Scavengers

I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Philip K Dick eating dog food. Bukowski’s candy bars.
A forgotten Fitzgerald writing How are you? postcards
to himself in the Garden of Allah. Sometimes
he would disappear for days in his improbable suit
and salesman’s briefcase. I spent hours then,
lonely as a wound in that dead house,
slowly filling the ashtray with evidence of my own condition,
while watching departing planes caterpillaring
across the warped kitchen window, and ants ribboned
their way around the empty honey jar.
He found me like this and insisted on taking me for a drive.
‘See,’ he kept saying as we headed south between
the Brett Whiteley blue ocean and sunlit rainforest. ‘See.’
Unruffled by my silence, he pointed out the red cedars
and peeling paperbarks, and the scribbly gums
inscribed with their pioneer’s maps. The mace-like heads
of the blacktops, and the holy eucalyptus trees
the aboriginals believed bound all life and death together.
He talked more about writers too. Their solitudinous calling.
A soothing balm of patter that seeped into me
with the generosity of the light. In Wollongong I watched
from the car as my new friend climbed the steep steps
to his old house in his optimistic blue tank-top.
Before he had a chance to knock though, the door opened
and a woman began shouting. Another joined in the tirade.
Soon they were throwing things: clothes, shoes, books.
Sleepy manuscripts brushing the dust of bottom drawers
from their wings; even a typewriter launched like a shotput
that landed on the scorched lawn with a cringing peal
of the margin bell. Luke retreated. He threw the Olivetti
and rescued pages and anything else he could salvage
into the backseat, and I pretended not to notice
the tears glazing his eyes as we drove back to Sydney
through that calligraphy of beautiful shadows
covering the flatlining smoothness of the road.

Mark Czanik‘s poems and stories have appeared most recently in Writer’s Block, Literally Stories, The Craft of Care, The Frogmore Papers, New Isles Press, and Dream Catcher. He lives in Bath.