CLARENCE CADDELL lives on sheep and cattle country in Victoria’s Western District, where he teaches high school English and humanities. He edits The Borough (theboroughpoetry.com), a journal scheduled for launch in September. The poems published here will be collected into the manuscript to be entitled ‘Broken Words,’ a narrative of marital conflict and eventual divorce.  

Digital Memories

I think we are immovable by now.

   Or what might happen?—What and how

Exactly? Rather, when will it fall, our last

   Embrace before the endless fast?

I wonder too if in succeeding time

   Nostalgia for our distant prime

Will see me find again and contemplate

   Hot selfies you once sent as bait.

Home Is Not Sad

What happened to us was unthinkable 

As matter in itself, of how our house

Kept standing in our absence like a fool,

So lacking in the least panpsychic nous

That when I first came back here without you,

Without our children, here was a cliché

It must have meant for a symbolic coup:

A pile of hearth ash by the door as grey

As were the clouds. If I had an idea

Of what it would be like, it was as far 

From this as noumenon from all these mere

Phenomena. My idiotic car

Behind, beneath that senile portico,

The lock and key spoke: ‘What we know, we know’.