Catherine Cole
Professor Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong. She has published novels and two non-fiction books. She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, (Berg UK and USA, May 2009). She also has published poetry, short stories, essays and reviews.
Looking for Serge Gainsbourg
Lying
on one of the graves
you kiss
the day-moon
(fading above bare branches).
Lover don’t catch a cold.
Don’t scandalise the tourists.
Don’t upset the cemetry attendants,
the grieving relatives.
This hunt
for Serge
is no laughing matter
I laugh
at the moon
at your lips
at the cemetry’s cats
making a wide
arc around
a crazy man
in a bright red scarf
a woman in stitches.
‘Go,’
you say
‘Allez trouvez l’homme.’
So I go
with my map
my gloved hands
dusted with snow
Je t’aime.
‘Serge?’ I ask an old man
watering,
‘Où et Serge?’
‘Tout près.’
He is close
(a little stream of water, a bare shrub, surely not lilac)
‘Y’a pas de soleil sous la terre,’ the man sings
Everyone’s a fan.
Près
And on Serge’s grave I find:
a love letter,
four metro tickets
and scrawled on the back of a café tab,
moi je ne tiens a rien
plus que toi.
manque de toi
je suis la moitié fou
and a
small smooth grey pebble
to take back to you.
Carlton
A late dark comes down
Cardigan Street
crows call from London planes.
By now you will be chopping at the sink
cat at your ankle,
pestering
ABC news
bushfires and floods.
Our friends live in separate cities too
we talk distance
of soldiers sent to war,
migrant workers
Stapleton in the Antartic, five years between letters.
Too tired by the time we call
to describe the crows’ black flash against red walls,
or how the drought has turned
all the grass
brown.
When next you come here
I will walk you past these trees
past the crows gnawing at plane tree pods
past the promise of Florence in the south.
I will sing sailor’s songs
Compose letters from the trenches of my heart
and hide them in your luggage
to read when you get home.
And while I wait
I walk past Victoria Street
past walls red radiant with heat.
I look a starling in its cruel eye,
step over the bleached bones of dead flowers.
And on Exhibition Building’s dome
a crow,
my heart in its beak.