Poem – Mike Ladd (Australia)
Mike Ladd | Oct 10, 2009 | Comments 0
Bedroom Ceiling Fan
White medusa
above our reef,
we watch its life-cycle
a fathom down.
In summer it never sleeps,
moving the night’s hot breath
on pale, cruciform bodies,
minds refusing to close.
In winter
it lies still,
a three-petalled flower of ice.
It is the turning reel
of our private cinema,
projecting onto these sheets
the amateur porn
of positions we’ve tried.
Fever sweats,
loneliness,
laughter.
A boring film;
the characters
read books by bedside lights,
and neither speaks.
Times we lie apart in anger,
far as the edges of the bed allow.
Wasted nights.
Here, your waters break twice:
underground springs
no muscle can stop.
Baby heads grow in the white field,
breathing milk,
howling the slow incision of teeth.
The buddhas become long and bony,
flop down between us
wanting to know what to do with their lives –
as we pretend to know.
My black curly hair
greys and shrinks
to a widow’s peak.
Your long chestnut waves
are cropped and dyed.
We are buried in the rustle of weekend papers,
their slightly-altered, repeating stories:
the greedy privatise gain and socialise loss,
husbands and wives cheat each other, leaders their states,
the so-very-reasonable sell guns to fanatical haters,
people destroy what exists, believing in what doesn’t -
and we live in the hegemony of gloss.
On setting one, it is a whisper,
a rumour, a silk dressing gown undone.
On setting two, sweet breezes start to blow.
On setting three, it knocks a rhythm
like the lovers climaxing below.
On setting four, it is a white beehive,
an inner sea, a shallow roar.
On setting five, it is a cyclone’s light-bulb eye.
Slow down now, slow down, slow.
.
.
Born in 1959, Mike Ladd has published six books of poetry: The Crack in the Crib (1984), Picture’s Edge (1994), Close to Home (2000), Rooms and Sequences 2003, Shacklife (2006) and Transit (2007). In 2000 he had a Churchill Fellowship in the UK, Ireland and France, where he studied poetry and radio production. His other awards include a Literature Board Venice Studio Grant (1987), and a Special Commendation at the Prix Futura, Berlin, for his radio feature Tracks and Traces (1995). His book Picture’s Edge was short-listed for the John Bray National Poetry Award in 1998.In 2006 he was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and was a guest of Venezuela’s World Poetry Festival. Mike Ladd is also founder producer and presenter of Australia’s ABC Radio National’s Saturday afternoon poetry program Poetica.
