Rain streaks the window. Somehow her hair
holds the smell of matches struck.
The wind is loose around walls outside, tying itself
up in trees (birch leaves soft as ash).
She watches: breath showing and fading on glass.
He said if, and she waits, not knowing his language,
all the things he might have meant.
Most of the time we lived in mine
or appeared to
you had been here as long as I had,
arrived in my birth-year,
but had to wear it in
second skin
(your sixth, if we count
unspoken Classics)
though there was always
a tacit understanding
we could call on yours
and it erupted, comic hernia
in the shared gut of our daily
dealings, at times of great
frustration, bemusement or when
words failed you.
At uni the man who ran
the language lab said, facetious,
that’s how they catch spies
get them to count or say
times tables, you can always
trip up a mother tongue
coax it, shy animal, or
smoke it out, too brutal.
I pull on the tip and up
comes a whole scarf, colourful,
knotted to others and
not about to stop, a magical
evisceration but I want
all of you, things you have
names for that aren’t
seen here: Zwiebelturm,
Trachten, Bergbahn –
or fragments, foods from
childhood, still stuck to their
labels and longed for
though irretrievable:
Hagebuttenmarmelade,
so that we cook up together
a Wähe, a Brei
because die Liebe geht durch
den Magen – goes through the stomach
like language, and last but not least
the cloud of names
buzzing about my head, like Pigpen’s
dust but unseen by others,
unmerited, since I could not live up to them
and they sound now, so many
years later, nearly obscene
with lost intimacy:
Süsses, Schönes, Gutes,
Schatzi, Putzi, Liebes.
Caddy in Adelaide, from The Sound and the Fury
You offer me crab apples, lightning bugs, a red pick-up with a confederate flag
passing black men walking for miles, the gentle roll of the flat road
leading to some other county. I wrap the warmth of my body
around your great rivers, my hips and elbows curving with each bend.
I let clear water from creeks splash my skin, hold white pebbles
in my hand then pack them away for a time like now.
I smell you, Mississippi, petals of honeysuckle wet like my own;
your name a soft stammer on my tongue, like a lover’s.
I romanticise you as wild and random: native honeybees
flirt in the juices of a full-bosomed magnolia tree
where in its branches the trill of a mockingbird, and over there
the sound of someone’s pleasure at three in the afternoon.
Sassparilla, Chickasaw, loblolly pine, dead skunk.
I can hear your guitar and your fiddle, your children and your unborn babies
the old stories – of mammies, of the fields, of dead brothers.
Conversation, Where’s the river?
overheard
Beyond, wedging itself
further into red rock
Skimming the crust
or surfing the horizon
Soaking the silt-gifting walls
Ducking from gulches, from
washes, from side canyons
Oh—there’s the river
A mirage of silver light,
parachuting down the waterway
A spate of life, a pocket deluge
snaking along the desert floor
No—where’s the river?
Perhaps she’s gone under,
subterranean
Perhaps she recreates the sipapu
foam flocking to surface
What river?
What river?
What mere lazy stream?
What choppy gush?
What surge?
What rush?
What soused gutter?
The Colorado River
Now clay-colored,
now brilliant jade
Now glassy, now dirty milk
Feeder of saltbush and pinyon
Slaker of yucca and juniper
Exotic water of the west
Oh—there’s the river
Turbulent dream
Misfit stream
Fissure aqua,
Rapture
No, you can’t see the river
Imagined sliver of raw silk
along rock
Ghostwritten braid
from here—the sign says so
Your watchtower fails,
water prevails
Speaker Where’s the river?
Oh—there’s the river
Speaker —No, wait, where’s the river?
What river?
Speaker The Colorado River—
Oh—there’s the river—
Speaker No, you can’t see the river
from here—the sign says so
So far, my name has been left off
the inflection of your question
as though it were a ticking meter,
inescapable and kept to the last second;
your fingers were like shifting clock hands
your eyes opaque bottle tops on a shaken drink
your words, a tide approaching slightly then retreating
and so the forming of your mouth over the vowels
of my name was an unexpected sunshine,
a night parrot landing on my hand;
you are relieved of your timidity, and I
of my ordinariness in your mind:
I have now been solidified in it;
acknowledged and alive
in your world;
I am named
When you first arrive, the doors are shut,
Big white doors, space off limits, nothing
To see here, wrong day, wrong time,
Interior closed to outsiders, go home.
She is somewhere in there, you are not.
When you return, a second coming, the passage is clear,
Navigable, free open spaces,
Place open for business, welcome.
You enter.
Wandering around, you search for her name,
Carol Maanyatja Golding: part of it easy on the tongue,
Part of it
A planet apart, a language away,
Untranslatable, unsayable, other.
Title: Muruntjarra munu Walu, you don’t even try,
Too many consonants, too many vowels:
This journey is for the eye.
And immediately you feel it, you think you can feel it, the power
Of polymer coloured like earth
Placed onto canvas in patterns.
But there it stops. These furrows and dots worth
So much to someone— curlew song? kangaroo tracks? the slow burn
Of ancestral campfires?— build to a darkening loss in you,
A hunger, a famine, black spots before the eyes.
Where is the world? You cannot make sense
Of her dreaming, her signs, no sense
Of the story within the lines, can surmise
Less than naught in her pointillist design, hitherto
You have rarely felt whiter.
Give me two eyes, a nose and a mouth smiling out of a possible face,
Give me a door, a window, a roof. You want to erase
All that is wrong here, want your heart to feel lighter,
Safer, less random, less subject to discomfort, this.
You need something stronger
Than two hundred years, an age or two longer
Than six generations of see how it goes, let me in, let me out, hit and miss.
Welcome to country. Take off your shoes, take
What you want, take it, take all of it, it is yours.
And then, when there is none of it left anymore,
Nothing you want, you can take the memory
and break
It to bits, and bring all the pieces to a Federation Square exhibition
Like this, and take her ticket, and invite her in, both of you nearing extinction.
A background of black. Clusters of dots— orange, yellow, pink, white—
Beneath a lattice of lines. You screw your sight
To a magic-eye hope that a picture you recognise might just pop out
But it won’t. You watch waves of indigo, blue swirl about
And try to imagine a sea in a desert but you can’t. You stand there,
Stupid, and call her name Carol! Maanyatja! Golding! You stare
At the painting, white noise in your head, crying Speak! Speak!
But she doesn’t. You flip the catalogue for clues, some kind of critique
But this work is not included. She has a black skin,
You have a black heart, but you can’t seem to join the dots. If some
Kind of inherent relationship exists, a code or secret
To allow you in, a connective thread, no matter how thin,
Linking her land to your own childhood home
(Melway ref. 47, F1), face it, you just cannot see it.
This place is pleasant, Heave away, haul away, isn’t it.
White-washed walls, an-apple-a-day, a surfeit
Of everything, for everyone! everyone! Bought from the Crown
At an acre a pound in 1841, the German orchardists cleared the bush
To plant new trees in pleasingly logical rows. You are six years grown,
You have what you need, plus a dog and a bike to push.
This suburb has been here forever. Weekdays you learn
To count numbers, read rhymes, you can sing your alphabet
Backwards. Weekends you wander with unconcern,
Piano and tennis and Sunday School, the television set
Black and white. Yes, childhood is all that childhood should be.
And losing yourself among the Koonung Creek edges
And hearing your mother’s voice Jordie! Jordie!
You follow your name, all the way home, back to cold chops and three veg.
You never did see an indigene
— Dad, what does Koonung mean? —
Until you were twenty-one.
She was drunk on a curb in Bruns-
Wick Street, cursing and screaming Please! Please!
And you drove her straight up the road to St V’s
Where she promptly gave birth on the linoleum floor
By the Male Toilet door
Right there and then
In front of the men
Going in, coming out
Her baby came out
A pale brown newborn son.
When you rang the next day she’d gone.
There is a place called Walu, way off the Melway,
A waterhole in sand-hills near a large salt lake
Between Warakuma and Papulankutja
(The east Gibson Desert of Western Australia to you).
This is where she was born.
Language: Ngaanyatjarra
Skin: Panaka
Year: circa 1930
Two ancestral men and a little boy were camping at Walu rock hole.
The men went hunting and left the little boy behind.
The men returned with an emu and pulled out its heart.
The boy was holding the heart and blood spilled onto the rocks.
The boy ran away with the heart and turned into wind.
The blood stained the rocks and can still be seen today.
You fly home over agitated bones, you will sleep
Among doors and windows and rooves,
Recite stories about little girls and big bad wolves
From the spires of a Europe steeped
Within, and the traffic jams up like cattle
In your heart, you are stalled, there is ceremony beneath
The neon and tarmac and ten percent off, small relief
As the centuries start to do battle
And you drive way, way out of your way
To the place where the avenues cross,
The peach trees and pear trees you climbed as a kid are lost
Under lawns, and the people, where are they,
Who is left, who is gone, where have we gone.
Where has history gone.
You look down the wide black road
with the thin white line
And don’t know which bone to move.
You need a song to sing, a chant, a stick to hit
But you can’t, you don’t know where to begin. It
Gets you then, This is longing, This is love,
This is life, This is death,
call it dreaming. Call it design.
And you deepen your breathing, endeavour to silence
The mob in your mind, quiet the science
Of statistic, attitude, aptitude, god, everything you have been taught.
You empty your head of all thought—
— And slowly, so slowly, the clamour recedes.
And slowly you enter country…
You take the first step to undo your heart,
That you may finish,
that you may finally start.
When at last you arrive, the painting is open,
Wide and open as a poem in a book,
Come in, sit down, have a look.
Your story may not be Ngaanyatjarra clan
But perhaps it is here, part familiar, part other.
And perhaps you will read of a long lonesome
Voyage. Of leaving behind the knowledge of home.
Of seeing the arms of your grandmother’s grandmother
Wave, diminish then fade to the white Cornish fog.
And perhaps you will read of the babies and bones
That tell you you are no longer alone.
That your story is one dot of many in time, a moment, prologue
Of earth, sky, fingertip, door.
A possible face, even yours.
The male stands simply enough in regulation grey. It has two tall slab sides, an informed roof, and three red lights which continually flash in dumb warning. As might be expected, the short female is more complicated. Broadly built like a tin house, she reveals a square doorway filled with dangling black strips of rubber, able to let bulky belongings through onto rotating belt, first, and then a marshalled band of steel rollers. These carry solids away for up to three meters.
Her steady green light remains on display, matrimonially close to his ruby trio. Lacking the distinction of rollers, he at least rests on a figured crimson carpet. They patiently complement one another, even when silent. Mutual loyalty is the name of their game. To live inside an airport, that must be something.
A warm stomach rests
on my arm. Breasts squish
against my shoulder blades.
Fingers fold back my ears,
gently but firmly lift my chin.
The clippers’ power cord
tightens against my neck,
stretches across to the outlet.
Without my glasses, my head
and shoulders in the mirror
are a blonde and black blur.
After spraying a fine mist,
the girl grips her scissors
and drawls –
You ain’t from around here,
is ya? Where y’all from?
– Australia
Neat! Did y’all drive?
– No, it’s a bit far. I had to fly.
You speak English real good.
Did y’all learn it in school?
So you know how I reminded you of how
I’d said Coleridge invented the word
subconscious, and then I said but I don’t think
I can have been right? Well, while you all
went on to the pub to talk like Coleridge
into the night about Aeolian harps or meme theory
or Bronies or whatever arcane topic
played itself out over your intellectual strings,
I entered the labyrinth of my H-drive files
and located there notes on the unconscious
according to which Leibnitz and Wolff
in the seventeenth century already
used the word; in the eighteenth, Rousseau
was experiencing with passionate intensity
what Leibnitz and Wolff recognised in theory;
and oh, by the nineteenth, the sturm und drang,
the amnesiac dreams, the vertiginous descents,
the wilful belosing of regular sense …
I wouldn’t read any further if I were you.
Turn back to your drinks till I am through
this dark and haunted section of my notes,
this inner chamber, this extra quarter inch
of largeness on the inside where no
string sounds …
Finished? Hungover? Not quite sure
how you got to where you’re at? We’re
on the same page, then, and right
at the end of my notes is what I must have
remembered when I reminded you of how
Coleridge invented the word subconscious
which he didn’t: the word was …
psychosomatic!
And now I’d like the word
psychosomatic to take us in a loop
back to the start of the poem to give it
the shape of Coleridge’s conversation poems
but instead, the word seems to have
caused some sort of a block, and
what is that knocking sound I think I hear?
from Skulváði Úlfr: Legends
Skulváði challenges Fossiker in ‘the simple game’1 to win a compass sought after by Sultans
They faced the cups. They sowed.
They winnowed. Four cards moved.
They tilled. Amulets danced.
Hunter drew. The Wolf dodged.
Less is more. More too much.
Eyes faced north. Eyes faced south.
Flat stones shimmied. Stacks skipped.
Still cups yawned. Stocks grew deep.
The Foe’s till2 sat. Varg sowed.
Spears’ din-3 sweller claimed. Ash4 sat.
Witch boom-wheels5 spun. Ash slept.
Hogni’s Maid yawned.6 Ash dreamt.
Oak fed Grid’s steed. Varg rode.7
Shield flourished.8 Seeds sprouted.
Point-crash-urger stood.9 Stand.
Guards rubbed their beards.10 Time aged.
Brigand-spy11 moved. He broke.
Bush-grinner12 prowled. Trees13 sighed.
Terror-homes14 heaved. Targes15 clinked.
Tilled cards stood. Seed-lines slept.
Hurdles16 dipped. Hunter aimed.
Hail bound north. Sun swept south.
He swiped hone-rods.17 She swerved.
He scooped swiftly. They tied.
Battles resumed. Stems18 leaned.
Net-bands19 emptied. Cards swam.
She reaped Third. Second bared.
Wolf struck First. Hunter paused.20
He was ring-short.21 She reigned.
Each had gained. No side lost.
Wolf played Sixth. Huntsman closed.
Prey’s Third sowed three. They tied.
Four fed each field. Crows sat.
Troopman scooped. His fist filled.22
He played the foe. He charged.
The wind soured. Smoke blew.
Strong ice slipped.23 Storm-Njörðr24 tripped.
Straits-darts25 plunged. Troll-wives26 laughed.
Skuld reaped Sixth. One seed stood.
She played it. Birch was snagged.
Wolf led by one. Winds rose.
One well dried. Fifth grew ten.
Always move east. Look west.
Fear north winds.27 Watch Muspell.28
Third sowed four. Varg held Boar.29
Skuld played Fifth. Úrðr stayed put.30
The forest grew. Eleven.31
Mowed field flattened. Seven.32
Sixth sowed one. Seeds dispersed.
So Skuld charged. Úrðr was held.
Second reaped.33 Sixth bloomed one.
Skier34 skidded. Planks sank.
Now came the rout. Wolf barked.
Fifth sowed its two. Oak ripped.
Planks35 strewed. Vain were rallies.
Claws doubled.36 And one to spare.
Varg’s Sixth sowed one. Spears lay.37
Thane strode. He gained three arms.38
He skied slopes. Then he skid.
Skuld’s Sixth cribbed one. First hugged six.
Both cups played. Oak was felled.
Thick woods closed in. Frost ran.
West moon rose. One rose tall.
Wolves doubled. Shadows grew.39
More storms brewed. Queen Skuld cloaked.
Oak mossed. Her Sixth sowed one.
Torn mail ran. Archer’s Fourth sowed.
Fogs lifted. Skuld thundered.
Third strew well. Three faced three.
Her Third stared. His Fourth cringed.
Varg ran free. Fangs were bared.
Hunter’s tracks slipped. Wolf grinned.
From Sixth rose one. Woods closed.
From Fourth rose two. Sky roared.
Carried split.40 Tops toppled.41
Wolf howled. Hunter turned prey.
Troll-wife42 tilled. Ván’s fields grew.
From Sixth came one. Fifth sowed two.
Sixth’s belly swelled. One birthed.
Thane cut fogs. Cattle bayed.
Hliðr43 was muddied. He stalked.
His cup held five. Wolf smirked.
Three moves were hers. She grinned.
Boar starved. One move was his.44
She sowed First’s two. Sun shone.
Second’s Three tilled. Trees bloomed.
No score scored.45 He was halved.
Queen’s First self-sowed. Serf bowed.46
Wyrd’s box closed. Wins were hers.
Wood-gold gleamed. Glass-stone glowed.
Troll-wife sang. Njörðr weighed stones.
Rome’s sun rose. Skuld’s coat shone.
Maniples danced. Helms bent.
More bets were planned. Úllr bowed.
Masked guests waited. All rode.
Gold ran. Járnsaxa47 won.
Viewed through the sliding
fountains of mirage,
the anti-tines
of a widely spaced comb,
or just croaked out in panting
chest infection,
the subject
becomes loosely fibrous,
jellied,
clotted with air pockets,
a freshly painted
glamour
from some previous life,
delayed
in the mirrored panels
of subaqueous
self-similar
nightclubs:
The Babylonian,
The Babel,
The Electric Workers,
The Hamas,
The Golf View
Hotel-Motel,
The Twin Towers.
After getting drunk with Mum
in the wettexed kitchen,
you sound spongily
susceptible,
velveteened
for cynical command,
housebound
for the maestro’s brush-strokes.
So when the early career academic
with a volume problem
barks
that he
doesn’t follow your argument:
disconcerted,
not realising
he is an idiot,
you mistakenly
withdraw your submission.
One. The Soldier: 6 June 2012.
Fallen into a war he cannot win
In conflict with sobriety
So long in the field his socks are filthy
Skin dry, caked in dirt and mapped in blood
He has not showered, cannot recall when he last washed
There’s much he can’t say of his battles
He must be coaxed into remembering all he wants to forget
It is the constant reverberation of explosions
Criticism bursting in his conscience
Truth exploding in showers of rage, until
Shell-shocked he admits to terror
Unable to confront the enemy face to face
At the bar damaging himself hand to hand
At war in no mans land is where he stands
Suffering combat fatigue, nodding off
In the trench of work, on the tram,
At the dinner table, exhaustion is a given
Sleep is delirium interrupted by bombardment
Constant as not thinking just slipping
Alive into nightmare battles where he wins
Only to be crushed along with his battered enemy
The soldiers’ lot does not end just because it is night
Apnoea the phantom strangler stalks the mind
Every endless eight-hour repose to wake to another day
He knows will be worse than the day now gone.
Two. The Chaplain: 6 June 2012.
He is a high priest of tales
Teller of tall stories
Indignant of non-believers
Intolerant of sceptics among his flock
Tears flood in the telling,
Drowning exhausted pilgrims
In the Nile River of contrition
Fake myth that it is, it works
On the alter of alcohol
He sacrifices sobriety
In rituals of mumbled jumbo
He requires fear not belief
He knows he too fights a war trapped
Within a doctrine of deceit and cunning
He is more sinner than sinned, for all he prays
His prayers will not fill the empty pews.
Three. The Spy: 6 June 2012.
The double agent cannot forget
His duplicity but at least
He never offers up information
It has to be dragged out
His supporters he believes
Are enemies in disguise
He lives behind his iron curtain
Letting his puppet life a free hand
After all it is only play
In a game of make believe
You make yourself believe, to be
Whoever you need to be today
To cover your real mission
To find a message in a bottle
Kidding your self
It is a skill that comes naturally
And if there are no witnesses
Who is there to deny your present identity?
Who you will betray depends
On who comes close to unveiling your deceit!
You are the spy and you must betray
Those closest who will unmask your shot eyes
Any who expose your fatty liver, swollen belly
Exposed an agent of your own demise
By the compulsion to lie under your
Disguise you pretend is the truth.
Four. M.I.A: 6 June 2012.
It is the ones who cannot get over
You not coming home
Night after night the fretting
Bloody imagination playing merry hell
Scenarios of every possible way he went
The women and children statistics
The men listed as missing in action at the pub
The real truth of his war is old news
It is hard to help, offer ground support
Widows and orphans, brothers and sisters, friends
Who know in their bones one bad moment
Is all it will take to hear the news
You have been expecting ever since his war began
He is not coming home from the front bar
Damaged beyond sense and cursed to live
Brain shot to pieces toasting at the tap
Liver and Heart suffocating under layers of fat
He’s home but missing in action
Missing the point wishing he were dead
And he would end his mission if he could
Think one thought through to the end.
Prelude:
Is it really true that one can’t change?
said Oscar Wilde, whose ode to metamorphosis got stuck
in the rot of a painting, while the youth
stood with features smooth as the beginning.
Chorus:
Fitzroy, Melbourne, the kind of strip that strips everyone down, right to the bone.
A ute, a traveller, and no way home.
Traveller:
What was a ute doing in Fitzroy? Hadn’t they cleaned this place up?
Chorus:
A traveller pulled by a rope of longing. Scrap that. She had no control.
The payload: a swarm of blue puppies, black spots turning eyes into chasms.
Their mother lying snout to floor. Her teats, ten props abandoned.
She dipped one hand over the edge. She did. The ute squeaked.
Traveller:
What am I doing?
Chorus:
A question she didn’t ask. We were there:
the mew of the puppies wriggling over one another.
Their necks tied to the floor. A series of black chains.
A rusted bolt. A medusa of pups we thought.
The mother doing nothing. Was she stoned?
Stand back, we said.
Too late, a melee of tongues and she was over, the traveller,
over the back, frolicking in her own
what? Mad max trip?
Or did she believe she was Actaeon,
testing the fidelity of the hounds?
Traveller:
What was it about this place? It was nothing. It just propelled people.
Like the way the sun, weak from winter, got taken over by a man
whose thick shadow I now wore.
Man:
What do you think you’re doin’?
Hands off the dogs.
Hands off.
Chorus:
She turned, smiling, as if it was a joke, as if she would see someone she knew.
The shadow shook his head. She was the type
he could see right through.
Man:
They’re farm dogs.
Traveller:
They’re puppies.
Man:
They’re farm dogs.
Traveller:
But it’s just.
Man:
Don’t touch ’em, right. Now git out now. Git.
Chorus:
She picked up the wronged hand with her right and removed it to her side. She slipped out of the ute. The rust fair sliced her in half.
The puppies swooned in their chains.
Traveller:
But I have one at home.
Chorus
She should stop
Man:
These here, right, are farm dogs.
Chorus:
He spat. He did. The length of the street seemed to rip
from its spine, torn like so no-one could see. She faced the shadow. He in his hat,
the things below brimmed in darkness.
She thought she saw a mouth, but it could have been a scab.
I’m guilty, she thought.
Man:
Hands off the dogs.
Chorus:
Though they were (we checked).
Traveller:
Why hadn’t I changed? All this time away and I get cracked up by a ute.
As if my home was some imaginary farm. As if my soul had been swapped
for a few foreign coins, and down here, in some wallet, my face could be burning.
Chorus:
It’s doubtful. In any case she fled, as travellers do, the scene went on without her.
We were there, we took a statement:
Man’s Statement:
She was as dumb as any city, I swear
that’s what I thought.
I scratched my hat. The day could wait.
I had saved a seat in the café and there would be time to savour it.
I mean, the bit about the farm dogs.
And the bit about the ute.
Chorus:
A truly cunning creature, man
Aristophanes’ birds once sang.
Some thwart the gods, others their husbands,
but this man picks out strangers:
all cunning for cunning’s sake.
Wait, we swear, one more thing …
Man:
The altercation but
that was truth.
‘A salesman is got to dream, boy’ … Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
I offered no resistance
for I went without a struggle;
I was high and dry and stranded,
no commitments left to juggle.
The Board convened a meeting
with the CEO’s permission—
forward estimates in tatters,
there could be no intercession.
I offered no resistance when they
touched me on the shoulder,
saying, ‘Sorry but we’ll have to let you go—
markets weaken; banks are bolder,
don’t you know?’ So I went without
a struggle, disconnected from that day.
And cleared my desk of flotsam,
though abundant jetsam lay.
Purloined some storage boxes,
put the in-tray with the out-tray
and my tea mug in the trash. Just
photos of my loved ones took away.
I offered no resistance
when security came calling,
saying, ‘Today’s no time for stalling
as the shades of night are falling.’
So they marched me to the exit
and things were looking grim,
when up and spoke the doorman,
his guard dog close beside him:
‘Come, lad. For two pennies
I will ferry you t’other side
of town!’ I went without a struggle.
He seemed a kindly guide,
so I offered no resistance.
‘I’ve helped plenty here to cross.’
I knew he meant his river trip
might console me for my loss.
As I lingered in the gloaming,
a thought was slowly shaping,
(for I went without a struggle)
so from what was I escaping?
And those I’d left behind me,
always fawning to the bosses,
were they sorry for my going
or rejoicing at my losses?
A buzzing in the ears as if bees
were swarming in my thoughts
or as if my head had become
a clearing in the forest
filled with the never-too-late serenades
of cicadas at summer’s end
makes me long for the gritty obscurity
of the west’s waves
or the suave silence of eastern lagoons
through which pouting fish
mutely swim. On the other hand,
if I listen carefully enough
to the sound of my own listening,
I might eventually hear something.
The hum of longing seems to fade at last
into a kind of aural impasto,
thick and bland, without apparent surface
but also without depth.
Neither meniscus nor void, without perspective,
not flat and not profound,
without extent or distance, not able to be touched
and incapable of penetration,
not flattened so as to stack up the shoreline,
the sea, the salty spume, the sky,
but not tricked out as a mirrored infinity
or a beach-walk into the never-never,
neither free nor necessary,
not imaginary and not a law of nature,
not spirit, not matter, without colour
but not the whiteness of all colour,
not abstract, not phenomenal,
not even the kind of paradox
that would let me end this
hapless catalogue, not ‘a jar’
both round and empty that might make
the wilderness gather itself
around a hollow core of form, nothing like that,
nothing like ‘a long-legged fly’
walking lightly on water
as a metaphor for the mind
moving across the surface of silence,
nothing like that –
so what am I saying? That this may be
the sound of consciousness?
But how, then, to imagine the silence
of oblivion, a kind of oxymoron,
since there can be no silence
where its opposite doesn’t equally prevail,
the waterlogged yells of those
whose upraised arms
mark places where the frothing rip
drags forests of kelp
in the direction of shipwrecks
whose phosphorescent ribs
flicker above their beds of black iron-sand,
or the hilarious shrieks
of revellers impacting
on the dawn-flushed harbour?
Yes, this could be the no-sound no-silence
of oblivion, but what
would I know? It’s the busy world
that sits outside my window
as if across a table
with wine and food on it.
Indifferent to the buzzing in my ears,
asking only that I listen and respond,
the world tells me stories.
That car whose windscreen glints across the bay
has a sad man in it. That yacht whose bow
pecks the wrinkled harbour
will still be tethered when
the next tide turns. The squawky sound
of talkback radio seems to come
from a patch of sunlight
or from the cat that basks there.
I want to call out to my lifeguards,
the one who watches my hope
flailing at the rip, the other
incurious as I loll in dismay:
Over here, guys. Find a seat. Fill a glass.
Help yourselves. Has anyone told you
what a great job you do?
It’s never too late. But listen to that.
You’re not going to believe it.
Tell me, friends –
what does that sound like to you?
The equilibrium position
shifts. Energy is given off.
Can salsa eat through the
bars of a prison cell? Such
considerations are far from
rare in Russian jails. The
topic also comes up during
the “dark ages” of the web,
shaping the policy of early
deployment & the etiquette
for military weddings. He
searches for perfection in
both swordsmanship &
consciousness. We both
have blackberries with
data plans. Ensure your
settings allow the page
content to update after the
initial load. Are the bride’s
parents still responsible?
Sometimes it seems we were brought here only to mourn
–That all our happiness, our future plans,
Are fruits of the salesmen’s lure to ‘get us in’,
To have us bid more eagerly in an auction
Which (despite the glowing ads, the bonhomie
Of the salespersons and the boisterous auctioneer)
We will, in due course, find ourselves lamenting:
‘This fabulous dwelling! Those rooms, the views!’
Appear as mocking echoes to us as we finally drive away,
Outbid by younger buyers …
It’s then we feel
Regret for ever daring, once, to suppose
We could out-bid futurity and stay
Forever in this mansion made of clay.
The two poems here are my most recent productions, written when I was winding up my commitments as bureaucrat and testing again the much-missed pool of ink for living lines and resonant images. My concerns here are countrified and rural, more natural and airier, and unwilling to prove anything to the world out there of social media.
‘Continuing Love’ and ‘A Kink of Burning’ were written for Agnes Locsin, who turned them into dance. The former was featured in her tribute to her mother Carmen some four years before her death in 2011. It was a mini biography of Mrs. Locsin as told to me by Agnes. The latter had a stanza translated into Filipino and also featured in her latest work ‘Dahon: Ikalawang Galaw’ (‘Leaf: Second Movement’) early this year. The poems are therefore about death and life and art and woman and creation, and the energies of natural elements around us that will outlive our shining human moments — themes that continue to fascinate me since I first started to write as a boy with a broken heart.
Continuing Love
Written for the Agnes Locsin dance A Love Story, in honour of Carmen D. Locsin
1.
From thick vines hung from trees
let go by hands,
from rocks by the banks
crammed with coiled springs for wet feet—
it is all wings and arcs
cleaving wild air
into the cool waters of Mintal river.
Loose planks bridge here
to nowhere shakily.
Towers of unseen worlds rise,
built tale upon tall tale.
From treetops where footraces ended,
the earth is more than grass
and clods of dirt—instead, a wide bilao
of hills and mountains, rivers
and houses and trees trees trees!
The sky is more than a roof
if you pry the branches apart.
God lives also in the trees,
and the leaves breathe with him.
No other school teaches that.
2.
Of all the fruits and flowers
and fish and fowl
that take life from the land
and the waters and the air
from Mintal to Calinan
and beyond to Marilog,
and even to Silay and Iloilo,
none turns the day around quicker
to its point of lightness and heat
than the sweetness without
husk or shoreline that is
human love.
Love the leap in the air
without shadows
over walls and trees and craters
torn open by bombs.
Love the stroke of midnight and fire
announcing orchids
ahead of bicycles and breasts. Love
keeps the hands of dreams warm
in all directions. Love
the stillness that won’t stay still.
Or slip away
like a ship in the night. Love
be still.
3.
Caught in their own melodies of growth
and yearnings,
they move apart and out
to come into their own—
the living forms in the dance and the garden,
and the children, marking time
on a tightwire, eventually unheavened
under all kinds of weather
and sleep. Meanwhile,
they are flung open to receive
lessons pried out of the rock
of astonishments
and the words that pile up
without end
on the way to school and
later, work.
4.
The hues and slowburn of sweetness
flush in one durian fruit;
the sure sail and dip of
eagle wingtip, deadly swoop,
and rip and tug of beak;
surge of fish and leap of cat;
pull and push of root and treetop;
burst of sap spiraling
inside trees and leaves and shells;
ebb and tiderush, rot of bones
and stars—
so too
in the flex and swing,
bend, stretch, twist
to near cracking, slack and
spring and intimations of
the body pinned by pain
and drip of death,
or wet with anguished joy,
lurk of hope, laughter shared
and emptiness.
Surface
tensions bruised by beauty
brief.
Rippling.
Tingle
in the soul between
measure and
release.
Here shall be space
for spiriting forms
of loss and love and longings
into their human likeness
and reach,
to teach the body
praise, prayer, possibility.
Come, speak
the speech of the body,
and pass on the dance.
5.
Harder on the heart is
the going away than being gone.
Being gone has walked through walls
and changed the wine to water—and now
the wall can break itself down
to dust and spilled water
dry up without smoke.
Going away shrinks all windows and doors
to the size of the unspoken.
A life gathers into a face before us,
and starts to close its eyes.
In the dimming light
we stand as on a jolt
of tide-sucked sand,
our balance shifted,
our own face flush with the breath
slipped out of the one becalmed.
Then, the one thing left to do,
the only tender thing to do,
beyond the anger and consent,
moving to its own secret music and
not made smaller by pain,
is to climb up God’s tree
and nibble on her breath,
or get the broom and sweep
without thought
or excitation
the shadow rolled out
on the hospital floor
tile by square
white tile.
6.
God lives in trees and speaks
the languages of winds,
shadows, light, laughter.
Always the birds bring in new seeds
and the waves new water—as if
they have not done that before, as if
they had not always done that
as before, as if they were not here
in the beginning after all.
New buds flower, dry up, and drop
from their stems. Suddenly,
a big shadow is upon us, and in a snap
the truck moves on and light springs back
on old familiars.
Frisky little bodies plunge into the water
and the waters receive them.
The work of memories and affections
is the work of water, earth, and fire.
Were we where we were,
or will we be where we’ll be?
A hand takes us, and we take the hand.
We feel the earth push back our feet,
and we move on
to feed the birds, or watch
the goldfish breathe out ripples
on the surface of the dug-out pond.
A Kink of Burning
1.
Breath of wings. Sighing of lovers
lost to the winds. Sigh of the wind then.
Breath unspoken. About to speak.
No mouth to word dead loves,
only—listen!
A premonition taking wing
bigger than trees.
Through spires of skylight
—through treetops
—through bird tongues swimming on wakened leaves.
The dead cling to music and the rains come.
Breath on ears tingling. Supernal. Breath of dead loves.
2.
Water jets down bald mountains
and wraps the fevered earth with thick muddy blankets.
3.
Among the morning branches a kingfisher—
Is it? Was it? On a leaf a butterfly
Stunned by the wildest flowers
Of faith and desire. Therefore:
Feeling
is all that remains
at the back of the head when no one is looking.
Weightless with lost names
And the fish-breath of solitudes.
4.
Forgetting, then, the last ablution.
Prayers drift past the blooming lotuses
Like ashes from some unsmothered fire
Groping for various shapes of desire.
A wild river flows up past trees still standing,
past words that have given up on words.
5.
A pair of long-parted lovers
recovered to each other’s attentions,
breathe a nakedness and a body
to the moon in their minds.
They find the fullness of longing
shot through with holes,
and its emptiness filling up the scooping hands.
Shorn of old obligations and allegiance
that invaded romance not just once,
they lick each other’s thighs, nipples and breasts
without the faithful words I love I love I love.
Themselves unmoving like roots
In each other’s arms, yet
Moving past names and renamings
Of old resentments and judgments,
they cleave to each other without memory or hope,
creating without god a sweetness
inextinguishable and tender
the way a feather of fire holds on to fire
and takes wing, blazing with singing.
More than a page’s capacity to document how fact took place, I am interested in the way sound can become revolutionary inasmuch as the word ‘revolution’ asserts the necessary paradox of motion in its etymology. As revolution implicates the tension between old and new, the force of its rupture is also present in our sense of the world: one’s gravity, the passing of time and our states of being here.
I am interested in the way etymology creates the circumstances of its word’s failure, and yet it makes language impartable. I am interested in thinking through revolution in order to think about the productive (read: ethical) implications of participating in the newness of rupture with the truss of tradition while operating in the present progressive. In these poems, I wished to unsettle the addresses of Adam and ‘I’ in order to acoustically render the experience of feeling at home in them.
There was the climate lingering on: the business of bearing mymy my myan original, drying leaf's last flutter. What Adam swept during a pretense of a rose is—or, my rendered elastic what he had hoped mym y to be another immovable hue. For natural read his voted-on sense for m y “what stays & away.” So far from feigning Adam & a pavement, ever after its symphony scored a crowd: do you remember your peopled to a tree's? my Do you remember the unaccounted, braced-for apology ahead? my In the humdrum ocean that stole you?
Ha, ha, ha Adam dirtied refusal, soiled his crumpled letterhead
a lesser suite. Shook one's else, your etheric “we shook ourselves with” when
he bore an oak branch to bloat A passage deadened enough to gag. Eyes gravity-
fed with a tick-tocking heart, with what the room
couldn't stand & another for. Dearest Adam arresting with tongues, couldn't you awe
your difference between? Your arterial, you're looking over one's
shoulder for one's wanting embraced. Your arterial we shook
ourselves with: his assembly lined & sworn flaw thrown off what he counts and climbs
On the evenings of November I harvested silence for an I that was my voyeur after having looked out of a skyscraper enough to feel at home in the lie of falling for the ground I couldn’t see. In the sense of storms betrayed by their names’ passing, I returned to transcribe a skyline that was more a seabed upon a traffic light’s sense of keeping time against a street against the trial in every sentence sighed as that storm struck, and her haze misread for dusk rendered the guilt I felt from looking away in order to think myself into trafficking wherever one was raised and therefore became December in the spirit of a cigarette, yet, perhaps, to begin without having to be in a room trembling from trains passing, nay, forging through and through a key to praise forests there in the uppercase, and every other page waiting for an ark to sail a home away from the haunting I was after I awoke drenched enough to mimic newness by foot without doubling back for every shadow caught inside another shadow’s strain, and after hours soiled from calling it work, the rot I incurred until a flood’s current could finally return me.
I am an artist who loves lines.
Vanitas at the speed of light he turned no further were we once an inviolate sorrow, an eyeful of apologies, too quick, or late enough in the instant to recoil from absence the consensus of cells that felt you leave with them as I consent to owe you, I owned who, I sang you my listening my lyric my Eurydice—forge the splash of my signature across any song any shade there mouths, the old gods—silt-handed with gossip still and holding their ends from the end as in the speed of sound she went free
Vanitas “I was named so similar others echo like yours spells through back against the flash of an origin that means something, not a man held it and instead as a stain in a landscape is shallow, it was shallow in the depth of the time it was given, and it called.”
Vanitas And when it had done explaining the dream—reached me, wordless beside the morning.
Vanitas
what joy can error
disprove down to source
its long life in the mirror To myself last night I said my own name
to hear my voice
sound like someone
stripped of choice like a knife
agleam with a few eyes
Sheathe it now your body must do where I
never thought to close, could open the open mirror’s
single eye its radiant mouth
listening to neither side of it equal
a lie, now where faces have no back
From my first collection, Dreamweavers, to the new work in two forthcoming collections, It is time to come home and Fishes of light / Peces de luz (with Cuban poet Alex Fleites), I continue to be fascinated by the tension between finding a way of saying what needs to be said, and finding spaces in the work where silence must be kept. Crafting a poem is, for me, exploring a musical configuration. And my main instrument is the human voice (or the voices I hear), and its (their) capacity for aural inflections and finely calibrated tones to render the textures of a complex human experience.
After I re-learned my mother tongue Cebuano, the possibilities and range of voices (per-sonae) expanded, enriched by and rooted in two different cultural/literary traditions. As a bilingual poet in the Philippines, I take pride in being able to drink from two wellsprings. In my university training in English, I found deep resonances in poems that explored a point, argued for or against it, and yet kept completely open to astonishment. Thus, I loved the discipline of the sonnets of Shakespeare and Donne, the vision of Blake, Whitman and Dickinson. In the Cebuano literary tradition, I revelled in the ‘Bisdak’ (Bisayang Daku) wit of the riddles and ditties, the melisma of the sonanoy of Fernando Buyser, and the ironic humor in the poems of Tem Adlawan, Pantaleon Auman, Rene Amper, Adonis Dorado, Myke Obenieta and Cora Almerino, among others.
As a translator of poetry from English into Cebuano, and lately from Spanish to English or Cebuano, I have deepened my respect for the intrinsic untranslatability of a poem’s musical body. Its substance can only be reshaped in another language, and hopefully, if the translation is any good, it can evoke the power of its sensibility (which is the musical core of the poem’s mind). This is how I read and was influenced early on in my writing by the sensibility of the Chinese T’ang and Japanese Heian poets translated into English.
A poem’s heart cares for and attends to its own mind and strives to sing the old stories in the face of pressures wrought in the world/s we live in, at this particular time, in this specific place. What W.B. Yeats said in ‘The Second Coming’, that ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,’ predicted a postmodern problem that I now experience, on a daily basis, in the Philippines. The poems I write (when I can steal time from the daily urgencies of making a living) are spaces for making momentary sense of the senselessness I have to live with and endure. They are tentative processes towards imagining some answers, or even more questions, in what is an evolving and continually changing and transient inner environment.
Sagada Stills
IN A F L O A T I N G WORLD
If with words If with images
I You
could catch
on photographic film on silk paper
a likeness
of You of Me
in Sagada
I would have You would have
to sit a thousand years
with master of austere
Light Measure
Masferré Shikibu
to learn the process
of rendering of staining
Silence Sound
For Maria Kodama’s Other Borges
'For the person that you will be,
whom perhaps I might not understand.'
- Jorge Luis Borges, Inscripción
I. Her labyrinth
A fortnight after you died,
I sang your black bones back
to shape.
In the silence I trusted
the dark from whence
you came.
Now, you are a figure conjured up
with light on this page,
mere trick
of shadows.
Who are you, Poet?
Whose god can breathe you back
to flesh?
II. Orpheus Falls
Who has not heard the Poet’s lament
for one descended into dream’s dark
stairs?
Who has not heard the gods’
admonition, given with knowing smile—
Do not look back—
last trick to play
on the body’s lighted book of memory?
Every single instance, the lover fails,
falls,
quick to usher the sought-after
back to the surface of time. He sings
to her, “Ascend with me!”—
yet in a
moment’s breathlessness, hers, he
looks back and she’s undone,
charred bones
and ash.
III. Dream of the Waterclock
'All those things were made perfectly clear
so that our hands could meet.'
-Jorge Luis Borges, Las Causas
This is the symphony’s last movement
dripping in the old waterclock.
For each drop of water—in the manner
of the blind poet—I offer you seven
dreams:
1) hush of bamboo leaves
before the onslaught of storm winds;
2) scent
of a golden pollen’s flight after a wild
bee danced the yellow roses;
3) first sheaf of rice
from the first season’s harvest after
the last typhoon;
4) fishing boats on the beach,
dawn silvering the catch in the nets;
5) threshold of sunset through which
my thoughts traverse to the morning
side of the world;
6) last drop of black ink
from the calligrapher’s brush on silk,
on which is completed the release
of the beloved from death;
7) two hands folded,
fingertips lightly touching my forehead
in timeless greeting, as if you’re here
with me. Palpable,
real.
Birds of Paradise after Women with birds of paradise, by Anita Magsaysay-Ho, oil on canvas, 1982 Their eyes are black slits against Gold of their burnished skin this side of morning. They do not shatter silence with chatter of the marketplace. Only their hands speak of the task, gathering the day’s burden of beauty: birds of paradise singing in tongues, wings spread over and between their heads, a feast of burning angels. The youngest among them bends down deepest into herself, wrapping the green stems in a second skin against breaking. The night before, she had watched the sea while the gravid moon rose red as her belly. She tore off her white bandana and broke into the waters, her black seagrass hair dis- entangling, waves hissing low ‘let be, let go!’
These poems are from an unpublished chapbook entitled Spleen. The poems in my two previous books have been called ‘detached’ and ‘objective.’ Thus, when I wrote these poems, I wanted to have it out with strong emotions and to explore (if not come to terms with) this seeming unease with overt sentiment. I also wondered if dropping one’s guard has a place in poetry. Two opposing forces animate the poems in the collection: a sitting figure and the wind. I am usually interested in historical subject formation in poetry, and Spleen is a clear departure from that. But I enjoyed writing these poems nonetheless.
Sitting Poem, 18 Blinding light, cold wind even in summer. The lake below is still: polish of cut glass, silver nourish of indifference. I have come here to sit and wait all day, years, sentinel to any sly arrival. Not scratching, not hungry nor succumbing, not feeling, not bereft, not longing, not moving. Air and sun pressing against strain. The hot sheet of noon shivering into afternoons. The world turning white; no horizon. Breeze catching voices from afar chastens by subtle reminders. O that my life may not always be this. More time, looming shadows. Dusk darkly yielding another setting, disfiguring a landscape I’ve come to know, here stooping, here gloaming, here indigo.
Toy And because I’d gone ahead and done the unthinkable, I want to know what else I won’t ever do. I go ahead and do that too. I think of a thing or two the mere thought of which makes me retch: I do it. And do it until the idea of me and my turns silly, toy, being built a certain way has little truth, until I get to the bottom of where I came undone and keep at it until the hurt it gives gets good and the good I give gets animal.
Night Breeze It is the swell of hours entering, slow It is the fumble of warm breath and blur Particularless interiors, sung equations, The soul shimmying into a cathedral
The poems I am working on these days defer to the impulse to archive and collect. Because of my interest in the collision of apparently objective methods of documentation and an explicitly idiosyncratic subjectivity, my poems employ the alphabet, the catalogue, the timeline, the diagram and the dictionary as forms. I seem to be in the middle of compiling a voluminous encyclopedia of ephemera, driven by a still un-rationalised desire to convert the perishable to permanent, to salvage the seemingly disposable from disappearance and erasure. I am interested in aggressively treating words and sentences as singular units of composition, polyvalent and prone to different registers depending on that which they are in proximity to. In other words, I am extremely attached to the act of enumeration.
Exhibition Notes
Signals
I took the amaretto to mean there was no beer in the house.
I took the bassline to mean a particular addressee was in the crowd.
I took the clairvoyant weather to mean I could dismiss your unappealing conclusions.
I took the dry run to mean the echo was unreliable.
I took the elevated appeal of allusions to mean the fever had no fangs.
I took your fury to mean there was grass in the basement.
I took the gelatinous substance to mean a diminished generosity toward herbivorous endeavors.
I took happiness to mean I had the right syllable in mind.
I took the initials to mean just leave the front door unlocked.
I took the jellyfish scuttling by the reef to mean the kleptomania was the least of my concerns.
I took the kiss to mean a potentially inconsequential lesson.
I took the lesion barely hidden by your sleeve to mean you had no wish to mimic the tragedies of your flawed heroines.
I took the marionette on the clothesline to mean there was hope for the unsuspecting neighbor.
I took no to mean it was the only answer.
I took the oppressive serendipity to mean that panic might or might not send us straight into an emergency.
I took the paprika to mean quiz the cook, not the gardener.
I took the imperious quill to mean the repetition was intentional.
I took the sly reference to mean the substitute had surpassed the preference.
I took the song to mean you took the necessary pill.
I took the tricky decimal to mean I should unsay the speech I made over dinner.
I took the unexpected unification to mean veer away from condescending middlemen.
I took the violinist’s lisp to mean it was imperative to wait in line.
I took the waiver to mean there was a xenophobe in the building.
I took the third x-ray to mean you had nothing more to lose.
I took the yapping from the room below to mean the token zorroing was a far more appropriate gesture.
I took the zero dangling from the headline to mean the aphorism was a spell in disguise.
Half an hour in the house of indecision or procrastination
ants
The cotton buds are attracting ants by the hundreds, they are almost flowers.
blinds
The blinds are behaving like piano keys at the mercy of an inebriated player. Or: the blinds are undulating like the sea on an uneventful summer day. Or: the blinds are shimmering like grass skirt of a woman scavenging for keys in a cavernous purse.
conundrum
Are there three illegal puppies yelping without let up in the apartment next door or just two?
electric fan
The dust clinging to the spokes of the fan spans several eras: The Era of the Apartment Devastated by Flood, The Era of Politically Incorrect yet Extremely Amusing Terms for Informal Settlers, and The Era of Citrus-Scented Cleaning Agents to Cover Up the Accidents of the Ailing Cat.
insight
Instant coffee with condensed milk is too pleasant to be thought of as making do.
history
There is nothing in the house that seems to have emerged from a grandmotherly chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl save for the stereoscope and the box of slides of pastoral scenes in turn-of- the-century India.
melodica
In lieu of the guitar left in the office. In lieu of the sorely missed cable subscription. In lieu of mid-week nights at the bar with unexplainably cheap margaritas, now closed for renovation.
note
The term you mean to use when you say threshed out is fleshed out.
shameful vanity
The studio photograph taken years ago to commemorate the shamelessly literary tattoo is languishing in a book bag from a forgettable conference.
wishful thinking
Today is hopefully not the day the landlady slips the electric bill under the door.
Ambient backing ‘126 Suburbs Neigbourhood Spring Evening Leaves Light Wind Kids Singing Chimes’ by freesoundrecordiss is licensed under creative commons attribution 3.0
