Umbrella
By Miro Bilbrough
I can see why you photographed it
the rubble pile in your living room that was once a fireplace, its crude metal
mouth flue stripped back to raw in the wall. Now we stand before it,
transfixed, not saying a thing, as if the outpouring of rubble were words.
Then we go find the bunnies in your darkened scorched earth yard.
They ate it all, you protest, pointing to a bunch of vertical brown sticks
forking skyward like a war-torn hand. The basil.
It’s winter, I say. Rose-red tapetum lucidum reflectors beam out from
under a bureau stood in the dirt. The rabbit lollops gamely toward your
sheltering calves, then away.
Then we are back in front of the brick-dust pile, magnetised as if by fire
itself instead of a demolished hearth. You sit on the sofa strumming an
unplugged guitar, fixing me with your whirlpools,
flirting with the sound down low.
You let me see your room with the not so freshly dug hole in the covers
you climb in and out of, the clothes growing moodily on the forest floor.
Come over to my house and pass judgement, you say. Chaos it gets inside
my head, I reply. You nod. Yours too.
We prop in the hall where a thin runner shivers over unreliable boards and
the paperbacks are rain-buckled. Your first flat, with your vegan
mushrooms lucid dreaming in a paper bag in the fridge, the woman whose
name you like to say & the boyfriend who shares your name, the two
rabbits that sleep one atop the other in a stack. I’ve only just realised
there isn’t a finite number of poems
that I can write about you.
Right before I go you pass me the umbrella: antiquarian, gracile, British
Racing Green. I don’t go for phallic objects. But this one, left at your house
by an unidentified party guest, I desire immediately. You offer it on the
spot. Verdant, slender-sheathed, improbably elegant. I steal a glance at it
now in the corner of my study: furled.
[Click here to read the poem in its original format]
Location and Geo Tag:
This poem takes place one Saturday evening in the ratty share-house of a friend, Illawarra Rd, Marrickville 2204. At a party the night before his flatmate had sat on the mantelpiece triggering the demolition we bear witness to.
Latitude: 33° 54' 47.66'' S
Longitude: 151° 9' 12.59'' E
Elevation: 16.22 m