Ways to fail to escape

Belinda Rule

Coming home in the deep country dark,

rear-view black as a switched-off screen,

the way I am sorry to round that last hill,

lava of lights poured

in the saucer of the lowlands,

white haze rising like steam.

The way, passing the marina at dusk,

boats at anchor on the bay

like flies on molten glass,

I want to be aboard that farthest deck

making for the rip

where the headlands unpinch.

The way it has been so long

since I’ve had a man,

when my friend from interstate merely

sat on my sofa, I stood afterwards

in the hallway still smelling him,

rabbit at the passage of a fox.

The way, in fact, I am uncomfortable

putting a sailboat in a poem.

I don’t even like to sail. Swooning

at the vastness of the horizon, I always forget

the damp creaking smallness of the boat.

Since my illness, the way I am always

plotting when next I might sleep.

Sleep is a missionary all day ringing,

ringing my bell, Ma’am, can I interest you

in some literature

on unconsciousness? Sir, I am trying

to take a shit right now.

The way, in yoga, when told to be

present, I am instead out the window

in that truck flashing sun on the bridge,

crawling into cloud as it rises.

BELINDA RULE lives in Melbourne. Her chapbook, The Things the Mind Sees Happen, Puncher & Wattmann, was commended in the Anne Elder Award 2019. Her first full-length collection is Hyperbole, Recent Work Press, 2021. Work has appeared widely including in The Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Island, Westerly and The London Magazine.