Famous Reporter # 14 - poetry, Lucy Dougan: 'Notes Towards an Impromptu Garden'

LUCY DOUGAN

Notes Towards an Impromptu Garden

(i)

You love this don't you,

like me? The rain beaded

on your eyelashes as you pass.

Nothing else disclosed

between strangers,

only this -

I had to have

black nails, full, pushed up from my skin.

(ii)

Down the side of the house

in unlikely soil

there's an impromptu garden

and all my attempts to move its show

have failed.

I turn and leave the tenderest

pertunias to it,

and then, delighted,

wonder if our souls become perennial

from sheer neglect.

(iii)

The first sign of you today:

a perfect cosmos flowering

from a trodden stem,

and as I cupped its pollen-dusted world,

close to the ground,

the dearest intimation of your life

comes down with the evening.

Lucy Dougan was born in WA. She has published poetry, reviews and critical work. She works at Newcastle Community Arts Centre and has two children.