mallarme: sea change

By | 1 May 2017
the body complains unfortunately and I’ve read all the books

shall I run away to where it is warmer?          I believe birds

get drunk on the void between spray and sky





nothing          not the familiar gardens seen on gazing into eyes

will keep back those who plunge into the sea

on such nights          not the desert clarity of my lamp

on the blank paper’s forbidding white

nor the young woman feeding her baby


no  I’m going  the steamer with its jutting spar

sets off for a world of strangeness





boredom is made worse by such hopes

and always falls for the handkerchief waving goodbye

but maybe these masts cruising for storms

are the sort that a gale sucks into a wreck and

we are lost          dismasted          far from green islands

but          desire          listen


                              to the song of the sailors
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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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