He says the way to his heart
is over stony deserts
through drifting dunes
along riparian banks
cut through glacial cirques
between braided streams
by the ablation till
away from the ash flow
behind the badlands
and around the taiga.
I’ll try that way first.
I’m in a room of glass. I see hair under glass, eggs under glass, clothes under glass, poems under glass – and then I see tools. Beside the tools are words in a frame. Ronald (Ron) Matthesius has taken great care to describe each tool, telling its story – the distance it has travelled from Brotteröde, former East Germany, and what it’s called. The ‘Jung’, the brand tiler’s trowel, and its function, to ‘guide.’ When I read the last description, I stop breathing: ‘the shape of the blade is like a heart.’ I know that this ‘heart’ has more stories to tell – other functions, other names, other journeys, depending upon who holds it. Here it is, under glass. On it is a reflection of my outstretched hand about to pick it up.
Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.
Remove the ID, remove the person - Mikhail Bulgakov
Grey coat sleeves at the border— We’ll all know about the second world one day. A passport takes us through the doorway To reach for what’s in his heart, his dented suitcase. One single page, matted pulp fibres. Chopped monochrome photo, the mark ‘refugee’— Beyond the barrier, his eyes quicken And hopes flick fast like turning pages. He dreams therefore he is, plus more. A string of stops and steps and stages Before the final quadrant unfolds. He studies the signs. He’s a navigator, Noting how even his signature changes In this waxing light, as he steps ashore.
‘Document of Identity’ was inspired by Hungarian-born István (Steve) Nyári’s single-page Document of Identity in lieu of a Passport. I worked for the Department of Immigration for almost twenty years. The official story of migration to Australia is contained in warehouses stacked with files created by Departmental officers over many years. Then there are the personal objects and stories. Because a travel document is evidence of bureaucratic approval, for a time it becomes the most precious thing in the world for the person leaving home with few material possessions. How do we write about this vast journey in a mere one hundred words? How daunting! And yet, this is what poetry is. As the Chinese Book of Changes says, ‘a small fire can illuminate a whole mountain.’
All blank, all white, inhaling jellyfish,
coughing up thylacines, my best intentions
entangle, disentangle, bleach to silicon dust.
Scrubbed to translucency, my equilibrium fails,
both scabby knees bleed.
Below the exit sign, you sit, head in hands,
ringlets loose across the nape of your neck, almost
prehistoric, with neither gold chain nor pearls.
Your pen-point idles, uncommitted, no longer blue,
abandons vacant Cartesian grids.
A sketch. Our awkward pharmacology. Three
knocks at the door: counterposed, an illusion
of sirens, fire alarms shaking bamboo blinds,
flashlights, parquetry. Was it something I said,
failed to mention, never considered?
At least my passport is valid. I know
a dozen popular songs. My data have been
analysed: finally, the statistics are complete.
In an atmosphere of collaboration, I offer you
tiger lilies, coconut oil, analgesia.
Beyond our continental drift, the numbness
you covet, a licence to misfold mountain ranges,
to encourage clamber and trip and tumble;
each success, every loss tallied on fossiliferous shale,
the search and destroy we run together.
A few words, numbers, a portrait always Each the same, but different Reich mark, Zloty, Franc, Pound, Dollar Hope? Or maps of misery with funny names Always held so tightly For some, keys to unlock the gate From the grey place so many could not leave Where laughter-and-death waltz, hope abandoned And still too many forgotten dreams Sit somewhere in a dark and dusty drawer
How much breath passed with each note? What heart beat with panic or pleasure at the moment of exchange? People live together in families, but who are we really? In times of trouble, the answer can be an ID card or the thickness of the wallet. But money is not money. It is a promise of ‘Hopes and Dreams.’ To have this promise fulfilled we carry other artefacts to tell others, or to hide from them who we are: an enemy of the state, a hero of the revolution, a traitor not quite forgiven, or a child of any of them. Daniela Lewandowski’s Polish and Prussian parents, who survived World War II, brought these artefacts with them to Australia. These are part of their legacy: breath, heartbeat, hopes and dreams.
Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.
200 million years ago you could have walked from Hungary to Australia on a trail of plates across Pangaea, sprawling humanless and wild: before continental drift fractured the landmass, before the ocean’s shifting surface hid the skeletons of ships and men seeking new places from which to miss the old places. now your trail of painted plates spans the vastest distances: time differences, generations, 15,862 kilometres, and the smallest, the most human: flowers, flowers, flowers that tumble, and bustle silently together in porcelain frames waiting for a knife and fork, a teabag, a smudge of pink lipstick.
In Éva Gyarmati’s collection of painted porcelain, I see the grand narratives of migration and culture intersecting with the small, intimate stories associated with crockery used to feed our families, to celebrate special occasions and to welcome guests into our homes. After migrating from Hungary as political refugees, Gyarmati and her husband raised a family and built a life for themselves in Australia. Her collection draws on both her old and new homes to combine distinctive Hungarian Kalócsai patterns with Australian landscapes, flora and fauna. In my poem, I imagine these intersections: the grand histories of migration meeting the everyday rituals that keep us connected across oceans.
Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.
nonchalant
cracks and kinks
in the orders of pecking
we wear all our lovers
away to find
ourselves
up at night
talkback minim and crotchety
deadpan timpani pineapple sharp
then a soft-clothed-earth parlance
meditative holding
enfolding
learning to draw all the intricate parts
till you shout
love
in the end
the body laid out
Though the clouds fled from your armpits
in spectacular foggy spirals, he gave me red dust
compacted and thrust above the curved earth. Below
I saw the Early Ones warm their hands over fire
offering up babies wrapped in skin and blood;
I saw dingos and camels and dust. When I returned
you showed me the folds of your cloak, olives
gingers and greys slain with purple gashes. I fell among
the prickly matagouri that smelt of pink and tea
and woke in communion with a white gentian.
I stayed with you and named your parts: turpentine,
tussock, scree, kea, karearea, odonata zealandica,
who, in-spite-of my efforts, flit irretrievable incandescent
over the braids of the Deception.
Amanda rented in Newcastle a submarine, green
that had clear domes to see the anemones
the stingrays, the clown fish.
She filled it with one long French toast scent
before submersible sank from air
to creak down bubble rushes. Then
holding sterling silver splade and porcelain blue plate
while dressed in slightly stretch black satin vionnet
she sat on single thin red-cushion square
inside her boat bow glass observatory
washed by sea glazed refractions
Amanda smelt fried egg-bread
tasted serrated sugar portions
explored, through deep aqua sunbeams
the predators glide
the sharp reef, the seaweed lines.
for Jez, Huw, “Disco” Dan, Anthony, Rufus and Paula
better to carve names
in a tree in some lost valley
known only to tribes long since
vanished like wisps of smoke
better to ask the wind the heedless
bitter fickle wind to carry your kisses
for the night to stop listening, better
for the age to stop conflating hubris
with pride and for the angry and the
disavowed to stop grasping for that
one perfect word that will melt the
edifice like a shadow, better all the
unloved and the loveless reach some
sort of pact and lie down together in
the molten dark of an improbable night
than that a poem of mine should ever
justify the leaden silence of this house
Somewhere within the reaches of the horizon
beyond the curtains of the South Eastern Highlands
I am space.
Devonian sandstones serpentinite rocks that shock
metamorphose
reduce to tiny particles under a microscope
I am a prisoner in a note of truth
Exploding drone pipe attack of the didgeridoo
Tangelo yellow blue bright blood dark
Scattered with glitter! Stark
naked.
Down to earth I walk among Dreamers
like saints in the midst of a rabble
in the quest for sanctity
Streams flow underneath my boots
harvesting angels draped in leafy pearls and flowery tongues
twisted around gasping chimneys of the modern city that clutter my mind
I degenerate and devolve and climax
into one
Even before I was
I am
And where I will be
I already was.
I leave my shirt on
in the rain.
No hounds herd
me to the surf.
Here…this denim shirt
carries no secret
messages. It’s just
rain. Someone called
me a teacher.
I wonder
how the cats are.
The frog is a symbol
of luck in Japan.
In China, it’s the bat.
A black cat
made of wood,
left paw raised,
sits on my shelf.
Lucky as well. It’s said
he waved
at the Buddha
who turned
back to look.
But it’s only rain.
This is a cafeteria,
a solitary ride,
a stale beer,
a piece of cinnamon gum,
and rain that’s still
only rain. The dog
is a symbol of luck…
I am gray enough
to start turning red.
Rain isn’t hard.
I’m in the library
horrified by Frost
and his shattered glass
teeth—sharpened
rain spilled across the table
like sharpened rain.
If I chew on love,
my mouth spits rain
that is only rain.
in the Pacific your point of origin
a speck of pollen
but a diaspora delivered you
to every beach resort
your trunk adolescent slim-muscled,
smoothskinned with occasional
acne and zits
your substitute leaves
scimitars
of baby claws,
stockwhips for the kiddies.
there’s surfwax oozing from your pores
yet the swell keeps slipping away
from your toes
You reach for the sky
you organic pyramid
and I’ll sit in your shade licking
a pine-lime Splice, our backs together, staring out towards the horizon …
madness in all shapes of lavender
an army of opportunistic pathogens,
recruiting bacteria, burgeoning in the nook
of a pale ear, your latest abscess,
about the size of an olive pit.
the self portrait of your sister haunts you
at 3 a.m. when you change bloody bandages.
the kaleidoscope of darkness
is also the size of an olive pit,
less of an almond, more like half a triangle.
si vis pacem para bellum.
if you seek peace, prepare for war.
when the draining stops, you stimulate
a series of reaction with a 9 millimeter
parabellum. when the voices
in your head start conversing in vietnamese
you’ll need a second pair of skin:
the largest organ, pretzel pulled.
Because we cannot take these bodies into heaven,
we must ground them here in the arable of
afterglow.
Tooth and hair, sweat and musk.
Constellations to stardust –
I remember you.
I re-member you.
Here, hold still, here is the crux of it,
the point of entry, or the continental drift.
Let me taste in turn the holy stations:
shoulder shoulder
mouth
south
centres of pilgrimage,
exalted in perfect equilibrium,
and save for last that
sun-drunk supernova,
conflagration
within your ribs.
Pokhara 1978
Twenty-eight years
since the last goodbye
he brings me long blacks
tells me stories
from before my time.
One day I’ll document
this pre-history
let lines leak from my pen
let him explain the now
through the then
take his word for it
and take it as read.
Today I only listen.
I’ll say it’s only words
but even he
knows it’s words I value more
than anything.
A story ends with tears
in our eyes
I nod, of course
there’s always more:
the dusty unmarked road
of my family’s village
the bright rattling bus
the blonde woman
in jandals and cheap
cotton clothes, drifting
a world away from love.
There’s the man
who will become
my grandfather
in his favourite hat
– I imagine –
calculated steps
recognising gravity
in departures.
He wasn’t so old back then
walks his son home
with a comforting arm
as the bus carries on
mutters Babu
to grieving hands.
The story ends
in tears
just the first few drops
in a lifetime
of constant goodbyes.
It stood, sweating
pages of ash.
_________
Stretched days stare
from stone and grass.
I run into their light, regretting everything.
_________
My fingers hook and unhook.
Listening to voices
hover up the wall and long bottles of flame explode.
The track lies
behind, shadows sleep through.
Turn it all upside down.
_________
You were young then
floated on water
and might have come with me to the sunken creek.
Now I bend
reflection flattens me
apart.
Now everyone has fire
they sit still.
_________
Embers jump from my mouth,
weeks collapsing.
The sky flies on.
_________
I’ve cut the evening
my face locked
one eye at a time.
_________
The warm dimensions of mist
move with me;
storming breaks ahead
and I blink forward, off the plain.
Do you have any idea
_________
Over itself the river’s drag
firm. Ascent
from paper soft with stench & thwack
of current hurtling.
_________
If a thin touch
spells out
down river
already I’ve passed you
(the banks brave, first star)
raising myself in time.
_________
My last face was streaked
with open water, buds caught in its silver
streams like mouths.
_________
Swamp bedding.
From its pattern
I separate
each blade clear—
no myth, I wade clueless—
the polis of moss in my ears.
Slowly twisting trees
crash to cinders.
_________
Your spine like smoke.
_________
The whole year is stripes
and grids of appetite;
wash away the surface—
eat it through.
_________
Into the apartments of sand
I entered flat under the door.
_________
Night tightens its grip.
Like an old moon
I rust in the pool
boiling
skinless and mineral blue.
Between ridges of rumpled cotton terrain
time is hemmed
by 300 count cliff faces
and the stubborn warmth of rest
loitering in soft whispers of ducted air
the feather-spun desert assures me
there is no need
at the other end of the eggshell blue plains
over the distant ripples crafted
by seismic sleep
silver watch-hands cannot scale mountains
now is mine, in this woven womb
this oasis of weight and fibres
my contented crease
between skin, breath
heavy fingers
buried springs and wooden bones
They hung me upside down
by the tail, molecules starched—
those Irish trackers, old-timers.
I was tribal, a trophy locked
with rigor mortis.
They forced my abysmal jaw,
my cough worthy of attention.
I would make no apology for stray
dogs who seized their pregnant ewes,
if I could speak.
Dingos took blame for the cull.
I’ve seen the You Tube videos
of Benjamin calibrating hunger
to a charcoaled thirl, eyes barred,
his hectored shadow.
How in God’s name they shot a pack
of us, huddled with hungry cubs.
Sold a batch to Europe as domestics.
Kept me— as mascot, emblem,
field study, postage stamp,
zoology enigma
(stuffed on a taxidermist’s plinth.)
When the last in captivity died
without too much fuss—
they dumped him in a paddock.
Have I slept for a week already?
A finger puppet in snow, a Visitorian?
The post identity theory and cli-fi symposium
may never make amends. Before Twitter
or the allegory goes viral
I’ll escape into ferneries, veils of Time
from the experts, bureaucrats, Lake
St Clair’s crags, from grotto to Sphinx,
jerking all the levers—till they
vanish from my world.
Some days are white
staring deep
into surfaces where
tides push shores,
sand climbs mountains.
The new border
is sometimes
vague though
flamboyant and ever
mercantile.
There’s boredom
in the banlieue,
middle management
cadres deal
in non-core activities.
It’s all mise-en-scene,
twisting towards
but not quite
a lyrical death
now lacking continental lustre.
Perhaps ciphers, emblems,
or fashion’s delirium.
Or figures
in decomposition along
walls and ocean shelves.
Slipping through frosted
wombat runs,
like an animal,
I recoil where the dead deer lay.
As naked as Bellow’s mares.
Her flanks and rump to be had.
She is a photo taken by headlights,
a Shoah archive,
‘Results of search for victims whose family name (including synonyms) is Kalisch: 806’.
She lay like Kafka’s sisters,
fence wire alive with sunlight and finches.
As unbearable,
but always possible,
as ‘SS-Unterscharfuehrer Kalisch,
served in Galicia, more…’
The ghostly, chamois-skinned woman
who served in my childhood’s delicatessen.
Her creased forearm’s tattoo,
its brutal, blue European 7.
Her neat, white parcels
of horrific imports.
(My father played the trumpet in a brass band, wore an
ex-Airman’s uniform, missed the last train on Anzac Days,
walked home like a ghost through dawning, distant suburbs.)
So-long the old sweet dreams of night breath now trapped in chest-locked-tight all corset-robed and body-probed she swallows back the dread … taste bitter-burning-fear and haunting the terror in her gut forewarning memories on her body etched on fear the terror fed, and on slaved-foot she fled. Foreboding bush all charred-dark-deep magnetic moon on valleys steep strange shadows trick-torment and menace light … crouched in fear her hands clutch throat to silence screams that gag her choke all body-soaked and worn she braves the night. Hunters haunting creeping near they mouth her name so she can hear her blood it throbs-pumps-pounds explodes her heart … she digs the earth and lies down deep but they smell sweet-fear and hear her weep and night-winds whip her scent to gift the dark. Invisible and silent tears from states-of-nothing she appears then to shadows black-damp-cold she returns … she panics darts from tree to tree can’t think can’t hear can’t cry can’t see but for the memory of her sister’s touch she mourns. To her ancestors she prays she cries to free her mind which terrifies to her heavy-heart be gentle and her shame obliterate … she dreams her journey toward a place not brutal bruised or disgraced but sorrow etched so deep such memories make; this postcolonial haunting in her wake.
A response to r e a’s work PolesApart – Tracking, 2011 – single-channel video [7mins] reworked from the original PolesApart series, 2009. This new work in progress was created for the Stop(the)Gap/Mind(the)gap: International Indigenous art in motion, 2011, exhibition where r e a’s work was projected onto Heart’s Mill in Port Adelaide.
