for Devorah, a kind judge
You are standing on a balcony
that is the ghost of a balcony,
jutting from the back of an unformed thing:
a house shell on the edge of the Indian ocean.
It yawns, this mass, this shell, this construct.
It is an idea slowly dressing in flesh
in the days before wires and plaster
have finalized its temporal form.
It yawns because it is winter
and it faces the sea wind,
which is at you—cold blooded and insistent.
Its windowless face is a infantile mouth.
At the other corner of the balcony,
there's the ghost of a living girl
that may be half dead yet.
She stands, smoking.
The arm, which isn't engaged in the act
of nicotine rich self harm, is folded
under her breast against
a pain you can't see.
She asks impish koan
in the language of Babylon,
and compounds
on real things too.
The unused pack
of red clay bricks;
a clipped geometric intrusion
against the crisp line of the horizon.
What is it, the straight line of the horizon?
A confusion of water and sky,
the same illusion the Neanderthals fell for...
Endless water... a circle... a return.
A background note behind the smell of rain—
cheap vodka—like nail polish remover,
like the age of twenty five, like dizzy sickness.
A voice whispering, just outside your range
the secret name of g-d behind a diatonic note.
Long, slow, entire.
Alan Fyfe is a writer who lives in Western Australia. He has published poetry, prose, essay, and journalism. He was the poetry editor for the first edition of the University of Western Australia creative writing journal, Trove, and in 2009, won the Karl Popper award for philosophy. He lives by the river, with his son, very far from you.