Essentially Human

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Bev Braune
In the Southern Highlands I think I’ve made a friend on the ground. She tells me the baby inside her has not moved. Her husband doesn’t know how not to smile anymore. The baby is dead but she does not know this yet. It is three months later before she shows me the photo she carries in her wallet like a Victorian lady. It looks already born somewhere else with a new name. In between, murder has sat in the road at my neighbour’s crossings and spared one save his leg and a mother at least one son. She makes dolls to keep her in the house, to stop her from crossing her own road. Now she too keeps a silent husband. Before I leave I will spend a night in the spotless pub with fine glass on the floor. For those who know the meaning of sound in the silent town—the way of glass in my steps, the shots saved for ducks at night, the dolls dancing on the clothes line, the wind in the dresses of the missing girls—disappearances mean discipline.
Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

A Silence

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Geoff Page

We watch them sitting down beside us,
(she, the latte; he, long black)
and see them splitting up the paper
(he, the sport, and she, the crossword).
Five or forty years ago,
we would have seen them leaning inwards
antiphonal and half-obsessed,
hands upraised to stroke a cheek.
We’re thinking now, too hastily,
how all their conversation’s gone,
how everything and more’s been said.
We see the waiter bring their coffees.
They look up vaguely with their thanks,
glimpse each other fleetingly;
then re-divide the world.
Alone or paired, it seems to us
that life is mainly diminution,
infatuations cannot last.
We read the law of entropy
across their concentrated faces.
Their sex life, we surmise,
must show the same decline —
skins in moonlight too well-known,
dramas long played out.
They look up once to share a smile.
She’s stuck perhaps on 14 down;
he wonders how the Western Bulldogs
ever won a game.
A knee is rubbed against a knee
as if by accident.
We’re thinking it’s all loyalty now —
and somewhere also seeing how
a high spring tide of pheromones
collapses into love.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

it is not the river carrying us away

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Shevaun Cooley

The armoured bream glint
and scatter. We bunt the hull
against a submerged pylon. The anchor
chatters its chain against the gunwale and
vanishes. We can feel in the swing of the dinghy
how the anchor kites in dark silt thin
almost as the water itself.

This is how the river catches,
hauling what it can from underfed creeks,
widening to pools where the tiger snake,
quick as history, swims in patches
of water warmed to a green
opacity. How many spirits
are caught in the phosphate
run-off, tugged, almost weightless,
against underwater rocks, torn at times,
only to come back together.

Rivers are secretive. They do something
to time. But only rarely do they catch fire –
the day smoking down on us, the cold cinder
crumble of a paperbark under hand, the hot sheet
of the surface at sunset, the hook in the eye
of a whiting. When the anchor is raised,
it’s a dead weight, laden flukes trailing dark
mud as it emerges. We have caught
almost nothing. But we hear,
in the beginnings of night
how, on the river, even
a voice is ash,
at last hushed.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

trees are about you

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Shevaun Cooley

I was far from
the root of things and
therefore quiet
of mind. Picking

holly, breaking stems
with gloved hands.
In each waxy leaf
the gleam of winter’s

flattest days. So few
berries this year,
and all of them out
of reach. I’d climbed

a steep slope, and in
reaching leant my whole
weight against a birch.
It was only right

to put my ear to it,
as once I’d auscultated
the chest of a man
I tried to love; whose

blood would press
to the inner meniscus
of skin, and skim
away. I heard this

time no sap, just
the tree’s own
chambering, a hum
of branch scraping

with another birch
in the rising wind.
Then, four clear
knocks. Who hid

inside? Or asked
to leave? Or wanted
to come in; to the hill,
the open air, my

simple ear? Who’s there,
I might have said.
Or found some other
question. Are you at home

in there? Knock,
knock. I know
of a man who,
faced with ancient

handprints in Chauvet
Cave, saw not an imprint,
but that someone still
pushed firmly

from the other side.
But what then of
the drawn bison,
the stalking panther?

Do they prowl and
moan behind it all,
coming at us through
even this bark, resolute.

Who’s there, I want
to say. There are no limits
anymore. Everything burns
and dissipates or

somehow roots in.
Joseph Priestley
felt his one death closing
in, no more than a high

whine in the tips of
of the trees. He said
goodbye, and covered
his eyes, that no one

should witness what
passed. In the end,
we always seem to
face a kind of shame.

I moved my head
away from the tree’s
inner murmur. Enough
gathering for today.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Inside Quietness (Söderlund)

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Mran-Maree Laing

I wake: only the wind
curls, the rise and fall
call of the whip bird
the white curtain billowed with light.
Everyone is sleeping.

The quiet house accepts my footfall
the way a winter forest accepts a solitary deer:
coarse wooden walls—
the colour of molasses—groan
as I pass, forgetting they are no longer
standing trees easing themselves
beneath weight of snow.
In the kitchen a kettle of water
catches heat, brews a thunderstorm—
I hold my breath
but no one rouses.

Back in bed I contemplate the small
grey bird pecking air on the white plate
left out overnight, the blue hills falling
away like a clear rain.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Alone in the Woods

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Hannah Mettner

You are standing at an intersection: what used to be called a crossroads. One way is gravel and one way is sealed. North is whichever way you’re facing. There is no right answer. The sun gets behind you and pushes. What would your 38,000-word vocabulary say about that? Down that road is a poem. Down any road is a poem. But when you walk towards it with your muddy boots it becomes a story. The plot and characters function in the same way but you take more steps to reach the end. The story is a series of interruptions. Narrativity is the way we make sense of unrelated series’ of inconsequential events. Where is the end? This is not something you should be asking yet. You should be looking into all the blind windows to see if you recognise – who said there were windows? – you should be looking – into the trees to see if you recognise – you used to – know – all the names – now they wear name badges and your knowledge is defunct. They are like foreign students standing there in groups – growing roots – they have their real name which they assume no one can say – and a fake name – Shirley – Robert – Beech – Pine – to long for – what is English responsible for? In Japanese there’s a word for looking worse after a haircut – in Norwegian there’s a word for the euphoric feeling of falling in love – and there’s a Tibetan word for giving an answer to an unrelated question – you are standing at the crossroads with the poem hanging – off your every word – tugging – at your sleeve – this way – this way – there is a German word for the feeling of being alone in the woods – the poem has abandoned you – are you lost?

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Torpey Spoon

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Vanessa Page

for Evelyn, Elizabeth and Janet

Home is the colour of sunlight through the kitchen window,
a lemon-curd glow as day infuses thin air.

I’m inside with my young daughter, crafting a version of love
from cooling figs and a row of gingham-capped jars.

And with each turn of our old cooking spoon, I’m borrowing
maternal lore; making simple transactions of inheritance.

Some domestic artefacts endure in their retelling and
become glory box gifts worth leaving – like this simple spoon

placed by my grandmother’s hands and her mother’s before
hers, deep in a calico-lined tea chest. The kind of old spoon

that carried the heart of a kitchen. Wide-mouthed and generous,
with lipped edges that could curl snug around a single egg

or stir resilience through with servitude when the winds changed.
During weeks that stretched to months when the work dried up,

when tall brown beer bottles kept an empty meat-safe company;
when something could always be made from nothing.

A domestic instrument with a defined use and a dozen undefined
others; a generational orphan, an extension of matriarchal hands.

This afternoon, we measure distances together, making jam and
history, ghosted by the thickening fingers of bush brides.

And as Saturday floats, I am witness to my daughter’s
industry, working beside me with small, deliberate hands.

Day slides away and crickets crowd the night air with an earthly
thrum. From the back steps, the sky turns the colour of eternity.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

A History of Australian Silences

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Martin Langford

I

The first
was a cross-hatch
of bodily lightning –
a nerve-net
of increase-sites
danger-sites
food-in-its-season.

The first silence
shook out its leg
and sang low in the drone.

There were no gaps
between it and story.

The first silence
could not conceive
of an absence or end.


II

But
when the firesticks arrived,
that’s the first thing they found:
who could not
see their faces in the water;
who could not hear their language in the scrub.

The stage set was there.

But the actors were somebody else.

Clumsily, shrewdly,
they misheard and improvised:
track names and creek names and food names;
tribe-bunting/race boundaries/prospects and vanishing points;
the Gregorian time-grid; the Governor’s space-grid;
the long names for misdeeds,
the Flash names – and all the look-dumb names;
the Secretary’s full-sentence edicts. . .
the jokes and elisions that rounded them, late, round the fire.

An emergency lashing, a raft of inventions and doubts –
but the new silence held.

And everything in it was God’s work.

And everything not in it yet.


III

Banging and whistling,
they worked to install it all over.
The Governor strode round and proclaimed it.
JP’s reinforced it with strokes.
Communions re-drank it –
and even the abject confirmed it by being left out:
a shape-shifting, feral, part-rational silence
of hard labour/Providence/Upper Case Principles/
costume/affection for Ma//
the self-songs of distance and dyings//
the God-song of weather/the sing-song of daily amens.

A flexible, muscular lattice with scope for emergencies.

Except there were those
who kept gnawing away
at an ur-silence, out beyond bounds.

Who would peer
into all those small lights.


IV

I hold the Gorgon’s head, my own, my own;
it stares this lockjaw land to light and stone.

Hal Porter, Dry Final Scene

And this one was too big.

It stared at us blankly.

It howled from the ovens
and laughed at the lovers’ wet oaths.
It shimmied and bristled and clawed in a teeming biota.

It sent Frank Webb crazy: for whom
each next tick would be Morgan’s last breath.
It was Nolan’s one subject: a sluggish but permanent creek
into which all events e.g. murdered policemen, would soon disappear.
It black-holes from Tucker’s burnt faces:
the ironbark-and-blue of a stonewalling rage dried to distance.
Humphries hurled gladdies and home truths to make it take notice.
White tried the glare of close witness.
Silence asked, Who? Them or you?

And it won.

As it must. You can’t out-express silence.

This one was all absence.

Time to invite silence in.


V

Stand him up.

Brush out the sand from his hair.

Let him take as much time as he needs.

Who thinks
he has no other choice
but fight silence and lose:

that his role’s to raise it with triumphs –
with projects and lovers
that don’t quite add up to a win.

As if it succumbed to arrival.

As if it weren’t what we are made of, as well.

What can we do
except open the sides of our stories?

Dance with it?

Come on Ulysses.

One half-step. One. And now two …

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Village, The Bathers, Dialectic

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Siall Waterbright

The Village

The villagers here have a single theme. Really, it
is quite wearing, all these variations on the
strain of insufficiency. Why should I care?

But until my train comes I am stuck here. At the pension
I take my meals on trays up to my rooms, which causes
laughter between the manager and her daughter, who

otherwise aren’t on speaking terms. The cars are
decorated for a wedding and the battleships bite
their little bits of sky from the horizon, quarrying

the blue. Along the sea walk a track joins
one town to another and halfway in between, lined
with cedars, is the cemetery. The old men play at cards

all afternoon and kick the cobbled stones horribly
laced by tiny spray faced cats. I think that
I will take up smoking, if only to light

the air with sparks, each swallowing its
little bit of oxygen and its little bit of dark.

The Bathers

Beneath the broken heavy hills by the shapeless sparking sea
the odd unerotic angles of nude bathers, pink and bungled,
float on the landscape like lights, like balloons, like migraines.
Scalded shoulders and knees, florid heads and aspirant
bellies, goosepimpled, bulging over marks left by tight
removed suits; their tender feet stumble on the rocks crafted
by the ocean into axes and agents of blunt trauma.
They fit as neatly here as a cheque in an envelope, and in
their small devotions, awkwardly applying sunscreen
or spilling a towel across the harsh pebbled beach, they
are consistent with one another as disappointment and hope.
 
Dialectic

Top-heavy small brown birds nod in
the pine trees like clocks: tick squawk.

The mountains are heaped up around
like infamy. I am beginning to believe

in silence as a worthwhile project.
Something I tried so hard to be talked

out of. But this place is very persuasive,
with its apt unkindness, its chalk hills, its sea. The church

bells ring things that are not the hour.
Someone performs some service. But look,

there is burning, the reflection intensifies
the light. Not here, not here, is where we go in.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Snow from Hakuba to Nagoya

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Carol Jenkins

Each house, each fence, bough, post & letter box
has its chapeau or topiary of snow,

a cap, a stack whose mosaic interlocks
until it’s doffed.

Icing sugar, talc-like powder, linen perfect, doona-esque,
foot-hold test, temple finial, gravestone grace note; snow.

Tree pillow, roof fondant, template for tracks,
acoustic trap, bringer out of burlap,

under-foot squeak, eave dropper, candidate for the corduroy rake,
light amplifier, sight stealer, world white-washer,

detail obliterator, hoar frost generator, slope groomer,
light’s diffuse deflector to all white, reflective extender of the last light.

Scenic smoother, road block, ground falsifier, pond slurry-er,
airborne sip, persimmon decorator, graphic illustrator,

lane hobo, mono-chromaticist, bough breaker,
ice-maker, false delineator, ditch obfuscator.

Wind-drift traveller, car roof hitcher, beard starch
and hair stiffener, boot clog and glove coagulant.

Cabbage coat, leek mattress, cold store,
shovel chore, wonder maker, gumboot infiltrator.

Toboggan-izer, foot freezer, cable garland,
ghost maker, cloud sown once-and-will-be water,

road greaser, sound cease-er, shrub shroud,
storm maker, fractal faction, self-assembler,

fine flurry-ist, architect of avalanche, blizzard grist,
yuki, neve, neige, nieve, schnee, snow.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Pool

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Debbie Lim

New York, 2011

Grief, they say, has four steep walls
cut from black stone. Water sheers
off the sides into a giant pool:
the edges milk themselves violently
towards a hollow centre.
The level of water is sunk so low
no birds skim it. You cannot hear yourself
cry above the threshing sound.
But if you sit long enough, observe
how sunlight edges round the mouth
like a man scaling a ledge.
By noon, its surface glistens like tar.
At night, tiny lights fixed to the floor
people the depths.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Nell

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Todd Swift

When she took the bandage off her mouth
she found her lips in the mirror
dead as doorknobs, needing to be turned
but opening the locomotive of her throat

only sent certain crackerjacks out.
The truth when it spilled was white
like the ejaculate he had given her
as a present when she turned kind of four.

This was not the gift she had asked for.
So all the banshees that stuck
in her teeth like chicken, and all the lines
she crossed her arms with like noughts,

were so many touch and go bouts
of circumstantial evidence; or, straws
the drowning girl grasps for in the Pacific
when, having risen for the lucky third

time, she can no longer mime her furore
so breaks the silence like a biscuit in two.
And this new silence sounds abrupt
and is a siren call made only for you.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Silence

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Todd Swift

It doesn’t matter
And it can’t be done.

The way a wave
Won’t outlast the sun.

You see a word once
Then it’s gone again

Like wet paint drying on
A wall to be knocked down.

The songs are flashing
In a pond like signs, fish

Half-asleep until the ice
Is broken off.

It isn’t wrong to cough
When the big guns sing.

I had a vocation,
It had begun.

It lasted two weeks,
A vacation more than anything.

It gave great pleasure
To the lofty mice.

My silent words, O Lord, to you
Were offerings

Of sugar and spice.
By morning the platter

Was licked clean and bare
By vermin who had fed

On my adoration.
It had been bent and soft

Before then, then hard and coarse.
For once you care,

Care can’t be taken anymore.
You’re sent off course.

What goes is gone, what goes ahead
Is just enough to stay a hand

From making bad things worse,
Or worse, bedding things best left unsaid.

Undone is what all sheets were once,
On that occasion when they bled.

What lost its purpose
Was the poise. To clear

My heart my throat makes noise.
Above the ceremony

Good birds take wing
And in their leaving notify

The ground that soaring brings
A distance to be mastery,

In the new conjoining
Of thought and thing.

It wasn’t clearly meant
To be just above,

Which is why love always
Lies down in the end.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Hafiz: Ghazal 75

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Paul Kane

The products from the workshop of the universe, all of it is nothing.
Bring wine, for the goods of the world are nothing.

The heart and soul long for the honor of intimacy with the beloved.
That is all, for otherwise heart and soul would be nothing.

Do not, for the sake of shade, be indebted to the sacred trees of Sidra and Túbá:
when you look closely, O flowing cypress, heavenly trees are nothing.

Five days you are spared in this way station.
Rest easy awhile, for time is nothing.

O Saqi, we are waiting on the shore by the sea of annihilation.
Regard it, for the space between lip and mouth is nothing.

Wailing and weeping have sadly consumed me,
but to narrate or explain is worth nothing.

Fakir, beware: do not grow complacent in your zeal.
The distance from your cloister to the Magi’s tavern is nothing.

The name of Hafiz has gained honor in the world,
but among outcasts, the calculations of profit and loss are nothing.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Writing: Silence ::

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Paul Kane

To mark the surface
(in gelid depths trout linger),
to inscribe in point
(mordant bites into metal),
is giving voice to silence.

Etymologies
are wiser than our sayings,
or, distillations
of our perilous knowings.
We write, but we are written.

Long or short, our days
are numbered, start to finish.
We can count on it,
but it will seldom be real
for us, more so for others,

for others we love
as ourselves, in whom we live.
I sit and listen
to the last breath die away.
How quickly her hand turns cold.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

New Glass

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Sue Wicks

On the other side of the glass
the garden mimes itself; even the leaves
ripple without a murmur in the breeze.
A question-mark above the grass

betrays a cat, suggests what the cat’s after.
If a sparrow dies
it dies in silence. Passing schoolgirls’ eyes
are full of silent laughter.

Ambulances hee-haw past unheard.
A wheelie-bin that used to mimic thunder
belly-rumbles quietly under
wraps, while overhead

the planes come in, reflect a gleam
of sun, their homing engines nearer than they seem.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Snow

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Michael Farrell

Blue flakes are falling on the tents and the tongues
of the kangaroos. It becomes white on contact. It
becomes warm. It’s one of the magics of the Monaro
of Kosciuzko. My arm and hair are one with the
kangaroo tongues. The tents are dripping. The sky

whitens the land as the land blues
the sky. That’s the feeling we
have in the jeep. Flakes silt the
tussocks and yams and ash trees
they Xmas the briars, if you’re
that way inclined: Chicago the
koalas; well we make do with
possums. I wear a red parka as

I run at the barbed wire fence and veer left like
a boomer. And whinny in the confusion of the
metaphor party the weather invites. When I’m
older I’ll catch Istanbul sky in my hands like music
and wear a trench coat like an extra from another

era – of Sydney – where they
only know of analogies. Here
we have no light only pieces
of the universe and bread. The
tents have left. The gum leaves
are clean as rifles. When you
put that piece of Europe in your
hand it’s your hand. I ride a white

horse as well as a wombat; I drive a white car
like a Fred Williams dab. We’re running deranged
on the fields of Bega, little white-arsed flies for
the most part and I put my face in yours. The mud
makes us shitty/happy. You put your face up in

the air like a kangaroo with a flat
tongue out for sugar, their subjectivity
gone haywire like the time there
was grass in the chocolate cake:
we just wanted to make it sound
nice, like Berlin. Everything’s
dual, everything’s a Hereford.
A blue haiku sun shines down.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Navel of the World

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Shari Kocher

Lake Titicaca is a freshwater lake the island of Amanti our home stay terraced and peaceful no motors no lights no buzzing at all the lake is an ocean of lappings the pathways are cobbled the fields tilled by hand the walls made of stone are Inca the light is soft the faces kind the food is simple and wholesome vegetable soup fried cheese cracked corn yams and beans and chick peas the peppermint taste of muña grows wild along the walkways everybody walks walking is life everybody moves so softly i love how the day keeps pace with the body the passage of sun on eating and working i love how the language has lilts and lulls how hands and feet grow silence the loveliest sleep in the world falls here i wake to water sheep at my window chased by a granny on nimble legs who leaps a stone wall waving her stick whistling dawn on a donkey ears lit softly beans to be dried a net on the mend everybody’s up and working everybody works but nobody hurries it’s hours still before breakfast the bed the floor the sweet latch at the door all has been worn to smoothness time deepens its rings in my hands

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Travelogue through Time

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Shari Kocher

colours explode in fevers of sweetness
a llama springs tied to a tree
cactus pillars packed with water
wind song through cacti thorns

one red rooster an ox-ploughed field
the silence of the puna every fold
of earth speaking a different colour
catacombs of human bone boxes behind

brass lion doorknockers twelve feet high
for those who once came calling on horseback
walls made of sand bird bones seashell
riverstones lime and water outlasting

centuries of earthquake the sound of a river
coming up from underground in layers
a child in the shadow of a darkened doorway
rocking the passage of water and time

cracks in the concrete swimming pool
filled with paper barking dogs on chains
houses behind wrought iron gates on hilltops
cacti and locks someone welding at dawn

red disk on the horizon head torn open
pin pricks and holes in the hessian
she drinks the chicha she is cold exhausted
the altiplano air implodes her lungs

she sits in her grave in a foetal position
wrapped in cloth facing east
her breathing slows the impossible scent
of jasmine stitching the hills to the air…

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Listening for Charlie

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Barry Wallenstein

Enough about me,
now tell me about you.
[tiny pause]
What do you think about me?

[silence]

Listen: the 12 foot schooner out on the lake
is but a twig compared to the ship I sailed
as Captain Kidd,
an alias to hide a connection
with Lord Vicious – never my friend
but always close and a beauty.

Charlie, what’s that faraway look as I speak?
Some critique grown in your skull?
My speech is not about me but you and us all.
If I tell you what we ate and smoked there
on that blasted, shipwrecked island,
you’d love the story but be too busy or too cool to respond.

But if you go on about your essay on pathos,
and how this high-toned, well-known
and on-time journal is about to publish
and pay well to print your title,
“The Wealth of Feeling,”
I’ll surely stop you for the health of my mind.

Tell me more (you haven’t said a word)
about your son who fell off a wall
protesting something – your details were lost in the wind;
remember? we were talking in the wind
and soon it was to be my turn.
This much I heard: he’s OK, alive and behaving.

The winds have died down, you devil,
and since you haven’t answered my question
or given any indication of how I look
in your mind’s eye, I’ll talk to myself –
as if no one were sitting across from me
here on the patio, hands slack and silent.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Silence: An Anatomy

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Alex Skovron

I reach into you
the half-light drizzles
my fingers caress your thoughts

You hear my footfall
we trace another memory
my limbs enfold

I follow you my eyes
can peer into the hidden corners
of your history

Your future I see within dreams
that shroud my bones
dreams I swallow to remake

My bloodstream thirsts
for the throb of matter my sex
gives birth to your desires

I wrestle with each sinew
to breathe luminescent dark
into your strivings

Your heart is where my heart
sings but your words
are not my words

My words have no names
a grammar of the unsayable
gesture’s pure tongue

And should you lose your way
banish the old conceit of sound
and I will guide you home

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

lip

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Joanne Burns

the reticent comic sprawls
across the numb linoleum considering
a loud tennis career pow-whoosh-slam
but no one loves me anymore; delphic
teapots leak like hushed puppies who
believes in loud prophecies these days
mountain tops prefer to sleep like blank
cassettes would you want to wear high
heels into yodelic canyons better to consult
a squad of kookaburras with zips on their
beaks ―


[a riff on ‘echo’ from on a clear day by joanne burns]

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Morphine

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Robert Minhinnick

All that’s in my head is in my head.
Try to notice Neptune, the poet said,

but there’s a mist outside, white on a white sky,
warm air across cold sea, turning the world invisible.

Morphine is a sister, is a saint.
In our blood and history they’ll trace the taint,

while all I see is the needle plunge,
or the golden-green, green-golden

draught in the eye-dropper
turning the world invisible.

Now a waitress brings the tables in.
I ask her for a napkin

and she comes across to the only customer
talking to himself and writing signs

like the moon and stars, the comet’s lines,
as if they could light up the gloom,

or the churning fret that hides the Seagull Room
and turns the world invisible.

I’m just the latest mad bastard to make her day.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to stay.

Yet all this dark matter is in my head,
and Howard, now you are forever dead,

and morphine’s still a sister and a saint
and an executioner. Too early for a cool carafe?
Let this eye-white fog then be your epitaph.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Mute in the Corner of the Museum of Love

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Campbell Thomson

Victorine Meurent, nicknamed La Crevette
modeled for Manet in Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’Herbe
also posing as a matador and with an African Grey Parrot
they were estranged when he rejected the Salon
so she became a painter and modeled for Toulouse-Lautrec
living out her days with Marie Dufour
in the Parisian suburb of Colombes
of her paintings, only Le Jour des Rameaux survives

Do words have enough of the taste
and texture of a low b flat
the sound of green
or the perfume of the back of your neck
to resist the lobotomy of thump
and the onslaught of ideas?

Prisoners in solitary, long distance truckers
sailors in the doldrums, high altitude pilots
and mushers with sled dogs in a flat icescape
see symphony orchestras, UFOs, steam trains
weird sea creatures, and baritones singing Schubert lieder

The ocean’s breasts heave serenely
its hair caresses the rocks
and it rests its forearms on the wharf
saying what a vivid orange voice you have
and isn’t 87 a fat woman
with a man twirling his moustache

Ingres told Degas to make lines, lots of lines
Renoir said he painted with his prick
but if you attach a rubber hand to your arm
and put your real hand under the table
when someone caresses the rubber hand
you can get an erection
because visual beats tactile every time

I see this nothing and it is something
that’s where the trouble comes in
the girl without hands doing arithmetic
with her non-existent fingers
a phantom foot can have a bunion
a phantom wrist a watch

You see the earth give birth to the full moon
like a turtle laying an egg on the sand
but when our night ends
the bay swallows it whole in one gulp
leaving a folly of bubbles
inlaid with lacquer marquetry
with the poet paid to be a naked statue
mute in the corner of the museum of love.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged