The Argument

By Tracy Ryan

Poems of keen appraisal and survival,bound by a cohesive vision, form this collection, whichfeatures the work of Australian poet Tracy Ryan. Revealing the poet's preoccupation with mortality, this compilation deals with the cold cross-examiner death by responding with life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781760991524

Book preview

HOME FIRES

1.

Dicing all day time against fuel

against sundown, teasing, eking it out

recalled each hour or so

by the sudden drop, on an unseen leash,

since this is the chore

that usually falls to you as the stronger,

cutter, carter, coaxer

and stoker.

Your absence translates as

a series of small failures and revivals

on my part, merely keeping it up,

and the basket gone wanting again,

the traipse, the replenishing …

Just one more thing

to add to the routine, but I need

constant reminding;

resistance, as they say,

always has meaning.

2.

You take away their spirit, they expire

And return to their dust.

– Psalm 104: 29

Deserted as you too are by

that third presence,

the heat we generate

sleeping side by side,

ghost that proceeds

from a proud, purported godhead,

alone now, halved now, I

swaddle myself within the bed,

layer on layer, pupate,

parenthetical huddle,

this interval, this icy space

I must cross.

3.

And loss of that other heat,

blind heat

that blazes in both

senses,

a trail through the thick dark,

your frame,

the permanent flint

of your bones that graze

and find their answering

soft hollows,

by contrast heavily banked, so

slow to ignite,

but never expended.

LAMB

Seems to leap at some unseen will

surprising herself, ad libitum,

a sneeze, a seizure in motion, a tic

ecstatic, mini-mystic, pure impulse, hauled up

and dropped by magic, now limp as a hanky,

now all spring and muscle. Three weeks

and the ground, great fontanelle, still hasn’t set

under her feet, too sweet to call cloven,

they are dolls’ feet, tottering, abridged.

Sniffing us out by the toes, how we do this

upright and hard thing, she’s nibbling

grass, leaf and plastic, everything grist

to a new soul-mill, runs rings around

small boy on trampoline, three years, who notes

twin marks on her neck where the eagle grabbed

and lost her to life, on her head twin buds

that will one day be all the horns

she has.

GIVE

And these nodes that start to gnarl my fingers?

– Vivian Smith, ‘The Return’

My small child, smooth, himself

distinguished only by dimples,

likes to place his fingertip

in pouches crept up on me,

despite me,

at knuckles and elbows. Buttons,

he says, and giggles

at these points of slackness, balloons

gone airless, the perished elastic

of a hand-me-down he never dreams

he’ll wear, though once, it’s true,

I encompassed him

snug as a bug before he shucked me off.

Now I let him try each joint, obedient

as a puppet, back and forth – when bent,

as sleek as anyone’s,

but only straighten, and stiffen,

and there’s the accommodation, ring upon ring,

the looser, lesser fit

between inside and out.

REHEARSAL

Tiptoe and whisper, we crouch wherever

a space is found, each week, to listen

as the real work goes on here, oblivious,

with or without us, possessing

through bone and organ in

sublime indifference, the way the ocean

crashes, drags back, swelling, enriching itself

with each cell it swallows –

so this orchestra in potentia, absorption

in all senses, awash with the smell

of brass and varnish, careless of occasional

audience from the junior class:

you, small but compulsive as when staring down The Gap,

me in helpless attendance, straining