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The Other Side of the Bay

These poems are available in print in John Tranter's Late Night Radio, Polygon Press, Edinburgh, 1998.






Listen to the Poet Read

 The serial changes colours, and our daydreams recycle -

but you're wanting the problem to be solved already

and in fact it was wrapped up silently while we were

standing here holding our drinks - the glasses

beaded with little droplets of moisture -
 


so we are still buried among the sound of work
 


But our happiness, and where it comes from,

how it gets tangled up with the promises

from the other side of the border, or deciphered

among the clumsy handwriting on the menu,

then behind her smile ruby in the grainy light

here in the Cuban restaurant, carnations

piled in heaps on the table and - flash! - am I

imagining this, in the future, a child, or

along the sunlit road ahead?
 


Speaking academically, she leaves the centre

for the ventures on the edge, accepting a job

in a provincial college and a gift pen

carved out of turquoise, representing

the imagined and the real, displaced

through the grammar of the "hidden future"

which is a subset of the coloured future

professors argued about in the twenties. Well,
 


the primitive should be second nature by now,

collapsed into a knack, as maturity declines

into age, painful age, full of spooky dreams

of the ancient hoist creaking down to do its job,

      lifting the gravestone -

look - they're all our hopes turning into mist,

a kind of ancestor bank with squandered assets.

Understand - the steel door has to close.
 


Our future might look like a bay curved

and blended with our daydreams drifting, those

flimsy clouds - mnnh - I'm waking -

to the little people beside the track -

on their lips a white word means

      ill-mannered

a dark word means unlucky
 


She tries to fix up the spat - newlyweds,

they watch the nasty stream flow past again -

but every kind thing she tries to say

gets dirtied somehow by those nerds -

Ken and Barbie: always fighting, or fucking -

no class, the timeworn basket of tricks.

Then he's naked on the lawn. No one wanted that,

wife-swapping, he's no flirt, only a jerk

from a jerry-built fifties township

whose lights gleam over the dark hill.

Her cheeky note, teasing us about it,

the sexual activity during the night, how he

faltered and failed, the malicious gossip -
 


We'll see what fell on the village all evening,

radioactive lumps, night sky detritus, now

the old folks have returned for the ceremony

and the women among them set up the slow,

sticky evening, making a sweeter light ahead

with their lamps.
 


                                     
To the border,

who cares if it's far away, the other side

of the bay, across the black water, that's
 


where you wished to travel,

that's where you wanted to go, and vanish.
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