Suburban Archaeolology
Living on a stable plate
while others tumble into the sea
you would think that maybe
we’re special
or chosen
to stay alive while everyone else
is swallowed by the sea.
Or maybe
because we’re so brand new
like freshly shorn marines
we’re not quite ready to see the seams
of the earth
split open like a mouth.
And in this strange
cookie-cutter of a country
where waves flick like some girl’s hair,
clouds scuff against a faded denim sky
with its LCD ticker tape of highways,
there are
only wells.
Holes that shriek
like baths being drained.
Sometimes
you see them slowing down,
drifting across a four-lane highway.
The night careening with cross-eyed cats’ eyes,
and the sky,
yellow and piss-coloured,
spits warm into the bay.
Seal-skinned swimmers freestyle between buoys
bobbing like bloated goldfish.
Goggles glint orange as the sun sinks
behind the smokestacks and empty apartment
blocks
with the lights left on by real estate agents.
You can hear the blink of ships
as they slip under the Westgate,
the soft plonk of fishing lines
and tinny rambling of AM radio.
The clicking and cracking of the magnet factory,
silver discs spilling towards each other
across the Williamstown warehouse.
Dreams here are black,
except for the solitary flashlight of abalone
poachers.
And at night,
lumps grow.
They grow up
out of the local football field
that used to be landfill,
a suburban grand canyon.
The under 18’s have to dig out car wrecks
that rise to the surface between seasons.
And in the cancer ward at Geelong’s Mercy,
a hundred women wait
like oysters to be shucked,
hands over their breasts
feeling for pearls.
We drive through Little River,
past the toilet block where my grandma
once found a finger,
a small bloodied pinkie,
black hair still on its knuckle.
My grandma stood there
next to the pinkie
and strewn paper towels,
waiting for the police.
* * * * * *
I run.
I never jog.
I fill the days
with cups of tea,
checking on my laundry across the road
and visiting the painter downstairs
who does canvases for Ikea
to match lounge settings.
He hears voices, mostly of the shrill variety.
It’s like a pair of macaws in here,
he once said, pointing to his head.
Sometimes it gets so bad
he shrouds the windows
with bed sheets he must have saved from when he
was a kid,
teddy bears and ET and racing cars
shield him from the light.
The painter asked me not to turn on the TV or the
radio
when his world was solitary and unused
– silent like a held breath –
under sheets like deceased estate,
because the voices travelled through
the goose-pimpled walls.
So I read the newspaper
to the sound of a giant moth’s paper-wings turning.
A frat boy is found dead
post-initiation night,
his throat clogged with Hawaiian pizza.
They say his body was covered in thick black texta,
I take it up the arse
nigger lover
I suck cock
eat shit and cum.
The ink sunk in like rigor mortis
and the parents had to bury him like that,
covered in the haiku of a fucked-up generation.
But still
when the sheets come down,
the painter exits,
a little thinner and spooked.
I can’t help
thinking of the girl on the news
who called out of my clock radio
at exactly 7am
– I’m drowning –
when she was being raped
in her basement.
* * *
When I met him,
his leather bat-winged jacket flapping,
standing in the service lane,
smoking hurried limp cigarettes,
ghosts coming out of his mouth,
I knew I was going to take to him
like lightning to a lake.
He had said, striking another match,
that before matches were red,
they were yellow.
And the factory workers in London,
they used to glow.
The phosphorus got into their hands and faces.
People watched them coming home,
bright yellow in the night.
His tongue flicked out the corner
of his mouth as he talked,
wetting a patch of dry skin on the curve of his lips.
Treads from trucks lay about us,
rubber flanks restless like horses in the starter box.
And his three-legged dog named Jack Farley
hopped up and down the service lane
barking at the cars.
Later he swore to me
that sometimes he could see a fourth paw print
when looking back at his and Jack Farley’s tracks
along a beach.
For an entire week he stood on a chair,
neck bent like Michelangelo’s,
mapping out the southern hemisphere
with 38 packets of glow-in-the-dark stars.
He copied everything straight from a map
except for the Milky Way.
That, he said, as we camped out in my onebedroom
flat
he traced from the freckles
spilt across my nose.
When Jack Farley and I slept,
the dog’s phantom leg twitching,
the stickers fading,
he worked.
He would stay up all night
zooming in on strange pixelations
and wispy formations.
A police scanner read out the sites of ordinary
crimes,
homicides and suicides.
He mapped out each ghost religiously
on his free tourist map of Victoria.
He collected life’s leftovers,
and had installed hundreds of web cams
across the state and beyond,
trying to catch the rah-rah skirts of the dead.
In the dark
my hands scrambled towards him
like spiders across the bedroom floor.
Sometimes he would take me half-in
half-out of sleep. I would come
with a film of moon over my eyes.
In between bulbs igniting like cars in the distance
was a deep underwater tug,
a fishhook caught on my insides,
dragging plastic bags full of sea.
And a jogger
– it’s always the joggers that find them –
he would tell me in the morning,
clutching their iPods
white rubber sneakers squeaking,
and a house key on a bit of string under their
t-shirts.
They would find the night’s bodies.
Creaking overhead in the mottled morning
under bridges covered in birthday banners,
pink bloated pendulums swinging
over concrete footpaths inscribed with teenage
love affairs.
Strewn like dreams coaxed to the surface.
Sometimes
the joggers note the small
squeezebox
of a heart.
A little bit of night
dragged into the day.
A cat with blood on its whiskers.
Out the window
I watch as the owner of the Laundromat
pushes each machine back against the wall
after they spent the whole night
shuffling forward on spin.
* * *
In summer the flat is too hot.
The stickers on the ceiling peel off.
He laughs and says
Falling Stars.
Jack Farley barks and tries
to catch the glowing stickers on his tongue.
In just a t-shirt I can see
on his arms the tattoos he had done with another
girl.
They had been rubbed out.
Like faded mistakes I can still see them
under his new artwork,
lingering in the way
only an ex can do.
I feel gangly around his ghosts.
My arms thick and legs like pylons.
Boobs like water balloons.
I close my eyes and smell our way out of the city,
past the vegemite factory,
the car rattling like an old Luna Park ride
up over the Westgate bridge.
The Vicks distillery, the treated pine yards
and treated shit farm.
We pass the toilet block where my granny found
the finger.
I can smell this place.
The secret blimps in the sky,
the paused kangaroos,
and the ink in my fingers.
Perhaps this country’s fault lines
are not so big and obvious like San Francisco’s
cracks,
or shuddering
like the earthquakes of Indonesia.
Maybe at the bottom of all the seas,
the place where letters land,
we are just a yellow canary blowing out
underground.
A little bird,
eyes like poppy seeds.
Wrestling a jammed cassette out of the tape player,
I unravel the shiny brown tape
that once somehow sung
out the window.
Black streamers pouring out the car,
catching on the fingertips of ti-tree.
Tomorrow the crows will line their nests
with the river water tears of Johnny Cash.
At the pink marshes
where my mum and me used to wade out,
bare feet and holding empty jam jars,
scaring off the egrets like miniature storks.
For cooking, my mum would say,
as we scooped up the crusty top layer of salt,
and the cuts on my feet stung.
Just past the crisp white bulldozed mounds of salt
where models pose for snow season fashion
spreads.
In goggles, puffy jumpsuits and beanies,
they crouch with skis poised and ready to go,
but all that’s ahead of them is a dirt road,
the last length of powerline,
and a soap factory where his most prized webcam
is on the blink.
I wait for him
beside an open container of rose-scented soap,
while Jack Farley leaves a fourth paw print on the
dusty concrete floor,
and he hunts for ghosts
that stink
like potpourri.
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