Tour de France

Gendarmes at attention on the village square,
kids practise waving plastic flags,
the doughnut man gets ready,
swearing about council rules,
and we’re all eating ice creams.

Down on the quay with an hour to go
a squadron of men in blue
riding backwards on motorbikes
and don’t the people cheer!
Trucks from Paris sell tricolour caps.

Media cars zip by.
Out of the way! This is important!
Cafés spill out onto the streets.
Oui, c’est la fête!

There’s a hush.
Helicopters swoop over the hill,
and a cavalcade of official cars
at a ripping pace.
Sirens warn kids off the street.
Ne touchez pas aux cyclistes!

We hold our breath.
Hundreds of legs and wheels in a tight bunch
whirring round the bend,
a blur of shirts, grim faces, sweat flying,
they’re gone!
We all breathe out again.

Holiday road

We will beat the traffic
We will get there before dark

We will not get tired
and will not slow down

We will gain a few seconds
on this section of road

We will overtake now
We will not skid
nor fail to take the bend

The oncoming semi
will not hurtle
into our windscreen

We will beat the traffic
We will get there
before
dark

Autumn blue

The old coal smell
of Katoomba
and currawong calls
piercing grey mist.

Early garbage trucks
snort and stumble,
lids clattering to a stop
in pools on pavements.

Up Lurline Street rolls a cloud.
An autumn tree trembles at its passing
and shivers off
a few more yellow leaves.

In room seventeen
Madame Rimski-Korsakov
in a fake gilt frame says
No, I am not the muse
and turns away.

Letter from Australia, 1990

… Meanwhile back here
things are pretty much as usual.
You know, open day at the crematorium…
Joan sang her swan song at Bennelong.
Lawrence shot his little brother
with his father’s shotgun.
It was an accident, his father said.
On the Gold Coast goats were disembowelled
by a satanic cult.
Police are investigating.
At Mootwingee they had twice the annual rainfall
in one afternoon.
Teenagers up the Top End have forsaken metho.
Now petrol and ant poison’s all the rage.
A man escaped from Vietnam
to a life sentence in Long Bay.
Another man jumped on a five-metre crocodile
and poked it in the eye.
It was trying to eat his mother.
Came into their tent
just like that dingo.

I suppose things are pretty exciting in Europe.

PS Nineteen chickens were disembowelled as well,
also on the Gold Coast.

Third century

Old red rattler
lurching down to the city,
late-running, defective,
tired and rusty.
Passengers on platform one are advised…
but will it be good advice?

Descending into greyer layers
we pass that black water,
that brown sky.
We did it,
transposed the northern grime,
remade it all in the image
of distant forgotten towns.

Two hundred years on,
the old red rattler
staggers and curses
like a drunk
in a suburban back lane.

Laundromats

It’s not just the drab piles
or the queues for the dryer
or the woman with ratty eyes
who keeps pretending
that the fifteen bags of washing
really all belong to her,
or the aloof brunette
who watches her man’s socks
like a daytime serial.

It’s the architecture
that puts you in a floodlit cell
of mutual interrogation
for people who can no longer hide
their dirty washing.

Blackheath

My wild desolate soul
circles with the hawk,
trudges the stony track
that crunches underfoot,
casts an inky shadow
on the cliff face,
shares the black cockatoo’s raucous nostalgia,
bursts out like the spiky bush washed clean
in last night’s rain,
tough as the heath
on this spare plateau.