Jaya Savige Poems

He wakes at ten, opens up a can of tinned peaches
and hacks at the succulent halves with a fork taken
from the dish-rack, the only clean utensil left
after a week of neglecting the washing up.
Pushing past split fly-screens in tatters after
making the mistake of feeding next-door's cat,
he flicks some of the syrup at a largish ant crawling
along a frond and four varieties of flies swarm
in like a squadron heeding the sticky reveille.
Some of the syrup hits a spun leaf so that
a spider worries for its sack, stumbles forth,
forelegs raised to attack the assailant, mimicker
of the elements, which it is unable to locate, aimless
in defence. He finds himself inspired each time
a Christmas beetle's wings close incorrectly.
The cat bears gifts: chewed cockroaches beckon
from its jaws. After lunch, ants scamper over crumbs,
march toward a crack, drown, fall off the stainless
splashback. Now the sun's warm paws reach in
through the kitchen window, toying with each web
as at a fraying hem. The sink fills with this predatory
warmth: it is the day drowns them, he is blameless.
...

Surfing probably didn't occur to the Vikings
but then you never know - maybe one of Asgeir's men
found himself oaring his chieftain's faering

for this Biscay shore, just as a set wave jacked -
the kind that narrows the eyes of the guns
who yearly light up the Quicksilver Pro

(Slater, Fanning, Medina, Florence, Parko) -
and intuiting to lean down the face of the monster
felt it take, the shove as the hull slotted flush

into the vein of the sea god, frisson pitching through
the crew like the shudder of a brained seal
as they fluked the drop on an outside bomb.

You can almost see them now, rolling in from
out the back like hoons on a banana boat,
on course to plow through locals. A nerf howls

to a thud; a kitesurfer eats it. And there must
have been some among the numberless wrecked
who happened to cling to jetsam felicitously warped -

the waterlogged panel of a walnut armoire, say -
as to hitch them a lift in the home stretch
of this crumbling A-frame's deep Atlantic fetch.

Perhaps one of them even cottoned on
that after breathing, the art lies in the reading
of the break, getting to grips with tide-shift

and how the wind's caprice vexes the takeoff,
the fickle line-up - but who among them
could have envisaged a Tahitian king, carving?

The guns will return, who are now braving
the skull-crushing torque of Teahupo'o.
...

Ripeness was a semitone below
the bone clef of the elbow

keying the rain-slicked
cyclone fence: the firm, saclike rind

of a warped minim, golden
drupe note for which we longed.

Stone fruit are fine tutors.
This one unseals a sensual nose hit.

At dusk they go lambent
like chunks of bent gloam.

Sucked, their fibrous pith
is birth-pouf — 

punk oblong pits
belonging in a goblin's pot,

infused with rich static
and the fresh electric scratchiti

of summer lightning. It's fortune
gave us this softer unit,

surely. Edgewise the frangipani
made a rain-gap fin

for heads rife with fire
in the shade of the mango belt.
...

for Luke Davies
Maze-bright, sans GPS down Fairfax
in the Buick, when a thrash fiend
in a chrome Corvette salutes hang loose
then flexes a burnout as he peels off
Sunset; and as the strains of Anthrax
scatter in the wake of his goatee,
stars are smuggled in via the print
of Wonder Woman's patriotic bikini.

Dusklit wildlife suffers no predicting:
a lobster juggles bibles unicycling
in the poorly lit scene of his mind,
a polymath samples his own urine,
while as on a folding screen depicting
notable scenes in feudal Kyoto,
a buff pimp in denim cut-offs blazes
drunk karate outside a 1 Hr Photo.

So we drive in silence, depending on
A Forest by The Cure for conversation.
It's like Almendros said: magic hour
is really only twenty-five minutes max,
when the locust sun descending on
a field of bending wheat is prologue
to a tale stripped of all denouement,
and silhouettes are all our dialogue.
...

Pac-Man is my minotaur.

I've lost the blueprint but from memory
the maze idea emerged first as a way

of mastering the art of being lost
by simulating it under controlled circumstances.

Even then we knew we would need someone
to be heroically repetitive in it for us.

Part man, part pixel he amasses
my hi score capital, chews through unitary light

honing my imperial future, mine
by right of skill but also birth.

Model avatar, pure id, breakfaster-on-ghosts
may I put you on the spot and ask

if you happen to know the way out?
Quick, before the window shuts

and my blinking initials vanish
forever from the end screen of the custom

French walnut tabletop video arcade
circa nineteen eighty-eight.
...

for Samuel Wagan Watson
There's a man with dreadlocks playing the didgeridoo
in the Piazza di Santa Maria, and everyone is listening.
Kids sit by the fountain swapping smokes for laughs,
tourists lick gelati as they pass illicit markets,
belts, handbags, sunglasses, all made in _____________,
the place scratched off. Nuns halt, then the Carabinieri,
white gloves, black steel-capped boots glistening.

The crowd hems the young musician in,
faces glazed with wonder: from where could this
strange music have come? Surely not this hemisphere.
A drone as deep as yet unexcavated ruins, far older
even than the Forum: Armani, Ray-Ban, Dolce
& Gabbana, all sink at once into equivalence.

He doesn't do the kangaroo, the mosquito or
the speeding Holden. Just the one dark warm lush hum,
the clean energy of circular breathing, lungs
and instrument the sum, familiar as the accordion
yet strange, as though not for money, nor just for fun,
but for reasons unknowable—some vast, unhurried Om.

I want to bolt up the stairs of the fountain
and claim that sound as the sound of my home—
but stop when I recall how rarely I slow to hear
the truer player busking in King George Square.
Memory kinks my measured walk into a lurch.
My stomach fills with fire. Far above cold stars wheel
around the spire of Rome's oldest Christian church.
...

Sundials shark through
cool zaffre, finning
toward dawn.

Adrift, warm-blooded,
you long to sleep
but your pulse, nomadic

roams again
the humming coastline
of your skin, thunders

heel to thumb,
taut as stretched vellum.
Press here.

I do, and feel
and know again
the drum, the single low

frequency you share
with neap tides
in the frenzied air, as

thumb to palm we strum
toward something
akin to calm.
...

In summer she kept lances of wild aloe
in the fridge door, cool spears wound
loose in paper towels to sop up the sap.
With the fine point of a filleting knife
she flensed the thorns, then flicked
her wrist to unzip the hunter green skin.

Today we etched her initials in a wedge
before unpeeling it, so it bled up
through her name like succulent graffiti.
Enzymes catalyze the milk to resin.
How she loved the sun, loved being
rinsed by the cymbal crash of hydrogen.

Tonight we will return to the windbitten dune
she sleeps on, supine as a beach bean;
and try again to decipher the glyph, scripted
by the tip of a trailing spinifex seedhead;
and notice the way her cheek seems embossed
on the dune's edge, as though drawn
by another ocean, deep beneath the crust.
...

Just now I thought I heard you say
my name in the familiar way
only a child knows, the warm flint
of an urgent reprimand, maternal.

I was in that liminal space, lamp off,
day's bright splinter almost extracted,
when from across that other border
your voice - your voice - the timbre,

scratching the inner walls of my skull,
that used to make me stop quick smart
before the roar of crosstown traffic.

How I wanted to demolish that wall,
retrieve the warm rubble of your breath.
How I shuddered like a bulldozer in winter.
...

after William Dobell's ‘The Strapper' (1941)
Camouflaged against the smug mahogany
of the Red Lion in Westminster,
the sitting member drains his knockoff Stella—
beyond the bronze Churchill disingenuous
tourists mumble hymns for free
entry to the abbey—and wonders
whether in Australia, like the constellations,
everything is upside down: a world replete
with Swift's Houyhnhnms, where beasts scold
men—centaurs gripping Lapiths by the throat—
rather than the other way around.
It's said their beer is best served icy cold.

Glancing like Orpheus at the underground,
something in him clicks like a starting gate
when the riders are finally set: how being
clenched between the buttocks of a thoroughbred
could be a kind of noble anonymity.

In such a place, one might take the features
of their betters—equine face, parted mane,
shoulders sloping gracefully beneath
a shiny coat—and, despite the yahoos reveling
in their fetters, or perhaps because of them,
come also to love the raw heat
of being flogged toward the post;
or if not, enough at least to stay in it
to the last, for the will to not diminish,
to leap out of the ground and take it by a nose
in a controversial photo finish—
and see off the protest at the weigh-in.
...