I Wish I'd Written This

Three Poems for Carmen
by Lyndon Walker

1. APOLLO BAY – 5am 7th August
The ocean was with us all night
Thunderous and heavy
Rolling over in its sleep
And further out, deep
Full of whales and coldness.

Your tiny sounds as you slept
My creeping through the house so as not to wake you
To write this.
Outside
Barely breathing
The dark, unwoken, world.

2. HER SOCKS
I knew they were her socks when I picked them up
And put them with other things
Into my bag. Two small socks without dislike or suspicion.

She had thrown them off, quickly
To race out across the road
To tell the man
Whose hat had blown off
Where he could find it.
She’s like that.

And when she came back
Leaping at me
Like a silver fish from a stream of pure joy
I lifted the camera I had been playing with
And gave thanks.

3. BECAUSE YOU ARE MUSIC
Because you are music
I drive carefully
Up the mountain road through forest
And patches of light
Into your absence.

When I asked Lyndon’s permission to include him in this series, he kindly supplied a bio:

LYNDON WALKER was educated in Psychology at La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne and Deakin University. Lyndon practices as a Family and Individual Therapist. He undertook a world reading tour in 1994 and in 1996 was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. He lives in Carnegie in Melbourne.

(Expanding that a little, from his facebook profile:) He writes poetry, short stories, novels, screenplays and academic works on Psychology and Psychoanalysis. He is a father of one adult daughter.

I first got to know him in the early eighties, when we were both on the Committee of the Melbourne Branch of the Poets Union of Australia, and both had books published by Pariah Press. Pariah was a Cooperative venture requiring meetings and discussions, so in both capacities I learned to value his intellect, wit and generous spirit.

As a performance poet, he could be wonderfully over the top — good lungs for shouting, when required! We no longer live in the same city so I haven’t heard him in recent years, but I imagine it’s still the case. His poems on the page reveal a similar daring, in his willingness to experiment. A free versifier like most of us, he also handles form very well. And as you can see, he is capable of the most tender nuances. Because the above poem mentions music, I’ll round out this little sketch by telling you that he sings in a concert choir called Soulsong.

Details of Lyndon’s books and some individual poems can be found at his website.

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).