My father was a bridle maker, ensuring the production of horses, of colts and fillies, alive-alive oh.
For some this was a supreme good, ensuring the survival of the genes of Longue Durée,
or as some have translated it, Regret. Within each desire is a secondary desire, and relations
for which this desire is primary. As Earth sped up, methods failed quicker. He got up at 5am,
or 6am, while the machines were half present, and more willing – malleable. In the half-light
there seemed to be more mystical possibility. Metaphorical dark continued, however.
If you looked in a pocket long enough the key would turn up. Delphi was as Delphi told.
Byes at work were a chance to catch up. [Avoid the interstate, the dentist, do general research
but only at breakfast. Chartres Cathedral turned its face to the photographer, like a mega demon.]
No one made their own traps in the twentieth century. Vraiment: they were the best traps.
A vegetable garden could be called a secondary desire. A carrot might consider itself
a supreme good. Biographies can begin at any moment. Or be divided – arbitrarily – by the times
we read such and such. I began reading Proust in Collingwood; I approached completion
(of the great novel, not the greater oeuvre), blocks away in Fitzroy. But I lived in Rome
in between (where I went to read Burckhardt). My ethics were severely challenged there:
more than in Canberra. There was love; there was malleability. There were horses in the streets;
the Pope rode a horse, behind a plaster Madonna.
*Note: While the above may give an impression of being prose poems, it is a verse poem of long lines.
This poem is published in Australian Poetry Journal 13.2: ‘desire’, edited by Ellen van Neervan.