Alan Gould is an Australian poet, novelist and essayist.  His seventh novel, The Lakewoman,  was launched at The 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and his twelfth volume of poetry, Folk Tunes, has just been published by Salt.  Among his many awards, he has won the NSW Premier’s Prize For Poetry (1981),  The National Book Council Banjo Prize for Fiction (1992), The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal For Literature, and The Grace Leven Award for his The Past Completes Me – Selected Poems 1973-2003.

 

 

 

 

 

Two At A Café Table

 

for MG

 

Gold estuary falling on your shoulder,

what does blonde hair do?

It’s thirty seven Aprils since

I swam in gold with you,

 

lay close and breathed pine resin in;

we bonked our lunchtimes through,

our syllabus was tongue and groove

and what might nipples do.

 

Now coffee and our fancy cakes

are lush, but snag our way.

Miraculous how natural

the things we need to say,

 

to find response aglitter in

the lives that we now reach,

this winter day’s exquisite calm,

this frisson in our speech.

 

Is it your body’s loveliness,

is it my voice alone,

is it the gesture of a hand

or curve of your facial bone,

 

that lift us to our form of words

healing as they renew?

How come it took us half a life

to find this rendezvous

 

and see the gift of person in

the flesh that we once held,

now ADG can be less gauche,

Michelle be more Michelle’d?

 

Thirty seven years are here

and shoppers stop to stare

where two old lovers incandesce

and golden is the air.