II

The grand hotel overlooks

A deep blue pool

Surrounded by novelty palm trees

Everything seems a waste

In winter

But it’s not raining here

And the sun is beginning to fill the morning sky

I’m too excited to sleep.

…

We play pool

Under the Jim Beam posters

Pints in hands

At the Sandbar.

Lewi leans over, his eye to the table

He hits the purple ball

Into the left hand side pocket

I groan.

On the TV above us

A football game

From the eighties finishes again

Men in small shorts jump together

Slapping each other on the back

“Did you see Sharon Olds?” he asks me.

I nod.

I had been leaning over a table of books

cradling her Father in my hands

when I had seen her over my shoulder

standing next to me.

I had in a purely surprised manner

Gasped out loud - it was unreturned

I thought for a moment

Of the small grey lady before me

And that perhaps she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen

And would ever see

Then maybe I thought,

I am being too romantic for this world

“Is staying with Brain okay?” I asked Lewis

“Yeah it’s fine.” He replied, his Adam’s apple

Rising and falling with the

Gulp of a beer.

“Who lets university students come and stay with them for the Writers Festival,” I thought,

“Only sickos.”

Will and I run up and down

The golden sand dunes

Gaining momentum

Laughing

And I feel like for a moment I know what it would have been like to be a child with him

In another world

He could have been my brother.

The Mildura desert

Spreads out before us

No one is around

Except for the birds that hang

And glide on the wind above us.

Pieces of torn off cardboard

Flutter on the sand

At our feet.

I am reminded of Anthony Lawrence’s talk

He said the constants in his work

Were landscape and weather.

The sand has wrapped around and engulfed the trunk of the giant Mallee tree.

We climb in its limbs

Anthony Lawrence said poetry was about

Finding something

Extraordinary in the common place,

I feel like we have done that.

What strikes me the most about the Poets

At the Festival

Is that they are cloaked right now

In the glow

Like a sequined cape of celebrity

But when they peel it back

They are still black inside

Lawrence said his default soundtrack

Was melancholy

And that reminds me so much of the poets I know

And the poets I see

These are multifaceted people

Shining in the dusk

We see them at their best – before they go to sleep.

On the drive back we pull over

Will steals some oranges from a heavily laden tree

On the side of the road

Mildura is famous for oranges.