Tuesday Poem - Fire With Fire by John Foulcher

FIRE WITH FIRE

(January 1994)

After the fires, a wind

dripping cinders

drew me back to Sydney,

where I was born.

At the city's shrivelled edges

houses and hills

were faint watercolours,

drained, diffuse.

That rich, fermented smell

of things that had been burned

rolling across the roads

to my brother's house in Ryde. Here

the bushfires had sent letters:

he showed me a bowl

of leaves plucked from the lawn,

each the exact shape

that had hung coloured

and lithe, now blackened to an artform,

dry and eternal.

And the soot, everywhere, as if churned

from factories. In the dusk

we sat outside

while the kids tugged fun

from the television. And we watched

with a few beers

the tired, safe world. That night

I slept in the room

that had been my parents'

when, close on a decade,

I was told

of my father's death.

All so different,

in a different bed. I dreamed I was caught

in some grim country town.

I gathered the kids

and waded quiet streets

to a rotting house

rimmed with stillness. In the dark

two men shaved

by a dead light,

the dark one below

speaking as softly

as a touch of wind

on your hands. Please, I said,

let me make a phone-call. This man

who was talking,

who was in charge,

leaned into the stain of lamplight

and said, pointing

to the other, His mouth burns

and heals, when he kisses

me. Then I saw his friend,

pocked, fat, staring

at me, his withered mouth

barely closed, barely open. Please,

I said again. Yes -

the word scuttled

from his lips -

Yes, but let me have

the children. I tell you I was shocked

and would have left,

but agreed. It was for their sake,

the children, curled and feline

at my feet. I woke

then, and the bedroom

became nothing

I knew, again. Outside, the wind

herding clouds

rubbed against the sky,

a few smudges

of leftover smoke. Crisp January leaves,

whetted on the glass.

Going back to Canberra,

I trailed along roads

burning with traffic

under a sky scoured

raw. I had to make

one stop more:

the national park,

clumped at the edge

of Maianbar, where I'd decided

about marriage and family.

But there was nothing

to remember here, nothing

green any more. Time

had been razed. The orange flesh

of the angophoras, their paper

leaves clattering in the wind,

their branches cracking

canvas ridges. Black-fingered banksias

along the scorched road.

A thin black stream

beneath a bridge,

glistening like an eel

among the grey rocks. And the roadsigns,

melted, Dali,

twisted, limp.

When I stopped the car and got out

the ground pouted

ash. Sounds evaporated

in the birdless air.

It was all strange,

this known land

hidden by growth

in the familiar years, in the time

I'd grown, not knowing

contours, undulations.

I felt like a man

who sees an old friend

drunk, and turns away

in embarrassment. In the end

I left, on a road

as cool as the earth,

a highway slung

through pasture and forest,

a land still to burn.

Home held its perfect rooms, its bed

and clean sheets,

all night. Tonight,

though, my daughter is sick:

she shivers on the lounge

in a leak of light,

twitching and vomiting,

throws back her head

simmering with sweat,

her hair lined

with saliva. Sleep

comes in bursts.

Again, the spasms of the body,

all thought of friends

or toys gone,

as she knows

in her blood and bowels

that her dreams don't matter,

that the only thing

is to wake

the next morning, and forget

all that has happened in the night.

John Foulcher used to live in Canberra but he has recently shifted to Melbourne and he is a very welcome addition to the scene. This poem is from his book – What On Earth Possessed You published by Halstead Press in 2008.

http://halsteadpress.com.au/site/?page_id=21

I like the way this poem takes its own subtle time and roams here and there. It's a road poem for sure, and it ends up at home.

http://johnfoulcher.com/