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ARTS AND CULTURE

Clean on the surface

  • 16 March 2021
  Selected poetry

Laundry

My father has laundry to do on Sunday.

Therefore he can come to Carnegie.

Therefore he can see me.

My father lives three suburbs

five kilometres

five minutes

away from Carnegie.

I see him when he can get away.

I don’t go there because that is their home.

He wouldn’t mind but his wife would.

It’s convenient to kill two birds with one stone.

I am a bird, he is a stone.

Sometimes I could kill my father.

We will go to the laundry and finish coffee in time

for the clothes to finish the wash cycle.

This is called catching up with my father.

He would say you don’t do this—

you just don’t do that—

talk about your dirty laundry in public.

Yet he takes my poetry and plays,

my stories, pretty well.

I apologise after poems, after plays.

But he says, well, why not?

It’s the truth. He can take it—

in the films he sees, the books he reads.

But catching up for coffee

is conversation light and frothy as foam.

If you bring up anything difficult.

Anything he finds depressing. He looks like

you’ve dragged him down, or you’ve

put him through the wringer.

And who wants to have that effect

on their father? Over coffee, he keeps

looking at his watch.

He keeps track of the time, so he’s not late

for the laundry. We finish when he’s finished

and head back for the dryers.

I spend the rest of the day

trying not to cry, trying

to write this poem.

Daddy long legs

It started with one. In the corner behind the TV.

Then there was another. Near the front door. Then there were

two, in my bedroom. They coveted corners, ceilings, or edges

of things. There must be a nest, said my mother, as if she was

an expert. She suggested vacuuming, but you’d have to make sure,

she said, cover the vacuum so they can’t get out. I knew

she could imagine me, taking the hose, heaving the thing out.

Dropping it, screaming; breaking it, as all those legs walked out.

Are they inviting their friends? Is it something about this house?

It never dawns on me to dust. I want to know their mystery.

I leave them there, as proof. Of what, I can’t say. I want to get rid of them.

It’s not as if this house is haunted. Who am I kidding? Of course it is.

You are not here. You never noticed cobwebs anyway, you allowed

them to accumulate. You always kept things clean on the surface.

So I leave the spiders there. It doesn’t matter how harmless they are,

I’m still scared of them. I’m frightened of killing them,

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