| Les Wicks AUSTRALIA leswicks@hotmail.com TRIP The road is a flat slimy black like liquorice licked & stretched for weeks on end. My hand on hop waiting as shadows evolve to night. We're at a great Australian bite bittensmittenkittens drunken rosy tired & toesy the taxi & Van Morrison like a dark brown honey. My job, blue shirt & neat long socks, is collecting the shavings of time. Rain is the beat between songs & I long (but that's of little matter) slide past/ rubber on a futon. Trees hanging crucified with damp. Bus shelters & toilets - hoards of homeless about the cover their tattered pennants flapping in the pre dark. You raise a hand like a greeting (or salute). I don't care, the car just weaves over to your bags & shuffles the rain. I've made you speedy & can't understand why. Sharing this new address with me is an intimacy: I know more than your workmates, more than the authors whose bedside books have brought tears & belly laughs. There is some nervousness inevitable when one meets one. Don't worry, I take what is required. We could travel the scenic route but would never arrive. As the cab leaps like a dolphin to “corner Hampton & Hornsby Bel rose”. you explain why this day is so sick, so damaged. How love, seemingly coated in layer upon layer of waterproof varnish, simply failed in a morning storm & left puddles the colour of bruise all over the driveway. & the body you gathered in good faith is breaking down/ smart TV adds but no warranty/ impotent arrogance of the mechanics, tedium of this tollway. I laugh & disagree. Corners turn, disappear like acquaintances. You lifted your hand to me & I am charged like a knight to the honour, the display of ANY trip. Your driver. This is the street. That journey wasn't hard & all your problems will either dry out or wash away. COURTESY. “Have a fine evening”. My touch, like yours, is either wind or stone & both lie down together in the net of fallen hours.- UNDER the WEATHER Fresh out of the shower you sit down opposite & I wonder at the one brazen drop, the runaway tearaway bead sneaking down your cheek - meeting co-conspirators at the ear lobe abseiling to the slowly rising nipple then joyously plummeting to the soft springs of pubic hair. You don't understand the cause of my wonder but that's okay because we've been naked like this beyond count, sometimes beyond interest , but we always return to this certainty of flesh. I follow the path of those drops like their lowliest acolyte; my tongue repeating their paths of prayer. Hand paints in broadest strokes, moving in to fine point/ the detailing of arousal. You always say this is a dance, demanded rhythms beyond timing. Seeking deepest resonance where the music itself moves with you. But to me we are painting - the coaxing of colour from beneath the white canvas of our skin. My hands are moving hard, avoiding the tender points but nudging flesh towards those centres as if your whole body was congregating. Your hands are roving lightly like a bay-protected tide. You reach down & surprise us both (because in these things we can all be at the edges of extremity). A few words & you come out to greet these two fingers. I come in like a boulder easing into soil. We seek the rhythms of your dance. Blood rushes north, rushes south. My thumb grinds nipple to fine ochre/ you are so intent & have come, then try to come again but I miss cues (as usual, imagination beats the art) & have to wind down to a calm, so calm that lakes are left looking strung out & shabby/ stillness poured from a distillation of afternoon sun-motes/ a book waiting in its store - gilt, ink & resin. We sense a rhythm in the distance as though initially it has nothing do with us: something in the flat downstairs even a movement deep in the earth. Both concentrating, trying to find a point where it meets & seconds us. It does & this pulse is neither smooth, nor subtle. You can't call it any relative of waltz or bossa nova. This is a storm. Your hands are busy again, a slickened finger slipping in stirring frenzy in the spine. Then my explosion then yours. I lie on you. Like moon-teased water you rise again from time to time - those aftershocks you love. “Just....” I wait, occasionally move. The phone is ringing (somewhere in Asia I believe) We return reluctantly to the old cars of husband & wife/ on the roads of family. Cash. Cleaning. Our secrets flourish under gouache afternoon light. TOBY'S LIST In bed, buying groceries or getting married we again turn our lovers into screens, watch scratchy re-runs of old pains & betrayal. Saying no (to myself) I make bird noises at a new day & the old work shirt is that, nothing more. Hungry, awake. The sun doesn't hear. Waves don't care. The BIRD'S SECRET A rich store of grain, feathers soaked in a transitory rain & freed from intelligence. From the tops of the tree, he looks down at me with a vacant curiosity. I hear a whisper.
© Copyright, 1999, Les Wicks. |