With thanks to Heather Parnell, Pocket Remains.


Beyond the softnesses of squirrel, sable,

the more liquidly flickering kinds




of weasel, there is mouse-whisker,

down-feather of cloud-pheasant, newborn baby’s hair.




Don’t credit the word ‘air brush’. There is nothing

to be said with that in your calligraphy.




But look into the fire.




Pick one flame. Watch how it licks

itself, its frayed point, to the finest




definition. Try to read,

then to write, what is sketched by that tip.




                           *




                                          In the lost script of the silent people,

                                          thirty one characters seem to refer

                                          to shades of being

                                          absent – e.g.




                                          ‘the sense that someone has just left a room

                                          where they were never present’ or

                                          ‘the state of having left what

                                          is no longer there’.




                                          There is a possibility

                                          that you will understand them.

                                          You have been warned.

                                          Do you want to read on?




                           *




Among the rakings out of last night’s bonfire,

this: a flicker book of stills,




a busted flush of pages, each a brief exposure

of maybe an almost a face as it twisted away




but not before its glance burned in

as her or his face turned away might scorch the other




to the heart.  Here’s a snap of the heart,




its heat print on the moment, here’s its ash-print

on the air. They’ll keep the albums, the two




matching albums of each other, see each other’s faces

riffled by in all the windows of a passing train.




                           *




                                          As if the most mundane

                                          and crumpled of us might reveal

                                          in the body one day

                                          what the mind hardly dared




                                          suppose: spontaneous

                                          combustion – every cell

                                          resolving, in a kind of Rapture,

                                          God’s equation, e = mc2




                           *




With a lighter-than-thinking brush-point,

a less-than-a-finger-tip’s flick, in an eye’s-blink,




a kiss to the page: a mark left without pigment

or ink – the almost weightless imprint




in the grass, the pad-scuff in sand

where life brushed past us, so close: signs




the old bush people knew. Ten thousand years




they shared the land with wildfire

in its season. Untended now, it stalks




the gardens of the suburbs, leaving crude

graffiti we can’t read beside our looted bins.




                           *




                                          Where the angel of fire passed over

                                          and did not stop

                                          to knock:

                                          a darkening …




                                          Where it came low, slowed

                                          and let its wingtip brush

                                          between the streetlight and the blinds:

                                          its shadow, with us …




                                          Where it hesitated on the gable:

                                          soot-fall

                                          in the bricked-in chimney,

                                          its grit on the page …




                                          In the morning a scar, a charred

                                          hole burned clean through

                                          where it entered: as close

                                          as we’ll come




                                          to beholding the face,

                                          to transcribing the one

                                          and unsayable

                                          name.


Note:

The poems of ‘Pyroglyphs’ dance around Heather Parnell’s Pocket Remains, a series of images

literally inscribed by fire, which can be accessed here.