
in the shape of a parabola — billows
like a little sail — and tears abruptly at the tip.
I hold up my relic to the light: it is clear
like cellophane and dries to a cloudy white. I
am wanting my caballista, but he is not in his skin:
it is only his wrapping! He must be underneath. I
peel faster. I want to uncover him. He
is my Christmas present. I want to open
him. I shake him. I want to hear what’s inside. I
roll him over and peel back his eyes.


Homecomings

Pretend there still are homecomings.
That we still have homes and can find them.
Pretend home is more than the meridian
encircling heart and soil at birth,

more than a history of receding horizon,
more than the illusion left behind.
Pretend it is more. There is a woman,
she could be anyone, sitting at her desk

or in a library, lying in somebody’s bed
or her own. She is studying maps — the clock-
wise swirl of oceans, migrations of sands,
the continents’ roam — but she cannot find

a map to suit her: one unpinned by stasis,
by longitude’s bar and latitude’s cross-
hatching. Her hand is following the curve
of equator, trying to get back to a beginning,

but her fingers are falling off the page,
learning the measurement of loss,
of never the absolute, of nowhere a finality.
Her mind is swerves on its axis, and her face

presses into the page — she is pretending
it is a lover’s neck, and the scent of papyrus
and ink is walking her back to the mulga,
back to spinifex plains and uncontoured sky.

Here there is nowhere to go. Except to the bush
pomegranate and the gnarled track of its branch.
Her hand is open and reaching for the flower —
burnt orange petal — as if it were fruit.

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