POETRY
S J HOLLAND-BATT
CIRCLES AND CENTRES
You are being called. All the garden around
the house is as planets in orbit, its slim persimmons
and cumquats, their shocks of rind,
the pumpkins viridian and grooved like
distorted grenades, plump wattle in sprays
rattling its sweet dust into your eyes and nose.
There is a dream here − a dream of endlessness −
only faint and linked to the gesture, with
no wholes, no interior to hang your light by,
to steady your clarities on. It is real, this field
of rings, orbs, cores; a narrative without fringes
or hard edges, growth that shoots as it rots,
accreting purpose in its circuitry, yet you find
it wanting order. You are digging, digging against it,
possibly for an end; going around the perimeter
of your plot, wielding your ability to crimp
and cinch and singe like a new addition
to your vocabulary. It is true: you can bring
nothing where there was once fruit, decentre
truth, and turn any middle into outskirts. The
neighbourhood dogs bay at the heaviness
in your hands, howl and bay, yelp and keen
and howl and bay. You stalk like the hunter
you are, ripping blades and woody stems,
scattering wish-weeds to the night wind,
ramming the lip of your shovel into clay,
into humus, into peat. You strip these circles
and centres until you have a mound of globes,
pollinated, lit. The moon rises as a cut
nail, and that lacuna frees you. You are released
from the burden of unification. It is night.You don’t belong here among these severed spheres.
You should go. The house, weird and geometric,
is calling you. The filaments and bulbs and electric currents
are calling you. The cups, the plates, the armchairs
are calling you, in, come in, or simply, all this
is yours. There is nothing to be afraid of. You are
being called. Go. It is warm, and you are needed.
SJ HOLLAND-BATT works in Brisbane as an editor and research assistant. Her poems have been widely published in Australian literary journals.
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