The Night, the Possum
Giant starry sky night behind an illegal beach shack
in a rickety add-on caravan he calls Steptoe’s Castle,
broken window wedged open for cooler air,
a possum squeezes its way inside, his bed adjacent.
He stirs, wind a banshee, half-wakens to noises.
Here among fishermen of the Roaring Forties
he trawls the roar of his past before he shook the grog,
to make sense of his footprints in the sand vanishing
into a cloister he tries to treasure for calmness.
The possum scents fruit, a dietary compromise.
Lists mulled over: jobs held, the dead, names whispered,
places lived, airports landed in, lovers lusted for.
He sometimes rouses hard, limbs creaky, tantalised,
wanting total dream recall, not glimpses, re-entry.
A kitchen tin clatters, sounding in sleep, outside.
Tiptoeing over soldier crabs on his crescented walk
he ogles a ferry balanced on the horizon as if painted,
recounts ferries boarded, turbulent straits crossed,
the excitement, enigma, of expected arrival.
Wildness crossed his sleeping form to reach that tin.
Now it employs his naked thigh as a trampoline,
claws gripping to launch back to the window ledge.
He wakes to his own shriek, kicking out, bloodied,
possum scurrying into the shack, a havoc of curtains,
both shocked by how it came to this.
Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in , Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal, The Brasilia Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He lives in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia.