Mascara Literary Review

Issue Six -November 2009

Anthony Lawrence

 

Anthony Lawrence’s most recent book of poems Bark (UQP 2008) was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Awardsand the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. He is currently completinga PhD on the poetry of Richard Hugo, and a book-length poemThe Welfare of My Enemy is forthcoming. He lives in Newcastle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your Letters

 

I can’t smell the oil-stained deck ropes

on the last boat leaving              

the last town of the Cinque Terra,

 

or see the highlights in your hair

as you pass the Roman wall in Lucca,

but I can see you’re in a hurry –

 

the broken flourishes of your thinking

as you run for a train, the word because

reduced to bc in all your correspondence.

             

I can’t see you there, in that postcard

version of your dreaming, overseas

or when you returned to a life

 

doubled by keeping your options open

like a wound gone septic from neglect.

Today I see your name on my calendar.

 

Your birthday will come and go,

untroubled by gift or word, though under-

scored by this certainty: lost in the poor

 

terrain of your grammar, you worked

a moulting brush through muddy pigments

to abbreviate me.

 

 

 

The Sound of a Life
 
In frames of elapsed time
and contractions of deep sea light,
an open water dance    
between science and bivalve
is bloodflow and the muted sound
of a life hinged and weighted
to its own design.
Behind the shelled meniscus
of a marine biologist’s faceplate,
where assessments of fact and beauty
play across her eyes, under pressure
she hears the blue mazurka
of loss and non-attachment
and she outbreathes what remains
in her tank to understand it.