April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
warming the core of things
by Nora Krouk
Hybrid Publishers
ISBN: 978192166543
Reviewed by BROOK EMERY
Over the last few months, while all the wise futurists have been forecasting the decline of the book and the ascension of the virtual word, I’ve been thinking about why I’m so attracted to books, specifically to poetry BOOKS, to collections of poetry. I’m not much good at reading poems on the web and I often feel dissatisfied when I read single poems by various authors in journals and anthologies, even in hard copy, even in canon-making anthologies such as The Norton. To me, in these formats poems seem to be isolated, un-contextualised, orphans. I find myself reading one poem after another subconsciously saying things like ‘Oh, that’s not bad’, ‘Yeah, I quite like that one’, ‘There’s not much in this one, is there?’ and flipping (or scrolling) to the next one without really engaging with the poems or feeling involved. I find myself hanging out for a book of poems by the one author so I can get some sense of narrative and coherence, a feeling that the poems speak to each other and enrich each other, a sense of the voice, and personality, and world experience behind the poems.
These considerations came back to me strongly as I was reading Nora’s warming the core of things for the first time. This is a book which invites you to enter and share a life. It is a book which, poem by poem, builds into a unified and challenging consideration of what has been observed and experienced over many years. It is a book in which the overwhelming feeling is ‘warmth’, literally and metaphorically. Such warmth is doubly attractive and welcoming at a time when a lot of poetry is cool, detached, clever, and sometimes seems to have lost touch with that really basic responsibility of poetry to reach out, to connect, and to explore what it is like to be human in our thoughts and feelings.
Warming the core of things is a book which is intimate, confessional (if you like). It celebrates the personal, the familial, and the emotional, it concerns itself with the relationships between people over time. It makes me think of lines from Jack Gilbert’s poem, ‘Highlights and Interstices’ where he writes ‘… our lives happen between / the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual / breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about / her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.’ Like Gilbert, but in a very different way, Nora raises the everyday to moments of insight and appreciation. And like Gilbert, despite what he says about himself, Nora does remember both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Two of the things she and Gilbert remember and feel acutely are love and loss.
The first section of Nora’s collection is titled ‘In Memoriam’ and begins with a delicate poem to her husband Efim who died in 2008. The poem ends with the simple, dignified statement, ‘I miss you’ but this section is no simple, romanticised portrait of a long marriage and the death of a partner. It is clear-eyed, emotionally honest and vivid in its realism. It notes the tensions and ironies and ordinariness in lines such as, ‘she hates to leave him alone / yet itches to step outside’ (‘They are together most days’), in the white chair that waits ‘brazen with coloured cushions’ (‘Slumped in a chair’), in the ‘bare bottoms and other bits’ and the ‘inmates with anguished eyes / [who] search for themselves / [and] stumble over the shards’ (‘Ward 15’). The section expands to take in other deaths, other inevitabilities, and below the surface of them all are the perennial human questions, ‘Why?’ and ‘Couldn’t it have been different?’ Usually the questions are implied but sometimes they are explicitly stated as at the end of the poem ‘Blue Doona’ when Nora asks, ‘Couldn’t you just live?’ It is worth remembering that question from an early poem when you come to the last poem in the book. I’ll say something about this later because it reveals a great deal about Nora’s vision. These poems, these wishes, are moving, touching, but Nora doesn’t live in fantasy, she knows that what happened has happened and nothing can change it or take away the grief because, as she writes in ‘Birthday’, ‘Love is the most pitiless feeling of all’. To really understand the import of this statement, to unpick the relationship between ‘pity’, ‘pitiless’ and ‘love’, you not only have to read the whole poem but the whole collection. Only then will you appreciate the wisdom and emotional intelligence of this collection. Nora is a participant in these poems but she is also the thoughtful observer and interpreter. These are poems in which the border between life and art is more porous than is often the case. It takes courage, assurance and depth to be able to write, ‘My dearest dearest difficult / husband My love’ (‘What should I do’).
The capacity for love leads to an indignity at injustice, especially the injustice done to the individual by the impersonal forces of history. It is there explicitly in some poems and is the context in which the personal happens. Nora has lived a memorable life and she remembers and can see, at this distance, things as they were, that ‘The good times in Shanghai / [were] a 20th century masquerade / as the world burned’. Nora also sees, for example in the poem ‘For Leon K’, how the effects of not knowing – ‘What did they do / before his boots were filling with blood’ – can reverberate through the decades and continue to hurt, even cripple. Nora is witness and rememberer of a father who had to break with his Polish past, of a mother ‘buried in Chinese soil / without a headstone / during the Cultural / Revolution’ (‘A short visit’), of massacres in China, experiments on humans in Harbin, of atrocities committed in war. That the personal is the political is a bit of a silly phrase but Nora’s poetry reminds us that we are all part of events that seem to have happened ‘over there’ or ‘back then’ or to ‘someone else’. Reading these poems we are reminded that no man (no woman) is an island.
Warming the core of things changes gears somewhat in the second section which is called ‘Renewals’. Here the warmth and love which were manifest within the sadness and grief are expressed in a sensual joy in beauty and in a determination to appreciate the bounty of nature. Here the poems are overflowing with wisteria, lavender, roses, gardenias, asters, food, friends, and the warmth of the sun. In the first poem ‘A smile is hovering over our street’ (‘A young woman’), in another ‘this day is / a glob / of honey / a pouring warmth’ (‘Dust on the silver chimes’), in another ‘ Like that butterfly / drunk / on sun / I claim it all: My sun!’ (‘Like that butterfly’), in another Nora is ‘… grateful to Fate / for landing in the sun’. (‘Memory’), and in ‘Shanghai Sydney’ Nora is ‘moving through an amazing puzzle / picking a piece / here on my palm / wishing I knew a psalm / or a prayer of thanks // For everything’ (‘Shanghai Sydney). This section of Nora’s book transforms as well as renews.
If warmth and wisdom are the two dominant qualities of this book, it is the voice of the poems which makes them so attractive. Nora often jokes that her Russian typewriter mischievously makes syntactical or idiomatic mistakes in her poems or, perhaps, even writes the poems without her intervention. I don’t quite believe her because I hear her voice in so many of the poems, in little statements and questions, especially questions. I constantly hear Nora asking herself what she knows, what she has learnt, what she then believed and now believes, what she can do about fate, the inevitable. This is most notable in the third section of the book, ‘Transitions’ in which Nora has a number of conversations with God, humorously wonders about chaos theory and deals with a number of more or less philosophical issues. So many of these poems have a quality of consideration and reconsideration which is made explicit, appropriately near the end of the book, in the poem ‘Once I could plan or act’. This is not dogmatic poetry but the book does grope towards tentative, provisional answers. This testing of ideas can be seen, for example, in Nora’s identification with the sasanqua in ‘Sasanqua in May’
Gold tipped unblinking lashes
in floral faces
focus determination
to bloom to hang on
through alternating currents
of chill air
tucked in the permanence
of green leaves
over the strewn wax petals
trampled to death
they cling to relevance
to celebration of
Here and Now
without blinking.
I know the feeling.
A similar hard-won understanding or, at least, acceptance occurs in the poem, ‘Discussions about God’ where she writes ‘My slender beautiful / jacaranda comes / into bloom slowly / It blooms and sheds / sheds and blooms // Is this the answer?
For me, a baby boomer born and raised safely in Sydney who has not known depression, revolution, war, dislocation, internment, expatriation or, on the other hand, the high, fashionable life, who has taught history but didn’t live it, these poems make me realise how little I know, how little I understand, how little I have experienced.
Here is where you have to remember that early poem.The last word in Nora’s book is ‘live’ with an exclamation mark and that feels appropriate and significant to me. As does the epigraph to the last section of the book, a Ukranian saying, ‘Wishing you good health, warm bread, and peaceful skies’. In its entirety, warming the core of things is full of life; it endorses and celebrates that Ukranian saying.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Out to Lunch
by Andy Kissane
Puncher and Wattmann
ISBN:9781921450204
Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON
Among other things, Andy Kissane’s poetry in Out to Lunch focusses on suburbia, public transport, family, television, the beach and sausages. So, why am I surprised to be moved? And, not only moved, but challenged?
That the visceral, emotional experience of this collection is accompanied by such a sense of surprise is to me a reminder of how much I have still unconsciously bought into the myth of novelty and obscurity. Kissane writes accessible, unpretentious, often humourous, subtly thoughtful poems. They use language that isn’t a long way from the vernacular, what you might overhear at the food court or the pub, eavesdropping. But it is a language carefully calibrated to heighten the sense of the momentous within the everyday. Not to eclipse the everyday, but to attend to it – something like the effect of a film slowing down, heightening the meaning of small gestures, glances and events. It is a deliberate effect, sure, but it’s entirely unforced and natural – as in “Visiting Melbourne”, these are poems seemingly “sung / by lungs that never pause to think of breathing”.
This comes out intriguingly in “The Earlwood-Bardwell Park Song Cycle”, his ambitious and accomplished response to Les Murray’s “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” (which Kissane rightly reminds us is itself a response to the Wonguri-Mandjigai Song-Cycle of the Moon Bone). Whereas Murray’s poem is an attempt to fuse Aboriginal storytelling with a European-Australian attachment to country attuned through annual holiday-making, Kissane takes a more modest and respectful tack. It contains something of the same grammatical structure and heightened attention to place, but it maintains Kissane’s characteristic clarity and light touch. His “Song Cycle” is the Australian suburban world as it is lived day to day. It begins “the long holiday is over”, and flows through all the regular movements of traffic, work, home, shopping, crime, birdlife, the small epiphanies gained and missed. Near its climax, the poem speaks “of the people who gave Gumbramorra Swamp / its name, the Gwiyagal people, who were here first and are still / here, who fished and lived and moved in this place, here”. In this, it is not only a revision but a critique of Murray’s epic reach, baulking at a presumptuous appropriation of an indigenous worldview.
Most of the poems in Out to Lunch are structured in a taut and concentrated casual way, reminiscent of Robert Hass or Billy Collins, yet arguably even more deceptively casual. I say ‘deceptively’ because very often the sensation of a Kissane poem is of someone sitting beside you to tell you what has happened to them, and just as you’ve entered into that familiar world, something twists or jolts you into somewhere exhilaratingly unexpected, though on second glance intuitively connected. For instance, “Falling through the Hoop” contains a string of scenes and memories that touch on the life of “Heinz”. It moves from an image of skinny-dipping at Elwood beach, to “a suspension bridge across a ravine”, then to Heinz’s sudden suicide. At this point, Kissane, as he often does at moments like this in his poems, recedes into an admission of ignorance – “some moments / resist, no matter how you worry / at them, or pound them, they will not / answer, they will not come back”, aware that the reader will understand that these “moments” are also the people who he has lost.
To me, this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Out to Lunch. Many of its best poems, while rooted in autobiographical specifics and a familiar suburban milieu, grapple honestly with the suffering of others, and with the limitations of that grappling. The poet is clearly aware of, and uncomfortable with, global inequalities, and acutely aware of the great distance between his own life and the lives of others. His poems apprehend political complexities through the very intimate lens of empathy and imagination. The very real dilemma of attempting to integrate global realities with daily routine is vividly evoked in “The Colour of Starvation”. Here, Kissane remembers watching as a teenager a documentary set “somewhere in Africa or India, where many people / were poor and starving” and his subsequent anger at his family’s material comfort, acknowledging how easily an awareness of the other slides into self-consciousness. The poem weaves this story into a meditation on William Morris, 19th century artist, textile designer and socialist; the poet’s desire to write about sweat-shop labour from the comfort of his desk; and the pleasures of food, beautiful objects and sunlight. The poem leads us towards a familiar, uncomfortable compassion and refuses to provide solutions. As these juxtapositions build through the course of the book, as a reader, I begin to want the poet to attempt some leap towards resolution or provocation, but Kissane eschews definitive answers in favour of the clarity of the poem’s evocation of reality. Or, to put it another way, he overtly recognises the relative impotence of the poem to directly affect injustice – thereby allowing it to have impact in the affective field.
Throughout Out to Lunch there are small, concentrated statements of poetics, either implied or in the case of “Joy and a Fibro Shack” overt. The poem begins with an exploration of poetry as “like the difficulty of building a house / without a plan, a wood, a hammer”, moving further into the metaphor, until the deliberately prosaic lines “Is a poem a palace or a humpy? / I prefer humpies, furnished from a daggy couch / reclaimed from the council clean-up”. If this was the extent of the poem, it may feel underwhelming, but it shifts gear, as Kissane often does, through memory into a secondary metaphor that is just as clear and subtle, while also refusing resolution. It ends with the poet “up at 3am, / walking the kitchen, walking the hallway, walking / the lounge room, holding a baby / who would not stop, would not stop, / just would not stop crying”. We know that the poet is in control of this poem, but at its closure, we are left also with his awe at the wildness and hunger of poetry.
The question is, what holds this collection together? How could it be said that these poems are out to lunch? This is perhaps my only serious qualm with the book – the title. The suggestion of daydreaming in Out to Lunch certainly alludes to the shifts and leaps which provide much of the energy and surprise of the collection. And it also hints at the “Meat Matters” series of poems, where meat in its various cuts and recipes is given centre stage (which is sometimes quite funny and memorable, but also left this vegetarian a little cold) . But the idiom to me is too much rooted in the negative or apologetic, bringing to mind someone who instinctively wants to escape from the everyday with their imagination, someone unconcerned with the world as it is and their responsibility to it. This is not Kissane.
This, of course, is a minor issue. Kissane is a great craftsman, the writing finely shaped yet always fluid and naturalistic. Out to Lunch was deservedly shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize – the poems are warm, subtly complex and humane. Its peculiar and ongoing resonance comes from its full immersion in reality and memory, where moments of detail remind us of the constructed and limited nature of the poem, moments that foreground ignorance, that imply that life goes on through not knowing.
Leaving Home is to my mind perhaps the highlight of the collection. It epitomises Kissane’s ability to fuse the quotidian with surprise and understated emotion. From a domestic family scene where –
The oven door was permanently ajar,
hanging by its last hinge, when my mother
crossed the kitchen and planted a kiss
on my father’s bristly cheek…
to a magical, yet matter-of-factly stated transformation –
‘At last’, she said to herself, ‘I have managed
to get my priorities right’ – and with that
the feathers sprouted from her scapula
and her dentures dropped, orphan-like,
from her lips…
ANDY JACKSON’s collection, Among the Regulars (papertiger media, 2010) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. In late 2011, he will be an Asialink resident at Chennai, India. He blogs at amongtheregulars.wordpress.com
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
amphora
by joanne burns 
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
ISBN 9781920882631
Reviewed by IVY IRELAND
quadrillions of singing atoms: joanne burns’ amphora
joanne burns’ most recent collection, amphora, could almost be a gold-bound book of saints, if it weren’t for the utterly human myths also seeping through its pages. The collection’s amphorae are filled to brimming with hagiography, angelology and quite a bit of effortless nostalgia. In fact, burns’ well-loved quirks and smarts flood out of this collection, unable to be contained by the ancient vessels of the title. Dipping into the overflowing liquids of the ceramic jars, the reader discovers not only the holy waters of poignant scientific enquiry, but also the pink lemonade of PopThink. There is a great sense of questing after the divine threading throughout these poems, even if it is the divine discovered in such suburban tasks as trimming the unruly Bougainvillea or sucking on lifesavers during rosary.
What strikes me most when reading burns’ work is her tenacious grasp on the humble quotidian, her understanding of the layers beneath the hours and her willingness to unravel the cosmos into quarks and photons without losing her grasp on self and home. “streamers”, burns’ collection of koans, koannes, give the most intimate examples of this:
weigh the rice before you boil it
how else can you catch up
with yourself
“rung” is, to my thinking, the stand-out poetry sequence of the collection. The ladder is the subject of this humble, yet unrelenting, enquiry into what goes up and what comes down. Jacob, Yeats and Miro feature here, of course, but it’s burns’ own nostalgic reflections that contain the best clue to the importance of this everyday tool:
great thorny branches of bouganvillia leap and lurch
towards the sky; junglegreen and purple riot in the air.
i try to prune them. cut them back into some kind of
order no topiary, after my father dies; his ladder is my
ladder now
And yet every lofty, perhaps enlightened buzz-moment, such as:
yeats knew the disloyalty of ladders
the vanishing of rungs in the windy spaces
of old minds; who end up after all those heady
moments back down on hands and knees across
familiar rubbled ground, small hearts picking through
the rags and bones of diminished time;
is craftily snatched away again by simple memories from the human psyche box:
but me. i look for an easier solution. enough of biblical
endurance and ordealism. i climb down the ladder
of memory.
Throughout amphora, burns tackles even the most typical Christian icons, such as saints and angels, with her witty, playful antennae intact. The opening poem (from the aptly named “angles not angels” section) of the collection, “pitch,” claims:
… i don’t want an angel with huge wings
that rustle, i need someone quiet who likes to dust and shop and
vacuum while i recline and dream up poems and skim through
dictionaries and roget’s there is something about the sight
and thought of those angel wings in most religious art
that makes me shudder
suggesting that it is the typical domestic joys that truly keep the divine (and the poet) afloat in this sea of the extraordinary. And this book of poems is awash with the extraordinary, simply packed to the brim with mini-insights that eek out of the “pleroma” and into the mind of the sage sensitive enough to capture them and distil them down for the everyday reader. Even the almost-accidental, scattered and observational poems of the final section of the collection, “this week next week the week after” contain snippets of insight that can only be described as near-mythological or Zen-instructive:
you can’t rely on the sky
to help you sort it out it just hangs
there like a lout sucking on a milk
shake and letting it all happen the burning years
and again:
the poems are running
running away running from
that dread of having to explain
themselves, those lists of
food ingredients they’veread on the back of packets
instant noodles for example;
The blurb on the back of burn’s book states that “from… common things, from familiar words and phrases… burns draws attitudes that define a way of living – gladness, openness, curiosity, acceptance and above all sensual delight.” Indeed there is a delightful gladness skipping throughout the pages of amphora, even in the midst of the most sardonic observations. Yet I would add that, even through all of this all-consuming openness, there’s a sense of mocking the openness, as through nothing is sacred because everything is. Everything is, thus, worthy of the air-knives of burns’ observational skills because the simple holiness contained within these mocked saints and abjured louts will act as their own necessary shields.
amphora is a mini-world of quarks and paradox, dissecting gods and saints alongside the contents of a school lunchbox. And the variations in theme are almost equivalent to the variations in form. burns’ trademark prose poems are still to be found here, yet she seems to play a lot with lineation in this collection also, as evident in “raft”:
i dream of the Gnostic pleroma
before the light and dark fissure,
the superstitious rifting: eternal hymn
Throughout amphora, however, nothing remains in stasis. It is a book of changes: mercurial, honest, undoing itself at every turn. Even the glorious realisations contained in these stanzas of undulating internal rhythms and rhymes are undone in the next instant:
…pleroma,
foremost world of fullness; did the gnostics eat
grated carrot?
Reading through amphora repeatedly (and consider yourself warned: this collection will need second and third reading), I discover that, for me, it’s not the vast, eclectic field burns is plucking her poetics from that packs the most punch (though I must say I am wowed even by the neologisms). Instead, the true magic lies in the intimate realisations, in the nostalgic, expounded memory-shards that unfold from these poems. These snippets of insight into the specific journey of one human psyche, such as this image from “relief,” truly sing:
the smell of that old school chalk. how time slips
away but the smell doesn’t. smell of your teenage
slip singeing after you wrapped it around your
bedlamp late at night on a school day, anxious to
conceal your awakeness from your mother while
you devour ‘the picture of dorian grey’. giving the
gods of reading lust the slip as a burnt offering.
I feel certain that the great gods of reading lust will accept joanne burns’ latest offering with all the zest it deserves.
IVY IRELAND is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant and Ph.D candidate. Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hoa Pham is an author and playwright. Her play “silence” was on the VCE Drama Studies list in Victoria in 2010 and published by Currency Press. Her work can be viewed at www.hoapham.net
Wave
Inside it was warm like greenhouse flowers. Outside it was the end of the world.
*
He was waiting. Waiting for his mother to come. In his favourite yellow hat with the cosy ear flaps on and wrapped up in his red puffy parka. In his gumboots with buzzy bees.
They had just had open play time when they could do anything they liked. He made a picture for his mother out of autumn leaves. The brown foliage crunched in his hands and littered the paper with broken remains.
Usually mummy was punctual. She would arrive and take her hand in his and give him a kiss on the cheek. She smelt of perfume and newly applied lipstick. Then they would go home and have a hot chocolate while she cooked dinner.
He hoped she would come soon so he could give her his collage of leaves. He had made a giraffe and a horse.
*
Her powdered face was a fraud, a mask to the outside world. Sometimes she thinks the mask is transparent and people can see straight through to her soul. Only her lover has seen her wake up in the early morning- her husband leaves for work by the time she rises at home.
She did not know what her lover saw in her. She was married and worn down like a river stone. Having borne two children she was plumper than she should be. She was respectable, not the kind to have extra marital affairs. Romance and longing were for other people, not for someone ordinary like her.
Only their shared secrets made her feel alive anymore. Her husband was amiable enough, good looking enough, stable enough. But something was awry with their family set, husband and wife, son and daughter.
*
Outside was the distant roar of the ocean. Today he could hear the waves. It sounded like the beach had crept right up to their doorstep.
Next to him the other children were waiting too. No one’s parents had arrived yet.
He was looking at the clock.
Soon they were all looking at the clock waiting for their parents to come.
The red digital numbers on the stark black clock told no lies.
Their parents were late.
*
He found himself thinking of his sister. She had been crying a lot in her room. She did not cry when their parents were home, lately she had been stiff of face. But when neither of them were there and she was supposed to look after him, she would retreat into her room and cry. He would sit in front of her sliding bedroom door and wait for her to come out for a cuddle.
His sister was beautiful, with cherubic short hair. She used to go to her friend’s apartment a lot, but that stopped when the crying began. He missed his sister smiling and talking to him.
He looked back at the closed door to the children’s room. No one’s parents had arrived. That was strange. Sometimes one parent would be late. But all of them?
The children began whispering amongst themselves.
One child began to cry, snuffling softly.
*
They breathe heavily, and fly at each others’ touch. Her back arcs as she feels the sensation of flying. Her lover’s fingers caress the petals of her inner self. She brushes her hands over her nipples for the fleeting sharp sensation. Then it is her lover’s turn, and they sigh together, moisture mingling. From their union, a pearl is birthed from her throat. Her lover plucks the sweet gem from her mouth with her fingers. Slippery and wet the multi coloured rainbow goes into her mouth and she swallows. They know that if anyone finds out about the gems they birth, they would no longer have the pleasure to themselves.
This is her memory- a reconstruction as she surges forward on her fingers remembering how to feel. Her lover is gone now over the seas, exiled far away from all that is familiar.
I still love you. Even though they have separated us. I will never forget you. Even though they have forced this marriage on me, I have learnt how to separate body and spirit.
Everything is a construction.
*
Mother! He thinks into the ether, hoping that she can hear him shouting in his mind. Sometimes she does know, the hiccup before he cries out aloud that brings her running into his room. Other times she is deaf to him even when he is in her arms, warm and snug.
Where are all the mummies? Where have they gone?
A child care worker opens the sliding door and is greeted by the silent anticipation of the children sitting in rows cross legged on the floor.
She shakes her head, and now he can see how white she is and the deepest frown on her face close up. Something is wrong.
*
She wishes she was other than what she is. Tenses turn and twist as she remembers, sometimes she remembers the here and now, other times the past as she recalls it, in the quicksilver light of her teenage years.
When she orgasms she remembers the most. Past lovers flick by like comic book frames, the neon lights of Shinjuku out of a love hotel window, the fleeting kiss of loves that never were.
She would not exchange what she is for something else, she tells herself as she sinks into the hot bath scented with pink ginger. Her skin dissolves when she is in water and the warmth penetrates her core.
When she was younger she and her first love would don costumes on Sundays and join the cosplay parading. She was slim and flat chested and would go as Dragon Girl, a warrior in pigtails that had dragons slithering down her arms. She yearned to fly like Dragon Girl and her lover would go as Dragon Boy. That way business men would not try to proposition them like they did when her lover stayed true to her gender which was the same.
Others cannot forgive that she still holds memories of her first love dearest to her heart.
*
In Zen Buddhism the circle is emptiness and completeness. In Japanese literature, a mood is captured, a fleeting feeling. It is not so important unlike Western literature, for the hero to conquer all.
*
She only began to play piano for herself once she was in Australia. There was an old upright piano in the corner of the multipurpose meeting room in the apartment complex. No one could hear her, she did not have to think about what other people thought and felt. The sound bounced on the wooden floor, and the touch was uneven. Clunky though her renditions were, she lost herself in the tangled notes of her memory.
*
He vanishes inside his mind then.
A photographer taking their pictures, a flash of light over the children sitting in rows like temple statues. Then a red headed white woman speaking a foreign language gives them soft toys.
He balances the brown soft toy kangaroo on his crossed legs. Outside older children are playing.
He remembers thinking – they have not suffered. They do not know anything.
Seriousness was pressed into him that day.
I’m not like them. I cannot be carefree.
*
She has a younger brother. He is the only reason that she would not wish death on her parents. She had prayed to the old gods, the dragons of earth, water, fire and heaven.
When the dream came true she was terrified by the freedom she felt, falling into empty space.
*
He had the ever present filial obligation to look after his older beautiful sister. Even though she had abandoned their ancestors and the family shrine.
Now the soft toy kangaroo is worn from where his baby hand had clutched it every night in his foster home. One eye is missing but somehow the kangaroo yields to being squeezed in between his shirts and shoes in his suitcase.
What do you call the hopping mouse with a bag?
Kan-ga-rou.
*
Melbourne is the first place she could see the stars in the sky. She is stunned and spends nights lying on her back on the roof of the apartment complex gazing at the Southern Cross and the rabbit in the moon.
During the daytime the sky is electric blue, arcing overhead. The streets are empty. Without the mass of people to hold her in, she feels the boundaries of her self dissipate and fade.
*
She is the legal guardian of her brother, being over 18. Australians think she is younger than she is, other Asians see the creases at the corner of her eyes and backs of her hands and say she is older. Since her parents died, guilt and responsibility makes her shoulders tense and her hands ache with pain.
Her brother has retreated inside himself. She is cocooned in her own silence and shame. They live in the same apartment and eat the same brand of instant ramen together but are each alone.
*
His sister taps on the computer keyboard late into the night, early into the morning. Once he surprised her laughing quietly at the screen. She shows animation to the CGI and flat of face to her little brother. Her phone beeps melodic messages constantly.
He studies the international baccalaureate in a school uniform that is slightly too big for him. His English picks up when he is interested in doing so. Their parents legacy had already been earmarked for their education. Without being told, the siblings do what their parents would have wanted.
He watches his sister’s movements. Sometimes she stays at university overnight and doesn’t come home. He fails to say anything. Some nights he watches TV until she returns.
He becomes immersed in anime that he is familiar with in Japanese, that is dubbed into English. He is swallowed up by the characters and is taken by one androgynous lone hero, who sometimes is referred to as a girl, other times a boy. He styles his hair in the same shaggy cut and peroxides blond.
No one is around to say no to them. She starts drinking lychee liquor in cans, imported from Japan. Then moves on to vodka and cordial. Sometimes she leaves empties around for him to finish off when she isn’t looking.
*
New Years Eve. At home they would go to the shrine for luck and write their wishes on wooden tablets to hang up and blow in the breeze. Last New Years Day she was with her lover. They had bought identical pink outfits at the sales and pretended to be sisters, walking together with linked arms.
At the Inari temple they had posed for snapshots under a giant stone fox statue adorned with the red bib and wrote their dearest wishes for their love in kanji on fox shaped tablets. Ringing the bells for luck they swore to never be parted and never to forget.
This year she remembers as she throws 500 yen coins into the stone dragon fountain for luck. At her home temple she had bought an extravagant gold tablet for the spirits of her parents. This alleviates her guilt, appealing to the same celestial gods to look after them in heaven.
*
Music was her joy from when she was a toddler. She was taken to a Suzuki method concert when she was three. Little girls in white dresses played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the violin in unison, the youngest being two years old. Her mother asked her which instrument she would like to play and she said piano. There was only one pianist amongst the little girls, and she had always felt she was different from the rest.
Mother learnt alongside her at first, a memory that made her fingers ache in sympathy. Balancing a 500 yen coins on the back of her hands to train her hands flat and straight. Doing five variations of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and listening to the Suzuki repertoire on her mp3 player at night.
Then the recitals began, first in the guise of music camps. Guests to their home were treated to a little night music by Mozart. By then her mother had stopped shadowing her. She was eight when the competition began in earnest. She began to make up her own music, her own variations. Then one evening her mother, cooking in the next room, put down her chopping knife and walked into the room. The music jarred to a stop.
“What are you playing?”
“I’m making up a surprise for the teacher.”
“Don’t ever do that again. If you play that to the teacher how bad will I look? Concentrate on your recital.”
Her mother left her, and so did the desire.
*
Her duet partner was assigned to her. A solemn girl, taller and four months older. Their mothers met, assessing each other under the teacher’s supervision. The two girls practiced together. The boundaries between them dissolved in the melding of their tunes, and when they won their first eisteddfod.
She rediscovered joy then staying at her duet partner’s house overnight. In this house they were allowed to read past midnight. They exchanged clothing, and secrets.
They played live to a TV studio audience to showcase their teacher. It was broadcast nationally and she was showered with attention for a day.
Their families went on excursions together. Then on one trip the mothers had an argument. Her mother blushed with anger told her they were going home early.
She never saw her duet partner again. She has been looking for her double, her collaborator, her muse ever since.
*
In his sister’s shadow he bloomed from benign neglect.
*
Maybe this is why she cannot perform anymore. The last time she drank a can of coffee before she was scheduled to play. She shook and sweated all over the keys. Then she disassociated, the audience dipped out of sight and she was far away, unable to access the joy that was once hers.
Her teacher was unsympathetic. The girl was a hard worker but fell apart under pressure. Soon the lessons ceased all together.
*
She does not realise that her mother’s lies parallel hers.
He does not realise his destiny is preordained like tram tracks from the stories he emotes.
The stories between the lines and spaces on the pages.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zen Cho is a Malaysian writer living in London. Her fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications including Strange Horizons, the Selangor Times, Fantastique Unfettered, Steam-Powered II and GigaNotoSaurus. Her short story ‘First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia’ was a finalist in the 2011 Selangor Young Talent Awards.
The Four Generations of Chang E
The First Generation
In the final days of Earth as we knew it, Chang E won the moon lottery.
For Earthlings who were neither rich nor well-connected, the lottery was the only way to get on the Lunar Habitation Programme. (This was the Earthlings’ name for it. The moon people said: “those fucking immigrants”.)
Chang E sold everything she had: the car, the family heirloom enamel hairpin collection, her external brain. Humans were so much less intelligent than Moonites anyway. The extra brain would have made little difference.
She was entitled to the hairpins. Her grandmother had pressed them into Chang E’s hands herself, her soft old hands folding over Chang E’s.
“In the future it will be dangerous to be a woman,” her grandmother had said. “Maybe even more dangerous than when my grandmother was a girl. You look after yourself, OK?”
It was not as if anyone else would. There was a row over the hairpins. Her parents had been saving them to pay for Elder Brother’s education.
Hah! Education! Who had time for education in days like these? In these times you mated young before you died young, you plucked your roses before you came down with some hideous mutation or discovered one in your child, or else you did something crazy–like go to the moon. Like survive.
Chang E could see the signs. Her parents’ eyes had started following her around hungrily, for all the world as if they were Bugs Bunny and she was a giant carrot. One night Chang E would wake up to find herself trussed up on the altar they had erected to Elder Brother.
Since the change Elder Brother had spent most of his time in his room, slumbering Kraken-like in the gloomful depths of his bed. But by the pricking of their thumbs, by the lengthening of his teeth, Mother and Father trusted that he was their way out of the last war, their guard against assault and cannibalism.
Offerings of oranges, watermelons and pink steamed rice cakes piled up around his bed. One day Chang E would join them. Everyone knew the new gods liked best the taste of the flesh of women.
So Chang E sold her last keepsake of her grandmother and pulled on her moon boots without regret.
On the moon Chang E floated free, untrammelled by the Earth’s ponderous gravity, untroubled by that sticky thing called family. In the curious glances of the moon people, in their condescension (“your Lunarish is very good!”) she was reinvented.
Away from home, you could be anything. Nobody knew who you’d been. Nobody cared.
She lived in one of the human ghettos, learnt to walk without needing the boots to tether her to the ground, married a human who chopped wood unceasingly to displace his intolerable homesickness.
One night she woke up and saw the light lying at the foot of her bed like snow on the grass. Lifting her head, she saw the weeping blue eye of home. The thought, exultant, thrilled through her: I’m free! I’m free!
The Second Generation
Her mother had had a pet moon rabbit. This was before we found out they were sentient. She’d always treated it well, said Chang E. That was the irony: how well we had treated the rabbits! How little some of them deserved it!
Though if any rabbit had ever deserved good treatment, it was her mother’s pet rabbit. When Chang E was little, it had made herbal tea for her when she was ill, and sung her nursery rhymes in its native moon rabbit tongue–little songs, simple and savage, but rather sweet. Of course Chang E wouldn’t have been able to sing them to you now. She’d forgotten.
But she was grateful to that rabbit. It had been like a second mother to her, said Chang E.
What Chang E didn’t like was the rabbits claiming to be intelligent. It’s one thing to cradle babies to your breast and sing them songs, stroking your silken paw across their foreheads. It’s another to want the vote, demand entrance to schools, move in to the best part of town and start building warrens.
When Chang E went to university there was a rabbit living in her student hall. Imagine that. A rabbit sharing their kitchen, using their plates, filling the pantry with its food.
Chang E kept her chopsticks and bowls in her bedroom, bringing them back from the kitchen every time she finished a meal. She was polite, in memory of her nanny, but it wasn’t pleasant. The entire hall smelled of rabbit food. You worried other people would smell it on you.
Chang E was tired of smelling funny. She was tired of being ugly. She was tired of not fitting in. She’d learnt Lunarish from her immigrant mother, who’d made it sound like a song in a foreign language.
Her first day at school Chang E had sat on the floor, one of three humans among twenty children learning to add and subtract. When her teacher had asked what one and two made, her hand shot up.
“Tree!” she said.
Her teacher had smiled. She’d called up a tree on the holographic display.
“This is a tree.” She called up the image of the number three. “Now, this is three.”
She made the high-pitched clicking sound in the throat which is so difficult for humans to reproduce.
“Which is it, Changey?”
“Tree,” Chang E had said stupidly. “Tree. Tree.” Like a broken down robot.
In a month her Lunarish was perfect, accentless, and she rolled her eyes at her mother’s singsong, “Chang E, you got listen or not?”
Chang E would have liked to be motherless, pastless, selfless. Why was her skin so yellow, her eyes so small, when she felt so green inside?
After she turned 16, Chang E begged the money off her dad, who was conveniently indulgent since the divorce, and went in secret for the surgery.
When she saw herself in the mirror for the first time after the operation she gasped.
Long ovoid eyes, the last word in Lunar beauty, all iris, no ugly inconvenient whites or dark browns to spoil that perfect reflective surface. The eyes took up half her face. They were like black eggs, like jewels.
Her mother screamed when she saw Chang E. Then she cried.
It was strange. Chang E had wanted this surgery with every fibre of her being–her nose hairs swooning with longing, her liver contracting with want.
Yet she would have cried too, seeing her mother so upset, if her new eyes had let her. But Moonite eyes didn’t have tear ducts. No eyelids to cradle tears, no eyelashes to sweep them away. She stared unblinking and felt sorry for her mother, who was still alive, but locked in an inaccessible past.
The Third Generation
Chang E met H’yi in the lab, on her first day at work. He was the only rabbit there and he had the wary, closed-off look so many rabbits had.
At Chang E’s school the rabbit students had kept themselves to themselves. They had their own associations–the Rabbit Moonball Club, the Lapin Lacemaking Society–and sat in quiet groups at their own tables in the cafeteria.
Chang E had sat with her Moonite friends.
“There’s only so much you can do,” they’d said. “If they’re not making any effort to integrate …. ”
But Chang E had wondered secretly if the rabbits had the right idea. When she met other Earthlings, each one alone in a group of Moonites, they’d exchange brief embarrassed glances before subsiding back into invisibility. The basic wrongness of being an Earthling was intensified in the presence of other Earthlings. When you were with normal people you could almost forget.
Around humans Chang E could feel her face become used to smiling and frowning, every emotion transmitted to her face with that flexibility of expression that was so distasteful to Moonites. As a child this had pained her, and she’d avoided it as much as possible–better the smoothness of surface that came to her when she was hidden among Moonites.
At 24, Chang E was coming to understand that this was no way to live. But it was a difficult business, this easing into being. She and H’yi did not speak to each other at first, though they were the only non-Moonites in the lab.
The first time she brought human food to work, filling the place with strange warm smells, she kept her head down over her lunch, shrinking from the Moonites’ glances. H’yi looked over at her.
“Smells good,” he said. “I love noodles.”
“Have you had this before?” said Chang E. H’yi’s ears twitched. His face didn’t change, but somehow Chang E knew he was laughing.
“I haven’t spent my entire life in a warren,” he said. “We do get out once in a while.”
The first time Chang E slept over at his, she felt like she was coming home. The close dark warren was just big enough for her. It smelt of moon dust.
In H’yi’s arms, her face buried in his fur, she felt as if the planet itself had caught her up in its embrace. She felt the wall vibrate: next door H’yi’s mother was humming to her new litter. It was the moon’s own lullaby.
Chang E’s mother stopped speaking to her when she got married. It was rebellion, Ma said, but did she have to take it so far?
“I should have known when you changed your name,” Ma wept. “After all the effort I went to, giving you a Moonite name. Having the throat operation so I could pronounce it. Sending you to all the best schools and making sure we lived in the right neighbourhoods. When will you grow up?”
Growing up meant wanting to be Moonite. Ma had always been disappointed by how bad Chang E was at this.
They only reconciled after Chang E had the baby. Her mother came to visit, sitting stiffly on the sofa. H’yi made himself invisible in the kitchen.
The carpet on the floor between Chang E and her mother may as well have been a maria. But the baby stirred and yawned in Chang E’s arms–and stolen glance by jealous, stolen glance, her mother fell in love.
One day Chang E came home from the lab and heard her mother singing to the baby. She stopped outside the nursery and listened, her heart still.
Her mother was singing a rabbit song.
Creaky and true, the voice of an old peasant rabbit unwound from her mouth. The accent was flawless. Her face was innocent, wiped clean of murky passions, as if she’d gone back in time to a self that had not yet discovered its capacity for cruelty.
The Fourth Generation
When Chang E was 16, her mother died. The next year Chang E left school and went to Earth, taking her mother’s ashes with her in a brown ceramic urn.
The place her mother had chosen was on an island just above the equator, where, Ma had said, their Earthling ancestors had been buried. When Chang E came out of the environment-controlled port building, the air wrapped around her, sticky and close. It was like stepping into a god’s mouth and being enclosed by his warm humid breath.
Even on Earth most people travelled by hovercraft, but on this remote outpost wheeled vehicles were still in use. The journey was bumpy–the wheels rendered them victim to every stray imperfection in the road. Chang E hugged the urn to her and stared out the window, trying to ignore her nausea.
It was strange to see so many humans around, and only humans. In the capital city you’d see plenty of Moonites, expats and tourists, but not in a small town like this.
Here, thought Chang E, was what her mother had dreamt of. Earthlings would not be like moon humans, always looking anxiously over their shoulder for the next way in which they would be found wanting.
And yet her mother had not chosen to come here in life. Only in death. Where would Chang E find the answer to that riddle?
Not in the graveyard. This was on an orange hill, studded with white and grey tombstones, the vermillion earth furred in places with scrubby grass.
The sun bore close to the Earth here. The sunshine was almost a tangible thing, the heat a repeated hammer’s blow against the temple. The only shade was from the trees, starred with yellow-hearted white flowers. They smelled sweet when Chang E picked them up. She put one in her pocket.
The illness had been sudden, but they’d expected the death. Chang E’s mother had arranged everything in advance, so that once Chang E arrived she did not have to do or understand anything. The nuns took over.
Following them, listening with only half her attention on their droning chant in a language she did not know to a god she did not recognise, she looked down on the town below. The air was thick with light over the stubby low buildings, crowded close together the way human habitations tended to be.
How godlike the Moonites must have felt when they entered these skies and saw such towns from above. To love a new world, you had to get close to the ground and listen.
You were not allowed to watch them lower the urn into the ground and cover it with soil. Chang E looked up obediently.
In the blue sky there was a dragon.
She blinked. It was a flock of birds, forming a long line against the sky. A cluster of birds at one end made it look like the dragon had turned its head. The sunlight glinting off their white bodies made it seem that the dragon looked straight at her with luminous eyes.
She stood and watched the sky, her hand shading her eyes, long after the dragon had left, until the urn was buried and her mother was back in the Earth.
What was the point of this funeral so far from home, a sky’s worth of stars lying between Chang E’s mother and everyone she had ever known? Had her mother wanted Chang E to stay? Had she hoped Chang E would fall in love with the home of her ancestors, find a human to marry, and by so doing somehow return them all to a place where they were known?
Chang E put her hand in her pocket and found the flower. The petals were waxen, the texture oddly plastic between her fingertips. They had none of the fragility she’d been taught to associate with flowers.
Here is a secret Chang E knew, though her mother didn’t.
Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.
At a certain point, this stops being sad–but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?
Chang E wiped her eyes and her streaming forehead, followed the nuns back to the temple, and knelt to pray to her nameless forebears.
She was at the exit when remembered the flower. The Lunar Border Agency got funny if you tried to bring Earth vegetation in. She left the flower on the steps to the temple.
Then Chang E flew back to the Moon.
April 26, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Pablo de Rokha (1894-1968) was born as Pablo Díaz Loyola. Despite his profound influence upon subsequent generations of Latin American poets, he failed to achieve the international fame of his contemporary, Pablo Neruda (with whom he quarrelled fiercely and publicly). In 1965 he was awarded Chile’s National Literature Prize, deemed by many at the time to be long overdue. He committed suicide at the age of 73.
God
He made man, he made him in his IMAGE and semblance, and he’s enormously sad and an immense man, an immense man, the continuation of all men, all men, all the MOST manly men, the continuation of all men towards the infinite, a dream, all a dream or a TRIANGLE that dissolves in bright stars.
***
How much pain, how much pain did the earth need to create you, God, to create you!.. how much pain! Gesture of the world’s anguish, of matter’s sickness and an enormous, enormous mania of enormities!
***
God, that great human caricature, God, full of empty skies, sad consciences, sad consciences and GREAT anguish, his neutered cadaver’s voice brings together and sums up, FOR man, in his common and disconcerting attitude, the moaning of every object and, in addition, the other, the distant, the other, the other, like the words of a naive child, a naive child, a naive child; bad God, good God, wise God, stubborn God, God with passions and gestures, virtues and vices, concubines or ILLEGITIMATE sons, with an office like a pharmacist’s, like any hairdresser’s.
***
The earth sculpted the earth’s ingenuous fruits for him, only for him, the earth’s ingenuous fruits, and man denied the enormous world, denied the world; who was, who was ever, who was more loved than him?… he, he was the most loved but never was anything, anyone, he never was, never, never was, never, never, never was!..
***
Tragedy of God, God, God, the major disgrace of history, the lie, the PHENOMENAL blow to the rights of life, God.
***
God answered smiling answered God, God answered the most tremendous, the most obscure, the most disastrous questions and the great question; BUT the most tremendous, the most obscure, the most disastrous questions and the great question still, still haven’t been, haven’t been, haven’t been answered yet, still haven’t been answered; God squashed the earth, oh! sacred hippopotamus, God squashed the earth with filthy feet, and the footprints survive until today, survive on the roads and in the tragic belly of the worlds.
***
He blackened, he blackened, he blackened LIFE with the black paint of dreams and urinated the dignity of man.
***
“God, God, God, do you exist?… God! God! God!..”, howl the towns and the old women, the old women and the towns across the theological plains… shut up! idiots, shut up! shut up!… God IS YOU.
***
Great absurd wing, God extends himself over THE VOID…
The Pale Conquistadors
Epic characters, epic, executive or emphatic characters, emphatic, emphatic, and souls of bronze, steel, rock, wretched bones, wiry muscles, men of concise, energetic, simple, authentic, authoritative, exact language, and RED actions, RED burning a priori, hermit-swordsmen, swordsmen-hermits, adventurers who are transformed by hunger and the thirst for GOLD, glory, dashing exploits – glory! glory! – transformed from frauds into heroes, from frauds into heroes, the power of having a soul boiling, the power of having a soul boiling, the power of having a soul boiling at SEVENTY ONE degrees in the shade.
***
Dim, illiterate, ignorant, ignorant soldiers, you predated the immense, contemporary urban estates and you were THE FIRST settlers of the dull brown, dull brown earth, dull brown, humble, agricultural, BLUSHING like a woman who is discovered naked; free to draw your daggers, you pursued two destinies: to be hung at the gallows or crowned with laurels.
***
And you’re called Pedro de Valdivia, Hernán Cortés or Francisco Pizarro, Napoleon, you’re all the same: brave, drunken swine, demented or crazy geniuses, contradictory, bilious – that is, IRRESPONSIBLE instruments of cosmic DYNAMISM and LIFE’S nocturnal forces; CONQUISTADORS, I salute you because you were a lot of dreaming-poet-leaders crossing the horizon’s SEVEN HUNDRED hardships with your absurd, painted-on, metaphorical costumes and resonant, fantastical attitudes, full to the brim with illusions, ambitions, heroic, enormous emotions, eyes full of landscapes, sleeping in the shadow of a great, distant dream as BIG as THE SKIES, and not ten cents, not ten cents in your pockets!..
Stuart Cooke’s chapbook, Corrosions, was published by Vagabond Press in 2010, and his translation of Juan Garrido-Salgado’s Eleven Poems, September 1973 was published by Picaro Press in 2007. His first full-length collection, Edge Music, is forthcoming in 2011.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Rumjhum Biswas’s prose and poetry have been published in India and abroad, both in print and online, including Per Contra, South, Words-Myth, Everyday Fiction, Danse Macabre, Muse India, Kritya, Pratilipi, Eclectica, Nth Position, The King’s English, Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, The Little Magazine, Etchings and Going Down Swinging. Her poem “Cleavage” was in the long list of the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. Her story “Ahalya’s Valhalla” was among the notable stories of 2007 in Story South’s Million Writers’ Award.
Ducklings
“Shiuli!” called Nityananda as he peered into the dark. The pre-dawn air was chilly even though winter was months away. Nityananda hunched his shoulders and tried to draw the threadbare shawl tighter around him. Shivering as he rubbed his elbows in an effort to increase the circulation, Nityananda wondered how many more seasons his old bones would take. He prayed God would let him live long enough to see Shiuli married and Laltu and Poltu settled. “Shiuli! O Shiuli!” But the girl was nowhere to be seen. She must have gone to the pond. Nityananda had half a mind to go there and drag Shiuli back. It would be heartless, no doubt, but the girl had better learn early how hard their lot was.
Shiuli was eighteen and under happier circumstances would have been married already, with a child or two to show for it. But the double tragedy of losing both parents to Cholera one after the other in a span of just four weeks had turned Shiuli into a surrogate mother for her two younger brothers from the tender age of twelve. The boys, twins, were four years old at that time. Shuili’s three other siblings had also perished in the epidemic that swept their whole district, mowing down village after village. It was a miracle that three of his grandchildren managed to survive. Nityananda knew he was lucky. God had been merciful and spared a portion of his family when he could have taken them all in one fell swoop. Still Nityananda rued his fate. He wished that he had died instead of his son and daughter-in-law. God’s mercy was cruel. Or else why would able-bodied young people like Nityananda’s daughter-in-law and son die instead of an old man like him? Why would they, who were barely able to eke a living from the few animals and the little land that they owned, be assaulted by this sudden new scourge of such epidemic proportions? Why God why?
Shiuli had wanted to study. From the time she could hold a slate and chalk, she had followed her grandfather about repeating the letters of the alphabet and writing them down after Nityananda had scratched them out on the dry soil, frowning and wrinkling up her snub nose to see the letters better. Shiuli never let go until she had fully grasped Nityananda’s lesson for the day. The girl was smart. By the time she was seven Shiuli could add or subtract a whole bunch of numbers in her head and write full sentences. Haripada, Shiuli’s father used to be so proud of his clever daughter. Being the youngest child – the twins had not yet been born then – she was easily his favorite.
“Shiuli will be a teacher,” Haripada would say, picking up Shiuli and swinging her above his broad shoulders. “Every time our Shiuli walks past adjusting her spectacles and brandishing her ruler, everybody in the village will say, ‘Namoshkar Mashtarni Didimoni, namoshkar!”
Shiuli would giggle delightedly. Then, Nityananda would pipe in with a twinkle in his eyes, “But our Mashtarni Didimoni will say namoshkar to me, with folded hands every time she leaves for school, because I was her first teacher!” And Shiuli would promptly swing towards her dadu, her darling grandfather, from her father’s perch and grab his arms.
Yes, they use to have many dreams about Shiuli, dreams that were as sweet as the jasmine that scented their garden in summer. They would lie down under the stars and talk about Shiuli’s future even though Madhobi, Nityananda’s daughter-in-law, grumbled under her breath that the rightful place for girls was in her husband’s house and Shiuli was better off learning to cook and clean instead of getting her head full of frivolous ideas. Shiuli’s mother had her reasons. Neighbors often passed snide remarks about Haripada’s and Nityananda’s dreams. Besides, girl children were normally never allowed to finish school in the village. It was not the custom. At the most they studied up to class five or six. The village elders disapproved of so much attention paid to girls. They frowned upon girls gallivanting around after puberty. The earlier you married off a girl the better it was; there were few troubles and the groom’s family was usually willing to settle for less dowry, because the girls were fresh and tender. Nityananda himself had brought Madhobi home when she was barely fourteen and practically illiterate, but well versed in household duties and an expert cook. Madhobi was only twenty eight when, already weakened by multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, she succumbed to the Cholera epidemic when it hit their village. Haripada did not get a chance to mourn his wife for long. He followed some weeks later, after watching three of his children writhe in pain and die, one after the other.
Nityananda wiped the tears that pricked the corners of his rheumy eyes and trickled down. He went in to wake up the boys. Laltu and Poltu helped him feed their cow and the two goats. Meanwhile Shiuli fed the chickens and ducks. They had their breakfast of tea soaked with puffed rice only after all their animals and birds were fed. This was the first thing they did each morning, and it had been their routine ever since the rest of their family had died. The children had insisted on it; they could never bear to eat until all their four legged and winged family members had had their fill. The three children’s world revolved around these mute creatures that demanded their love and gave back in full measure with their nuzzling and cooing and clucking, following them about whenever Nityananda and his grandchildren were nearby. Shiuli always chattered with the chickens and ducks as if they were her own babies. She also chattered with the cow and the goats. But ever since the ducklings had hatched, all three children had become unnecessarily attached to them.
Not becoming unnecessarily attached to their livestock was something that Nityananda, being a life hardened and practical man believed in staunchly. His own behavior towards their livestock was gruff, not that it made much of a difference as far as the animals were concerned. They still went up to him and followed him when he was near them. Nityananda scolded them as he stroked the larger animals or threw a handful of puffed rice at the chickens and ducks. Nityananda knew that attachment created problems. Like that time when he had to sell the year old pie-bald male kid to the butcher and Laltu and Poltu had cried for days. Shiuli had consoled them and given him black looks side by side. She would never know how bad Nityananda had felt that day; as if he had sold his own grandson. But he had had to do it. What choice did he have? There was the loan to be repaid and taxes too. Someday, when they were grown up, they would understand.
Nityananda crossed the narrow four poster bed sized bit of courtyard that separated his room from that of the boys. He bent his head to avoid the strands of thatch hanging over the low doorway. He didn’t like to wake the boys up so early. They were so young; if they didn’t play and read and have fun now when would they ever? Time flows like a river and never stops for even a moment, thought Nityananda to himself. Soon the boys would be lost to manhood. The pleasures of running down a field or splashing in the water would be lost to them. The magic of a new world unfolding day by day would be gone forever. But what could he do?
Laltu and Poltu went to the free government primary school. Before they left for school in the morning, they helped Nityananda with the cow and the goats. Together they untied the animals and led them out down the village road. Once they reached a customer’s house, either Laltu or Poltu called out while Nityananda sat down on his haunches to milk the cow. The boys were quite adept at milking the goats, but Nityananda still preferred to do the cow himself. There was time enough for his grandsons. He measured and poured the milk from the pail into the vessel that his customer handed over. Laltu collected the money or wrote the amount and date in a notebook kept especially for those who preferred to pay at the month end. After that they moved on to the next house and then to the next, until all their customers were served. This was a slow and sometimes tedious process. It would have been better for Nityananda’s old bones if the boys’ took the milk to their customers later on in the day. Raw milk didn’t go bad if you kept strips of straw in the cans. It stayed good for atleast an hour or two. But people liked to buy milk that they could watch being milked straight from the cows. So Laltu and Poltu had to be woken up at the crack of dawn, even during holidays. Today however, they seemed to have got up on their own. Nityananda rubbed his eyes and looked again. The grass mats that served as their beds were empty.
“Shiuli! O Shiuli! Laltu! Poltu! Where are you?”
No one answered.
Suddenly feeling alarmed, Nityananda hurried out. He looked to the right and left and then went down to the pond. In the brightening morning light, though still misty, he was able to make out shadowy shapes huddled near the pond steps. He called again. The shapes remained still. A broken sob caught his ears. Nityananda ran towards the sound.
He found them sitting there, hugging the ducklings. This time it was Shiuli who was crying her heart out. Laltu and Poltu were crying too and trying to comfort her at the same time. Shiuli, bent over with grief, sat holding the ducklings to her bosom which would have held babies had their circumstances been different. Shiuli, weeping her heart out as if she was going to lose her own children to sickness. Shiuli, who no longer ran up numbers inside her head or read fluently from the day old newspaper that Nityananda sometimes brought home from the village school master’s house. Shiuli, who had grown day by day into an exact replica of her mother, and turned into a quiet dutiful woman, a good cook and a devoted home-maker.
Nityananda felt his heart cracking up under the weight of sorrow. His eyes stung, but the tears remained inside. He wished he could weep like these children. Hold the half grown ducklings to his bosom; shower them with kisses. But what was the use of getting emotional? This wretched bird flu had hit every village for miles around. The men in white suits would be coming over to claim the little ones, any day now. Any day.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Alan Gould has published twenty books, comprising novels, collections of poetry and a volume of essays. His most recent novel is The Lakewoman which is presently on the shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Fiction Award, and his most recent volume of poetry is Folk Tunes from Salt Publishing. ‘Works And Days’ comes from a picaresque novel entitled The Poets’ Stairwell, and has been recently completed.
Works And Days
Now and then throughout the night, other coaches arrived at this depot, passengers disgorged, bought coffee at the all-night stall, returned to their seats, whereupon with a growl, their vehicles departed, for Athens, Istanbul, Skopje, Sofia. Henry and I returned to our seats, dozed upright, bought further coffees, waited for what the Turks might do. Dawn came up, strobe-yellow from behind the angular roofline, the disco closed down, and in the early light, now resembled any old garage. But our two feckless Turkish drivers had vanished along with their plump Greek girls and the hundreds of spectral dancers we had glimpsed under the blue lights. As it became clear some fraud had been practiced on us and we were not going on to Athens, one by one our fellow passengers took their bags from the lockers and dispersed into the industrial town.
‘What’s the verb from ‘feckless,’ I tilted to Henry.
‘Well and truly fecked,’ he rejoined, hoisting his pack. And we went looking for a roof.
We found a room in Thessalonika quite quickly, but the city promised to be tedious for an enforced stay. Here were shopwindows displaying lathes, compressors, saw-benches, a workaday town without a historic relic in sight. By late morning we had wandered to the waterfront, where we met Martha.
There was a wharf, and a Greek woman thrashed a squid against the timbers. Behind her the Aegean resembled hammered tin. To one side were monstrous derricks and several bright container ships. The day was warm and the scene was held by a complete inertia but for the woman’s exertions with her squid. Some loafers sat on bollards, watching her or minding a fishing line. And there was also the American girl who had been on our Istanbul coach, regarding the treatment of the squid with evident dismay. Hup! And thunk!
‘Like, I know they gotta eat,’ she said, seeing Henry and I approach.
‘It loosens the guts, I suppose,’ I offered.
‘That is still one helluva way to treat a squid.’
‘You’re probably right.’
We all three watched. This American girl was solidly built with short blonde hair and small eyes that now showed an expression of affront. Indeed I wondered whether she intended to intervene on behalf of the squid. If she did there would be a scene, and this, I recognized, would disappoint me because I found the Greek woman’s heave and slap rather magnificent. Here was someone putting her whole being into the simple domestic task. Up flew her arm with the long, glistening squid at the end of it. Then with an undulation that ran from squid-tentacle to human ankle, down came the creature with a forward jerk of the woman’s torso, a bounce of her ample bosom and a resounding crack as the squid hit the boards. Hup and smack! Hup and smack! I thought of Eva, and how she would have relished this turning of task into dance, immemorial.
‘One helluva way to treat a squid!’
Henry had watched the spectacle, then lost interest and gone to the wharf edge where he gazed at the oily sway of the sea. But for our different reasons the American and I remained transfixed.
‘I concede I’d prefer gentler treatment for my own insides if I was being prepared for a meal.’
‘I’m thinking of that squid,’ she dismissed my attempt at charm.
‘Actually, I find this rather a thrilling sight.’
Hup and smack, hup and smack, and the Greek woman a silhouette against the glary Aegean behind her!
‘O sure thing! It’s ethnic as hell.’
‘And beautiful in its way.’
‘It’s still one helluva…’ and she shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished, distressed by the sight, unable to tear herself away.
When I made to rejoin Henry, I found she had followed me. ‘May I tag along awhile?’ she asked. ‘I’m kinda lonesome right now.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed, and learned that she was Martha from Muncie, Indiana, where
she practiced as a plumber. I saw she had big hands and long fingers. ‘Boon&Luck,’ I introduced ourselves. ‘Both poets,’ I owned.
‘You say that’s your livelihood?’ asked Martha. ‘That’s weird.’
‘Not livelihood,’ I allowed. ‘Somewhere between an aspiration and a place in history.’
‘History? Speak for yourself,’ Henry interposed.
‘I don’t get any of this,’ said Martha. ‘You gotta have a livelihood.’
‘Poetry is a kind of money,’ Henry was prompt to supply the Stevens, which left Martha further bewildered.
‘And you…um… plumb?’ I asked.
‘You getta lotta treeroots and sick smells come out of a job,’ Martha brought our conversation to earth. ‘But sometimes I get to do a course on plastics or the latest hydraulic theory. I never grew outta liking being in school.’
‘What brings you to Greece?’ Henry asked.
‘I got kinda itchy for some of the things I learned back in school.’
‘Like?’
‘Like, well, that war they had with the Trojans. I’ve just come from there. And like, all those Gods and Goddesses having ding dongs with each other.’
At a waterside café, we took coffee, then some lunch. Martha did most of the talking, about her visit to the Troy diggings at Hissarlik. It was a methodical presentation, but something in this person brought out a kindliness and patience in Henry that I might not have expected. We wandered further down the waterfront, retraced our steps and found ourselves back beside the Greek woman, now resting from her squid-thrashing, her galvanized bucket containing a mash of several squid at her side.
‘I kinda think I’ve seen this town enough,’ Martha stated. ‘I don’t like discos and bad ladies and someone smashing hell out of a poor squid. When you travel, you come across places that kinda have no poetry I guess.’
‘On the contrary!’
We both glanced at Henry who held his body poised with conviction, like a heron that has just seized a minnow. ‘Everywhere you look you can see a town saturated with Hesiod.’
‘What’s Hesiod?’ asked Martha.
‘A poet,’ I knew enough to explain.
Henry might have given us dates, a lifestory, but instead he advised us to check out Works and Days. ‘Hesiod’s your boy for tool shops and working women of one sort or another.’
‘I don’t know that guy,’ Martha decided, her attention drifting back to the tub of mashed squid and her face clouding as she did so.
‘Do you believe in the dignity of honest labour?’ I should say that Henry was positively firing his questions.
‘I guess.’
‘Protestant work ethic, etcetera.’
‘Of course,’ Martha glanced at her interrogator with sudden suspicion. ‘I belong to our church.’
‘Good. Well, the Protestant work ethic is pure Hesiod.’
‘Hesiod was a Protestant?’
‘Absolutely,’ Henry nodded with that grave deliberation indicating he was having fun.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Martha pondered this new information. ‘At school I learned about Socrates and hemlock,’ she decided to risk.
‘Hesiod is pre-Socratic.’
‘And yet he’s a Protestant?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I don’t get that.’
‘Do you think present times are degenerate in comparison to a past golden age?’
This caused Martha to take her eyes off the squid bucket and look at Henry’s intent, mischievous face reflectively. ‘I sometimes have a gut feeling that things are coming kinda unstuck these days,’ she conceded at length.
‘Mankind has a golden, silver and iron age – in that order?’
‘I guess we all think that deep down.’
‘Then Hesiod’s your boy for things coming unstuck.’
‘So he’s important, right?’
‘He’s critical,’ Henry affirmed for her. ‘Final question!’ and my companion poet was not quite able to hide his smirk, ‘Do you like the poetry of Robert Frost?’
‘Of course! Frost is a great poet. He is taught at school.’
‘Frost’s poetry could not have existed had there been no Hesiod.’
Martha’s brow furrowed at this connection. ‘I don’t get that either.’
‘Poets of a present age learn to speak by taking in the speech of poets from an earlier age. It is a process identical with how infants learn to speak by absorbing the speech of their parents. Frost is a pastoral poet because Hesiod established the territory of pastoral poetry.’
‘That’s kinda neat.’
‘It is very neat indeed,’ Henry trumped.
‘I thought Frost was a pastoral poet because he liked writing about his farm,’ I ventured to check the progress of the lesson.
‘The farm was incidental,’ Henry could not disguise his smirk. ‘The farm was inert without earlier text to animate its possibilities of meaning.’
‘I guess this Hesiod must have been quite some guy,’ declared Martha.
‘He was,’ said Henry. ‘For instance he advised people not to urinate where the sun can see you.’
‘I can see that makes sense,’ Martha the plumber nodded, willing to be taken along now, for all that the information came at such headlong pace.
‘Hesiod discouraged people from telling lies simply for the sake of making talk….’
‘Ri-ight,’ Martha was not sure how this one related to being a poet.
‘…Which is to say’ Henry continued headlong, ‘we have a poet at the dawn of poetry who understood the pathology of people who get nervous in conversation.’
‘I get nervous like that,’ Martha brightened at the recognition. ‘I get kinda muddled and blurt, and then falsehoods come out.’
‘Exactly,’ Henry clinched. ‘Hesiod also said that sometimes a day can be your stepmother. And sometimes a day can be your mother.’
‘I think that one just gets me confused,’ she decided. Nonetheless I could see she was intrigued by the proposition.
‘So you see, Hesiod tackles the gut issues,’ Henry summed up. ‘You must read Hesiod at your earliest opportunity.’
‘I guess I’ll do that.’
She had been distracted entirely from the squid-bucket now. So had I. And once again Henry had performed according to his genius. He had taken the substance of books and brought it to thrilling life. Yes, I would re-read Hesiod at the earliest opportunity, now that print on a page was somehow made vibrant, as the blades of light scintillant on the sea beside us, as the gleam of the squid in their galvanized bucket.
We strolled the waterfront. Henry moved us from Hesiod to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics. Thales, with his view that the underlying substance of reality was water, was a plumber’s gift that Henry did not neglect to present to Martha. We took an early dinner of moussaka and retsina at a waterside café, walked some more in order to tackle Pythagoras, then parted, Martha to her tent at a campsite, Henry and I to the small, cement-smelling room. In the morning the three of us met again at the same café and when it came time to catch the Athens train Martha again requested she be allowed to tag along.
‘I’m kinda more curious than lonesome now,’ she said.
‘There’s ground to cover,’ Henry welcomed her along, and in Martha I recognized, we had a Henry Luck project in view. From it I would gain an insight into the purity of his altruism.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maria Takolander’s poetry, fiction and essays have been widely published. She is the author of a book of poems, Ghostly Subjects(Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. She is also the winner of the 2010 Australian Book Review Short Story Competition. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.
Hide
Night has settled through the house like silt. My bedroom is as dark as my nursery memory of it, as dark as my child brain, which is only beginning to build an image of the world inside my skull cave. The plaster walls are what I remember the most, although I think of them not in terms of paint colour or wall paper but only in terms of their hidden chalkiness and how they persist in the shadows. I remember, too, the framed cavity where the door hangs open to the darkness of the hallway, and the draped space where the window is allowed to exist untroubled by day. I remember nothing about the furnishings, although I assume—or is this a memory?—that in the room there is a foam mattress and bedclothes colourless as the walls. And I assume that I am on that bed, too, although I cannot see myself or feel myself on it. It is as if I do not exist in the world. It is as if I am like the shadows. But I know that I exist because I know that, out there, beyond my bedroom door, something terrible is happening.
My sister, barefoot in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, appears in my room, body-real and dangerous, urging me to leave with her, to come and help, even though I am not really there, even though I will never want anything less. Are there words for this child-whispering, for the flesh-and-blood crumbs she holds out to me, compelling me to come out of hiding, to cross the threshold into witnessing and remembering?
Sometimes I think that the memory belongs to her and that she gave it to me, like a birthday cake, at a later time. But I must own this memory in some original way because I remember the warmth of her hand. I feel how her nylon nighty hides electricity as she leads me down the hallway, dense with night. And I see how the floorboards and wall in the hallway ahead, outside the entranceway to the lounge room, are striped by the streetlight entering through the Venetian blinds. I find myself remembering that, on some other night, strange men with shaved heads and tight jeans had gathered on the street outside the lounge room in packs and that a brown bottle had crashed through the window, tangling in the still-broken blinds. Another evening in the lounge room, abruptly littered with gifts, I had unwrapped a tin of colouring pencils next to the white figure of a tree fit for a storm.
At the end of the hallway, past the striped light, there is a bedroom with its door ajar, behind which there appears to be a movie screening. I can tell by the yellow light streaming through the crack of the door and the loud voices and the skin noise that it is an adult movie, not a movie I want to see, not like the one about Mary Poppins, who has a friend—the smiling chimney sweep—and an umbrella like a lollipop with which to steal me away into the spangled night.
My sister, in her synthetic, pale-pink nighty, moves down the hallway towards the bedroom, pulling me behind her. When she reaches the bedroom door, with the vertical stripe of yellow light beaming along the door jamb and the movie playing inside turned suddenly quiet, she lets go of my hand. I watch as she touches the painted surface of the door with her fingertips. Then, from my position behind her night-gowned body and her outstretched arm, as the electric light, like radiation, floods her face, I look at what she is looking at. And I see what is on.
There is a naked light bulb and a mirror, gilded and tricky, on the wall above a double bed that has a threadbare, purple coverlet. And there is a man kneeling on the rumpled, purple coverlet with his back to me. The blonde hair on the back of his head, which I can see directly in the bright room, is matted, and his face, which I can see in the shining space of the mirror, is flattened. His fists, which I look at in the glinting mirror and then in the luminous room, are clenched by his sides.
My sister, standing in the frame of the door in front of me, lit up like a shard of glass by the sun, says something. She opens her lips and makes a sound. She says his name. She says it in a voice so small that it could be me who is saying it.
The man turns, the yellow light bulb setting his face aglow. He is in the room, and he is in the mirror. He looks strange: empty or full. I wonder if there is a man behind his eyes. I am afraid, but he does not see me among the shadows. He looks at my sister in her pink nighty and in her skin, and she glimmers and burns while he flares and blazes like a fire lapped by the wind. When his mouth opens, he roars and leaps from the bed. The light is shattering.
The door slams shut.
I see a gush of air puff my sister’s hair and nightgown, and then suddenly there is my face and body cast like the living into the ashes of the night. I am aware of my skin and the way it covers my flesh and bones and of something else—strange, jagged and quiet—embedded within. But only after I glimpse, in all that razing light, a woman’s body—adult words: torso, arms, legs—on the purple coverlet, and a white, cotton nightgown—private word, child word: nighty, nighty—ripped on the floor.
*
Afternoon has settled through the house like a ghost of the day. I am older—just a little—and this is a room that I remember. I have hidden under the bed with the threadbare, purple coverlet, lying on my stomach on the dust-covered floorboards, feet to the headboard and the wall. The mirror, I know, is hanging above there, its depths swallowing light, but it helps that I cannot see it and that it cannot see me.
What I can see, straight ahead of me, are the tapered, timber legs at the end of the bed, and the dangling, ragged fringes of the purple coverlet. I can also see the fourth and last drawer of a timber-laminated dressing table that occupies the wall at the foot of the bed. One of the handles on the bottom drawer is missing, and although I do not like the bronze shapeliness of the one that is there, I dislike even more the two, dark screw-holes in the timber where the handle was once attached. Between the bed and the dressing table is a stretch of clean floor, but beneath the dressing table is dust, so still, like a held breath, that the mirror cannot see it. There are maroon curtains to the right, hovering just above the varnished boards, with dust hidden beneath them, too, and a tall cupboard to the left, which is made of heavy timber and has doors that do not properly close. The hallway is also to the left, and I can see its emptiness through the open bedroom door.
I am not alone. I have, clenched in my arms, squashed between my body and the floor, a toy clown. It is as big as me and so floppy in its limbs and neck that it might be broken. The fabric is felt-like and yellow-coloured where there is skin. It has yellow wool for hair, and its eyebrows and mouth are made from white sausage-shaped pieces of material. It has crosses in the place of eyes, sewn in inch-long, blue, woolen stitches, and it is clothed in a jumpsuit, which is fastened to its body at the ankles, wrists and neck and made from flannel patterned with images of children’s blocks, each with letters of the alphabet.
The clown feels misshapen and fragile tangled beneath my body and in my crossed arms, but I am trying not to move, and I believe, in any case, that I will not be waiting here long. I breathe lightly through my nose so as not to disturb the yellow wool of the clown’s hair, which sticks out through my arms, or the dust on the floor in front of my face. I watch the vacant hallway through the frame of the open door.
I have since been told—perhaps after looking at a photograph album, in which I remember seeing a badly lit image of myself on a vinyl kitchen chair with the clown in my arms—that I carried the clown everywhere with me as a child, until the day its head broke away from its torso and clots of wadding started to fall out. I know that the toy was pressed, as I slept one night, into one of the plastic bins crowded with shapeless rubbish bags in the dark, narrow yard at the side of the house. But I can remember having the toy clown with me only one other time.
I was squatting with my sister in the backyard in the shadow of the grey paling fence. The grass there was lush and long. There were crickets, black and sleek, clinging to the blades of grass, and cobwebs packed in the crevices of the old fence like stuffing. I had my clown with me, bunched under one of my arms. My sister had her clown with her, too. We were listening to three children, older than both of us, playing on a trampoline on the other side of the fence. I remember that I wanted to look at them and that I wanted them to look at me, with a desire I felt in my crouched body as if it had been invaded by a stranger, reckless and ready to be unmasked. But climbing the fence was my sister’s idea.
Standing next to her, with my toes on the middle rail of the fence and my fingers curled over the splintered wood of the top rail, I held my silence. My clown hung beside me, one of its yellow, fabric hands trapped between my hand and the rough timber of the fence. My sister had her clown with her, too, folded under her left arm. She peered over the ragged edges of the palings. I raised myself on my toes and peered over, too.
I saw three dark-haired and bare-footed children on a trampoline in an otherwise empty backyard that looked much like ours. There was a fat girl, curled into a ball in the centre of the trampoline mat, and two boys, who were older than her. They were trying to make her bounce. The girl saw me and sat up. Her brothers then stopped and looked. They said things in a language I did not understand, but I recognised the slow smile on the girl’s face and the boys’ too-loud laughter, and I was glad that the worn fence was there, marking the edges of the known world. I climbed back down, and my sister climbed down after me. As I stood on the cool grass, holding the hand of my clown, there was nothing to be said. I remember the feeling of loneliness that comes with shame, that I looked to the dark windows of my house, but there my memory fails.
My memory of the day that I lay under the bed with the purple coverlet, with my clown tucked in my arms, is clearer. I am waiting for my sister to come home from her first day at school.
The hallway remains empty. The dust beneath the dressing table in front of me does not move. I look at the two, dark screw-holes in the veneered timber of the bottom drawer, where the bronze handle is missing. I think about the mirror on the wall above the bed, and I find that I am suddenly unsure.
Should my sister be home by now? I no longer understand why I came to hide under the bed. Do I want my sister to come looking for me, or am I afraid that she will?
I hold the clown tightly and keep still, but I feel that I have been robbed of something, as if the mirror had been looking at me all this time after all.
*
The morning arrives with a dusky silence. With my sister, I walk down the hallway, past the empty lounge room with the damaged Venetian blinds, to the bedroom at the end. The maroon curtains are still drawn, the mirror, in the dimness, is closed onto itself, and the bed with the purple coverlet is unmade. The knotted fringes of the coverlet trail on the naked floorboards, and in the murkiness of the room they look like the legs of so many large spiders, all dead.
I do not know what time it is, but I have been going to school for some months now—my sister for more than a year—and I understand what I have to do. I begin to get dressed. There is enough light coming through the curtain parting to enable me to see what I am doing. In the tall cupboard with the doors that cannot close, I find the short slip-dress with the blue swirling pattern, like marble, which I especially like, and a pair of white shoes. My sister chooses an orange dress with buttons. On the dressing table, there is a tube of lipstick, a bottle of mascara, a compact with three colours of eye-shadow—green, blue-green and blue—and a small round mirror with a retractable silver stand. I do not look at the dark mirror on the wall behind.
Before I leave for school, my sister makes us both lunch in the kitchen, buttering four slices of black bread, which she pulls out of the plastic bag left on the table. I put my sandwich in my handbag. We leave the house, my sister making sure to close the front door behind us, and walk down the driveway. We pass the line of khaki-coloured succulents, which seep pus when the leaves snap, and turn onto the cement footpath. As we walk past our neighbour’s house, a squat woman in a smock, with curlers in her netted hair, rushes out from behind a screen door and across her front lawn. She grabs me by my wrist and my sister by her forearm. She looks at me as if I have forgotten something.
And it is true that I have, for while I remember what happened that morning, I remember little of the preceding night. I assume, for instance, that there was a drive home from the hospital along streets fire-lit by headlights. I should be able to remember the private feeling of being in the backseat of the car in my dressing gown and, when I got home, the glow of the porch light and the sound of scoria under the tyres. Did I click on the bear-shaped night light on the floor next to my mattress when I got back into bed? Did I ask my sister to sleep with me then?
But I remember nothing of the events that occurred after—or before—I saw the woman on a trolley, its wheels dark as ash and uneasy on the vinyl floor, disappear down the yawing hallway under the fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor, and the man with the blonde hair re-enter the waiting room, looking at the wall.
April 25, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lars Gustafsson (born May 17, 1936) is a Swedish, poet, novelist and scholar. He was born in Västerås, completed his secondary education at the Västerås gymnasium and continued to Uppsala University; he received his Licentiate degree in 1960 and was awarded his Ph.D. in Theoretical Philosophy in 1978. He lived in Austin, Texas until 2003, and has recently returned to Sweden. He served as a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, where he taught Philosophy and Creative Writing, until May 2006, when he retired. Gustafsson is one of the most prolific Swedish writers since August Strindberg. Since the late 1950s he has produced a voluminous flow of poetry, novels, short stories, critical essays, and editorials. He is also an example of a Swedish writer who has gained international recognition with literary awards such as the Prix International Charles Veillon des Essais in 1983, the Heinrich Steffens Preis in 1986, Una Vita per la Litteratura in 1989, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for poetry in 1994, and several others.
Nyårskantat år 2007
In med tenorerna i höga lägen, pukslag!
Snabb övergång från ess-moll till C-dur!
Champagnekorkarna som lättar
är som änderna som flyger upp ur vassen
skrämda utav kyrkklockor och ångbåtsvisslor
Jag har aldrig förstått varför man firar nyår
Mig skrämmer de rejält
på samma sätt som morgnar skrämmer
med sitt kalla ljus. De vill för mycket.
Varje år som vi har upplevt
var en gång ett nyår.
Vad är skillnaden emellan framtid
och förfluten tid? Ingen vet.
Vad väntar oss strax bakom hörnet?
Krig, pest och annat fanskap? Eller Eden?
Ej kan vanans nötta läxa
Evigt repas upp igen
skrev en aktad kollega,
herr Tegnér, år 1813.
Jaså kan den inte det?
Hur kan man vara så säker på det?
Vissa dagar kan man undra.
Får man skriva så i en kantat?
Det är nog fel. Kantaten är beställd.
Beställaren är optimist.
Vi antar det i alla fall.
Hans yrke kräver det.
In med tenorerna
i höga lägen, pukslag,
snabb övergång till C-dur!
Vet: denna match är inte avgjord än.
Slutsignalen dröjer.
Minuter och sekunder!
Visst finns här plats för någon överraskning.
Visst gör det så!
Sensationsmål i sista sekunden!
Ett sådant där som ändrar hela läget!
Och i det mellanrummet,
i en hårfin spricka mellan tid och tid
där allt är möjligt, önskar jag er lycka till.
Mellan ”inte än” och ”strax”
hörs nu tydligt ljudet av
en kork som lycklig lämnar flaskan.
New Year’s Canto year 2007
In with the tenors’ high notes, kettle-drumbeats!
Quick transition from E flat minor to C major!
The champagne corks taking flight are the wild ducks dashing out of the reeds
frightened by church bells and steam-boat whistles
I have never understood why they celebrate new years They scare me soundly
in the same way that mornings scare with their cold light. They want too much.
Every year we have known was once a new year.
What is the difference between future
and past time? No one knows.
What awaits us around the corner?
War, pestilence and other damned nuisance? Or Eden?
The worn lesson of habit cannot
Eternally be unravelled
wrote an esteemed colleague,
Mr Tegnér, in 1813.
Oh, can it not?
How can we be so sure?
Some days make you wonder.
Can you really write that in a canto?
It is probably wrong. The canto is commissioned.
The commissioner is an optimist.
We assume so at least.
His profession demands it.
In with the tenors’ high notes, kettle-drumbeats,
quick transition to C major!
Know this: this match is not yet decided.
The final whistle is delayed.
Minutes and seconds!
Of course there is room for some surprise.
Of course there is!
A last-minute sensational goal!
One of those that change everything!
And in that interspace
in the thin rift between time and time
where everything is possible, I wish you good luck.
Between “not yet” and “soon”
the clear sound can now be heard of
a cork happily leaving the bottle.
Primtalen
De första
är mörka fästningar
som byggdes av furstar
i en längesedan bortglömd tid.
De ligger tätt intill varandra
och kastar långa skuggor,
landet omkring dem är en platt
och svårförsvarad våtmark.
De är byggda av en stenart
som ingen tid kan söndervittra
och alla de andra är byar
som hukar runtomkring dem.
Sedan blir de allt sällsyntare:
man måste rida länge över stora slätter
för att se ännu en vid horisonten.
Sanningen är att de blir allt färre
på sin väg emot de ofattbara djupen
Och doktor Riemanns skugga står
onaturligt hög och varnande
i en oändlig solnedgång
The Prime Numbers
The first are dark fortresses
built by princes
in a long-forgotten time.
They lie close together and throw long shadows,
the land around them is flat
and hard-to-defend wetlands.
They are built from a variety of stone
that no time can crumble away
and all the others are villages
crouching around them.
Then they become more rare:
you have to ride across vast plains
to see yet another on the horizon.
Truth is, they grow far fewer
on their way toward the unfathomable depths
And doctor Riemann’s shadow stands
unnaturally tall and cautionary
in an infinite sunset
Sjöarna
Sjöar utan öar
har inte mycket att säga.
De ligger där på sin plats.
Vänern
detta Mellansveriges bleka emaljöga
skulle då kunna tjäna som exempel.
Exempel på vad?
På sig själv, naturligtvis.
*
Sverige, somrarnas ljumma regnland
med tydlig doft av allt som
murknar, ruttnar, flagnar
De gamla ensamma husen i skogen
sjunker långsamt in i sig själva
och ett mossigt äppelträd
försöker berätta, men
kommer sig inte riktigt för
att komma ut med sanningen.
Berätta om vad?
Sanningen, som är alltför förskräcklig.
I somrarnas milda regnland
blir det inte så mycket över att säga.
Hörendesjön inåtvänd.
Och sedan mörkret,
en våt och ljummen mur.
Vi signalerar över sjön
med våra alltför svaga lampor.
”Och sedan mörkret”
Logonauten lyssnade uppmärksamt.
Och kommenterade sedan
på sitt stillsamma sätt:
”Den som har stora mörka rum
inom sig, mörka som potatiskällare,
mörka som rummet mellan galaxerna,
känner sällan mörkrädsla.”
The Lakes
Lakes without islands
do not have much to say.
They lie in their place.
Lake Vänern
this the pale glass eye of middle Sweden
could thus be an example.
An example of what?
Of itself, of course.
*
Sweden, the land of warm summer rain
with a palpable scent of everything that
decays, rots, peals
The old lonely houses in the forest
slowly sink into themselves
and a mossy apple tree
tries to tell, but
cannot really bring itself
to tell the truth.
To tell what?
The truth, which is too terrible.
In the land of warm summer rain
there is not much left to say.
Lake Hörende turned inside itself. And then the darkness,
a wet and warm wall.
We signal over the lake
with our too-weak lamps.
“And then the darkness”
The logonaut listened carefully.
And then commented
in his quiet way: “He who has large dark rooms
inside himself, dark as potato cellars,
dark as the room between the galaxies,
is seldom afraid of the dark.”
En försommardag vid Björn Nilssons grav
(Midsommar 2005)
Väster Våla kyrkogård i försommarljuset
och med den vänliga sydvästvind över
Bruslings ängar som måste ha rått
den milda förmiddag på sextiotalet
när vi uppfann Monstret i Bo Gryta.
Monstret var en jättemal, och vi behövde den
för att ha något att skriva om i Expressen.
(Det var en av dessa förargliga veckor
när inget vill hända,
världshistorien tvekar eller grubblar
på hur nästa verkligt taskiga överraskning
skall se ut och ingen stjärna hade brutit benet.)
Bo Gryta är ett djuphål i Åmänningen.
Man hittar det någon kilometer utanför
Bodarnes och Vretarnas byar, på en linje
mellan den gamla Bodahamnen, där vraket
efter en i åskby kantrad och sjunken malmjakt
skall ligga men ingen vet var, och Tandläkarudden.
Hur djupt detta djuphål är? Ingen vet.
Mången har försökt med lod och lina.
Och när linan kom upp, avbiten
lika elegant som av en rakkniv
eller kättingen de prövade i stället
lika blank och prydlig i snittet
efter vad som väl bara kunde vara
mycket stora tänder, gav man
upp försöken. Christopher Middleton
beskrev dem i sin dikt ”The Mole”.
Det blev förvisso verkningsfullt,
för ett par somrar senare kom en busslast
av engelsmän, excentriker och experter
på djupa sjöars monster. De lodade
och antecknade. Per Brusling bjöd på kaffe,
nu en äldre man som vet en del om sjön.
Över Björn Nilssons grav går sommarvinden.
Och jag fruktar att jag är den ende nu som vet
hur det egentligen gick till.
Expeditionen återvände
djupt övertygad att denna jättemal,
inte bara jättelik och illasinnad,
också är slug, mycket slug
och vet att gömma sig i dunkla djup
närhelst det kommer någon dit
som söker den.
An early Summer’s Day by Björn Nilsson’s Grave
(Midsummer 2005)
Väster Våla graveyard in the early summer light
and with the kind south-westerly over
Bruslings meadows that must have blown
on this mild morning in the sixties
when we invented the Monster of Bo Gryta.
The Monster was a giant catfish and we needed it
to have something to write about in Expressen.
(It was one of those annoying weeks
where nothing happens,
world history hesitates or deliberates
over what the next really crude surprise
will be and no star had broken a leg.)
Bo Gryta is a deep hole in Åmänningen.
You will find it about a kilometer outside
the villages of Bodarne and Vretarna, on a line
between the old Boda harbour, where the wreck
of an in a thunderstorm turned and sunken iron ore carrier
supposedly lies but no one knows where, and Tandläkarudden.
How deep this deep hole is? No one knows.
Many have tried by lead and line.
And when the line came up, bitten off
as elegantly as by a barber’s knife
or the chain they tried instead
as neat and tidy in its incision
after what surely could only be
very large teeth, they gave
up trying. Christopher Middleton
described them in his poem “The Mole”.
It was certainly effective,
for a couple of summers later a busload
of Englishmen, eccentrics and experts
of deep lakes’ monsters. They leaded
and noted. Per Brusling made them coffee,
now an older man who knows something of the lake.
Over Björn Nilsson’s grave, the summer wind blows now.
And I fear that I am the only one who now knows
what really happened.
The expedition returned
deeply convinced that this giant catfish,
not just monstrous and ill-spirited,
is also shrewd, very shrewd
and knows it must hide in dusky depths
whenever someone comes to seek it.
warming the core of things