David Howard

NESTING

1

A patch of gravel, the rash of children

playing without supervision –

in their nostrils a secret garden,

in their throats a name

that is immortal.

One day, near the garden shed, they’ll see

what comes with age is shame, discovering

a swallow’s nest is made of mud and saliva.

2

If patience is an aspect of love, then

she was not loving. But she stuck

like estuary sand. And you feel her

thirty years later, under your nails.

Patience, then. Play with your hair, there

she likes it that way. Try to describe

a mirage: it is inauthentic, like ‘like’.

It is Father’s smile written up as a vanishing line.

3

Stop looking at the clock, look

at that flowerbed the old dog shits in.

What in God’s name? Power is not perception.

The sun does not see the plot

it lets us see. We count the hours, our blessings

into a plastic bag, speckling them with phlegm

from Grandpa’s pipe stem.

Put it down to dust.

4

The contour of what was is yours,

it causes you to fall

out of bed in the small hours

when even a mouse is comfortable

under the hot-water cylinder.

By moonlight, from the front door, you see

a mirage: your past. Put it down

to mud and saliva, swallow.

LATE

            A man in grey was waiting under a chestnut tree. It was me.

            - Max Jacob: ‘Write Your Memoirs’

You spun me out of your guts

so I know the matriarchy’s code.

The great below was our home.

We heard no birds, every tree

empty except for white

droppings. ‘Settle down,’ you

say, ‘near the compost heap

of family and friends,

it’s getting on, sweet pea.’

There is no safety valve for the first

son, by twenty his pressure holds

steady at the fourth atmosphere, almost

explosive. Girls keep him

at arm’s length, a friend to share

rather than commit indiscretions with…

His silence is stylish – a black tie

with a narrow knot, steam-

pressed. His eyes can flatten a statue.

Move to pull up a blanket

the whole forest covers your body.

By morning you break

clear, a beast without the feather bed

that follows from a good job.

You are an anachronism: the last

steer at the fence, bending

over to get the grass that’s left.

Your friends went to the works:

Jimmy Taylor dropped the Honda –

those bottles in his coat pockets emptied

the bluest vein to sunset.

With assistance from the government

Wayne Rugg washed in Agent Orange.

Nine children made a jigsaw of him.

A sunspot lodged on Kevin Little’s back

and burnt through to his lungs;

the oxygen combusted.

When you have nothing

to do, say it: the sun the stuff the non-

stuff underneath now, how

she spun you out of her guts

covering this page in blood.

Exeunt omnes.

© David Howard

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