Greg McLaren
Greg McLaren is a Sydney poet and critic. His books are Everything falls in (Vagabond, 2000), Darkness disguised (Sidewalk, 2002) and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, 2007). Greg is presently co-editing a collection of essays on Australian poetry, and is poetry editor at Puncher & Wattmann.
Transit Lounge
On the last day
I leave work hours early
and bus in to meet you by the quay,
you nearly drunk
an hour before you reach the ferry
Past the terror-proof windows
everything is busy-ness,
flight preparations are tinted
a pale yellow that in some light
might seem orange
I wander through the fluorescent mall
of the airport, wait thirty minutes
for a train and dawdle
in the bookshop underground
until a friend rings my mobile
At cruising altitude
you’re sheeting across the south east
of the continent just short
of the speed of sound
My bus slopes back up Parramatta Road
Your mother the commercial artist
greets you past the gates
with something between coldness
and expectation, and with news
of her latest exploits on e-bay
Somewhere, I’m not sure,
I’ve kept the train ticket,
that emblem of love,
its coded magnetic strip past expiry,
peeling from the backing like a mirror