January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Born in Newcastle in 1981, Sam Byfield is the author of From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Press). He has been published or is forthcoming in magazines including Heat and LiNQ (Australia), The National Poetry Review, The Cream City Review, Meridian, and Diner (North America), Nimesis (UK) and in many online magazines including The Pedestal Magazine, Foam-e, and Divan. He currently works for a public health/environment NGO in southwest China.
Sapphires
All afternoon panning for sapphires
in eucalypt shadows, hands dry
from rocks and river water,
frost-browned grass burnt back
by the optimistic site owner –
no snakes in that grass now.
Cockatoos make a sound like pure panic
and the dog races off after rabbits
and trouble, but not too much,
while the Milky Way comes out
like it only does in the country,
a massive tangle that seems to float
above the Earth. Way off, the cough
of kangaroos, big rough males
like the one my father told me of
from his childhood, that kept coming
and no amount of .22 slugs
could stop. Another image of him,
out on the Nullarbor hitchhiking dead –
west, nothing but sand and crows
for company, ending up in Esperance
and writing her, saying
it was the most beautiful place he’d seen.
He came back and proposed, straight away.
The Infinite Possibilities of Water
From here I can see the flood; the view is sublime.
Thirty year swell and the beach fills with container ship,
the Pasha Bulker like a boulder resting in a river bed.
God of such things, remember the anemone fossil
I discovered high in the mountains, a swirl waiting eons
to be found? And quickly lost, as such things are.
From here I can smell the salt of the rearranged beach,
and I can see the gulls, watching the ship and thinking
What a strange sight for a Sunday.
God of such things, remember the salt of her breasts
three days up the valley, how she felt as insects danced
like fireworks and the whole place shuddered?
Light funnels away from the ocean, turns red
then white; then, the quiet reconnaissance of the stars.
In the morning the faintest hint of smoke.
God of such things, have you ever noticed how sometimes
a woman smells like pine, or pine smells like a woman?
The streets fill quickly with flood, yet the warmth.
Cures in a Cold Place
Ten minutes off the plane, first snow of the season. It starts as tiny darts, wind-whisked and rapidly dissolving,
then the city fades to white. It seems timed for my arrival.
I left here four months ago, walked straight into trouble. I was hollow, as if some piece of me remained in the city,
some fundamental part. Months later I landed on my feet and the terrain began to look familiar, yet things were
still off kilter, my yin and yang somehow askew.
Spent three days in Beijing, a city that has never been good to me. I had to make things right, settle some scores.
Outside a rowdy nightclub a beggar told me of his sick eight- year-old daughter. They’d come to Beijing to see a
doctor from a city eight hours south, but now had no money to pay and no ticket home. He said a man should
never be this low, begging to save his daughter. Above us, the flicker of coal-stained lights.
Then today, Changchun, the lake, frozen over a month earlier than usual, foot-deep tracks like tears across the face
of an angel. Old people spoke soft, faces lined like willow trees; the young threw snowballs and flirted in that
Chinese way. Street sweepers cracked the ice from roads, danced as if the snow made them warm. I found a piece
of myself, put it in my pocket, whistled a tune.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
rob walker’s first full collection micromacro (Seaview Press) was delivered in 2006 after a twenty year gestation period. He’s published online, onpage, onradio and onCD. His latest chapbook is phobiaphobia – poems of fear and anxiety (Picaro Press). He moved to Himeji, Japan in January 2008.
cello
we drift
into sleep. my hand
an explorer wandering
your familiar valleys and
mountains playing the
xylophone of your
back. you are a cello
my hand languid
draped on
your
waist
for
an
8
bar
rest
Danny in Detention
Dad works at Hills but he
hasta go to the physio. for his
arm. whennie was a kid his bruvva useta twist is arma
round. me bruvva & me fight
all the time he’s 16 I’m 11 but
I can bash im up. he’s psycho
he calls me pissweak so I bash
im. dad belted me. I adta go to
bed ungry. me bruvva works at
kfc. dozen gimme nuffin. dad’s
got is own playstation in the lounge. dozen
lettuce uzit tho
The koan before the satori
(a long haiku / short tanka)
One hand is clapping in a forest,
unseen
The other crushed by a falling tree,
presumably
also unseen
Koan: a Zen teaching riddle
Satori: the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism, roughly translating as individual Enlightenment, or a flash of sudden awareness
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Philip Hammial has had twenty collections of poetry published, two of which were shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize – Bread in 2001 and In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children in 2004. He is also a sculptor (33 solo exhibitions) and the director of The Australian Collection of Outsider Art.
Photograph 2006: Philip with his daughter Genevieve
Help
With a little help from a reader
we could crawl up onto the back
of a bicycle & blow. A horn? If
you like. Or a kiss? Maybe, but first
a question – what
is your aim? To kill
swimming? For a closure to swimming
a kiss won’t do. Better
a horn, its blue. With
a little help from a reader we could wear
the same face for both, for the grown men
asleep in a bucket, for the children snoring
in a thimble & not care which belt
we’ve been trained up to. With
a little help from a reader we could blend
the desire for hearing with the desire
for speaking & come out on top
with meat to burn, your choice
of kangaroo or stork. With
a little help from a reader we could home rule
the market women AND their troublemaking
husbands, them to houses confined until
some progress in basting & roasting. With
a little help from a reader we could insist
that our at-a-crossroads-style becomes us
& everyone after us, even the marchers
as to heaven. With
a little help from a reader we could be joined
by an Alice whose relationship to history
however tenuous is precisely the joinery
that our journey requires. With
a little help from a reader we could swallow
the first & the second & even the third word
& even, if some truth was thereby accomplished,
the whole of the poem.
Socks
So you really think we’ve established
a case for bliss? Stand up in court
for how long? – two minutes
if we’re lucky. Which reminds me: some joker
has taken all of the socks from my sock drawer
& filled it with forks with bent tines, all the better
to eat what with? Our last supper for two
was a disaster. Served by nuns
in a forest clearing, we were constantly distracted
by a klatch of monks who insisted that happy slaps
(as per those on London buses) could induce
instant liberation. A kind of pudding? Sue
those slap-happy bastards. For what? Their
bowls? Their beads? Count to ten
while I put this flesh to one side, for
later. Right now there’s work to do. We need
to set up for the next scene – a carriage
at rush hour, Aunt Jane getting on at Redfern
for her morning performance, will squat & pee
as we roll into Central. Watch out
for your shoes. Socks
still missing. Stand up in court
in piss-splashed shoes, no socks, our case
for bliss? Two minutes if we’re lucky.
A Ball
You saw it on NAGS, the scratch channel, how friends
in black can breed with friends in blue & at the end of nine
have a worthwhile product, a ball, say, that you can bounce
wherever you like. Why not
in a casbah? It’s speech as though by magic
translated into Arabic, you’ll break the spell
of Delmonico (the lion tamer ripped apart
by his seven lionesses). These urchins
will love you; they’ll let you live to tell the tale:
how camels, having negotiated the perils of the Pont
Neuf & the cobblestones of Rue Dauphine,
eventually arrived in Oran with three rimes
& a metaphor into which anything, even a recipe
for a homemade bomb, could be stuffed.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Marcelle Freiman is a Sydney poet who migrated from South Africa to Australia via England in1981. She lectures in creative writing and post-colonial and diaspora literatures at Macquarie University. Her poetry has appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies. Her first book Monkey’s Wedding (1995) was Highly Commended for the Marjorie Barnard prize.
Yellow
The journalist Nat Gould gazes into a doorway of a Sydney Opium Den 1896.
My pipe is honey, Englishman,
to you I am indolent, yellow
on a low bed in my house of pleasure,
head on a silk cushion, hip rounded.
I see you clearly through the smoke
sweet odour of my O P’Ien,
my slender pipe of bamboo like a flute.
Your slack mouth hangs with lust.
Is it my cheongsam body you desire
or the pagodas, ice and crocodiles,
the Herb of Joy brings,
the fine pitch of taste, the way
my smooth skin lives?
You at the door, half in half out,
– I am not a woman
but opium and sex. You would steal it
as your country did at Nanking,
pious in your avarice.
My life is nothing to you –
I am dragon-woman
exotic to you as baboons and monkeys.
This is no den, it is your own
dark cell. Your necktie
is choking you. I am bright as fire,
my hands are small.
Yes, drink from your hip-flask, Mister,
shake my gaze from your face
if you can.
Nat Gould, ‘Eaters of Raw Meat’ (1896), The Birth of Sydney, Ed. Tim Flannery, Melbourne, Text, 1999.
Clown
A smile, crazy with shame,
little lost diamond-eyes,
the clown mask pushed
its face against the glass
days of empty rooms
when we played a mad tune
flippy with pigtails and mama’s red lipstick
stolen for sheer revenge –
turned itself tight, yes,
little monster found its power
but got trapped in the smile
like a puppet, got locked
in the cold room,
wild at the boar-shaped world –
and elsewhere it knew was sun,
like the ball left in the corner,
yellow as light of windows.
Road
I like streets that go down – Grace Cossington-Smith 1971
It’s a road that ribbons down a hill
and up – a velocity, a force
more than a road –
the sky is wide and bright
and the speed of your eye
grabs the horizon –
wanting elsewhere, beyond –
fast as telegraphed voices in the wire,
fast as the line
of the eucalypt that bends its curve
on the surface of your eye
upwards from the purple gully.
How it fights with the walker, this road,
with the slow horse cart,
its line tense
with trees humming green,
edgy with the speed of sound,
the speed of your eye on the road.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher; he lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia’s southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2008 as The Cambridge Essential Writing Guide), The Land’s Wild Music and A Place on Earth. His landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Green Grammar Book will appear in 2008. Mark is also at work on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age. Mark’s prizes include The Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, The Calibre Essay Prize, The Wildcare Nature Writing Prize and shortlistings in major awards, including The ABR and Broadway Prizes. His writing (poems, essays and criticism) has appeared in many books and anthologies, in Best Australian Essays, and in Australian and overseas journals and newspapers including Island, isotope, Orion, Manoa, PAN, Southerly The Sydney Morning Herald. He has written regularly for The Bulletin.
In recent years, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). He has taught landscape writing, creative non-fiction and poetry at centres in the USA and at The University of Sydney.
Photographer :Tony Sernack
Urban Eclogues
I
Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’s abstract particulars.
Football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.
II
Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say
but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl,
empty and unable to stop.
You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know
the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen.
The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down.
III
The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor
I never could prise open.
All I’m good for tonight
is to let the night pass,
while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully
like a trout on God’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.
Two Hens
Make prayer at the concrete trough
beneath the dripping tap. Flush now with summer
the water poplars graze a slow benediction
over the birds, and a miser’s rain falls through the
morning.
From my desk I look out on this
epitome of good fortune and pray for more
rain. The weather has turned. It will do that
if you wait. The wind is in the south
and the leaves of the poplars shiver silver
as though something that was wounded is now healed.
These past days have tried and found me
wanting, and I have almost failed, but here
I am, still who I always was,
only more so. The days you love are not
the days that prove you. Winter is my weather;
I grow by waiting. And there is no end
of the dying one did not know
one had yet to do to one’s self.
But you’ve had days like these. I envy
the hens the steady circle of their days,
but this is not how mine go; I am strung from stars
that once were gods and can’t seem to forget.
Plenty
Dandelions break out like lies in the grass. There’s an election
in the wind and promises on the table beneath the poplars and even the weeds
look good in the spring. But not far west
crops fail in their red fields
and rivers wither into memory. The future fails and the economy blooms
its profuse abstractions. What will the children eat when the wheat no longer rises?
And You
One child learned to walk
the day another learned to drive
and in between sixteen years ran before they could crawl
me any closer to who I’m meant to be
by now. November’s fallen back into winter. All day long on the roof
the rain writes the only script there’ll ever be for any of this.
God delivers when you stop
praying. The music starts when you stop
playing so hard and listen.
Some good came along today when I was busy hoping
for nothing, sweeping the cowshed instead and putting things off.
Want only the rain to fall and your children to find out for themselves.
Oh, it’s way too late now
to hope to say anything new.
All the music and all the meaning there ever were
have been here all along, and you may catch some –
but you mustn’t try too hard – between your child’s first steps, between
downpours, between the sweeping judgments of the broom.
The way Nan walks the lane
morning and evening behind her dog,
each step sounding one year of the ninety
she has seen; the way the black ducks land like tardy extras
on the rainy grass at dusk – enactments that say something I’d like my life
to say. Something the weather says, my children say, and you.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mario Licón Cabrera (México, 1949) has lived in Sydney since 1992. His third collection of poetry, La Reverberación de la Ceniza was publshed by Mora & Cantúa Editores in 2005. He was invited to the Spring writers Festival (Sydney) in 1998 and to the Semana de la Poesía Barcelona, 1999, and to The National Poetry Week in 2006. He has translated the poetry of Dorothy Porter, Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, J.S. Harry, Robert Adamson, amongst other Australian poets, into Spanish.These poems are part of Yuxtas, a bilingual collection (Spanish/English), written with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts/Literature Board. Read Peter Boyle’s review of Juxtas in our Reviews and Essays section.
Photographer: David Cahill
Osario
Will these be the 206 aristocratic bones of my father?
R.H
I
Rodolfo Hinostrosa speaks of his father's bones and
I think about yours, padre,
and suddenly I wanted to see them.
Will they have survived this quarter of century
buried under those drastic,
so insolent climate changes?
The scholars in such matters say that one – or better said,
our bones – can survive thousands of years
buried in the Sahara sands.
But you are not directly buried in the sand.
I don't even know what kind of coffin
my brothers had elected for you.
In any case, I don't believe that you were buried
in a dark and fresh clay wombs' pot
as our ancestors used to do it.
II
Will they move. Will they change site –
skull, humeri and femurs? A shoulder blade
on a fibula or a tíbia?
Will they seek the trace of the once beloved bones,
the bones loved
beyond the skin?
Of what will they dream?
Which song they will remember? What name
will they want to name – the bones –, in their darkness?
Perhaps when it rains they are scattered?
III
Once, as a boy, I saw the relics of some coffins
and in them – remains of hair
and clothes stuck on some bones.
They had removed a cemetery to build a playground in its place.
We never played there:
It was so much its dryness that we all crossed in full silence.
IV
One night, a couple of years ago
I passed in front of your last shoe-repair shop,
that one near the now extinct creek of your Villa de Seris.
The doors were wide open.
A dark deep silence inside. And the ruins
of the old huge house of Los Gómez more dead than ever.
Now I think that the ideal place for your bones would be there
beside the ghost-creek, near the narrow bridge where all passers-by
greeted you with so much respect: Don Ventura.
Tonight
Tonight I will not read
any of my poems.
Tonight I want only to give thanks –
thanks to Poetry and to a bunch of poets.
To Poetry herself, for having given me
another voice,
another voice with which I can talk
to the trees and stones and birds.
I want to say thanks to the Aztec poet
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin for his deep knowledge
of the human heart.
To Saint John of the Cross
for his advice on how to make love
to my soul.
And thanks to Dante Alligieri and Arthur Rimbaud
for having given me such good instruction
on how to commute through the Hades.
To poetry for giving me a pair of hands
with which I can greet the wind and touch
the faces of my beloved dead-ones.
To Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca
for the profound resonance of their cry and for
the great love the second one had for the first one.
To Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra for
taking off the face of to-much-solemnity
that Pablo Neruda gave to poetry.
And because the first one showed me how
to fall from the bottom to the top.
Thanks to Jorge Luis Borges who in his noble blindness
thought that paradise was a library.
And thanks to Cesar Vallejo, for all
his sorrows, his solitude and his poet's bravery.
Esta Noche
Esta noche no leeré
ninguno de mis poemas.
Esta noche quiero solamente dar gracias –
gracias a la poesía y a una banda de poetas.
A la Poesía misma porque me a dado
otra voz,
otra voz con la que puedo hablar
con los árboles y las piedras y los pájaros.
Quiero dar gracias al poeta azteca
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin-
por su vasto conocimento del corazón humano.
A San Juan de la Cruz
por sus consejos de como hacer el amor
con mi alma.
Y gracias a Dante Alligieri y Arthur Rimbaud
por darme tan buenas instruciones de como entrar y
salir de los infiernos.
A la poesía por darme unas manos
con la que puedo saludar al viento y tocar
el rostro de mis queridos muertos.
A Walt Whitman Y Federico García Lorca
por la profunda resonancia de sus cantos y por
lo tanto que el segundo amó al primero.
A Vicente Huidobro y Nicanor Parra por
haberle quitado el rostro tan solemne que Pablo
Neruda le dió a la poesía. Y por que el primero me
enseño a caer de abajo hacia arriba.
Gracias a Jorge Luis Borges porque en su noble ceguera
confundió el paraíso con una biblioteca.
Y gracias a Cesar Vallejo por toda su tristeza
todas sus soledades y toda su bravura de poeta.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maria Freij is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle where she also teaches. Her theoretical work focuses on literary representations of melancholy, place, and identity. She is also interested in translation between English, Swedish, and French, especially of poetry. Maria has presented her work in Australia and Europe and her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in journals and anthologies. Her collection, I Was Here, won the University’s Harri Jones Memorial Prize in 2007.
Kindergarten (I)
The child’s breath appears
and disappears on the window-pane.
Beyond the reflections
of the others playing catch
and the smell of orange and clove
lies the forest with its secrets.
Shadows join deeper shadows,
melt with the tree-trunks,
sweep away the toys left in the playground,
the stray mitten.
The sweet odour of sweat and wool
blends with the sound of the ticking clock,
the voices of parents collecting their children,
the bitter taste of orange peel on fingertips.
No one notices when the child falls
through the reflection of her own eyes.
She finds herself standing
in the middle of the yard.
All is quiet;
the sky is a black bowl
over her head.
In the air,
snowflakes hang suspended
like promises.
Kindergarten (II)
This is the same spot where, last summer,
you collected tiny frogs in buckets.
Frail lives:
delicate legs and sticky eyes.
This is the same spot
where the girls shrieked in pleasure
when cold little feet touched their palms.
The boys collected more and more
until the sun set behind the pines
and the air turned cool and wet.
This is the same spot
where they sometimes found a toad
and beat it to death with a rock.
The air smells like it is about to snow.
Last year’s air is trapped in the crystals of ice
that form in lumps of moist, aerated earth.
Inside, your history shines in the sharp light.
You look inside:
see yourself walking to kindergarten in the dark,
being collected in the dark,
the soft toy that went missing in the forest,
the silence at the dinner table,
water tracing the outline of an icicle.
The flat rock burns white before you,
its surface smooth like a skull.
Spears of ice whirl through the air
as the other children throw the porous chunks
into the rock face. You, too, lift your hand.
Kindergarten (III)
Monday afternoon: playtime.
Long johns, socks, trousers,
shirts, sweaters, scarves,
mittens, bonnets, jackets.
The sun has already fallen
behind the red shed; the roof’s ridge
is alight for one more minute.
Always this sense of urgency,
of having to savour the light.
Too late.
The fire goes out;
the drifts turn blue;
wind blows the snow into waves.
Under heavy layers of down
the children play hide-and-seek in the half-light,
stand still in the shadows.
When you turn your back,
the shadows break free from their objects
and dance over the snow like birds.
Amber
How many times has she been to this beach? When she was a child, she used to come every day. Countless times she’s walked by the water’s edge trying to find an amber bead lodged in the wrack after a stormy night. She turns the seaweed over with a stick: a cloud of sand flies, some wet feathers, bleached bones. The air fills with the scent of stale water and rotting wrack. No pearls. Every day the newspaper reports findings of large chunks of amber, with mosquitos, bugs, rainbow-coloured beetles trapped inside. The jeweller on the corner polishes the amber into art. The girl presses her face against the window but never steps inside the shop. At night, she is a spider scurrying down a tree-trunk. She cannot seem to move fast enough.The drop of resin, like a ball of lava, catches up with her. She strikes a pose.Today, the ocean is calm. She swims one hundred and eleven breaststrokes just like when she was a child. She spreads her towel, lights a cigarette.On her back in the sand, she closes her eyes. The insides of her eyelids burn like amber.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lou Smith’s poetry has been published in Wasafiri, Overland, Kunapipi, Undergrowth, Mod_Piece and various other journals and anthologies. She is currently re-tracing her maternal Grandmother’s life story – her migration from Jamaica to England to Newcastle, Australia, through narrative poetry. Lou also loves making handmade books.
Remembrance
Over fig-roots from Moreton Bay
cracks in roadways
and cicada shells dropped
crunching under soles
with a shock
lubb-dupp lubb-dupp
of the heart
the tips of summer grass singe brown
and the cattle in Abermain grow thin to rib
curtains closed halfway
from glare off pane of glass
we squint at the world outside
our island,
red-tiled roofs, and Jacaranda trees
that have lost their leaves
the bush has burnt black, ash
falls like feathers
and green sprouts from crevices
in trunks of Banksia
after dinner we dust fritters with fine castor sugar
yellow-combed cockatoos feed on berries
you bite into pawpaw flesh
the seeds spilling
down
your neck
like strings of black pearls
Setting Sail
Sports on deck
quoits and rounders,
to prepare you for English life,
holidays at Brighton
on pebbled beaches.
and there
next to you
smoking his pipe,
his boater shading the
familiar sun,
stood Grandad
leading you
to your new home.
Columbus sailed this sea,
thinking he was in Japan,
thinking he was in Cathay,
thinking he was anywhere
but here.
And in the sea
you saw the sky,
intense, endless blue
ripples of cloud
skimming the water’s surface,
the sea, where in 1494, mermaids sang
and led sailors astray.
Staff Sergeant Butcher
posted back to London
left Jamaica with you that day,
the year 1930,
the year you married
at the Scots Church in Kingston,
the year before my mother was born
in London, England
and your mother was already in her grave.
The Sadness
It’s in the currawong’s song
dropped bark, groundfall
moist rocky clay soil.
It’s caught in corner
of the eye
between
cilia of leaf
and cicada wing.
And here it is seamed
scars,
raised white
wounds carved in
deep
and bloody
in my palm.
I hold a river stone,
my fingertip rests
in the cool hollow
of remembered
grooves and ridges.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
I was born in Sydney in 1972. I currently teach English in a Loreto Sisters secondary school in Sydney. My work has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Eclogues (The 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology), The Big Issue, Spinach 7 (online), Vegan Voice, The Drum Media, The Brag and 3D World. My poetry was highly commended in The Broadway Poetry Prize 2004 and The Inverawe Poetry Prize 2007. I am passionate about bird watching, traveling about Australia and the electro-reggae band Dreadzone. I am married and have a baby boy.
Trolley Man
For over twenty years you pushed your trolley between Sydney’s glass and chrome
with a red crash helmet protecting your imagination from having a head on with reality.
Hunched like Atlas during his nursing home years, villagers who worship rice,
you were this bitumen Bedouin who’d arrived from the far corners of abstraction,
never the Central Business District’s central business, but always mine.
Your ambiguity unhinged me; your tongue carried the weight of Bedlam’s flare; your
ubiquitous presence provided this surrogate backbone through my edgy Marist
testosterone years. Along with the Monorail’s click-clack glide-hum, Club 77’s pop arc,
the hanging whale geometry in the Australian Museum foyer, neon-smacked vegetable
boxes in Dixon Street and whispers within St. Mary’s Gothic skin, you were my Sydney.
Your origins and the contents of your trolley were the stuff of Holt’s conclusion.
The dove-hearted who fed the wandering bed cravers said you were a shipwright and a
knife-sharpener. Homeless men with ashy cigar toes and Orc profiles said your trolley
contained old letters and photos from a frozen bullet space you’d fled. To open truth, one
would have to make a point of cross-questioning the pointers of The Southern Cross.
The only certainty is that in nineteen ninety-four, you pushed your fading street-life
into the gardens between The Domain and the cool jade lapping that defines us. Amidst
weaves of lush multicultural foliage, under a sweaty scarlet sky cooled by the wing flap
of fruit bats, you sat facing The Bridge’s inverted robot-smile, shut your eyes and waited
for the long golden afternoon to cave in on you and your bright dancing secrecy.
Sixteen Pieces from the Forty Weeks of Pregnancy
On Christmas morning, after months of hollow days, you whisper, “There’s someone
who wants to meet you”.
Praline butterflies, chocolate bilbies, Iranian floss-candy; sweeter than all these Easter
gifts, the knowledge that our child blooms within its rich, dark egg.
My ear on the side of the most buoyant balloon… under nine layers of skin, the magic
mammalian swish cycle.
Off Mistral Point, in splattering skua weather, a humpback spy hops. If it were to dive
after drifting unicellular snacks, perhaps their breech baby would finally face downwards.
At the ultrasound checkup, a midwife uses her Christ-pen to find the beating bubble, and
next to it, the blackest of holes from which fragile primal light tried to escape.
For that divine moment of release, you will concentrate on peony roses opening in
spring-shine; I will recall fluid falcon flight through The Valley of The Winds.
From the neighbour who talks to The Southern Cross at four a.m., barks at laughing
children and fears visiting her letterbox, an article under our door on raising healthy
infants.
At the antenatal class, the kebab king said his wife would have to work in their restaurant
up until the birth, so they’d reserved table nine for the delivery.
Tunes by Mahler, Ravel, Sigur Ros: daily aural Valium for delaying the inevitable, acute
extremities.
In the private Royal Prince Alfred room, a melting mother cradles her hour-old twins in
the half-light of late dusk. By the bedside, her husband, in a Wallabies jersey, gives in to
the heaviness of it all.
During the Calmbirth sessions on Merrigang Street, Bowral, a merry gang of expectant
couples learned to breathe for the first time.
With her three-year-old on her lap, the Newtown back street soprano says, “Before I gave
birth for the second time I ate chilli chips, drank Cascade and went on the swings at
Enmore Park for half the day.”
How there must always be poetry within the delirium of sleeplessness.
Whilst watching Desperate Housewives, you hum private melodies and your hands move
slowly over your swelling belly, as if God conjuring Earth-stillness.
Between every layer of tiredness, the dramatic acrobatics of our weightless little
astronaut, rocketing towards his or her new sun.
This never-ending heady longing to meet our child’s midnight banshee guise and that
first ever smile that has the potency to soften extremists and inject this fearful age with
the sugar-stuff of afterlife.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jill Chan was born in Manila, Philippines. She migrated to New Zealand in 1994. She has two books of poetry: Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2007), and The Smell of Oranges (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003). Her work has been published in Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, Trout, Takahe, Brief, Blackmail Press, Deep South, Southern Ocean Review, foam:e, MiPOesias, Tears in the Fence, Blue Fifth Review, Asia and Pacific Writers Network, and many other magazines.
Body
There was a woman who wore nothing but silences. All the men would bring their words to her, make her dream
without sleeping, next to the loudest scream. How each of them would pronounce their words like a body running
into language, full weight of vowels and purse of lips.
And in the farthest hidden corner where not even silences could exist, a rolling of thoughts into flame. A game of
never ever losing, hot rays, and runs always near enough to win. No worms, no forms of death to worship or deny.
Neither the woman nor the men went there to stay. They visited a few times a year or if they could, every second,
but couldn’t stay longer than that. Time lay down to dream in that corner.
They took from there the loud gazes, and went home with their words like a body running out of language.
Places
When we first met,
you were living
in that stone house.
Salt air, strong winds.
You stood afraid of nothing.
Is fear just a turn
towards many destinations,
fulfilling none?
I could just as well stay here
in my house of straw,
drawing near the sky,
filling the ground with feathers
of abandoned flights and starts.
Where you are,
I have no chance of following,
now that the years
have become stone,
heavy, edgy with character.
The Poet
You are always the poet
with no ending,
with an ever-present way
of continuing,
looking a little shy, perhaps,
about making too much sense
with too vast a purpose,
how we try to remember
every beginning
that dares to become another,
a suddenness
beyond quickening,
to arrive like the many shapes
it makes of appearances –
your word calling to be written.