Poems by Tim Wright

Previous Post

red sky cast offs
to that of a deeper, postcard moon
just a flick, a screwed off lid
of a jar saved from recycling
remaining now as a piece of sound — one
bracketed indication of rain
not as it is but as it is collected
on a wave-like surface made of tin
the ding of a machine, a bird scuffles
just a chick, now a honk
but not a goose (what would it be
doing up there?) then more scuffling
an animal hard to imagine
puppet-like — a day when it dims
“to make up for yesterday”
so you sweat inside a plastic jacket
but need it for the rain and
a siren cuts through it
to remind you of something
the previous bracket of life, twenty-five
minutes ago, unlocking the door
and coming around the side
the moving weight of cars, not
hostile but not altogether
friendly either (what if you had
an engine beneath you?) their
pleasurable version of floating
around, sleep in your eye, a radio
still as a drum, porous, agreeable
and annoying, a day: a gallery
or a tram, why not both? damp
salty surfaces and people hanging
their jackets up, sighing as if the weather
were a newspaper, dangerous day,
singing, ebullient outside, teeth
gritted against the weather, “the first
wave” as musicians fold over pillows
and go back to sleep, toast
from wood-like, two-day-old
bread: put what you don’t eat
in the compost, remember
the slighter changes in depth or pressure —
now a gull, yesterday a magpie
city birds, a teaspoon against
porcelain, a brush with the day, so far
so good, gathering —

Do not lick lid

Experience is the lazy equivalent they don’t teach you,
or won’t. How the squished model plane gets renovated
or reading becomes a metaphor for artful youth:
a failed beehive, the days not spent
lustrously combing backyards for lost farthings,
unopened cans of Kalgoorlie Bitter,
 
A thinned down set of golf clubs, the coastal
variety. Wound down the window to yell something.
Anything. That’s what tamed zebras are for,
riding around on — look, there’s one with its casing removed,
ecstatic rus in urbe, sullen roadkill. We greet each other
with mild complaints about the city we live in.

Pigeon Politics

Having an opinion on it
The crust of what was there before
becomes more rock-like and in places, one can see them
The weekend paper falls apart like meat
 
Downhill skiers arrive and disappear
in shining suits, while by the fireplace
the chef and Matt Preston
serve up perfect agedashi tofu forever
in open mockery of the dialectic
 
THE SUN SHINES OUT OF OUR ARMPITS
a prismatic beam that feels sort of like
getting pinched all over
inside a Saturday morning cartoon

“Previous Post” was published in Cordite, “Pigeon Politics” in the Sun Herald newspaper, and “Do not lick lid” in Otoliths.