Tuesday Poem - 'Joy and a Fibro Shack' by Andy Kissane

Joy and a Fibro Shack

            ‘I’m a little ashamed that I want to end this poem

            singing...’        — Robert Hass

The difficulty of writing a poem

is like the difficulty of building a house

without a plan, wood, a hammer.

You have to start somewhere

and if you have a tin of nails,

then that’s as good a place as any.

The foundations, the frame and the finish will come

if you work at it.

Or might not come.

There’s always the canvas shell of a tent.

There’s always driftwood and burlap fastened with bamboo vines.

There’s always the music of corrugated iron in a hail storm,

or its blistering shade at midday.

Is a poem a palace or a humpy?

I prefer humpies, furnished with a daggy couch

reclaimed from the council clean-up.

I want to capture the grit beneath fingernails,

the mysterious gaze of a brush wattlebird

peering at me through the window,

the misery of a broken marriage,

and the elation of the night we bumped

into Rebecca at Kilimanjaro, the restaurant

not the mountain, crammed around a table

as those first contractions took hold of her body.

Breath, heartbeat, blood—the nervous dash

to the hospital. Then screams far too loud,

far too long for the sanitised labour

of soap opera—they’d call it over-acting,

they’d call it amateur, they’d say

it was in very bad taste.

I prefer poems to come into the world

shining with vernix, green with meconium,

radiant with the open-eyed awe of a baby

in the first half-hour of her life,

while the wind lifts and rattles the walls

until the house resonates with its own bright keening,

like the night I was up at 3am,

walking the kitchen, walking the hallway, walking

the lounge room, holding a baby

who would not stop, would not stop,

just would not stop crying.

'Joy and a Fibro Shack' is from AndyKissane's collection, Out to Lunch, Puncher and Wattman, 2009. Andy lives in Sydney and writes poetry and fiction. He has published three books of poetry, Facing the Moon, Every Night They Dance and Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry. His first novel, Under the Same Sun (Sceptre, 2000) was shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year. A book of short stories The Swarm will be published in the coming year. He has taught Creative Writing at four universities. He coaches basketball, barracks for the Brisbane Lions, and is busy regenerating a bush garden. 

Andy Kissane will be performing at the July Word Tree - 2nd July @ Burrinjah Cafe @ the Burrinjah Community Centre, cnr. Matson Drive and Glenfern Road.