quartet

By David Kelly

'David Kelly has an uncanny ability to dissect the most mundane moments with unexpected bursts of insight. Laced with David's bizarre sense of humour, quartet is a collection of poetry like no other. It tantalises the senses and makes you reach deep into your own humanity to reflect upon snippets of time, real or imagined. From the environmental

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781761096853

Book preview

quartet

QUARTET

DAVID KELLY

Ginninderra Press

Quartet

ISBN 978 1 76109 685 3

Copyright © text David Kelly 2024

Cover image: Jupiter – dennisspiteri.com.au

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

First published 2024 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

CONTENTS

paragraphs

Daddy meant happy

tall trees

a man called Marlo

Acknowledgements

Also by David Kelly

parents

For my father, mother and brother with thanks for the happy.

PARAGRAPHS

Giant leap

So he’s…my God he’s standing. It works! A positive, an active sunlight flows through the wide picture window into the room. He does not know I’m here yet. I say his name softly. He turns around and sees me and all the atoms in the room vibrate. He outdoes the sun. I walk halfway towards him and he comes to meet me. He walks. He walks to me. I kneel. Even so, his face is well below mine. He giggles. The atoms in the room toggle out of control. Sunshine was made to light this scene. He is like a koala. Baby koala ball. Warm as if furred. Vertical at last, he walks the wide open plan room to find his mother. They come back beaming. We will never see him crawl again.

It’s deep

How old were you that day? Very early years but walking well enough already with your chubby legs stretching into themselves and, beginning to talk, you would practise voice tones beyond your mother’s or mine. Clearly it still comes to me, when the three of us walked over the rough splintery deck surrounding the tidal swimming pool – well upriver and black-brown muddy on the bank, rusty iron bars like prison gates to keep out the sharks, the water a dark dirty impenetrable green with me on high alert in case you fell. We watched as you peered down, perhaps seeking your reflection before you looked up and informed us, Aaarrh…it’s deep, it’s deep, with a slow side-to-side motion of the head and your voice long-drawn, sounding old and wise with the knowledge of many loose-timbered wharves and jetties and the cold green danger below them.

Supermarket monkeys

The woman behind me in the line at the supermarket toll gates is telling the one behind her how good her children are in the school holidays with the rain all week and how she reasons with them and they respond with real maturity so that, obviously, the two kids swinging Catherine wheels on the upright chrome pipe barrier between the toll gate aisles to try to loosen it from the bolts holding it to the floor and kicking me softly in the calves and sounding off more squealy loud and hooply-hooply than a troop of rare and endangered marmosets in a doco, could not possibly be hers.

Old men and little dogs

You see them a lot in this town – old men with little dogs. No longer roaming with Shep through meadows, well, paddocks. Up to the shops and back is enough. Across the traffic lights, pay the rates and two cans of beer at the pub will do these days for the open road and over the hills and far away. As they walk, the dog makes friends with everyone and allows the man in these last years to be the Earth, the centre of things. His dog is often white or whitish-grey like a little Moon, tethered to the man as the Moon is tethered to the Earth. Yes, it spins around him like the Moon, a little grey-white Moon dancing for him on its wagging tail.