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the poet
Born a poet nearly five decades ago, David Pecotić has had many adventures in the years between then and now: as seeker after truth, academic, partner, public servant, father and counsellor. Recently, tragedy reawoke in David a need to express himself in poetry. His poems have so far appeared in the Australian Poetry Collaboration and The Canberra Times. David lives in Australia, where he's in a complicated relationship with his daimon.
the poems
There are Days
You Cross Hunted
There are days you cross hunted
in rivers, shaded and breezed.
Foot after sucked foot,
this little can be a lot
if it’s yours
in the solid dark.
Where you stand,
others barely
there
move slightly
unseen
and you see to live
is to live around yourself
closer and finer
and doesn’t take
the eyes in a face.
Where they narrow,
they blow in.
Where they long,
they draw out.
Such small round things
slip
through the net strings.
Even at the last
strung
at the estuary’s edge.
Inheritance
Out of time,
I am become
what I was:
a fisherman
off & on
a black goddess
island,
where the fish
that make dreams
school their poison.
Back on shore,
I tell the bees
the names
of every gutted vision earned.
A million glass wings
beat sweetness in return.
Further inland,
I am the goat man,
hoofed hard-on
chasing every woody
piece of arse,
even my own.
Up on the mountain,
I’m his father,
equally erect
but frozen,
the holy thief
whose hungry mouth
made the music.
A dead ringer for shades
who wings for tricks.
Only in the forest dark
can I reach down my throat
to pull myself out,
a vukodlach,
wolf-skin
turned inside-out,
drum-like
and ruddy.
Village monster
I kept down for so long,
I had cut my hams,
pricked my whole body
with pins to prevent this:
I cannot pretend
after this operation
I won’t walk about
forcing your submission.
Strigun—human by day,
demon by night;
held in check
by my krsnik:
the warlock gift with his hawthorn stick,
that takes away,
gives peace
by piercing,
the heart again.
Hoarfrost Future
Winter is always colder half-broken—
the frost bleeds out
as a sacrifice to what comes.
Today is as hard and cold,
sparkling a sharp wet razor.
So many melting facets,
so much hoarfrost future.
Glass candy hard
on a ground we can’t feel
getting warmer,
so subtle the seasoning.
I flow out the same, rhyming the solid ebb-tide—
wounded words and eyes
swallow unsatiated
spongey beds of loved leaves.
What does the sun-warmed wind
mean to their delicate rise and fall?
They tell me
to my autumn and spring
I don’t owe anything
at all.
Publishing credits
There are Days You Cross Hunted: Australian Poetry
Collaboration (Issue 34)
Inheritance: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 30)
Hoarfrost Future: The Canberra Times (February 2021)