Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 198
autumn 2010
ISBN 978-0-9805346-5-8
published March 2010

Disquisition on Home

A fly kindly punctuates the table cloth
before moving to remedy the syntax of a wall,
a banana, a door knob … my lip. And the sun
is more presence than detail. Unlike, say,
the dark which remains a tease and knows
its place. Light here invades lines. Colour
has no room. My hands confuse themselves
with the sand but not the trees; too dry to weep,
they can only wait. A magpie gargles the air.
That bird is the one fear from childhood
I keep for comfort. Still, it’s more intelligent
than most creatures. Pollsters should ask
for its opinion, while grammarians
should study where that fly lands,
see if it finds words for its pedantic self.
You and I would argue over the significance
of each position. Sorry, you’d say,  ‘You and I’.
Maybe, we should take this inside.

Ryan Scott lives in the Czech Republic. His poems have appeared in a number of journals and websites in Australia and overseas.
© Ryan Scott
Overland 198-autumn 2010, p. 99

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