AA: I love it.

And there’re so many things in there that I strongly agree with. I think broadly that is what a poem like ‘Octofurcation’ does. I might get you to read some of that for context. This book and your poetry, in general, I feel does the thing that poetry is best suited to do, which is a fracturing. Like that Gertrude Stein quote: ‘the difference is spreading’. It’s like finding, highlighting, difference – allowing for difference, making things bigger. Less cohesive. And looking at things from multiple angles at once. Would you like to read it?

AP: Why don’t we? The one which has been dubbed the bestiality poem, but maybe we could just say ‘pansexual’.

I can even show you the book … It was an exhibition of Shunga pictures, the Spring Pictures, which were kinds of Japanese erotica delivered to housewives when they started their marriages. It came to the NGV some years ago. I bought the massive book of it. There’s always a voyeuristic aspect in the works. There’s always a couple doing outrageous things with enormous body parts. It’s hilarious. They’re so funny. And then you have someone looking through the curtain who obviously gets off on the scopic, or on not-participating. Somehow the whole thing is wildly sexy. And then, of course, in that selection, there’s a lot of work by Hokusai; and his work called ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’, which is basically a woman having an octopus go down on her. It’s a wild concept that this is part of ostensibly ‘very conservative’ Japanese marriage preparation. And hence the octo– (of ‘Octofurcation’) in relation to that octopus. Then I played around with the notion of other kinds of species …

As what species
could you love me best
hunt my pleasure
most sweet-precisely
 – our wants unleashing
bright ladder-blips
pirouettes in the chains
of full-moon mathematics?
 
As a smooth brown bear
lumbering near
on heavy legs
through funk
of the leaf-rot?
I’d curl my back
to your hot, plush belly
breathe your breath
and umami fur – 
with your heart
a far-monster,
coming nearer
and faster
building raw
weather
in my tiny ear.

Or need turns feline:
you enter as cat – 
from the sodden garden
glittering darkly
making dogged beeline
for my trailing legs
turning bedroom-eyes
all snakeish upon me
lazy – quite – and quite decided
to thrust your triangular
perfect head
into person-hands
and person-hips
while my fingers probe
into shoulder bones
finely mobile
under liquid pelt
kneading that narrow
and vulnerable place
till you buckle
and flip
and with vision a slit
we board our plateau
of sustained invitation.
 
Or – 
you are forest, trees
want erupting
in bursts umpteen
precocious, confetti leaves
 – gasps
of howling colour
storming me
on every side – 
you, a rippling cloak
of carnival eyes
on my matte
and mottled nudity – 
faces flurrying,
quilted, wanton,
swarming my face
in quick, block swatches
coming in squalls
buffeting surface
swaddling my waist
all feathery pungent – 
then calmed to cushion
to coy, fickle bed
of grit-smitten tumbling.
You, my whisper-city
of orange and red – 
your manyness flicking me
to spectrums illicit.
 
But – were I
to let want even more
and wetly further
unpicking those edges
of sly politesse
I’d be found soundless
on combed sea floor
with you on, around
and monstrously in me – 
ghastly head with waveless gaze
trained on my closed
and flitting eyes,
your eight keen limbs
sleuthing my Sensitive,
disc-sucker-pocked
with reach to drown me:
one tentacle thick
beneath my nape
a pulsing yoke with
tip in my lips
urging my tongue
to mute imitation
 – another, a question mark
fast at my breast and
a tail to verify
rose punctuations.
Then slipping from statement
to swelling obscenities 
(those syrupy lozenges
neither spelt nor said)
you auspiciously splice
and divide my pleasure – 
between surface, envelope,
and muscular inside.
You network the folds
displace every shell and
artfully deploying
my lush supine
with invertebrate-canny
deftly unspine me.