Charles D'Anastasi
Charles D’Anastasi is a participant in Poetic Portraits, an intergenerational creative project to showcase the creative talent and diverse life experiences of different generations in Monash.
Charles D’Anastasi is a Melbourne poet.
His work has appeared in various journals including Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Spineless Wonders and Burrow. His chapbook Madame Bovary and other prose poems was published by Mark Time Books in 2014.
Travelling
The plan must have been for the wood to float –
even linger – water the bloodline of its former life.
Now stiff and fading, it hangs
on a wall amongst pot-plant foliage.
Letters etched on it are strange and leaving, as
are colours of the wood turning ghostly white,
inviting history and mystery, almost covetousness,
while it unfolds a past, a face brimming with stories.
Its usefulness was once playful and rhythmic,
kept sentry over a fishing net resting with others.
Night hours inhaled. Dotted lights were consolations.
Kept lives together. A way of life. Continuity.
Paid the vendor, thanked him for the wooden floater,
joined the throng of marketgoers and smiled.
And although it was safely in my backpack,
I imagined the piece of wood bobbing on the water.
Something found, Japanese, not a watch
or sushi, but an object that sings and wails: water…
other ways to discover and travel the world.
Now and then
After William Carlos Williams
Even in those days
the blue of the sky,
rain and light were there,
as were the clouds, sea creatures
and all other animals.
The poets and their world,
painters and architects too.
They were there. They were there.
Why then the wasted
temptations, the forks in the road?
Do you remember
the poet in Danse Russe
in an upstairs room, while his family slept,
the ‘sun’ ‘a flame-white disc’,
how he twirled his shirt, above his head,
and couldn’t stop the ecstasy and madness
of the moment – the purity of it all,
said ‘I am lonely’, claimed it was congenital,
and that it was best so, or words
touching that crown
of thorns. Even in those days
you instantly connected
with the possibility of self-recognition,
joy of solitude, but also a void, a catharsis.
Do you remember?
Do you sometimes?