sweetly sweetly. bottle the creeping. press it through the walls then I'll

withdraw my blurry hands. as I pull them back their outlines

become united and swollen, the outlines of my hands. anthem.

dog scuttles out from under the cot,

comes to lick them all over. red dog darling, cooling.

I'll make biscuits with my hands the size of loaves 

and dry them on the roof. if I ever can get away from your attentions.

*

autumn. who is that man with the heavy bag? what is inside the bag? 
pay attention to him because his behavior does not seem right.

red dog darling, warming, what is inside the bag? when we wake

we wake into a revocation. not now three outlines for each hand

but eight. the outlines are normal in size. who is that man?

wait for his debarkation. dog darling. we can't follow him where 
the two-way street goes one-way so we’ll swing away
(in the morning) 
we'll swing away

promontory

but at home it was always at night, never in the morning. while she was drifting a

man in a blue swandri came along and stopped by the toilet. he unzipped his zip.

the cave opened up into sunlight - and it was full of butterflies, the size of hands,

she moved forward, bringing her chest in to her knees, disturbing the

torsoes, mobile in the silence. everything was shining, it was just a bath,

there was nothing stupid about it. the cliffs were sheets of hanging stuff, isinglass

crisped into land forms. “that’s embarrassing,” he said, and tucked himself in.

now there would be no problem fitting her in with the dentist. kiwis cried out

in the bush, and cold came up through her wet feet. she exchanged the shoes

for a pair of white crocs, taking the first of the thirty pairs. it was  over

very quickly. there was nowhere in her mouth for tartar to collect.

together they stroked the dust away from the lower porcelain.

ugh. ugh. ugh. overexposed. zap.

full moon in the orangerie

I'm walking to the gates, fast,
breathing hard & letting
my mobile phone ring

The problem was I was making the dog anxious. Whether the dog had been anxious before my arrival was unclear, but certainly all my positive reinforcement of the dog’s anxious behaviours had, since my arrival, dramatically increased that anxiety. Every time the dog sought out my hand my hand responded. When the dog whined, my hand responded. When the dog came to my face to wake me in the mornings, alternately gnashing at a chunk of lego, whining, and slobbering at my mouth or eyes – I patted, I crooned, I soothed. The dog accepted the soothing, was calmed for a short while, and then withdrew. He would back away to sit just slightly out of reach, or lie down, then resume the gnashing and whining. If I failed to respond he would reach up with a paw to prod insistently at my arm or leg.

Now the anxiety was spreading to the whole family: the six year old developed the habit of twisting his forelock into a tangled, ratty knot, then pulling at the knot till hairs came out. The toddler’s progress towards toilet training had ceased. The babe in the womb had suddenly turned breach and now had a foot stuck against the mother’s urethra, making urination an ever-present urge for her, one that was painfully difficult to meet.

I had a looming sense of myself as firmly implicated, and though conversations at mealtimes remained gentle enough and apparently aimless, the air of frustration was hard to miss. There was speculation about sending the dog away, back to the kennels of its origin – just for a time. And there was light conversation about the rudiments of behaviorism – conversation that between two small animal vets seemed a little too easy, as when two brain surgeons on a medical drama pause to offer each other definitions of ‘stroke’ and ‘aneurysm’.

No. Sit. Drop. Good dog. Okay. I will keep my hand by my side. Grief is a problematic habit. Things to praise: quiet independence; the prone position; non-response to food scraps and to the toddler’s squawks and clamberings.  The dog improves.

You’re moving quickly in the mirror’s bevelled edge, accomplishing something in there. It’s something to do with the arrangement of the room. The angle of the walls, or how much airspace there is for expansion and contraction. Arrangements for insulation: firm packed to dampen reverberations, or just muffled with that loose, itchy, glassy fill.

I meant to come and pack my bag in this room but when I enter I see the dog, lying awake in the dark beneath the empty cot. I don’t want to turn on the light. Whatever you’re doing in the edge of the mirror I’m not going to catch it, not going to see it or get it, no matter where I stand. I leave the light off, go to the wall and sit there for a while, on the pile of my clothes. 

a hen croons in the chookhouse & the sound is so itchy, rising - & rising the smell of possum skins hung up on nails to dry; dust and birdshit caked on the beams of the mezzanine floor; & there's the old pram the bantam got round in, paint flaking off the white cane.

but now by the chookhouse in the winter sun fifteen kids pass the parcel. a freddo frog in every layer, mother at the cd player, eagling for who misses out. and one short shorn redhead is wandering the garden - sees the circle, looks curious, wanders on. like there's no recognition that she's of the same breed. gets caught up in tearing dried seedheads from the grass.