Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Prose poems from Subsidence by Mark Roberts.
Prose poems from Subsidence
1.
Last night I dreamt again of escape. Not of how I could leave the city by walking
to the transit station and catching a bus to the underground car park just beyond
the city walls where I left my car months ago, but of how I could keep climbing the stairs,
laneways and skyways of the city until I could step onto a soft grey cloud
and drift to the islands I sense wait just beyond the horizon.
2.
Outside my room
there is a mass of people
pressing in on me.
I can feel them
against the walls.
I need to open
the door to relieve
the tension.
3
I rarely talk now. Only when I walk to the road on the other side of the hill
behind the city and wait at the side of the dusty road for the bus that travels
to the town on the river where there are still shops and cafes, bars and people.
I speak then, request coffee beans, rice and wine. Check at the post office for
the cheques that arrive from my publisher. But my words are limited, nouns
mostly and no abstractions.
4
I look out across the old promenade, abandoned now as the ocean rose. I imagine
I’m making a film, a record of what is being lost. The cafe is framed by my lens.
Black and white. Abandoned on the walkway above a beach of small pebbles now
covered by a rising sea. My camera goes inside – a king tide surging through the empty cafe,
water lapping at the top of the bar. The camera just above the surface
of the water, hand held as if floating. Then dissolving into a shot from above, perhaps from
the top of a nearby building or a drone. The view moving from a close up of
the sign on the roof slowly back to show the building flooded, surrounded by the
sea reaching out to a retreating camera.
My language is almost entirely written. I hear words in my head but rarely utter them.
I write a poem,wait a little, and then translate it to Italian. The poem lives for a while split,
each word stretching to another.
© Mark Roberts
Mark Roberts is a writer, critic and publisher living on unceded Darug and Gundungurra land (NSW, Australia). He is co-editor, along with Linda Adair, of Rochford Street Review. His last poetry collection, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016. His next collection, The Office of Literary Endeavours, will be published by 5 Islands Press in 2025.