Kate Middleton
like a ghost or a short, quick river
Martin Harrison
Replace one water with another:
the spectre of drought in Vegas:
imagine dry showers, being sanded of dirt, like
in the dystopian movies we’ve seen:
filth an extra skin to be
abraded, the porcelain of beauty mags
now only available to those
hermetically sealed in, away
from any megapolis:
the stop-start of the border river—that once
swept illegals away with its force, now
dammed into walllessness
—a stand-in for the future of water
restrictions “back home”: the dry creek bed
of childhood the longest
deprivation:
on talkback, news of a town committed
to underbid the restrictions enough
to donate the excess to their botanical gardens—
at last a true collaboration: the future
of beauty:
flow evaporates to standing water: to
ruffles the surface’s satin sheen,
reconjures the old crinkled shot silk of it: abundance
of light, still unfurled across its surface:
the surface, memory, shrinks
Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, Ephemeral Waters (Giramondo, 2013), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s award in 2014, and Passage (Giramondo, 2017). From September 2011–September 2012 she was the inaugural Sydney City Poet.