– – –

Two Eurydices

You were named after a daughter of Apollo.
She was shy, like you, and she lived in the hollow
of an oak tree. She was capricious and callow,
like you, and when the music called, she followed.

But a stranger spied her like a hunter and gave chase.
She took flight through the wheat stalks, but stepped on a snake.
It sunk teeth into skin, sending her to Hades.
Her husband sang so mournfully at the gates

of hell, that even the furies wept. They let him
bring her back from the dead with his music
and she danced along to the land of the living
but when he turned to look at her, she was missing.

You were a stand-up with more than a few good laughs
who walked home from a gig through Princes Park.
You couldn’t know that routine would be your last.
Women should be able to walk home after dark.

The biting irony is your name, Eurydice,
means ‘wide justice’. Your life was taken too early;
in one of, count them, sixty-three attacks.
If only we could play a song to bring you back.

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of a higher power? Prostrate on my porch
lies a bluetongue lizard sun worshipping.
Is it genetics or luck that’s warming

his blood? Apostlebirds are gathering
in the grass, a family communing
while they scrounge for seeds. I don’t want to preach,

as poem transfigures to parable,
because it is you whom I want to reach:
In this world, who is the real animal?

They claim no god, yet act as though there is.
We claim god, then act like he doesn’t exist.

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I smelled iron the day my body failed me.
No thoughts, no sounds, no crying and no name.
Only that smell, four white coats and a white wall
and a flower arrangement that would be
fitting for her funeral. I don’t blame
myself. My fingers couldn’t stop the fall.

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Wonder, my dear, at the abandoned
agora and all but forgotten forum
while we walk along the harbour. Ruined
mosaics pave the decumanus and crumble

into marble white, Mediterranean blue,
and onyx black tesserae scattered
on the foundations for careless shoes
to crush: the tessellation interrupted.

Consider, my dear, these declining statues
clamouring for our attention – one sculpture
used to be Artemis, but her virtues
could not cease time’s slow decay and this figure

was lately Hadrian, but now his
broken torso has only a few tourists for
lieges – eroding effigies who point us
down the cardo to a forgetful future.

Ponder, my dear, this fading aqueduct
which once supplied a city with water
but now all these channels do is conduct
with us in the hollow amphitheatre

where one hundred and sixty thousand seats
are empty. We perform our parts: Echo
and Pan, singing each other to pieces
but there’s no one here to see the show.

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My brothers retire to my balcony,
watch kookaburras rush from tree to tree,
remark upon the bamboo canopy,
and remember seventeen birthdays we
have shared in familiar company.
Ethan picks and plucks his ukulele.
Dad builds a barbeque. And what of me?
I recline and write this soliloquy:
This is your birthday Evan, and I pray
each one that follows will surpass the last
in the time we have with one another.
And as sunlight through our green ceiling fades,
foreshadowed are the birthdays yet to pass:
a lifetime of barbeques with my brothers.

**Originally published in the 2012 Sydney Uni Anthology, Sparks.

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from the sapphire sky, and I wait for you
like a stone. I stay as magnolias
mock me with morning aroma, but they

cannot mask the lack of your musk. I pause
awhile with gawking magpies, their gloating
cries signal night is plunging into day.

I scrounge in burgeoning light between grey
mangrove branches for any sign of you –
the smooth rocks you would skip or the ring

you buried. I linger as black orb spiders
tangle in their gossamer strings and I
grieve with their star-crossed game. And as dawn breaks

so do I. The magnolias stand guard
and the magpies sing dirges as I grip
your stones and sink them in the dam where you drowned.

**Originally published in Long Glances

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As we walk on ruined temple walls
our tongues reclaim the language of Genesis
and I am created with parts of you.
We are raising our own religion

as our tongues reclaim the language of Genesis.
We trace the etymology of maps
to orient our own religion.
And I try not to notice your fingers.

We trace the etymology of maps
to resurrect antiquarian words
and you try not to notice
as I reflect the freckles in your eyes.

I breathe the air from your lungs
and exhale our favourite words:
“I am built with parts of you.”
But you’ve got someone else in mind.

**Originally published in Australian Love Poems.

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* יש לנו חוק, ובהתאם לחוק היא חייבת למות

* لدينا قانون وتبعا للقانون يجب ان تموت

It’s a god-fearing land you’ve travelled to
and the leaders have divided even the dirt
into lots. Your yellow fields look
swollen for the summer harvest
though they are deserted, except for one girl. She walks
between rows of wheat towards home.

On the way to her mudbrick home,
she passes the threshing floor, two
olive presses and a barren fig tree. She walks
on stray ears of wheat and treads them into dirt.
Those stalks will miss the harvest
and so will she. She looks

like her older brothers and they look
like wire, and hard work, and home.
She hasn’t seen them since the harvest
festival, when she sat down to
draw them in the dirt.
She traced their faces as they walked

away. She watched them walk
towards the wall – she thinks it looks
like a tombstone cropping out of the dirt –
and it blocks her path home.
It is March 2002
and the air has the scent of harvest.

You see the girl alone in the harvest
fields and a clanging sound halts her walk.
The olive presses crumble into
grains, shards of fig tree look
like scythes, and her home
is strewn, with the wheat, on the dirt.

Her yellow dress lies in the dirt.
There is no one to reap this harvest.
She is lost in the clamour, but that wall, and your home
still stand. And as you walk
through the wheat fields, you look
for her. For her brothers too.

Though Tamara was returned to dirt,
if you look out over the wheat harvest,
you can still see her walking home.

* We have a law, and according to the law she must die.

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down to the market. Shopkeepers spruik
souvenirs and lavish meals: Aladdin’s shoes,
Sinbad’s dhow, shipwrecked amphorae,

gold oil lamps, and bottles of Petra’s Treasure
– sand funnelled and sifted into desert scenes –
sprinkled between cups of Turkish coffee,

grounds-covered copper cezve, flakes
of baklava soaked in ziziphus
honey, mansaf lamb steeped

in yoghurt and bulgur, kenafeh
saturated in sweet syrup and rose water –
then wrapped around nabulsi cheese, and sahlab

fragrant with vanilla and coconut and peppered
with chopped pistachios. I choose a store
to have a taste and, with strained

English, a plump local man says: “Aqaba
means the obstacle”. I tell him
my only obstacle is where to start.

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on a jagged outcrop and stabs his leathery hand into the biting
air: the Khaz’ali Canyon is beyond this range. From my elevated
vantage I can observe my guide’s home, strands of goat hair thatched

into a tent.  A harras of Arabian mares graze scant grass around
an acacia and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom rise like steps behind
the camp. Difallah informs me that on clear days we can see

the Saudi border and the Red Sea from here. We walk
against the spiralling sand and gale toward the gorge and I tell
him that even a glimpse of the petroglyphs will be enough.

My guide gestures his palms to the sky: if these gusts stop
we will reach our goal. I drop my eyes and shield
them with my hands. He drapes his keffiyeh

about his face. We trek out to the Khaz’ali Canyon and the callous
wind turns to whip our tunics and shirsh. Difallah sketches
in the turbulent air and sand: the etchings are over that ridge.

Ancient graffiti of antelopes and strong young men appear,
stamped onto cave walls in thamudic times. I pause to trace
the outlines with my forefinger. The khamsin subsides.

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