Geoff Page: Two Poems

Invercauld Street

4 a.m. Don’t check. A mid-size

town, say Lismore, NSW.

You listen to the doppler cars,

the build-up and the fade-away,

the awkward intervals,

three in quick succession then

a fourth three minutes on.

You think about those cruising cabins,

whooshing by, one after one,

some 10 K above the limit,

others almost thoughtful.

And now you’re seeing them up close;

the plumber leaving early for

that new job up on Ocean Shores,

the smiling, early-twenties lover,

heading for his share-house

and three hours sleep maybe

before his phone goes off;

the serial adulterer,

incorrigibly late again,

his lies almost a novel now,

the girl, nineteen, who’s got

her life and licence back,

heading for Kyogle

to catch her toughened three-year-old

having toast with Nana.

Each car has its narrative,

their intermittency designed

by some half well-intentioned god

to deal with your insomnia

or taste eternity.

Geoff Page

The Lexicographers of Rhyme

Were they merely pedants with a candle,

sitting up too late across their lives,

nosing slowly through the language, thinking

always of our endings, not beginnings?

Or was it that they heard a weird, addictive

music, high above the stave, words

stripped back to sound alone, freed from syntax,

a serious delirium, a wild

concatenation, almost overwhelming,

as once, years back, in Switzerland I heard

a whole small town of frenzied bells

summoning believers to a mass?

Geoff Page