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Chris Wallace-Crabbe

A selection of poems

          Thin monarchs tanning
along the edge of a loan system
at ease on some historical
antbed tennis-court
          while the fat peasants
are pissing against the wind
in a daydream
          of baccarat tables
and local bubbly.
 
 

Pussyfooting indoors, the tacky
media bunging your sinuses with newsy
economies going through the floor,
it's time to take the air.
 
Under the daylit, heavily
not-yet flowering gumtree
it conceivably does you good
to ignore the flop-flip-flop
of atrociously pink camellias
 
Maybe it's just plain beaut
to up and get out of doors
into unpainted otherness where
you don't have to match up dry socks
 
or catch the footy scores,
with a manic imported thrush
overhead in a spotted vest
singing a repertoire to rags.
 
And the phone is ringing
its nasty little head right off.
 
 

It wasn’t exactly a right-of-way and
I got there by the skin of my teeth,
reaching that Volvo in the nick of time.
They were part of the city parking crew
and the two of them were fiddling around
at the car in front there, out of synch:
luck of the devil was on my side.
I began to like the look of the day,
feeling that I must have got out of
a more-or-less right side of the bed:
something of the kind, I thought,
not being fond of parking tickets
but in need of coffee pretty soon, and
revving round the corner like a bat out of hell.

It wasn’t precisely the end of the world
but a bit of a hassle there, you know.
Getting it right is my cup of tea.

Memory is a curious organ
and can also be inflated, as you know
or half-know,
however language tries to tie it down.


When there was no There
Lilith or Sheba came,
preceding even the name of the game,
so the brain obliquely remembers,
and the limbs do.


Her ghost stirs smokily underneath
our human muscle and breath.


Somewhere at full midnight then
the grass has been thoroughly trodden down;
there are horse-tracks in the sand.


These nymphs, I’d like to put them in a film,
the other poet said about all this,
bees murmuring in a ripeness
through his eclogue,
making nothing happen once again.

Listen! The shape of hooves
lost in your blood.

_____________________
Arvo: Not an Estonian composer; rather,
an Australian colloquialism for ‘afternoon’.

The jungle is only the jungle

So let’s all admit that
the writer believes in words,
as painters loves paint
or a musician loves
the treacherous, gay piano;


those very words may then hunt down
a feral poem for the tracker,
Muses being as often lodged
in slinky grammar and raw sounds
as in green chunky objects,
or a breaking heart


and
what is more,
metaphors put a tiger in your tank
or else provide a turbaned mahout
for the stamping elephant
in his dungy enclosure.


The words are only the words
which is more or less everything.

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