deep south 2013
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dsj poetry
Last Term
It was December and in the dead afternoon heat of the prefab classroom
we were fading over our scientific calculators unfinished equations
and textbooks already out of date and there up the front was Mr. Brower
who was pissed off having just realised the line of red chalk running
across the front of his walk shorts had got there by rubbing himself up against
the first row of desks which had been chalked on by those who were eager
to trap him to see him get fired he was about to launch into a morality rap
whipping his chair with the wooden ruler and before he even got close
to the part about there being no gate at the school to keep us in or out or the
other part about there being no gate to the greater world and as the bell
rang sounding in the end of the lesson the end of the term the end of year our shoes
were off we were gone we were halfway across a field of seaward leaning clover.
Tic Doloureux
Found him back there this morning sitting on an upturned blue paint bucket
holding open a Picador paperback copy of Mailer's ‘Ancient Evenings’
right index finger still hooked still pointing to a line somewhere at the middle
of page three hundred and seventy where he was always by the front door
of the two-room cottage once standing in the far corner of the Telstra car park
at 239 Hereford Street with his wife adjacently suffering the same affliction
shaking his head slowly as he started to mumble until the mumbling slowly became
‘The baker hasn't been today. I'm still out of double. Best to pop back later,’
which I'd heard enough times to know as the joke he told before each transaction
sighting the corner of a hundred-dollar packet folded up in glossy black paper
catching light from the left breast pocket of his short-sleeve denim shirt
with his wife still hovering behind the scene in the kitchenette like a kabuki ghost
nodding out over an endless book with the right index finger still pointing towards
the line he has just read and already forgotten because it was a morning in early summer
because the southern sun had just licked away the last winter chill from his dark skin
sitting there on an upturned blue paint bucket beside the dahlias the freesias
the lavender plants dressed in rugby shorts and denim shirt palming me the packet
he was smiling because the dope and the southern sun were inside him singing together.
Jollie Street
A kind of remittance man from northern Dublin.
He could have easily been a character in a Behan play
or a late song by Thin Lizzy sent to live in this
city of grids and ghosts: to duke it out with an ineffable
darkness after his first marriage ended. A black dog
A Celtic duende.
A man who proclaimed to function
best in a state close to coma. He was accountable once a week
(usually on Sunday) to suspicious questions fired
down the phone-line in a thick brogue, ‘Have you a job yet?’
‘Were you in Mass today?’ ‘Your fahdha knows you're drinking.‘
—You hated Kerouac. You nicked my stash.
I took your smokes. I ran up toll bills pining to ex-lovers.
Our good intentions soon forked like the tongue of the same serpent.
I'll remember you best when we were at our best—
on that Christmas Day we shared a stolen quart of Ballantynes
driving a borrowed Superminx up and down the street,
estranged from and longing for the intimacy we talked of happening
behind those closed and wreathed and silent front doors,
or the time you just burst into the lounge: home from
the doctor with a valium script (filled, of course) a bladder of Chasseur
and the Oxford edition of Ulysses stuffed down your trousers.
Michael Steven was born in 1977. Recent poems have lately appeared in brief, Jacket 2, Landfall, Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems. He persists in Auckland.
