Peter Sirr

You say
there is a language in which the word for family

is also the word for departure.
Handing across books, tapes, the world's

thinnest dictionary,
learn it, you say.
...

Welcome 3755547K
your small head rests
in the arms of the State
your fingers are counted, your toes
...

Even asleep, you're everywhere.
You fall through the house,
right down to the small room
where I sit staring at the screen.
...

First comes the idea, someone's dream
of a winding street, of streetlamps.
Then sticks, wattle, ships flaring in the sunset,
serious heads on the coinage. Flagons
...

What vagabond bones
and you, too, Ivar the Boneless,
come together now
stench of what plagues
...

I'd grown almost to love this street,
each time I passed looking up
to pin my father's face to a window, feel myself
...

Minced lamb, apricot jam, milky bread
while onions, garlic, ginger soften

not having forgotten bananas, bay leaves
nor neglected
...

The mapmaker downed his tools.
I've caught it, every alley, every street,
every fanlight and window-ledge,
the city fixed and framed.
...

And often, when I have finished a new poem,
I climb to the dark roof garden
and lean on a rail over an ocean of streets.
What news I have for the sleeping citizens
and these restless ones, still shouting their tune
...

Nunca fiz mais do que fumar a vida

All night I have dreamt of tobacco,
of a world filled with smoke
and governed by tobacconists.
...

Seeing at last into the heart of things,
I could have stayed all day
hunched over a milkshake in the burger bar
watching the doorstop grip the door, marvelling
...

The mapmaker downed his tools.
I've caught it, every alley, every street,
every fanlight and window-ledge,
the city fixed and framed.
...