Prologue: Jay Gatz works a double on the ‘Belle’
The wedding guests had boarded late,

so entrees were not served til eight.

In silence, Jay Gatz cursed the bride

then turned back to the pan, the plate.
Standing in a glaze of foam,

it was surrender made him roam.

In full voice Jay Gatz blessed the bride

and named this place, this lot, his home.

 

1. Jordan Baker plays Wallacia
The coach ride reminded her that she was older;

as she stepped down into the Wallacia Hotel foyer

she felt a supreme distance thrown back at her

from the trees. The hotel was ridiculous

in its Tudor hosiery, but the course seemed green

enough, and she checked in.
The afternoon was filled with movement

and sound; her own bags perfectly still

in her room, the glazed tiles of the mock angles

burned with white fire. The park invited her

to join a nameless crowd for a swim.

She joined in.
On her return, the bar was all abuzz with men

who scorched the air with marsupial flair

and a new coarseness. A throng had gathered

round two fighting dogs, and someone told her

the hotelier was there, betting on the bleeding-out

like everybody else. She threw in
her wager with the boys, and stood under a fading

melaleuca sipping at a champagne flute alive

with dust. The bet seemed electric in its spread,

as each hard face fixed on the fight, as autumn

light ran over fields, and evening came with yelps

and bestial screams. She gave in
to the quick fulfillment of a dream, when

everything about her suddenly turned green,

as if she stood upon the water’s edge, straddling

the light that captured more than half the men.

She stood in a ring of man, green as the river

which ran away beyond the hill. She swam in
a waterhole as round as mythical desire, deep

as unplumbed depths, and her toes tingled

in the colder vein. Her rest would have to wait.

The night, starved of known constellations,

drew her into early morning admissions

concerning the circles she moved in,
and she gave the phalanx of men their fill

of explanations tinged with consolation.

They would have to go home without her,

to bungalows on floodplain sand and rocks

from dry ravines that boiled in moving crusts.

Alone they’d have to fill it in –
the second half of a single sentence: marriage

of a world that made its myths to one

whose moment as a whole had passed. The hotel

was a fitting cake, she thought, as stumbling through

the heavy doors, she found the fireplace of brick,

and turned as one who drinks a lot towards

the ostentatious stairs. In
her room she found the rest that had avoided her

in other lands, and after rolling darknesses

unveiled herself to images of men who’d paid

for her to visit at their course to play at golf

with rotund friends who’d bottled wine

they’d made themselves in
cellars cut of ancient stone – vintages they’d named

after their wives. In this brilliant vivid dream

she stood upon a fairway thick with dew

and cried to see the eucalypts thinned in portraiture,

as if she’d sat for an expat painter-friend,

and all he’d seen fit to paint were trees in
clear distress. She wiped the tears and took her stance

in slacks as rigid as the shaft and looked along

the golden fairway towards a haze she couldn’t pass.

The green halo she’d felt before had run away

and gone aground. She stretched her arms towards the light

in gracious imitation.

 

2. Tom Buchanan runs for Mayor
Council Chambers are the only rounded buildings in the district and

it’s never sat well with Buchanan. Half-baked red brick modernist blot.

He would have rebuilt ‘Regentville’, and what’s more, when he gets in,

he’ll bulldoze the damn lot. So the middle of his city won’t resemble

anything, and if that soft style should spread into new blocks,

he’ll wave a hard mayoral hand and reject all new building plans.
“Straight angles suit this place,” he’ll shrug to his supporters,

“and it’s not that we don’t understand, its been that way since year

dot, that you cannot change. Perhaps because the mountains loom

like waves above our streets, our children simply grow up loving lines.

Curves are not conducive to good policy, and ‘progressive’ will not

yield strong service delivery.” STARTING WITH SERVICE,
that’s his current hail. His campaign manager’s been servicing

the mail. Local Government elections should never be real

competitions. The plan was hatched on the candidate’s back patio

but this is the first time he’s heard of it. “What phoney pamphlets?”

The city will go to the polls, and above the line the hands will quake.

As they count, Buchanan will water-ski with mountains in his wake.

 

3. Daisy hits the sales
Bins arranged in clustered cells

picked at by credit card trash.
Corpuscles of retail light,

congregations of minute dreams.
She knows better than the crowd

who come for hind and off-cut.
Marked-down is exactly that –

a compromise, a come-down

off the rack.

 

4. Carraway in Castlereagh
Invited out to fish the shallows,

he stands and warms himself by fire

and plays self-consciously with line

that shakes away from hand and eye.
The river slowly starts to crackle

peeling back the gauze to show

with rise of morning sun, the mist,

the bank, the stone’s warm shadow.
The spot is confrontational –

fast water threatens grip and balance,

but Carraway is pleased to see the holes

below the fallen logs. Insouciance
carries him across the river’s sand,

and a child’s love of the river moves

his hand. His rod is brand new,

sparkling and light. He casts to prove
that any fly cast anywhere is just the same –

it is the surface and the rings around the point,

where line falls below the face of what’s perceived,

that holds the glimmer of a black-green joint,
a doorway linking the valley’s quiet verdancy

to a black and colder world beneath the skin,

where a fishes’ will is a spectral double running on

ahead of slowly swimming earthen kin.

 

5. George Wilson Automotive
Myrtle will be at the club again.

No reason not to stay for a few,

see in the weekend with the crew

and watch the sun sink into fen.
I hear the laughter from my chair,

something about a miracle product –

“it doesn’t work, its utter bollocks!” –

A ring of men with words to spare
for everything, but only at this time,

when the valley’s green air stirs and zings,

and the hazel-light makes a fool something

else, something dressed in iodine.
And in this mood I close the ledger,

move toward the garage door,

imagining the valley’s Friday splendour,

opened up, speaking a river.
But it’s amber light that burns the page of sky,

so the figure in my head begins to fail –

ash rains down in exploded scales

and losing life in air, comes to lie
on the baking asphalt and on grass,

catching in the wipers of gleaming cars –

mountain flakes that might as well be stars

trembling in a universe already cast
and set. Friday will become Sunday night

and Myrtle will soften in the blue morning.

Mounds of ash will leave just as they came

and a blackened world will spring, as we might

expect, into new and renewing forms.

 

6. Gatsby
He has already possessed her,

and they are both now waiting to fade.
He won her in the end, by swimming

across the face of the river – she fell
into his wringing arms, whimpering

about surrender in the green world.
She told him that he’d won, but the race

had changed him – the water was in his ear
and the coursing had made of him a reed.

Now his hair blooms blue-green, his eyes
are black stones. He waits in a groove

and he walks through the ground.
He has quenched, and is the quencher

of the flame in outstretched arms.
A shapeless flood narrows at the bend

becoming a new river. United man
and woman look together downstream

and fix a coupled gaze on the bright bank.
A shard of emerald glass catches the sun –

the light is out, and a new light is lit.