Degrees of Flight
Rosanna Licari
1.
Call me tonight
because I’ve been scribbling
the same poem for days.
Lately, I have stopped
not just mid-sentence but
at the beginning,
after the first letter,
or even between the space
where my hand moves
from air to paper.
Thoughts have become rotary,
a centrifuge that sticks me
to the sides of a tunnel
that leads nowhere:
no new sentence,
a full stop,
an abandoned take-off.
2.
The darkness and fresh sheets
usually bring freedom
but now insomnia blinks
at a spotlight of moon.
Then, in the garden,
a commotion
in the frangipani tree.
Three tawny frogmouths
position themselves
for the night watch.
On my approach
two fly away
but one lingers
and looks at me
as my eyes adjust to
its face, head, wings
and the cat meowing
for attention.
The bird swoops
and lands on a fencepost.
I watch, walk towards it.
When I look up at the stars
the frogmouth disappears
as my nightdress billows
like cloud.
3.
Light flutters
when the wick bends
into the melted wax.
Dreams are as illusory as
shadow play on a wall.
I can only pretend to inhabit
the sky’s wild beauty.
4.
The blinds are down
so as to hold back
a stiff, chilly morning
whose stare will order me
into stuttering action.
The tepid sunlight
encourages reflection.
Midwinter, and
the pond water is sky-filled
with hints of blue.
This is the natural border
where the ancient scrub turkeys
pass on their daily route
into my world.
The children of crones,
all of them,
doused in limp, charcoal feathers
smelling of glacial ice.
They’ve torn up the garden,
dancing the staccato of
step, look, peck and scratch,
then digging
like mechanical hens.
They don’t soar,
for flight is a clumsy arc
that ends in roosting trees
or roofs.
5.
I can’t see you.
You’ve wrapped yourself
in a blanket and say
the darkness is comforting.
I raise my arms as wings and
think of Spring.
Rosanna Licari is an Australian writer. She has appeared in various journals and anthologies including foam:e, Island, Tincture, Shearsman (UK), fourW: New Writing, Idiom 23, Small Packages, Softblow 12th Anniversary Anthology: We are Multitudes (Singapore), Australian Love Poems and Global Anthology (Canada). She is the poetry editor of StylusLit.
