I Blame Cluedo

No Damascus, no horse-toppling
…………………………………………moment, no light haloing the hillside, no significant

astronomy of any kind; more my brain gone to custard, debating whether Colonel
Mustard deserved to be busted, or whether it was Professor Plum who shot
the gun, concealed beneath his academic gown until the kismet moment.
In early gestation I shunned books and films as if they were soups to be ladled
into my fevered brain, a description my Mum used as she patted my head

and pinched my cheeks.
…………………………………………I needed grit, not nutrition, the knowing was palpating

hands, pavement-thudding feet, live or near live tissue, all manner of doing,
even in play. True crime arrived later with a plot-charting and re-enactment value, texts
crammed my study as I careered towards policing, first in unform, then in Fletcher Jones
suits, though never topped by a trilby or pork pie hat, obituaries and eulogies
now case-research, my ever-present notepad–names, places, times, actions–

a breviary for contemplating evidence,
………………………………………………………..a songbook for the dance of proof.

**

My First Solve

Through the window of the detectives’ room, the sky was a sliver
on fine days, an end-stop on gloomy, the room itself a fug
of instant coffee and wildebeest armpits whatever the meteorology
or shirt print, the desktops always tussocked with unemptied ashtrays.

There were no incident rooms back then, no sticky tape or blu tack
visuals, no marker pen confabulations, just pocket notebooks we flipped
lengthwise as we decanted our measures of misbehaviour, squashed
into chairs that subverted most human shapes into question marks,

and waited for the assemblage of a melancholic or ambitious superintendent,
the one mechanical in the way of a broken-tooth typewriter, the other
prey to the logic of a gazelle, the pressure to assign blame insistent hailstones
on iron roofing whoever the led the case. A first lesson emerged: look

for the forced meld when the pieces are too tongue-and-groove
or dowel perfect; the scars of a made unison are hidden from view.
(The awkwardly aligned had yet to find a light bulb in me.)
It fell to me to unpick the case chronology–a locksmith become safe

cracker–its logistical elegance such that each act and journey was deftly
tagged one to another, fore and aft, and any delay or mishap would scuttle
our suspect’s alibis. As we probed the margins, our suspect resisted,
wavered, appended and revised, the thread of concoction unspooled

and he booked a saloon passage to the dock. Midnight pondering:
a half-truth punctures less easily than a bald-faced, or even bearded, lie;
past patterns frame the cross-hairs and they lock onto the obvious suspect
Occam’s-razorly, indecently almost, whither our acquiescence or query?

**

Mind Stunts

1. Foreboding

Impeded light, an air-pocket
in the room’s high corner, a sudden breeze
across my unshaven chin, an echo
ghosts every sound, my mind rakes
recent encounters for peripheral eyes
or gestures that might have accosted
my self-absorption, the page before me
poised for a pointless third perusal,
the unborn rustle at my shoulder craves a name.

2. Premonition

The road slick with evening’s retreat,
the usual traffic glacier, a level crossing
sign hovers above the verge on the climb
to the traffic lights on Malvern Avenue.
Once it registers, I swivel to recapture
the image, but find only columned
emptiness. Later that morning
a random internet search opens onto
a trainspotters’ almanac, an attachment
listing 20 years of level crossing accidents,
my breakfast eggs now a sump
that repeats on me. I scour the newspapers
from that time hence, haunt
the radio dial for the latest bulletins.

3. Déjà Vu

Curtains bunched and ruffled, stripes
of oblique light through the casement window
accent a single colour in the shade-dun
pattern, a tie or scarf I once owned perhaps.
My feet find their steps as if in a dance,
as if preceding me, I mime my friend’s greeting
to the syllable, welcoming as yesterday.              

4. Mirage

Distance on the bitumen is rectangles
of shifting sameness, a javelin runway
west, acid-harsh gibber and ochre
to the north, a pocket of remotest blue,
yet lakes somehow lather the vista,
lapping makeshift foothills
and a pool-shimmer on the road
far ahead. I am a thirsty fool.

5. “Hallucination”

Deft undulations of sand
for an unforgiving sacrum, my neck
knots the bow of a peanut pillow,
the book floats to my chest
like an accordion bird
as the clouds convocate
in my eyes, sun-slit arrows
and splinters are momentary
other voices, wisps become
sparks, whorls, helixes and curlicues
cavort, the cloud cotton chalk-coloured
and cadmium, denim and fuchsia,
the sky now an enveloping lung,
its breath an incubator, a lament,
floral-tinted in the eddies that catch
my whiskers, recommitting
to this finely-grained earth
a sensate light year away.

6. On Waking from a Dream

Revellers clump in corners, beneath
mantelpieces, streaky, resinous plumes filter
through doorways, words without conversation,
the music swings between surge and drone,
boom and echo, my ears are gramophone horns,
my eyes gold lamé buttons, a slit tunic banners
my iridescent flesh.
………………………..The alarm wails,
I fade upright, my head swims with body heat,
stomach acids bite at my throat, I clutch my tunic
tassels together in pyrrhic modesty, arrive at
pyjamas, smoke a nostril memory, music an arcing
beneath sound, “Whose party was it, anyway?”

**

An All Stations Train

I smooth away catkins of saliva spidering
your mouth, work to a pucker the kiss that will arc
across the distance we now endure with sweet
electricity, I pray, and not hang on your lips
like a dewlap that has outlived biological need.
To think, our embraces once rattled the bedhead!
Yours was a quizzical snare: an ardent brow, the rapture
of nomadic thought in slanting light, your hair
a gossamer weave with glints of gemstone; I yearned
to wander in that wondering. Our first meetings
were the clumsy manufactures seeming chance might allow,
your smile crinkly wry but captive, my ruses self-deceptions.
Our talk began as the shyest wren on the nethermost branch,
then trooped young and earnest into incantations,
a jig, a caper. A vase freshened with today’s flowers,
not of your legacy, where I loll on sunny afternoons
but tend lacking the wise conduit of your hands,
from Abdul on the corner, whose every courtesy
is an oud; the green through the panes promises
a stroll, should I be able to wheedle you from the bed.
Meanwhile, high school poets, anchored still beneath
our octogenarian haze, as if scripted for my rusty recitals,
the headlines, the tides of nations, morsels to savour,
the tumblings and paraphernalia of the generations,
our neighbours amok. Whether these warblings make
for birdsong or settle like mist on the fixity and ache
of your gaze, I persist: your breathing is my tabernacle lamp
and, when courage shrinks, routine apes its would-be stamp.

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Paul Scully is a Sydney-based poet, an actuary by training and works part-time in finance. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing and is a Doctor of Arts from the University of Sydney. The Literate Detective and Other Crimes is his fourth published poetry collection. His first, An Existential Grammar (Walleah Press), was short-listed for the Anne Elder Award. His poetry has been commended and short-listed in major Australian poetry competitions, including the ACU and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, and has been published in print and online journals in Australia, Ireland, the UK and USA. His website is http://www.paulscullypoet.com.au/. 

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