Varia - I·A

Varia – Poem

Philip Salom

Varia

I’s happening in bedrooms like another style,

slow anticipation, like someone rolling cigarettes

on the shape of it. There’s a form of it in boardrooms

collectively, in studios. On advertising floors they plan

it past the possible, they make this echo-chamber

sounding like your own if you’re a fool, to lead you

out of yours to this of no-one’s. Taking the sucker

in colours and in nakedness like the satin model

you may buy of it, but must resist. Pornography

for those who find love hard. There are the shrunksounds

of those who wear the future up too close:

a V8 footdown from warble to scream clearing

down a path inside the living, death as fast. Flames

rumpling their fierce silk when cynicism or despair

hurls up from the corrugated pages of a factory,

at 2am is writing arson, or somebody on fire.

This usual ghost, the past more truly dubbed

irresolution, like the crimp of petrol fumes in air.

Some find grass too green, the stairs still loose,

or boards carry the sound of pacing, adulterous

love-making, and the foot naked all the way up.

The wind at this life, the same unchangeable one.

Philip Salom has received many awards and honors for his poetry. His previous works include the international prize-winning Sky Poems, Feeding the Ghost, and The Rome Air Naked. His latest book, A Creative Life, was published in 2001. He has also written fiction, a play (commissioned and performed by the Festival of Perth), literary reviews, and articles for national journals. Currently living in Melbourne, he teaches poetry at Deakin University and creative writing at Melbourne University.