Tuesday Poem - Love In The Suburbs by Peter Lach-Newinsky

1. Georges River, August. Her Poem

• ‘Put the poet watching........’

grey trees

glint and tingle

among the plastic

caught in the mangroves

the river trudges by,

thickly. Brown.

It is going to the sea.

Magpies stukkato

the hat- or stickless.

Two women are sitting on a carpark log.

Afternoon. Balance

cuppas struck by long orange light. She leans

over to the other, confides:

George isn’t very deep Flo

a bit sooperfishl. Reely. Sips.

A powerboat big-bangs it all.

The plastic shudders.

Winter doesn’t even try.

2. Lawn, Pool, TV, January. His Poem

• ‘tries to see them.....’

Water

In plastic lemonade bottles

dreaming on forlorn lawns

reclining totems

against shitting dogs.

For reasons unknown. Just trim ‘em

till you bleed

diggers of suburbia,

fiddle and blast and weed

(as tides turn

and things stir

under the silt

of the heart)

that true blue concrete-and-grass

Arcadia : (o what a lark

in the old Manor park

heigh ho

as we poached after dark

heigh ho

and were most cru-el-ly

transported !) make it

a short-back-and-sides and Decency Returned

with a vengeance, a power mower

and some agent orange

under a quite indifferent

big gun-of-a-sun. Yes dear

no dear pass the certainly

dear would you like please or

else love we can (I bloodywell hope

the scone sticks

in your throat

like a sardine can

down a pelican

righto righto righto

and your bloody girdle

explodes

as you bend down

at bowls

o yeah) but I

did remember the special

on pool chlorine at Franklin’s.

O yes, love.

Maggie love. For reasons unknown. The crack.

under the back door. The screen

flickers. The sand

from the mudflats is blown a little higher.

Brown sand. Stealthy.

Alive.

Watching.

3. Watching. The Poet’s Poem.

• ‘It is all going to the sea.....’

Put the poet watching

at the riverside carpark.

His poem of this Maggie the Magpie’s husband,

their suburban life cut up

at the top of each of their poems.

Tries to see them

tries to hear them

from within objects and personae

named like the plastic bottle totem the magpie

the other lady on the log or the log or the jerk

in the powerboat God maybe the shitting dog

the sluggish old river, naturally the river

and especially their TV set

having a secret affair with Maggie

while we see or hear their phantasy lives

in the phantasy life of the poet

who is a phantasy like George

the RSL dragonslayer (imagine he said and

the curtains weren’t even drawn I want he said

I want to stick and he only had his sweaty old

singlet on my lance in you and me

in me girdle you dragon he called me I spose

that’s sposed to be a turn-on and from behind

coming at me like a lawnmower he’s not

in the army now you know how you go

through the motions just to keep ‘em quiet

and the other night imagine Flo I dreamt

this huge great dune yeah dune just came

all over the lino I always told him to

put something under there

but the sand was brown or black and yes

full of eyes). In fact

there may be as sense of ancient things

surfacing like weeds or sandbanks

up through their suburban lives the totems

only partly buried under the obsessive lawns

returned again the sifting sands, quietly

built up by the brown wind (slow, tidal)

from the river the mudflats as they have afternoon tea

and telly (i see

i reflect them watching me as i watch them

as i throb with lurid phantasies

that flicker furiously and blare on the surface

of my glassy brain for hours it’s exhausting tho

that finger soft and stiff that pushes into me

at seven is always always exciting exciting again

as the energy surges thru the sky

and thru me me me and cataracts of wordimages

race in my veins my cells yes o yes

how lovingly she wipes me clean of that

traffic and mangrove dust on Saturdays then

even his put-put his put-put his put-put

powermower can’t come between us) and, yet

he snarled to leap at the heart of the real,

the sinews within the skin of satire, the real

slouching away along trimmed surfaces, howling

silently at cosy violence, to the ebb and flow

of caring and tortoise desperation.

So that the poet too can be seen (as he sees,

watching, by the watching river) to be

all that. Helpless in metaphor

and more than the smartfart voyeur

lawnmowing and opinionating as it is all going

to the sea and love and poetry

no overwhelming and obvious

constant cataract of passion,

for the tide is deep

and a wonderfully slow, perhaps,

brown, old

river.

Peter lives in Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands of NSW, quite close to where I used to live in Wingello. When I was running Bundanoon Poets In The Pub he was a regular and I came to know his work quite well. And to admire it. In recent years he has been featuring on the poetry prize lists quite prominently He and his wife, Barbara, run a 20 acre permaculture farm and his new work is deeply informed by this committment. Love In The Suburbs is an older poem which I have liked for a long time and is in his book The Post Man Letters published by Picaro Press.

http://www.picaropress.com/p2-3.html