Can't Say No

                                                                    If for me there's 80% said
                                                                    for you there's 20% unspoken.

Received one blank postcard
for John's flood installation in Sydney

not really blank, but white, absolute white
as if all had been overwhelmed by light.

Floodlights are flicked
for postage stamp softness
and these wavy lines on the back
write a watery History.

Webb referred to these lines as
the sea's bickering passport motion
when he was a custom's officer in Adelaide.

But you're not interested in metaphor
as anything but response though
there have been times — remember
Shelton Lea's Fairweather postcard?

Just what do you say
to all that geometric grey.

When David Marr sent those black
& white pictures framing shearing sheds
at Inverell Station at least, I had a sense of place
though not of time, unlike Mark's colour
postcards of Big Renata's Cafe in Coen
just after the rain.

There's a connection here, which reads
these things must be thought about.

Last week, someone forgot
to open the floodgates
and the Patawalunga became
Glenelg North for a night.

The water rises, a nightflood, a father
who can't say no to a mother
in a black room with wavy lines
on her face, perhaps watermarks
on the wall of a room in which
you once thought you were drowning

in silence.

I'm Ready

                                                                    I'm ready
                                                                    to let the rivers wash over me
                                                                            Tracy Chapman

Tonight there's something outside
preying beyond my window on the dark
and I'm ready for it to come inside
to lift me up and let me sing like a lark
but I'm not ready to return to rhyme
because I've had enough of those two wings
beating in classic metronomic time
against the nothingness of forced things
against the polish of a new millennium
against the black, the back and rum
of rebellion. I'd rather take in a breather,
offer a light to the darkness beyond
the frame, turn on the radio and listen
to talkback or slip into ambience, take
whatever comes, not wanting anything
in particular to happen, ready to let
the night wash over me, to see what
driftwood she's left for me on the floor
in the morning after the rain fell and
rose up about my walls until there
was nothing left but me and you
floating on this dream where we fuck
between waves of sound like clogs
laughing on gas because you've forgotten
to take off your sunglasses, because
you've dropped your hair, because life
is a celebration and beyond this
we need no meaning.

N.B. Tracy Chapman quote is from 'I'm ready' © EMI April Music, 1995.