Roger Higgins joined Friendly Street in 2004. He has poems published in various magazines and journals in Australia and North America. His first collection Hieroglyphs was published in Friendly Street’s New Poets 13, in 2008. His recent collection is Surf Sounds, published by Liquid Light Press in late 2014.
Everyone you pass in the street
Picture that cellist from the string quartet
with a stave of quavers and semi-quavers
like the rings of Saturn around her waist
Those around you point until you notice
Now everyone you pass in the street has their cloud
a blizzard of zeros and ones in coffee-house fumes
a cemetery fog, little crosses
a haze of hockey pucks like flies
iridescent asteroids circling a wrist like a charms
a halo of words
which starts to droop after the third Chablis
You start to wonder –
your own cloud disturbs you now
the threatening grey of an approaching storm
sitting over your left shoulder
as if blown there by a sudden gale
you watch it roil as your brush your hair
and raindrops mist near the nape of your neck
leaving you clammy inside your tailored suit
(from Friendly Street Anthology #38 2013, The Infinite Dirt)
Atacama dancers
The cirrus ballerinas are in rehearsal again tonight
pink and orange tutus fill the dusk sky,
A black and brooding mountain
observes without comment their dance.
There are unknown days yet before the performance
when an audience of thunderheads will sit in lofty judgement
clap explosively and bring down the curtain
in an excitement of rain.
I prefer to watch the rehearsals
the placement of pastels on a simple canvas
the fluid change of scenes and moods
as first the pink troupe and then the orange
and last the incandescent reds
pirouette on centre stage
just me and the mountain quietly watching
the lights go down without applause.
(from Hieroglyphs, Friendly Street New Poets 13, 2008)
Weekend
Peanut butter on a teaspoon, burnt chocolate on my fingertip
A verdant sauvignon blanc from the Hills
Waves like mood music crashing, on a distant beach
Your buttocks silky under my fingertip
No pyjamas no nightgown, spooned after sex
At midnight, bedsheets rustling
Dry cakiness of your daybreak lips, smiling
A breakfast of seaspray and singed toast
Tongue, snaring nectarine juice errant on my chin
Lazy cappuccino dusted with bitter cocoa
Unsweetened certainty, loving
You hot from the shower, draped in a towel
*
An algorithm written in haste for the afternoon
on the exhausted freeway, stench and brake lights
Caught in a riptide of shoppers lamenting summer’s close
The mark-downs are a racket, artificial sweeteners
Lining-up at cheerless registers and parkade booths
Breaking out, saying never-again, knowing that we will
In a roadside café, the comfort of deepfried wings
Cajun chicken and a giant lemonade
Calmed by sounds like surf surge from the CD
Your fingertips unknotting my neck and shoulders
Until, sheltering behind our own front door
A spoonful of peanut butter, a syrupy nectarine
(from Surf Sounds, Liquid Light Press, 2014)