Spleen 1
January, pissed off with Sydney, pours
steaming torrents on the lessees
of Camperdown cemetery and mortal dumps
on the tenants and landlords of selected suburbs.
Tiles offer scant comfort to Minky,
her failing back legs splayed out like a frog’s
for maximum chill; tiny Kafkas haunt the hot drains,
squeal as they’re turned into ghosts by Raid.
A siren grieves summer, its miasma of smoke, fire;
a mosquito hums falsetto to this end-of-day’s
catarrh. Meanwhile, some other apocalypse drops
biblical ice on Canberra, and invisible
solar coronas that eat lungs for breakfast
disinter whole centuries of fear.
33 Fleurs du Mal of Sydney
sickle wattle, wedding bush
christmas bells, pill flower
bloodroot, bloodwood
fuchsia in the gutter
snake flower, spider flower
showy copper wire daisy
bastard rosewood, strelitzia
wall of old man’s beard
loosestrife, paperbark
night-scented jasmine
sprawling bluebell, smokebush
bindweed on picket fence
spike rush, club rush
chainfruit, barbed wire grass,
dagger orchid, trigger plant
devil’s needle park
cough bush, sour bush,
kidney weed, bleeding heart
weeping spleenwort, waratah
clustered everlasting
Black Panthers Haunt the Georgics
On the outskirts of Darug and Wiradjuri
Lying on branches of ghost gum
Grown deep into the Blue Mountains
On the outskirts of Darug and Wiradjuri
Can’t help thinking that’s what I saw
Grown deep into Blue Mountains
Big top mascot zoo escapees
Can’t help thinking that’s what I saw
Elders say they’ve been here all along
Big cats up with the trapeze
High above the floodwater peak
Elders say they’ve been here all along
Now dragging cattle into tree forks
High above the floodwater peak
Spotted across Australia
Dragging cattle into tree forks
Their gold-eyed shadow economy
Spotted across Australia
The uproar if the State admits it
A gold-eyed shadow economy
Snapping the supermoon and Milky Way
The uproar if the State admits
Anti-work, a different ergonomics
Snapping at the supermoon and Milky Way
Lying on branches of ghost gum
Anti-work, into a different ergonomics
Black panthers haunt the georgics
Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland, and the author of the poetry collections Rawshock, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012; Jerilderies; The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau; ILL LIT POP; and, most recently, Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond Press 2019). He lives in Sydney on unceded Gadigal land.
