the same way a junkie might rifle a stolen shagpile shoulder-bag
thrown over a fence on Pension Day.
Sometimes she finds what she is looking for-
a smooth-celled translucent embryo-thing maybe three inches long-
a fondleable foetus with bulging Chernobyl eyelids
that she feeds with a bottle and a queer skinny teat.
It sucks, then, as ferociously as the infant horizon sucks the tide
and it sleeps between her speckled breasts under a moss-green
hand-knitted jumper and sometimes when you see her
in the street the embryo-thing is jostling under her jumper
the way men say tits clamber like puppies in paper bags
but all over the place and sometimes in her hair
which is matted like a nest of dolly-bush shreds.
The reason I mention this woman who raises orphans
is this: I have lost my animal.
It, too, was unformed and horrid tender-skinned
and could give strangers a fright if taken unawares by its sucking
o-mouthed or appearing inexplicably sightless on my neck .
Like that woman, I was so accustomed to my animal
I could sleep with it under my breast-flaps
where its tiny claws left graffiti in the bruised hollows.
That woman, she lets her orphans go bush when they feel
the Irresistible Call. Sometimes months later they come back
with wise expressions and climb into bed as though they’d never left.
I’m hoping that’s what happened to mine-
that it’s just gone off for a while
to answer the pull of some wild centrifugal force.
One night when I’m locking the chooks up, in the blindfold of the dark,
I’ll sense it watching me from the blackwood tree.
Come on! I’ll wheedle forgivingly, holding out uncurling fingers
and my animal will hesitate momentarily and then shuffle downwards
like a coconut boy shinnying down the trunk of a tree and once more it will
burrow under my jumper and incyst against my expectant skin and for a time
my joy, hand-raised from a nuzzling blind thing, will be back.
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