Three Poems

 

by Tim Wright

 

 

 

 

VIII.

 

 

A divided track, lowering in volume until it’s eclipsed.  Red tongue on charcoal.  Trees shaped by the atmosphere.  A hand clasps a beam of wood.  Your request is being finalised.  Air pressure drops.  Ironing board.  Different airs unlocked.  The effect of one, superb book, coming apart in one’s hands.  Drinking and walking.  Gaunt pieces of furniture, under a white sheet. 

 

Safe to say.  Pollen in one’s hair.  An object moving through space.  Breathless on the radio.  Driving to Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians.”  The concrete imagination.  And the percolator joins in.  Making a mistake, waving from a porch.  The accent of that afternoon. 

 

Music in translation, internal politics.  The future poured into small metal cups.  “At this point I’m just pressing buttons randomly.”  The birds come closer over time.  The pleasurable state of namelessness.  Disembarkation.  Float into a different suburb.  Ring bark.  “Wearing” a beard.  Field of disconstructed machines.  Grass farm.  One mood trounces another. 

 

 

 

 

IX.

 

 

Turn your money inside out.  Bloodless statistic.  Woke up with sore muscles and wet shoes.  A frame upon which.  Degrees of confluence.  Continuous beard of bees along a shoreline.  The image equally abstract and concrete.  Changing shirts, changing altitudes.  The photographer can smell death. 

 

Your quota of experiencing for the year.  An object woken up.  The line intersects the space, makes two adjacent areas.  Conical shadow.  Reservoir, a groove in the staircase.  Fixate on a vowel.  Discretion.  Or tearing strips off.  Finishing what one started. 

 

A familiar cannibal.  Purified gloop.  Sold by the shipping container.  Live exports drifting past the groyne.  Unexamined pages.  Lit up like a shopping centre.  Not all things are like other things.  Chewing it over.  A layer of connectives.  Old coffee, banana republic.  Mental emission target.  Dragging itself down a hill.  Running and climbing at the same time. 

 

 

 

 

X.

 

 

Land sweepings.  Or the trunks of former glory.  Space equally devoted.  Whimsical attitudes, rapid eye movement.  A corner of rubble.  Falling into line.  Cash register, brass alarm.  Set it afloat.  A slideshow of well-washed atmospheres. 

 

Forgotten phases.  Symphonic gloom.  Wonder who’ll be listening.  The gloom of the visible.  Trucks with us, light throughout the house.  Trusting a drove.  The slinky harbour.  Shave off the crinkles, on top of your coffee.  “Live” from the skirting board.  Pieces in a felt bag. 

 

A drum shelter, safely unrelated.  Red string from the roof.  Has gone quiet.  Electricity meter imperceptibly changing.  Gravel teeth.  Something burning wetly.  A capsule or a frond.  Raised above itself, from a multi-level carpark.  Affably unconnected to those others, now among them.  Later forming queues at locations.  The driving home would also be visible.  And this for months. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Wright is a poet living in Melbourne, Australia, who has had work published in various Australian journals.  The poems here were written in the south west of Western Australia and are part of a longer series.