Still Life

Tame enough to venture and explore,

Gem-flecked with dew in the Bruny Island dawn,

Two wallabies, stock-still,

Look up and pause while feeding on the lawn.

Five minutes and they’re here at the kitchen door.

Memory flicks to that trip from Broken Hill

And the rolling exhibition along the road,

Enough to make you gulp

Your rising gorge, which every half-mile showed,

An illustrated history of roadkill,

Truck-smacked and mangled kangaroos, all pulp

And gore, as though some surgeon hoped to find,

There in the guts, the spark

Of life. That Rembrandt painting comes to mind,

The body peeled apart by Dr Tulp.

The thought and image grip me cold, how stark

And total the distinction that affronts

Our sense, between a mere

Object and that thing there, a person once,

Now dead. No thought or image, though, to mark

This morning. In they stare, suspending fear,

Or simply mesmerized, at the half-gloom

Of the interior,

Still lives behind the glass. But when I loom

Among the shadows they are out of here,

Before I reach the door.