Thirsting for Lemonade Read online

  Meaning is what we make of it.

  What it makes of us.

  Slow Motion

  the blow of a hairdryer due north

  fastens me damp to this seat.

  heavy, I swear I smell red dirt.

  there’s no end in sight,

  only bright suns every day on the news.

  my children cranky

  my husband and I too tired to touch –

  it’s Fringe, Festival, nightly, in Adelaide:

  fast paced slow motion.

  someone told me in passing it was autumn.

  autumn?

  true.

  yesterday in a souvenir shop

  (gifts for my nieces in North America)

  I saw the Festival Centre inside a snow globe.

  snow?

  no,

  wouldn’t happen.

  but dreams are what children make them

  and here I am, imagining a giant hairdryer.

  it’s dreams like this that make me an insomniac.

  half in and out of sleep

  half in and out of covers

  nine nights

  got to sleep

  should buy myself the snow globe.

  an American autumn carries coloured leaves

  and here I find a twisted comfort

  as nine days of this sun

  have turned these leaves

  to yellow burnt and dead crisp brown.

  my hairdryer blew them to the ground.

  people talk, background buzz.

  I only tunnel-vision this:

  close your eyes and dream that smell

  (fall’s guidance toward winter snow)

  flip this country upside down

  watch it fall soft and white

  upside down

  slow motion.

  Two Trees

  One: Slowly Growing in Understanding

  I yearn for the commitment of the Pine

  rising to where crisp is a layer of sky

  sunlight gently multiplied

  on each green blade.

  I lie in the shade.

  Now, combine tiny purple petals

  with rain and the fresh

  dung of a deer;

  you will smell it.

  Strong like my father.

  Difficult to climb.

  Two: Tribute

  The Eucalyptus spreads itself

  with twists only it comprehends

  and the tips of its limbs

  reach toward the space

  where its own scented breath flows.

  Inhale –

  watercolours brought to life by breezes shifting clouds.

  Exhale –

  sun-flickered leaves like a symphony of fingered rims

  and Semillon.

  I fit my back to the white of its wood.

  I welcome children and animals.

  Split

  I claim Elvis

  hips and lips and that whole generation

  and Beale Street, gospel, rock and blues –

  hell, I’ll claim the Mississippi River too

  and if we’ve made our way on down the Gulf

  I take Cinco de Mayo because Americans know

  how to cook beans

  that sit somewhere between firm and soft

  and we say ‘quesadilla’ properly

  so then throw in Blackspeak and Native art

  because I spent my childhood in the deep south

  my twenties in the desert

  and man I seen oppression

  through the window of my Ford Tempo

  so there is a sort of kinship in my us and them

  and yeah, the destruction of the Twin Towers

  (but not Bush, neither of them)

  and the monumental loss

  the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains

  and the monumental space

  and the open road, every diner

  the ever-present fizz of Coke

  so you might as well put me at a baseball game

  because I claim that too

  (you see I don’t get cricket or meat pies)

  but I do so love the Australian twang

  of my child’s emphatic ‘no(y)’

  the way my man slips on his worn leather Hard Yakka boots

  to split our winter wood

  and the smell of the sea, how it drifts to me

  wherever I am when dusk clears its perfect throat

  and floats over the city’s red roofs

  and seeps between the gum nut trees

  and the way we rejoice in a morning rain

  and the scent of eucalyptus it brings:

  these monumental things.

  The Water Poems…

  In between

  I make my prayer to those who, like Indra,

  ever delight in much drink—

  – Rig Veda

  I

  Eleven o’clock.

  Morning comes in a heat wave

  through the cracked window of our room

  waking me unwillingly, but what can you do

  when it’s already ninety-two?

  Your body sticks to me like my own sweat—

  a certain thirty percent proof.

  Drank too

  Smoked much

  Loved too much last night.

  Your eyelashes flutter as I lift myself

  to begin again.

  My lungs are angry, of vulgar voice

  grinding and grating and spitting syllables

  of I-told-you-sos, still

  I search the last cigarette under clothes

  scented with neglected bodies, under meager

  paycheck stubs we were eager to cash,

  under newspapers from last month’s scandal.

  Is the United States still at war?

  Your breath moans in a dream

  as I open the door.

  The eleven o’clock morning

  awakes with stale smells

  of beer and here and over there

  are last night’s leftover bodies

  drowning in last night’s memories

  and ashtrays spilling with last night’s

  deep and meaningfuls;

  cans and bottles

  the implements of wonderment

  of last night’s merriment.

  I climb over clutter, uncaring

  who is who or what it is.

  The eleven o’clock morning

  spreads through the kitchen

  like the heat that seeps through the floors

  and under the doors and somehow drips

  from the ceiling.

  Upstairs you flutter and the bodies clutter.

  I cling to cleaning so tonight we may begin again.

  II

  A summer day.

  Can we waste our lives away if only

  for today? It is one o’clock.

  Blow up the raft and I’ll make the drink

  call it Soma, because intoxication was worshipped once

  when heat was drier and religion

  was higher and debauchery was sane.

  Careful hands, an artful heart and a bottle of Golden Grain;

  cherries floating, watermelon sinking and oranges

  splashing color. So float down the Chattahoochee

  with me in your arms and the water at your feet

  and Soma in a plastic green jug

  as the city climbs in a dreamy haze,

  Atlanta so lazy in soggy heat.

  It’s best if we stay off the crowded street.

  Float down the Chattahoochee with me

  because it’s best on water in a city in a sauna

  and if we become blurry like the skies in our eyes

  let’s stick together. I’d so hate to drown

  in this blistering town in the river that runs

  through pine trees and factories.

  Let Soma bind us in revelry,

  let revelations come gently, so gentlyr />
  gently pushing us

  to begin again.

  III

  There’s too much light in your eyes

  on our drive down Interstate 95.

  It’s five o’clock in the afternoon;

  let’s eat at the neighborhood lake.

  A few drops of Soma for our sun-dried tomato

  and black olive pie.

  The sun will leave just as my hair will dry

  and I will wipe the light from your eye.

  Seven-thirty evening

  and the lake laced with corroded condoms

  and bottle ships floating on a forgotten mystery

  of mallards and water – where has the time gone?

  With Soma somewhere.

  Somewhere with Soma.

  In the car we copulate because there is no time

  and surely the heat waited long through the year

  surely the light waited quiet through the night

  surely Soma waited in its jug

  but there is no time for us to wait

  so in the car we copulate.

  We do it. We fuck.

  We fuck.

  IV

  Let’s enter our house and sleep in our bed among the clothes

  and crumpled notes and newspapers we should have recycled

  with the bottles and the cans I recycled this morning

  at eleven o’clock.

  And we sleep. And we dream.

  V

  The night wakes me with the moon in our room.

  Your eyelashes flutter

  and I kiss them in the shadow.

  The sun is gone

  and it’s cool now.

  I hear footsteps at the entrance of our house.

  They come in pairs to play that game—

  the one with colored balls that goes so well

  with green bottles lining green felt.

  Did I tell you that your eyes make me melt

  like the sun on my skin in the heat

  on the raft at one o’clock this afternoon?

  Too bad we lost the green ball

  and use another red instead.

  I lose you when they come in pairs,

  when the house fills with smoke

  and my ears loud with jokes.

  Did you hear the one about the Jewish porn star?

  Hardy hardy fucking har.

  If I could find you I would make you mine

  on the cold bathroom tile where we would defile

  the Comet that makes the bathroom smell so good.

  VI

  Tomorrow.

  There is tomorrow

  like there was today.

  There is no rain in Adelaide

  Hundreds of pure drops of water beat

  into the summer bucket, the red

  and cumbersome impossible to avoid

  bucket scraping her calves. it nudges,

  communicates with sobriety each time

  she showers.

  *

  one red bucket in clamped wet hand

  and the sun caustic on this particular day

  and the naked woman from the shower

  naked in the sunshine hot

  sunshine drying hair and skin

  naked burning soles of feet

  tip toe hops too fast.

  Splash! almost a smack on the skin

  of the hard concrete

  and the ants dive in.

  time enough to reflect

  cringe, dip feet (brief reprieve)

  then walk on to the garden.

  it may be small or powerful, relativity in its place,

  but redemption reigns in the waterfall

  from the red shower bucket:

  naked woman squints and steams,

  the zucchini plant breathes.

  Hemispheres Apart

  North America.

  Winter crouches over fall

  and will always have its way.

  Today was that day.

  As I walked to the waterfall thinking about ice

  wishing it colder because I had heard

  of non-gravity snubbing a mid-stream flow,

  the rain invaded.

  Through windblown pellets and stinging skin

  fingers numbing and mood going sour

  I decided ice might be too cold

  for the waterfall, for me.

  And I resented it:

  the rain.

  Water slowly down the drain in the rental cabin shower.

  The steam has settled on mirrors and walls.

  My back arches in prayer

  to the Goddess of Heat

  and other large things

  and I am unashamed of my indulgence

  in the elements of water and fire

  and the earth and the air

  from which they came

  because after the rain

  my body begged extended warmth

  and this was not Australia.

  I eyes-shut smile and whisper wicked

  so much water

  so far from home

  disassociation key.

  Water

  I gulped Lake Tahoe by mistake,

  just swimming and breathing

  it can easily happen

  and clear,

  have you ever tasted clear?

  I rinsed my hair in a mountain creek,

  his hand splashing the cold of it between my thighs

  and the shock of it;

  how quickly the relief.

  We paddled in the Ozarks

  where humidity drips from trees

  and blends into the horizon

  and the river

  a gentle reminder

  that the afternoon can be endless.

  I could have drowned in Pacific waves

  jumping fast into water and foam

  and seconds of disorientation

  but, addicted, I rose desperate for air

  just to jump again.

  Three days we lived in the lake

  just down the hill

  from our tent

  past the sunflowered meadow,

  our children naked as fish.

  There is rain in Adelaide

  There is rain in Adelaide, set in.

  The streets no longer run to town

  but in the direction of gutters.

  Must have felt it coming

  when last night I turned to you

  and from our sleep…

  I’m in love!

  the rain!

  in Adelaide!

  lasting all summer day

  lifting our worries our earthbound fears

  and filling fat our water tanks

  so every bucket overflows

  and blesses the green green growth below.

  We are smiling in the kitchen

  embracing in the hallway.

  We dance to the beat of ten thousand drums

  pounding on our thin tin roof.

  All Things Big

  The lake was enormous

  and you but a man in an old canoe with only a single paddle.

  Fire flicker blurred peripheral and boiled broad bean stew;

  snowmelt ripples blurred your wake, parenthesising my insecurities.

  The green mountain before you – enormous – frightened me.

  The image of you moving toward leaving me behind

  your shirtless back in confidence

  the colour of your sunburn

  the dusk, the stillness, the midnight sun,

  silent moments of one man’s truth

  and my imagination – enormous.

  What I saw in the swirl of the smoke was an aisle seat empty

  on the plane ride home and you, having reached that mountain.

  Every moral in all the fables would then be yours.

  The poems would be mine.

  Settling

  Outside and the blue below,

  forming and vanishing slits of white:

 
the Pacific Ocean.

  Always that moment

  deep into the fifth hour

  going on the eighth

  when a settling has overcome

  my upright seated body.

  My eyes rest on nothing

  but space through the rounded window

  and the air is measured into fractions

  of slow streams of manufactured

  and faster streams of recycled

  so the act of breathing

  becomes efficient and ultimately sedating:

  sleep encouraged,

  jet lag a bitch.

  Must be heavy, the middle of the ocean

  so thickly seen from such a distance,

  the idea of weight and water unsettling

  that settling in my bones.

  And deep into that liminal space of Home

  and home, where definitions interchange

  depending on which memory sticks

  with momentary greater force

  there is falling,

  something slight though real enough

  falling in my gut.

  I’m thinking hard metal crashing liquid

  death and sink but no pain

  my body floating

  the outside inside

  the cabin a wreck of salt water

  and bodies, fodder for fish.

  I smile out the window. I settle.

  Think that it would be fitting

  to be buried somewhere between;

  no earth has ever been mine to claim.

  Lemonade

  There are places where time rests a little longer.

  I wore ponytails, had unshaved legs, my problems

  were small and monumental.

  I seemed to sing pop songs all day long.

  There is a portable snack stand at a beach

  a backyard with a jungle gym

  a picnic in a wooded park

  freshly squeezed lemonade.

  The newly dug lemon tree with a border of pebbles

  in the shape of a heart is Matilda’s.

  One day I will tell her

  of a pre-pubescence I once inhabited

  with painted signs: LEMONADE 5 CENTS

  and the jugs lined up

  in a pretty yellow row.

  And when she is older

  it will be the weight of the ease

  of the mix of pure water with lemon

  and sugar that will teach her simplicity.

  I will tell her to squint away squirts of juice

  that will shoot from lemons into her eyes