Poems by Anthony Lawrence - Monthly Features August 2018
Home Invasion
My sister is a somnambulist. She has walked the length of sleep in her childhood home around the deck of a river cruiser and into the arms of a home-invader who woke her slowly, singing Nights in White Satin. She handed him a porcelain pig and a plait of her hair coiled in a cedar box. He proposed on the spot but she declined, insisting that sleep interruption would be hell on pillow-talk. He left with the pig and box of hair waving and walking backwards into a hole in the garden, where a metal spike opened his leg from thigh to knee. In the hospital she fell asleep holding his hand, and on waking unlaced their fingers and said farewell in two languages. He came by six months later. She saw him limping up the drive, and did not respond when he knocked and called her name as though it were a rare breed of raptor, and he a falconer.
Watermelons
As if to demonstrate, when laid open how red and green are commensurate with leaf, vine, and being eaten
I arrange halves of watermelon the seeds like tear-drop terminals on printer's plates
for a guide to the nature of blood and skin. I consider the taste and texture prior
to science being slipped into the water, back when you could determine ripeness
by slapping the rind. Now to lift and palm the weight to try and summon acoustic
resonance from the centre the wet equivalent of heartwood what I hear is more
like resistance, as though its inner music had been made aesthetically redundant
refined through years of harvests in a lab the new generation farm shed.
Anthony Lawrence's most recent book of poems, Headwaters (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016) won the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith university, Queensland, and lives on Moreton Bay.