An Object exists only as it might exist to Another

By | 1 August 2016
The melancholia of not being Anne Boyer.

The melancholia of melancholy,

of listening for factories out there in the sea

when everyone else was searching for whales.

The melancholia of a word without a poem,

of the poem as pristine category looking forwards

to an unseasonable year. The melancholia

of mid-size body suits still wrapped in the box.

The melancholia of the test subject

reduced to running slip or outmoded art form.

The melancholia of the barely perceptible

snakeskin purse clutched on dry afternoons

of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s true, isn’t it?

Only the romantic can be that real.

The melancholia of sharp, leopard-print belts

burning naively at the fashion blog

found in the heart of yesteryear.

The melancholia of the human

as a class of actors, reciting Moby Dick

to the signature tunes of Prince. The melancholia

of melancholy, writing city rather than cosmos.

The melancholia of repetition,

recidivist as the eye that refuses

to gaze back at you. One woman’s fantasy

is another’s solipsism.

The melancholia of not being loved,

firstly in the age of Aquarius and then again

in the age of the Anthropocene.

Or the melancholia of window dressing

the incision between innocence and experience.
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Ann Vickery is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the author of three poetry collections: Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack (Vagabond Press, 2021); Devious Intimacy (Hunter Publishers, 2015); and The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (Vagabond Press, 2014). She is also the author of Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt, 2007) and Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), and co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009). She recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and has also co-edited Poetry and the Trace (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). She is currently series editor of Palgrave’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

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