The Moment of Waking


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These poems are available in print in John Tranter's Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, ISBN 0 86806 029 1, paperback.

She remarks how the style of a whole age

disappears into your gaze, at the moment

of waking. How sad you are

with your red shirt, your features

reminiscent of marble, your fabulous

boy-girl face like a sheet of mist

floating above a lake.

Someone hands me a ticket

In Berlin a hunchback

is printing something hideous;

my passport is bruised with dark blue

and lilac inks. Morning again,

another room batters me awake

you will be haunting the mirror like silver

Now the nights punish me with dreams

of a harbour in Italy - you are there

hung in the sky on broken wings

as you always have been, dancing,

preparing to wound me with your

distant and terrible eyes.


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