c’est l’homme

By | 1 May 2017
for John Forbes


                                        you

develope a style until

it can say what you want          you need          it may

take years and years


of need          a style

is a bit like a life

                                        and then

it comes together

style          book          life

                                        and then

much to your surprise

this neat construction

falls apart


there is no book

the life is not what was planned

and the style

seems hopelessly out of date and

immortality a fading dream but


the need

turns out to be timeless


and in the house there is

some small drug or other

to tide you over

                                        and the style

takes a mini cooper and throws it

down like a gauntlet


and choosing a word is again

the first mouthful of something

brilliant and daring

always perfect


                                        and you know

despite all the stumbling about in the bushes

the stubbed toes          the dirt          the broken fingernails


there was a kind of twisted little track

leading to the photo opportunity at the top of the cliff

and from there you can see


a mini cooper burning in the snow


perfect
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Lee Cataldi was born in 1942 in Sydney, Australia. She grew up in Tasmania, went to university in Sydney, then as a post-graduate to Oxford, England. Subsequently she lived and worked in England, then returned to Australia in 1974. She taught English for six years in an inner-city high school in Sydney, then worked as a teacher-linguist and then a field linguist in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Her publications include books of poetry; Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party, The Women who Live on the Ground, Race Against Time and a Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric With Peggy Rockman Napaljarri Yimi-kirli she co-produced Warlpiri Narratives and Histories, and with Tjama Napanangka she published a Ngardi-English Dictionary. She now lives in the southern Mt Lofty Ranges of South Australia and breeds horses.

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