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ANDY KISSANE
Joy and a Fibro Shack
- "I’m a little ashamed that
I want to end this poem
- singing…" — Robert Hass
- The difficulty of writing a poem
- is like the difficulty of building a
house
- without a plan, wood, a hammer.
- You have to start somewhere
- and if you have a tin of nails,
- then that’s as good a place as any.
- Foundations, frame and finish will come,
- if you work at it.
- Or might not come.
- There’s always the canvas shell of a
tent.
- There’s always driftwood and burlap
fastened with bamboo vines.
- There’s always the music of
corrugated iron in a hail storm,
- or its blistering shade at midday.
- Is a poem a palace or a humpy?
- I prefer humpies, furnished with a daggy
couch
- reclaimed from the council clean-up.
- I want to capture the grit beneath
fingernails,
- the mysterious gaze of a brush wattlebird
- peering at me through the window,
- the misery of a broken marriage,
- and the elation of the night we bumped
- into Rebecca at Kilimanjaro, the
restaurant
- not the mountain, crammed around a table
- as those first contractions took hold of
her body.
- Breath, heartbeat, blood—the heroic
stride
- of that old iambic line. And screams far
too loud,
- far too long for the sanitised labour
- of soap opera—they’d call it
over-acting,
- they’d call it amateur,
they’d say
- it was in very bad taste.
- I prefer poems to come into the world
- shining with vernix, green with meconium,
- radiant with the open-eyed awe of a baby
- in the first half-hour of her life,
- while the wind lifts and rattles the
walls
- until the house resonates with its own
bright keening,
- like the night I was up at 3am,
- walking the kitchen, walking the hallway,
walking
- the lounge room, holding a baby
- who would not stop, would not stop,
- just would not stop crying.
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