Infinite Ibis by Keri Glastonbury
obviously ageing (headshot short ashy hair
resting poet face, hook nose) but never
old enough for Winnie Blue in a silver
drawstring handbag after hockey: the slacker
in Staggers who thought the Boomers
would have solved Aged Care by now
was I expecting to move back?
not there, to Eastern suburbs art deco
cracking frozen puddles at the tip
once a depression era shanty town
& before that you have to turn to Trove
in horror, to fathom where star-crossed lovers
shouldn’t cross the river & I try to pull off
being a dog owner & my dog dies
so I’m back to feeling like a pretender
I’ve pulled up dead kittens in a hessian sack
with a canoe paddle, put crayfish in a boiling pot
seen a platypus but I have aphantasia
so can’t picture it or Big Murray
the 52kg cod in his concrete tank
this lit rectangle is a sinkhole in my palm
that refracts my gut biome
opening a packet of salt & vinegar chips
a bag of sherbet like ossified cocaine
Space Rocks exploded decades ago
on my tongue, as I see Artemis II on TikTok
the moon through a telescope in Coona
a tiny sacred kingfisher trapped
inside the amenities block
as I remember childhood wisdom
like wearing thongs to avoid tinea
& worrying a bleeding mole might kill me
one bar then offline as I walk back
across the freshly mown campground
to the Snow Peak tent & firepit
or how I stopped drinking once I got my Ps
wishing @Brownhatttt would do
the Wednesday Adams’ dance
is my version of dark academia
do you realise ibis
were once farmer’s friends?
This poem was written after an Easter camping trip with my dad and our respective partners at the Warrumbungles (on Gamilaraay Country). We drove through Coonabarabran, which had the feel of a country town arrested in time: the art deco Commonwealth Bank was still trading and we pulled in to grab dinner at an independent chicken shop. The road out to the national park was lined with numerous animal-themed novelty letterboxes and the atmosphere of the area reminded me of my childhood and adolescence – analogue and eternal. Though while our campsite was rustic, we have a groovy Japanese tent and fire pit and I was posting photos to Instagram.
The poem makes a lot of jump cuts and is a bit of a “glitch” poem (read it like a Lana Del Rey video). Where Del Rey is nostalgic for Americana, my poem engages with Australian iconography – including the ibis. Ibises are a native bird species that migrated to cities and I use them as a symbol in this poem to trace my own migration from growing up in an inland regional city (Wagga, by the Murrumbidgee River) to urban modernity in east coast cities. The poem overlays the past with the present, from memories of 1980s candy to seeing the moon; my mum, who died in 2021, was an amateur astronomer and the area around Coonabarabran is an international Dark Sky Park. We walked on ancient volcanoes, saw “Frank” the diprotodon fossil and the telescope at Siding Spring observatory.
This is a poem about time and distance, generation and family, mortality and star-gazing and ultimately finding solace in place (among human and non-human animals). As a woman in my 50s “obviously ageing”, I find that I can draw on a rich tapestry of sense memories that I combine in this poem.
Australian Poetry Month runs throughout August and includes festivals, events, workshops and a commissioned poem of the day brought to you by Red Room Poetry. Find out more here
