Rose Hunter
Poetry
The Rehearsal
The vodka-tinged air rolls over my
shoulder like waves into a rock pool.
I don’t want to think about
his friend with cirrhosis and cardio-
myopathy and stories of stomachs
exploding and how he’s
got numb hands and feet.
I stop hearing his breath and lie
holding mine and it rolls through me
how this plays out, over
the red tiles and the terracotta railing
the geckos knocking on doors
the dark ushering of the palms
until he breathes out, and so do I
him so solid, me so solid.
Three Cockatoos
Above the marble plinth by the stairs
they are on their perches. Le dejeuner sur l’herbe
on branches. The little one on the left is naked
a yellow crest . The jungle, like Manet’s scene,
lacks depth. The leaves are brocade
and the birds’ feathers puckered upholstery.
The top one has one wing out: a cloak
for the little one who cowers
from the third’s open beak, jabbing tongue
and foreshortened body. Above them three
flowers and the stem of another bows over-
or it’s a case of negligence, that top one
with no tilt in his torso;
a precarious cantilever.
Through the lianas a clearing-
or it’s grotesque, this semaphore? “Painters,”
Zola said, “do not share the masses’ obsession
with subject,” but here it is, I say to him:
draped over the lower branch like tripe,
something regurgitated, jungle slime,
something, finally, from deep within.