for Sherman

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Steve Halle

what i mean to say is i mean no,
that’s not what i mean to say
i mean to say something “some-
thing, anything” the silence
is torture, i mean. what i mean
to say nothing at all even something
said, i mean, can mean nothing
but what i mean to say, something
i meant to say, i mean, before
i was so rudely interrupted, i
mean to say what i mean to say
regardless of who is speaking.
i will interject, being derelict,
what i mean into this laborious
discourse, i mean i will labor
to say what i mean to say and i
will, i mean to say, say what
i mean until each ear hears what
i say i mean. what i mean to say
is i mean to say i love what i
mean, so to say, i love what i
mean to say, for instance, say
i mean to say what i mean to
say then once what i mean to
say is said only then can i say
what i mean by what i mean to say,
that is to say, i will say what
i mean about what i mean to say
when i say what i mean to say,
and then also when i say what
i mean about what i mean to say
and then say what that means.
i mean, i see a man or woman,
and i say, “say, that man or woman
may mean to say what i mean to say,”
but i’ve not yet heard that man
or woman express what they mean
to say to see whether it is similar
to or the same (in principle) as what
i mean to say and i say if we
are in agreement why not say what
we mean to say to one another. i mean
to say, who does not love to revel
in the agreement of saying and meaning
and saying, furthermore, what one means
to say. yet, if this very same man
or woman means to say something askance
of what i mean to say i mean, this
is another matter entirely. what i mean
to say is i will say what i mean
to say i mean until the man or woman
understands not only what i mean
to say but also adopts what i mean
and says what i mean to say before
i say what i mean myself, or failing
that, says what i mean to say simultaneously
with the thought of what i mean to say
unclouding itself cognitively because
what i mean to say is why spend time
saying what one means if another means
to say something dangerously contradictory
to what i mean to say. i mean, if what
i mean harbors any kind of value at all,
then certainly this value presents
a kind of universal and i will find
that what i mean to say connects me
with other mans or womans by the shared
principles of what we mean and say,
i mean it is not possible and possibly
not even conceivable that what i mean
to say is not what i mean because
if i mean to say it, it must mean
it is what i mean and what i mean
to say ought to be said in such a way
that what i mean to say is recognized
as saying what i mean to say in the doing
of the saying. say any man or woman
happens to hear the act of me saying
what i mean to say, i mean, this man
or woman should know what i mean
by and/or through the act of saying
what i mean to say and if the man
or woman do not know, it is perhaps
because they have never imagined,
i mean to say, something other
than what i mean to say. that is to say,
i have completed the extent of what
i mean to say to the fullest superscript
of my powers for saying what i mean
to say i mean. i have made the act
of saying what i mean to say so
incontrovertible from and interconnected
with the true meaning of what i mean
to say that any man’s or woman’s version
of what i mean to say that differs
from the true version of what i mean
to say or mean will most surely
be the fault of the man or woman who
has superimposed what he or she means
to say or means or says over, above,
beyond or through what i mean, what
i mean to say or say i mean. i mean
these mans and womans that don’t
mean to say i say what i mean to say
have tipped the communicative playing
field in favor of hises and hers
egos, in favor of believing i mean
to say something other than what i
mean to say. what i mean to say i mean,
i mean, i mean i think, or what i mean
to say is i think the acting out
of saying what i mean to say is a
perfect act. i think and what i mean
to say is as what i mean to say appears
like a ghost voice on a recording
device as if from out of nowhere.
what i mean to say gets enacted
and emerges in what i say i mean about
what i mean to say and what i mean
to say is these mans or womans cannot
possibly think, what i mean to say
is, cannot possibly think what i mean
to say is something other than what
i mean to say or of what i mean
to say as expressed in word or deed
ought to mean what i mean to say
and not, i mean, what some mans
or womans means to say i mean. i mean
what gives that he or she the right
to say that what i mean to say is anything
other than what i mean to say i mean.
i mean, considering a discrepancy
between what i mean to say and mean
and what some man or woman thinks
or interprets what i mean to say i
mean makes me so angry and frustrated,
which is unwholesome, i mean, my anger
prevents me from acting out what i
mean to say. i mean i want to rid
the world of the potential mans
and womans who say what i mean to say,
i mean, differs from what i truly mean
to say i mean because, i mean, in this
way it is possible to once and for all
mean what i mean to say in emergent
thought and word and deed finally.
what i mean to say is i will then not
hesitate or waiver to say what i mean
to say for fear because then when
i say what i mean to say it will be said
in such a way that what i say i mean
to say will really, truly be what i
mean to say and mean without hesitation,
counterpoint, misinterpretation, or dispute
until what i mean to say differs
from what i mean and say, at which point
i will have to refute what i said
i meant to say with what i mean to say
about what i meant to say and said
and meant & it will become gospelized,
eliminating of course, those mans
and womans who say that what i mean
to say about what i meant to say
and said differs from what they mean,
what they say and what they mean
to say about what i have said
and meant, or say and mean, and then
what i mean to say and mean about
the changes to what i have meant
to say and meant will become gospelized,
overflowing, i mean, with the absolute
truth of what i mean to say that is until

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Sinking into Silence

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Lorraine Caputo

—a poem for two voices

Long after midnight
silence pools within
this inn within
the city

Sliced by
someone’s snores
the giggle of a baby
a motorcycle sputtering by

Each sound

the keying of a lock
creak of a door
marching steps up the main street

Each sound
sinking

the cooing of a caged dove
rustle of bedclothes, squeak of springs
a truck shifting gears

Each sound
sinking into the
depths

a television tuned to the late-late show
dripping water from a faucet
distant bark of dogs

Each sound
sinking into the
depths of the night’s

quitted shoes falling on a wooden floor
hushed voices

Each sound
sinking into the
depths of the night’s
silence

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Offshore

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Barnaby Smith

11.53pm, Crackneck Point, Bateau Bay

tankers queuing up and down the coastline
sparkling in their sleep they are
compulsory distances apart

the scene, what we have decided is sorrow as bruising clouds
hover offshore compelled by
stage directions: sound of seagulls
and waves

impetuous winds mark the ritual
in coarse March air forming
puffy blisters decoratively against the stars

the hush before psalms

silence as a virtuosic act of history
written in memory of the sea

a whip of intimacy must be how the animals
feel
when they come
to our back door
to die

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Art of Fugue

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Helen Parsons

Angela Hewitt in concert, October 2013

There were two silences. One I had expected.
Where the final contrapunctus breaks, unfinished,
she had asked us to be silent and we were.

It was as if Bach had just died, as if
that vast creating mind had vanished suddenly,
gone into some dimension inaccessible to us.

We felt the miracle of what we’d heard, the mystery
of the source of rivers and of their dispersal finally
into the sea. And then she played a late chorale:

Now before your throne I come. It ended.
Silence again, and then the clapping came
in great cascades and we were on our feet.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Termites in Spring

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Kyle Kohinga

He says Termites. Scrutinising
their Braille, he finds a tinyness too obscure for such stubborn
thumbs. He says The wood’s too bitter, compensating
with his literacy in timber.

*

I think, the termite’s entire body
is devoted to language. Following a scent’s stain,
a pilgrimage to sucrose wood.

*

We talk about the tragedy of knowing.
He says Look at this bit, steel-toe circling
a section of raspy
decay. He says They had no clue, sniffles
at the arrogance of the past.

Alone, I study sections of floor-board
for nescient letters, tracings
in dusty termite-shit, scraping clots out
from under my ruby-red fingernails.

*

He pulls back more stucco.
He says They’re gone. He says Bet you they’ve got designs
on that oak out front.

In dreams, my elbows scar with blisters
where a termite has broken out
through the skin. I spit creamy fistfuls of them, feel
a scrotal tingling, that
their empire needs the sex of my bones.

Waking, I hear a phone-call in the hall, his voice gone stiff
on certain words: sander. Girls. Concerns.

*

Yesterday, I bit paint off my nails. I coughed
at the ceiling. Today, I scratch three lines about water, or
the dank retch of rot, and then

such human noise is muted; everything
is muted by the bitter taste of wood.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Reaching

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Heather Taylor-Johnson

Somebody died three houses down
it was the girl – and this is what I want to say –

she was sixteen and could not breathe
air failed to travel its path and floated

just beyond her reach. She could not speak
and worst of all, no one heard her reaching.

Silence is never silence;
darkness and cloud-cover cushion volume

but they are not impassable.
I sat outside; no wind carried the pain

from the home three houses down
yet I felt death by the handful emptying its load

onto my lap, skin absorbing the heavy loss
it spilling from my chest, my eyes

pouring pictures out, tacit words shooting
from my mind. You were there:

in the op-shop hammock hanging
from the longest branch, you near-winter rapt

to be lazing, drenching in the big sun
and a thin grey jumper, there was a bottle

of water resting in the curve of your hip
the novel you had been talking about

sleeping on your full breast, and then
you were dead –

the loss of your breath
felt in the stillness of the leaves.

Death was not death that day
even in autumn, when sunflowers refused to rise,

but something like silence, like darkness
and cloud-cover. Sometimes I reach

for your phantom body as if I am trying not to fall.
I cannot breathe or speak

and this is what I want to say – I might die
the heart ceding to long stretches between go

and go, the brain too tired to dictate to the heart
and no one, my love, no one would hear my reaching.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Pain Management 1 & 2

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Lesley Carnus

What size is your pain, what strength on a scale of one to ten,
what colour is it, what song does it sing?

My pain is grey. Dull like layers of fog that settle
over the tors of bog-lands. It is a gloom
that spreads and seeps through bone.

The song it sings haunts the bleak muirs.
It leaks out of mean homes that once bred warriors
whose callous shadows weigh down

the shoulders of men taught to bear grief
with a straight back and a grimace.
—————————-
Mine is a scarlet poker that sears
nerve, spine, brain and flesh.

It skewers each act and thought
with thrusts so deep
that each breath is a burst of fire.

It has trapped me here on a narrow cot
of catheters, drips, timid shots of morphine.

I listen to the faint pulsings of machines
and pray to no god but mercy, for silence.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Finishing

Posted on February 1, 2014 by David Hathwell

The love of form is a love of endings. —Louise Glück, ‘Celestial Music’

What if it’s somehow like the end
of a good, a well-told story?
Then you’ll have completion,
have, better still, completeness.

The reckoning will be a rounding off,
an arrival so well foretold
by the setting forth the journey
will have seemed all along a return.

All questions will be answered.
Should the sense signal loss—
or, worse, disaster—even so,
at the sound of the last cadence,

when the long rhythms of the telling
lapse in a great easing fall
that finishes the whole,
prepare for a lift of startling fullness.

Let the speaking word ebb as it will
at the close, not hurried or slowed.
You’ll feel the rightness of silence
and space.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

A Cup of Tea

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Paul South

after Kevin Brophy

A good cup of tea is poised so
everyone becomes your aunty.
Below the base of the nose time is infused.
The afternoon sighs.

A butterfly may dance through your field
of vision. You needn’t look around.
The room and the chair are recognised
as long-lost friends. A teddy bear
is raised from an old box somewhere.

The conversations are wallpaper.
Light filters into the old house,
and beams upon the still living carpet.
The air swirls, dizzy with dust.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Pope Innocent the Last Addresses the Crowd from The Gallows

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Eric Paul Shaffer

As God’s first servant, I’m here to reveal His secret:
we’re entertainment. We’re a spectacle for clouds,

who admire our constant changes and read mystic
meaning into our shifting shapes. For the wind

and waves, who rub us like stones, we’re lucky.
For rain, which loves irony and our laughable,

accidentally effective efforts to erode and exhaust
the world, we’re amusing. For mosquitoes, leeches,

sharks, and crows, we’re fresh fruit. For coyotes
and cockroaches, we’re the best of good providers.

We’re a doomed, mistaken race, a two-part mini-series
on the Evolution Channel: “Species of the Damned.”

Don’t deny the truth: Deity deserted us long before
we designed our Dolls of the Divine and forced

our words into their mouths to frighten our children,
quell our silly fears, vindicate our ugliest ideas,

and invoke a host of winged, blonde, bubble-headed
Barbies to sing an unseen sublime. Tighten the noose.

Check the trap. The drop must be quick and clean.
Do well now what you do best, but mark my words.

My grace is to believe what no other is fool enough
to believe, and I worship, as should you, what I see:

a gutter pool dammed by leaves in November rain,
a finch in a cat’s claws, the yeasty rising of the loaf,

a summer cottonwood crashing into a muddy river
gnawing the bank beneath ragged roots, a black slug

on a sidewalk, an owl, a thistle, a fly, a star so faint
the eye admits the light only at the edge of vision–

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Nagasaki Rain

Posted on February 1, 2014 by John Upton

Silence is always audible through the noise,
it’s your watching soul
disturbed. The buzzing city is a laminate
pressed upon awful stillness. You arrive
among a Ninja whispering of rain
under a riot of tyres at
Victoria Inn, 6-24 Dougashou.

In this lobby they’ve buried the body of the desert
in art deco
plush English furniture complete with upright
Agatha Christie phone – you’re in the Cotswolds
not Nagasaki
till in reception Japanese are bowing
as in the days of Queen Victoria,
when smuggled guns began this sad relationship
with high explosives.

In the lift’s quietness you ascend like God, aware
of an itchy skin rash on your ankles. Hotel soaps?
Room 412, you splash on lotion, rub it in
hang your soaking socks over the towel-rack,
then step into the shoes
of invading armies back five hundred years
that burned across Japan’s most Christian city.

Jesuit footfalls in the aisles
of this painted wooden church, modern veneer
on Armageddon. At Ground Zero you stand
before a high blackened chimney, potent as
a crucifix.

Peace Park down the road, a shuttle-shuffle place
with photographs in tiers of floors to terrorise
the human spirit into peace while, blocks away
devotees hover in pachinko parlours
firing exploding rounds like they’re in Moscow,
New York, London – not in a nuclear graveyard.
The rain has stopped, the desert’s everywhere.

What do you do when you’re bombed back to the Stone Age?
You bury and rebuild, and learn to love
baseball. Now, in the silent lobby, waiting
for the bus, you’re thinking it could be
yesterday, or Nineteen-Fortyfive, serene,
two minutes past eleven.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Swan Song

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Lynne Potts

It was the song of a swan I heard falling
in mist over the harbor after the ice broke
leaving the shattered pattern of a spilt goblet,
its long neck still, after splintering the air.

And the swan herself mingled with faints
of water flowing as the ice shrank
the edges of that strange harbor so empty
except for glass and a long unbroken silence,

others having left, holding their coats by thumbs
over their shoulders as the quiet echoed
over their footsteps as if the harbor pond
could be forgotten or left to merely happen.

But the song had been my own so many years
I knew I would know it when it came for me.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Eurydice Speaks

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Caitlin Maling

(after Edward Hirsch)

I
You didn’t know how I hid my head in darkness,
a child in the oak avoiding moonlight.

How I could touch with only closed curtains,
snuffed candle lingering in hair, in breath.

How your skin burnt through my sleep
so I woke all mornings on the boil, a little more

evaporated, a little less, than the day before.


II
My Father hung light all over my Mother
as though she was his hatstand. Across years

she was blinded to any other image;
my face was his and in her own
she saw only the places he had touched.

On our marriage when you took my chin in your hands
I knew, I could never hate myself so much,
nor love you enough, to become your mirror,

to see myself only through your fingertips.


III
When you played my name back into being
I remembered what it meant to want,

felt the drowning sound of longing
reborn at the back of my throat.

You peeled dark off me like autumn leaves
leaving me bare, blood already blistering,

the thick of you on the tip of my tongue,
Orpheus. Orpheus, the song of you

in my footsteps, almost enough
to dance me out of shadows.

Not quite enough to stop me
slipping your name from my lips,

the turn of your head, and the darkness.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

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