Two Poems - takahē

A Stuffed Owl in a Museum

Potatoes in a box at the bottom of a rack,
bitter greens bunched in twine, the cold air.
The shop is dim inside, packs of sliced bread
in brown paper bags. No soy or rice milk
at this grocery store. I buy a bag of spinach,
rinse the soil in the sink, pull the roots away,
let the leaves drain in a sieve as you cut carrots.
The hillside has been scraped, turned out
for apartments, loose stones on the tar road,
and a dead cat. The owner of the shop stands
outside, smokes cigarettes; he doesn’t say much,
a stuffed owl in a museum in the dark,
and as the days go on, I notice his mouth
turn at the corner. Salt air falls off the wind,
piles on top of streetlamps, keeps the street
as it is; no one says anything anymore.

Cheese on Toast

The table was full of figurines, of mallards
and old men. I don’t know when he stopped
going to the markets, walking the streets
on throw-out days, looking for more to take.
He didn’t finish reupholstering
the Victorian lounge; a book by Eliot
stood against one leg on the floor, and another
by Pound at the foot of the coffee table.
Everything was there as I remembered;
the painting of Guernica behind the front door,
a row of small Renoir nudes
above the balcony window, and a few of his own.
You won’t find his name anywhere,
not as a poet or a painter. Only that he died.

One of his paintings was of mum with long hair;
he didn’t like it when she cut it short.
After she left, he fed pigeons on his balcony,
dropped seed all over the worn carpet by the door;
he walked the promenade at the beach,
took the bus home when his angina came on.
He loved Theodorakis, clay target shooting,
fishing from Mermaid Rock.
I didn’t see him till he was in a casket,
the day before his funeral.
I remember he drank black coffee,
painted the empty coffee jars and doors,
and when he was older, on his own,
he ate a lot of cheese on toast.

Ion Corcos was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1969. He has been published in Cordite, Meanjin, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain, Southword, riddlebird, and other journals. He is the author of A Spoon of Honey (Flutter Press, 2018).