Fastlove
You barely arrive and it’s gone, says singer in rare tearful interview,
during which reporters avert their eyes from the classical scene.
The only competition is the image of sleeping under a giant butterfly
wing. The book is there: half-read. The game is being played. That day,
I felt the need of a small, red apple. I waited a year for Sam to come.
(A different Sam – not the one you know.) I write our love story
at two pages a day, sometimes as fragments and blank space. It’s
summer: the cricket is on, the tennis is on. Apples are not at their best.
The air is heavy. Insects, mynahs fall asleep mid-flight. Stop and smell
the gum leaves, say the signs. I’m talking to Sam as Marcel, narrating
The story of my inner life, as if I expect him to take Albertine’s part,
without having read the novel. Reading books is work for those
who have no fence to fix, no log to saw. At dawn, it begins to open,
the book, the story, the pair of wings, the curtains, the morning. I draw
a line down Sam’s chest with my finger: his heart plops into my hand.
Observational Tragedy
Like a child peeping between the waves, the waves of memory now.
A black haired, tawny eyed, Hamlet strides the deck – a stranger at first.
So few others direct my gaze, apart from incomparable Satan, and Byron.
Ned Kelly, naturally. Perhaps I could consider teen martyr, Joan of Arc,
Contrive to flesh out the pith of The Smiths’ music-addicted portrait.
By the time I was eleven I had seen Hamlet three times. Luckily I had
a teacher from Penrith, who would transport me and a couple of others.
I had been to Sydney four times. I had seen the Opera House but not
An opera. I had seen kangaroos box, and horses broken,
and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern consigned to the waves. I think
I’d seen imaginary waves about as much as real ones. No one seems
to think that bush children need beach culture. Writing this I am
Provoked into wondering if David Gulpilil did any Shakespeare.
The first thing I saw him in was Storm Boy; it was the end of killing
birds for me. Were heaven and Eden designed as places to be cast out
of? Hamlet, ejected from Denmark, finds his inner killer, finally.
Lovers
Lovers in the distance can look like giant skulls (paintings of lovers, sculptures
of lovers). I do not look like a giant anything: a snail perhaps. In an illustration
of Dante’s Inferno, by Gustav Doré, an enormous Satan eats small humans
without caring whether they have lovers or not, mothers or not. Representations
of lovers have different meanings to different people, the couple on the grass
In the park’s an irritation of representation, or a test of acceptance. ‘All the world
loves a lover’: yet this is patently not true. The grass in Mark’s hair makes him
look like a scarecrow, or a maypole, a figure of folk tribute – a corn god – someone
to sacrifice for better weather: for crops, or for sailing boats up and down the coast.
I was not part of that song, but a piece of stringy bark that had fallen to the ground.
My righteous attitude had me transported out of Sicily, where I was born. I was
then grafted onto a new family, a Sardinian family, who didn’t wonder where
their next vacation was coming from. We went to Mauritius, to the Dodo institute,
where I made sketches of dodos, and gave them my brothers’ and sisters’ names.
I was a volunteer – partly in the hope of finding a Dutch lover – alsjeblieft (please) –
In the 2006 dig for dodo bones. I found seven bone and skull fragments.
I accidentally touched the hand of a local researcher: that was the highpoint.
What I like best about the movie Little Tornadoes is its treatment of time,
how characters are on trajectories that take them into others’ lives, and out again:
they keep moving, not stopping to take in more oxygen than they need, just
Putting their heads down, and not being subject to anyone else’s idea
of storytelling. Who wants to end up another victim of fake realism? I’m most fond
of those I dated without breaking up with them, and try to keep them in the show
of my life, which is eventually produced, for both stage and screen. I’m lying
on a hill in a small town cemetery by then, with something nibbling at my foot.
Michael Farrell has published a number of poetry books (most recently Googlecholia, 2022), anthologies and a monograph on the history of Australian poetics; a story appeared in Heat 3, 13, and chapters are forthcoming in both the Cambridge Companion to, and the Cambridge History of, Australian Poetry. Originally from Bombala, NSW, Michael lives in Carlton, in Melbourne.
Locative Magazine 