National Genres
History’s gallop
and simultaneous dread
of a throwback. These words to approximate
the march spurring the nation
– or, tonight at least, the subtext
of a budgetless alien movie
ambling through transmission.
You disagree: it’s faith
in numbers. You’re waiting
for breaking news –
your sport,
baiting
anachronisms.
(On my phone, I read
“American Gothic”:
B-movie actress found
mummified
in Hollywood home.)
The aliens desist. Yes, faith –
you conclude –
and a place to defend from
the wolves.
______
Later I read her obituary. Learned how
to define B-grade: playing mistresses
in genre scenarios,
such as when leeches
or female colossi attack, disquiet transfigured
as obvious enemies.
Also, Playboy shot her
in that house in L.A.
The room’s perfect, baby.
Pass us a tumbler, will you
– picture it: shirt unbuttoned,
buttercup leather settee,
rammed against untreated pine
– baby, you crawl on that couch.
Play us your favourite record.
Come on, baby, everyone’s got a song
they wanna hear.
______
Another actress found her. The detail sticks,
recurs. I watch your figure
reach the sand’s edge. Intervals of gristly footsteps
record the difference between stride
and contemplation. Heather clouds
lurch over powerlines – ashy fruit
waiting to drop.
This southern pocket of our country
defies archetype,
coaxes wintry habits out of Aussie dispositions.
(Why I resist climate as indication of character.)
Another detail:
mummified
meant nobody stopped by
for almost a year,
a small heater burning
in the bedroom, door shut
while the wolves howled outside.
Three Women’s Noses and a Critique of Imperialism
I
Picture her supine, baby viper
cuffing her generous wrist — queenly
bracelet or deathly totem.
Recognise that prominent profile
minted in Roman coins, of which
Pascal pensait: “Cleopatra’s nose,
had it been shorter, the whole face
of the world would have been
changed” — meaning
a fierce physiognomy conquers, meaning
that coiled snake unwittingly entwined
the original question
of beauty.
II
Some critics — mostly scholars,
mostly female scholars — were offended by
the costume proboscis of Virginia Woolf,
a prosthetic lump
moulded to the smooth face of a statuesque
actress in the name of
authenticity.
Authenticity, the scholars revealed, is not always
accuracy; it tugs the line drawn between
the fact of a person and
what she represents.
(The real Woolf once posed as an Oriental lord:
did the nose flatter her borrowed turban,
help or hinder the brown-face disguise?)
III
A friend told me he dreamt I had plastic surgery.
After that I took a long look in the mirror,
imagined myself in miniature running the course of
my nose, treading its osseous ridges,
surveying for symmetry — applying the inexact
sciences of aesthetics and iconoclasm.
Transfer
Not long after moving with metafores (to carry across, letting slip to Anglophones are figurative, all require the transfer the habits the formative dimensions of home giving way I suppose that’s why language fails when
I read somewhere that
in Greece
one sees vans
blazoned
transport)
that all journeys
of meaning:
of dwelling (the script
of passage from room
to room),
(you or the light tracks
the other)
underfoot.
we discard things,
separate the start-overs from
the carry-overs; why
the removal truck arrives.
Spillover
In a bar on Boundary
Street we sit on tapestry cushions,
discuss swine flu
over mint juleps,
the courtyard sponge-dense,
too hot for September.
His foot raps the floor when he talks – that,
and if he smokes still
were the two things I wondered
before tonight.
It’s called spillover, he’s saying.
The virus reservoir overflows,
spreads to neighbouring species
gotten too close.
Talk like this has always balanced
our friendship, rolled gently
like an egg between our palms.
Lately something has tipped,
soured. The drink is stronger than
the name suggests, I remark:
I expected breezier
bourbon notes, a summer-sweet
menthol drawl.
His father was a vet,
shot horses writhing at Hendra
after Drama Series the mare
swallowed bat faeces or pus and infected
the whole stable.
The late-night alarm of unanswered phone-calls
kept the children awake
and dad, stone-faced in the morning,
sat under the backyard fig tree
and shook.
Synecdoche
The train delivers us cleanly.
Our host had said
the top deck made the best
viewfinder.
She has to doff her magazine
every time,
a commuter’s mark of respect.
It is a fitting carriage:
modernity’s chariot
terminating
at the site of its leisure.
Saturday doers
nudge the turnstiles.
Sublime is right, but
a complex descriptor:
there is the architect’s gift
of course
but crowds too have always
made me conscious
of infinity.
A couple asks a stranger
to foster their camera,
directs him to
just fit in
as much building as you can.
The lens levels
not at their bodies
but through, a compass
divining its version of proof.
If you bought a postcard here,
bought several,
you would recognise the pose,
not quite instinctively –
rote learning is
not quite wisdom.
But you know
the candent carapace
with or without
the Sydney scrawl,
despite the sunset having weakened
to a greenish canker.
Or maybe
that card arrived once
rolled up with the gas bills
and beneath an inky stamp
was that familiar recline,
a theme varied, hawked
world-wide
in school-books and gazettes.
The city’s autograph
blanched
by cheap inks:
moon moulds
in silhouette, parted
cockatoo crest.
Up close, angles are
just angles.
Whites differ.
Forced to look,
it’s impossible to see
anything
but parts for the whole.
The clouds are filmy
sacs, slowly
ballooning.
The shells become shelter
when rain bursts.
One Hour Opera
One Hour Opera: Mobile Impressions of an Icon, 2010
One Hour Opera is an independent zine project featuring photography by mishobaranovic, and writing by myself and whilebird. The project documents our impressions of one of the world’s most documented tourist sites, during a recent trip to Sydney.
Click on the cover art above to view the magazine on Magcloud. You can also purchase a print copy there.
Feel free to email us on onehouropera@gmail.com if you have any questions/comments about the publication. Or, let me know your thoughts on here!
Dinner Service
When she was a girl
the table dipped just beneath her sightline
she watched the procession
land on the linen plain
listened to the piano-key chink
of plate upon plate
memorised the narrative of cutlery.
Years later she trimmed white candles
with a bread knife
so she could see her husband over the wick
and noted how the light’s whisper echoed
around the gold lip of the tureen.
And when guests toasted her hospitality
she understood praise
as a form of completion
the courses of a meal
the end of a list
the inheritance
of forty-nine pieces of bone
assembled
for the very best.
She finds today’s mug lacks posture
and wonders what became
of the dinner service
she intended for her daughters in Australia,
who found they have no use for such things.
Detective
You play the flâneur,
cloaked in my black shiver.
In this winter city I lose
your shadow’s stitch
in alleys cut
with the phantom cloth of your suit.
You made the drop. There was no mystery,
at first, and I always did delight
in the men least likely.
But those eyes, oh my,
those private eyes,
their niggling shadows –
and you cook a killer plot.
Behind every great man
or crime,
they say, look for the woman –
a good woman
with no one on my trail.
If only I could slip my arms
though the sleeves of this city,
I would know why men’s suits are black.
Reverence, by Seanna van Helten
In the end, the night tore as quietly
as tissue paper. I held up the morning
like an envelope to the light, a sleuth.
The reveal was you: the reef-knot
of pantyhose in the squall of bedsheets,
the coal dust of mascara. You stumbled,
a demi-god with limits: shivering and finite.
Yet here you landed. I took your temperature –
a secular precaution. In the breach
of possibility from which you appeared,
to understand myself as your lover required
some other virtue. Groping for knowledge,
the upshot was faithlessness: wonder lost
to wisdom: the weight of an egg before it cracks.
**
First published in Voiceworks, Issue 80, Autumn 2010
Inspiration
The waking thought shines with such promise.
Delivered by the hidden fund of dreams,
a tremulous gift, you chase it all morning
like a kitten rolls a bauble between paws.
But after brunch it loses bounce. Coffee cups
cast long shadows across a vacant page.
A Trojan toy received with too much trust,
you curse, but that’s too bad, besides
there’s ironing to be done, and the stiff material
of book reviews to chew, then evening news,
then bath, then bed and oh I couldn’t possibly
try again this late. And yet. That thought –
that gift, that curse – it grows a nocturne thirst.
And who are you to blank a muse without a voice?
“You’re a dead man”
A warning; but, specifically, a prolepsis; that is, a figure of speech in which a future event is referred to in anticipation; a contortion of time; “death as both past and imminent”; related to foreshadowing; related to anticipating any objections (“I know what you’re about to say: ‘You’re not a psychic, you couldn’t possibly know that he’s about to die!’ And you’d be right.”); but a prolepsis is a speech act; a pronouncement, though not quite a premonition (it’s merely a figure of speech, after all); bound up with storytelling; bound up with the intimate, individual knowledge of impending death.
The Road
When the time came, you had simply run out of words
for goodbye. Dry-eyed, the drive so began
as any other: seat-belt fastened, a perfunctory
glance over your shoulder. But by the second day
sound gumption had shifted into misgivings.
The road’s white cord that pulled you forward—
steadied your course through the dun scenery,
the sameness of grass, sheep, bark, trees,
and the thumb’s smudge of hills fronting the
two-lane highway—you realised was the same
that could lead you back. Obvious already
that you had left, here was the proof:
the line drawn in unsteady script, the faintest chalk,
fading like a tissue box left too long on the dash.
Thoughts About Frames
The perimeter of a street
scene, the gummy lips of
a smudged glass pane
whistling at birds, boys
with wheelbarrows, dust.
*
‘I ran to the door, dear Susie – I ran out in the rain, with nothing but my slippers on, I called “Susie, Susie,” but you didn’t look at me; then I ran to the dining room window and rapped with all my might upon the pane, but you rode right on and never heeded me.’
—Emily Dickinson, in a letter to friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert
*
Gilded carvings distract
the eye. A dealer’s trick?
(Faint, faint chalk tracks
ivy-crawl the loom of beetle-
black canvas.)
“I could have done that,” someone says.
*
The shape you make
around my day.
Morning, Questions
Your fingertip ponders my shoulder and my own name tickles my ear when you breathe, asking me again why I’m here
with you.
