and become the girl again.
It only works if there has been no untimely death in the family,
if all the children are well, and if there is not another big baby
swinging and jalloping in the saddle of my hips.
I discovered it this way:
the wind came up after a putrid-hot day and a close night,
and the chimes in the cherry tree went troppo, jangling and clanging,
like a devil-bell on a reef. It sent me seasick.
I finally went out to muzzle it with an old school tie,
whispering to our dog, Styx, who thought it a mild joke.
It was such a relief to still those chimes that I stayed out there in the yard,
my thin and faded nightdress, ghostly and blue-lit.
I hung out the beach towels in the soft scudding of the wind.
Styx whimpered at my weird behaviour, while that trespassing beach-sand
made a dry shuffle on the ground.
The moon was just waning: it sailed up there on an unswimmable,
unsalted sea, transparent shoals of bright foam making it list and tack westward
to the ghostly shores of those unpeopled, unfurnished isles.
That was the night I learned the secret-
that I live the wrong half of the circadian cycle.
For when you wake at night, the dear soft world is yours.
While your bedmate snores the Blowhole of Morpheus;
while your children sing to the three-headed monster of dreams,
you can be awake in a sweet dark world that is your own.
A sweet dark world where the rooms of the house are empty and silent;
a whole hunk of hours, untimetabled;
a whole hank of weather, unpredicted;
a world uncommented on by the wise or the foolish;
a stretch of hours uninterrupted by badly-timed
eating, washing, dressing, undressing.
No traffic on the dirt road;
no crazy or strange blue dogs;
no ferreting or dust-bathing fowls;
no hostile passers-by to wave at
as they grimace from their cars.
A treasure! A treasure of virgin time,
when you can sit on the dried-out grass in the backyard
and listen to the chumbling and thumping of wallabies,
the chawing and chiacking of possums;
when you think you can hear rain pattering on grass and corrugated iron
but it is the popping and dropping of shiny black wattle seeds from their red pods;
red pods abandoned in drifts along the edge of the road,
staining the tank water, and making it bitter and scarlet
as a brew spilt for the old god Hymen.
You can be the girl, at last, put to sleep so long ago
she has grown into a new body but not another soul.
That girl-of-the-soul used to sit on a window sill in that blessed abode
watching the night taking its slow course, and half-waiting for the laggard sun to rise.
She would sit with the window opened wide for the breeze, in the dark,
writing letters without a light, using her damp girl-fingers to space the lines,
the writing inevitably climbing upwards on the page,
like promises written in blood.
And finally she would crawl into bed, inside a circle of forgetfulness-
a cave of sleep; hip-shuffle down under cool heavy sheets,
and the wind would come up as she slept, hidden from the harpies
that might snatch a girl to her death.
The cool change would come, whipping her hair at a white white pillow,
and in the morning her bed would be full of wind-debris:
grey wattle feathers and crisp and empty pods;
and the grass outside confetti’d with hard black seeds with tiny curled tails;
the sweet tiny white tails that one day might be wattle trees.
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