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Cassie Lewis

A selection of poems

The News muted by blank snow.
Drivers’ coffee dawn. Promised
cures. Music conjugates the verb
to witness, holding forth. Parish
of all light: shelter those on foot.
Broken town: two trucks collide,
and at one juncture a frozen face
looks more formal than the trees.

I jolt awake. Remember beer for breakfast
in seedy bars. Furnishings close in, suddenly, their sweat.
What is this wanderlust
decorating.

Stay here wrestling smallest things,
this broken morning.
It is unremitting —
must I force this door?

Haven. You sit still in your chair,
like an absolution. Each of your knuckles burns
white hot on the armrest. You are a saint,

I just pose as someone awake.
How do I tear this parcel open? Are you
the glow inside?

I wiped the smoke off the walls
but I can’t stop the forest.
It blows through the door’s wooden slats as
we confer. Late night TV

glares, and murmurs
“I’ll love you through this.”

Lights strung out across the roofs
all things that are

once were dreamed.

At the kitchen table my hamster worries run
the treadmill. A glass of milk or, for rapid cure,
an ice-pick in the skull.

You are unable to contain yourself,
your edges blur like light

through a prism.
Tonight I make a pot of chicken soup,
thinking of you, cold and blurred in Rochester,
ordering room service.

Mathematics seen through you is like living
colour. The snow falls,
covers all footsteps.

Lights strung across the black roofs
of the most remote houses,

made to bear the weight of powdered ice.
Because I cannot see your face

I write this. Landscapes pitched and green tents
in the valley. Desire is the shape

of our minds. On the page
in the air.

Now the ghosts start coming. They skulk in poor suburbs, making claims on fountains, things. Gusts of America’s past hit me, like smog that blows out to sea, so that I pity those who cannot shake the stares of the dispossessed. Every time I see a bulky figure in the street, I’m sure John Forbes has arrived in town, to help me shed an illusion. Once a bus driver looked so like him – Scots features, stern gaze, curiosity – I had no concept of ‘destination’ anymore... Is there a word for ‘shape of a loss’? Here, old wildfire in the shape of a cross. In the aisle at the supermarket, American children play at shoot-outs. Cowboys and Indians. They know which they’d rather be, but I’m not sure, are the haunted luckier than those haunting? So it goes around. Australia’s ghosts left instructions. Graffiti: a name loves another name. And a poem, not a life itself.

First published in Overland magazine

Way of poppies, I climb upstairs — hurts to think,
bliss to move. And I won’t dispute a cigarette
on the famous corner. Hummingbirds; stars.
I never saw how hemispheres breathe differently.
Are hamlets of equal worth, is globalisation a mirage?
An antidote to poetry could be spring in America —
cures that make us stronger, champions of all we crave.
‘Long hair is a sign of patience if nothing else.’
May mine become that shining river ... Places
aren’t of equal worth. Sudden cold in a forest,
with ghosts of the lynched, streets in San Francisco,
or the chicken factory on the highway to Geelong.
Will memory fade, or grow more intense?

On the wide screen of my heart
a crowd scene is showing
and the girl makes modest plans.

She won’t cry, she won’t return.
Tonight will mark the end
of drunken homage to broken imagery.

And she doubts
that they’ll fall apart when she goes off
into those worst case scenarios

we become at parties.
Someone nudges a glass into her teeth,
they clank like soft loose change.

‘Lord save me I will perish, Lord
save me I will perish’. The truculent organ
and her pulse grow fainter then recede.

Something will out in her
and on the last stretch of clean sand left alive
the swansongs she haunts embrace her fairly

warmly — we’re so at home here.
She’s in the bathroom, smoking,
thinking ‘I know this from before’
and standing out from her function entirely.

Waking up to whitewashed plasterboard,
jettisoned by my pride I grew
to love this: because this was the only way
I could continue. How the tide repealed us,
then erased itself. Maybe the house,
with its palm trees, was more alive than I was.
Barely there, I was visible to others
as though by a miracle. Enjoyed the homage
of warm smiles on my shining skull. We each moved
in a private orbit and yet conflicted gravity
tore up the paths of everyone. Messes of human forces.
The flimsy world shone back with an anger
like an immovable sun. My room was all buoyancy and air.
Little blessings, like worry beads or rosary beads,
were counted until my tongue swelled up and balked
at the continual view of the placid sandy earth outside my door.
Just try protecting the innocent from belief.
I once read of worshippers who vowed to leave
no trace of their existence on this earth.
Later I understood how far from home I’d come.

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