There’s a bird in the Aussie bush
builds bowers out of bottle tops.
At my crash-pad in London I employ
scented candles to mask the stench
of fresh emulsion, halogen magic
to enshadow the whitened walls, and prise
the crown from an ice-cold Foster's
to flush away the tastes of the city.
A blackbird hops along my window ledge
toting a bloodied syringe in its bill
drawn I suppose to its glinting steel
or the ripe red berry sealed in the vial.
I watch my blackbird spirit away
its prize into the foliate reaches
of the plane tree opposite my balcony
when suddenly the penny drops
that the twisted butts of spliffs
and burnt foils scattered under the tree
aren’t after all the aftermath of kids
but fall-out from construction overhead.
From my window I can’t see
through the canopy of palmate leaves
what jamboree of bric-a-brac
the blackbird has found its project needs
so my thirst for the story’s reveal
impels me to the littered foot of the tree
where on the cracked and swollen flags
lie several empty condom packs
the fruits of whose deflowered seeds
aren’t hung nearby, so I construe
those sheaths weren’t hatched in situ
and my bird is building a thatch
up there of a most unnatural nature.
Still those infernal vernal leaves
conceal from me the blackbird’s folly,
the lure to my itching curiosity
stubbornly still beyond my reach.
And a London plane is not a tree
that’s easily scaled, so I run to retrieve
my three-in-one extendable ladder
and rest its staves on the lowest bough.
I clamber up into the plane
whose wooden heart hammers a metre
too slow and subtle for us to hear
and sap-like I’m drawn by capillary action
into the void of its cavernous sphere
where daylight, shattered, lies scattered
in coruscating geometries that come
and vanish again before they’re seen,
a universe cloaked in constellations
blinking in and then out of being.
And from the still axis of this turmoil sings
the blackbird, its nest like a mirrorball
laced with tinsel and shreds of sequined
smalls, held together with earrings
and paper clips, ring pulls and nappy pins,
lined with tampons and cigarette ends.
Adapting to the spectrum shift
my eyes are drawn to a gap in the leaves
through which can be glimpsed now and again
a flickering tableau like a TV screen.
How otherworldly from here it seems
with its halogen lights and candle flames
casting shadows on the lonely walls
and forming stars in the amber bottles
collecting on the windowsill.
