Poetry

When I lived on the edge of the plain
tucked up against The Scarp, an orchard
on the northern bank of the thin river
was my point of repair. The orchardist
lived in a shed among his equipment
and chemicals, his clothes drying
on his tractor. He ignored my alcoholism
and played Philosophy to my negativity,
though his answers were always defeatist.
His son wanted to sell the property
to housing estate developers. He told
me of his childhood and youth in Dalmatia.

He mows the backyards of this
country town in a strictly
conventional fashion: up and
down, up and down, up and
down. After many hot and lonely
summers, he changes his
technique and begins to mow in
circles from the outside in, each
subsequent circle becoming
smaller than the previous one,
until he finally reaches the precise
centre of the universe, stands atop
his lawnmower and raises his
arms to the night sky.

Decades after his first visit to a Sylvia Plath archive, Peter Steinberg has edited the book he dreamt of from the beginning: an edition of her collected prose.

I was forced to move lodgings,

was forced to move

my chilling mode from

solid boulder blocks to

gaseous intake. Now when I exhale

my frozen breath is fuel

that drives rockets to the

moon. It does not wake the bird

but something inside it

awakens.

The guards here all love me. I have the greatest, the classiest cell, a golden bedspread with my name on it. Maybe I could just walk out of here, I don’t know, my people are looking into it, and I have the most incredible lawyers ever.

Every tree that survives this image-crumbling dry spell
is statutory, and those holding on to layers of story
       on that targeted “farmland”, surviving the record-keeping
       as much a record-making, weep sap for what is to come.
They sense their destruction, the modes of approval
that allow images to blur across the world so we composite
       the fragments of who we are with where we have been.

A body suffering in sleep
or sleepless, dreams that do not wake you
but remain in daytime, steel feathers
stippling your skin, the prick of vinegar
or roses, a cloud that blurs the rooftops
and meets you with dread or the edge
of beauty or something less
definable, a future you can’t process
that is your own no matter