Three Poems by James Walton

Street Life

 

I am caught in the acrimony of oxalis

   a galaxy of orbs and survival testimony

pulled and tossed for green collection

   thinking of how there is a sunset between us

 

When Madeliene stops her walker

   telling me my house is haunted

her Rastafarian magenta hair

   a waiver against the fragility of stepping slow

 

and I rise up my knees clicking

   a practised uniform tuneless descant

 

silent in the clear horizon of our knowing

  distant wind turbines circumnavigate

the breadth across wetlands

  to where they talk of us being over ‘east

 

I pass her a black tulip

  for behind a studded ear alight by the dawning

 

we smile in the confederacy of two moons

   leaving eclipse as she moves away

the grevilleas in tidal wash bystanding

   for the parabola of our returns

jostle in the up and down of wattle birds

   and sparking darting spinebills

 

on the cusp of sepia immanence

   my ghosts nestle in smaller things

 

handheld occurrences of earth

  and the wriggle of sun wrought warming

a look west for the folding planes

   of your return to envelop us once more 

 

If you plant a poem

 

Soundlessly as you can

hush the dawning birds

stroke out the birth in soil

and air, put back the worm

to its house of gentle slumber

where the rainbow sighs

colourless, check for a lyric

that hook and root tender

as a baby’s fingers clasping

unwarded faith, seeded now

poised for raindrops wake

thin of cover and wanting

to let fall, watch carefully

the barren trespass redeemed

by luminescence meet to contact

rising hemitrope, each angle

now alight with new leaf

stretched to cascade over

through every home and bay. 

 

The waves in a near whisper

 

I am stretched out a calf birthing to light

she rises on her elbows hides a relit moon

Her lips and teeth find a rib, tugging

there is a lemon cashmere of sun rising

the day hints of a summer reckoning

I watch our thoughts, a scutter

leave the ripples of night’s refuge

the ranging promontory of cool sheets

These bulwarks against intrusion, linger

our bed looks like Italy I muse

as a cuckoo shrike bells for cloud and want

now there you are my old fool, she says

James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He is the author of five widely acclaimed collections of poetry. ‘The Leviathan’s Apprentice’, ‘Walking Through Fences’, ‘Unstill Mosaics’, ‘Abandoned Soliloquies’, and ‘Snail Mail Cursive’. He has been shortlisted for the ACU National Poetry Prize, the MPU International Poetry Prize, The James Tate Prize, and the Ada Cambridge Prize and is a winner of the Raw Art Review Chapbook prize. He was nominated for ‘The Best of the Net’ 2019 and is a Pushcart Prize 2021/22/23/24 nominee. He was a librarian, a cattle breeder, and mostly a public sector union official. He began writing creatively as an older person at the age of 60. He is in his second youth at the age of 72, a dozen years into his writing. He is also the author of short stories and flash fiction published in Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, and a number of overseas journals.