Flying to Queensland to see my Mother / Soldier Crabs
Two poems by Jayden Spillane
Flying to Queensland to see my Mother
It’s 6am.
Sydney is barely awake.
as she disappears beneath the plane wing
I trace her jagged shape –
broken plate, crystal ashtray flung against gyprock,
Rorschach stain.
The rising fog forgets the city.
Above the cloud cover,
a strange land wakes and yawns –
dawn stretching dazed across the
enormous ruffled blanket,
sheets tussled by the giant
kicking in her sleep,
still dreaming.
All is stillness here,
mist encased in a picture frame,
and I reminisce and sift through the
sun-bleached photograph,
a sleepwalker lost in
colonnades of cloud,
snow-soaked statues lining
cathedrals and castles of unspun cotton,
marble mountain ranges lurching unchanged above
acres of alabaster prairies –
frozen memories of endless places
that have never not been.
In a twist of light,
the illusion dies,
the cloud’s white knuckles buckle against their grip on time
and are smoke again.
before the end of the day,
these swollen mausoleums will vanish into
air or rain.
We’re landing in Maroochydore,
endless, straight, sun-baked ceramic
dotted with dead volcano bones.
Mount Coolum stares headless into an open ocean,
remembers being known by other names,
remembers being molten,
recalls the cracks that open and ache in her ever-shifting body.
To me, she looks the same as she did two years ago
and ten years before that.
In a few hours I will see my mother.
we will say the same words that we always do,
avoid the same words that we always do, but
she will be four months older than last time.
In two days
I will be flying home again.
The plane stops. The cabin doors open.
Everything now is eternal and temporary,
and the tarmac is wet with rain.
Soldier Crabs
You spot the soldier crabs on the beach
and bound toward them with delight –
marvel at the battalion of blueberries
balanced on matchsticks
scattered across the bay –
your smile resounding as you encounter
your Cancerian kin.
That evening, sitting in the car,
your cheeks wet with saltwater tides pushing
from your moonlit eyes,
you carry the vulnerability of crustaceans,
bare to the sun on the mudflats
scared of the gaps in their
salt-patched armour,
scurrying for the sanctuary of soft silt
to cover their careful bodies.
Deep in the night,
I sense your restlessness
as your bones lie beside me in the bed,
your long soul stretched uneasily across this city –
head nestled on the mountainside,
souls of your feet in the sea,
and your heart
searching for sustenance in the low-tide
somewhere in-between.