Communing with Nature: part three

Part 3

Swimming 2

I can't swim like that anymore
can't even walk up stairs

Marsupials

run stop run stop

I was eighteen
(drunk)

she hugged me and her boyfriend
made me instant noodles

twenty-one
my mother, over the phone
offered to tell the rest of my family

he had said "I suppose it must
have been hard for you
all the things I said"

he probably still
thinks that's an appology
or that I don't deserve one

she said "I'm not suprised
I'm just hurt you didn't tell me yourself"

I understand you were a child
you didn't think you didn't know
you still don't

I have a small and rapid heart
they say I am a snake with silver hands
I could be crushed underfoot

any young men?

where's the part
where all the the tension dissipates

like wandering through the bush
with your best friend, leaving

all the heavy weights you carry
in the brick house with the sloping driveway
that's no good for floods

he's not well
all you have to say is no

and anyway what so

I tell him and
his anxiety (like mine)

leaves him an insomniac? crying
like a kid (or someone
at a funeral)

it's not his fault I have
been made a hard subject

it's just
so frightening
so frightening, love

Oyster Shell

sweetheart
we are two halves
of an open mouth

drifting

when the hand comes down
to prise us apart
we cling together
so tight

Grandpa

no one drowns in the suburbs
but we're right near the beach
I see myself swimming out
into the river

a long black road

maybe my dead dog
will paddle out with me
and I'll find you

like when I was young
you were tall and
spoke

Janet

no one else gets how important it is
to go to bookstores that only sell poetry

or how unbearably necessary the world seems

god if only it was just
the rain outside
and a warm fire

she said - friendship is so important

yes like with rain poetry and
a warm fire

life feels less unbearable
and more necessary