Two Poems

Ian C Smith

On Location

They strode away to a drumroll of crickets
watched hard by locals looking like extras.
This reminds me of Paris, Texas, he said.
She recalls him then, ideas-rich, money-poor.
She often didn’t know where they would sleep,
didn’t even know what a road movie was,
sensing only a lurking premonition of danger.

Too trusting, she thinks. Damned lucky, too.
She is baffled by bottled-up memories.
No dancing breeze, not a car in sight,
the trek out left their skin lustrous.
He suggested they quickly cross the road
should a car appear from the other direction.
The Long Hot Summer, he explained.

The indigenous man, hungover, menacing,
fell asleep after telling her to drive,
head lolling in the open front window
while she whispered with him behind her.
He plotted for when they needed gas.
Cunning, they escaped, merging with the night.
And cut! she thinks. That’s a wrap 


***


Talking to herself

At breakfast in the all-night café
that reminds her of Hopper’s Nighthawks
she has lost the mood for eating
thinking of a remembered phrase
a certain loneliness peculiar to old age.
A leather-bound philosopher wrote that
she mutters, glancing at other earlybirds.
The coffee tastes valedictory.

She is spared grandchildren addiction
their me-first smash & grab M.O.s
& gardening, a despot crushing snails.
On her wall she has Monet’s Giverny
& in raffia baskets, potted begonias.
Benchtop traces of lunch vanish
as soon as she halves her sandwiches
which she eats heckling Dr. Phil.

She was stricken, a deep wound of love
in her distant art student days.
Supper is three-quarters alcohol.
Relatives decry her taste for solitude
& books, Martin Amis & de Sade among them.
She reads of a comatose accident victim
waking after years, his youth gone.
Like Sleeping Beauty, she says.

On the late watch with her cats
lightning in a Caspar David Friedrich sky
skin alive to air, the operatic drama
she mind-laughs at a Wagner joke
sees herself with ghosts of the past
scenes in a pre-war black & white film.
The Weimar Republic, she whispers.
With Sally Bowles’ panache she would sing.

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in The Best Australian Poetry, Descant, Island, Magma, The Malahat Review, Southerly,& Westerly His latest book is Lost Language of the Heart, Ginninderra (Adelaide). He lives in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia.

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