January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Frances Kiernan is an artist and designer and exhibits in and around London. She runs workshops and courses in making book structures in schools, adult centres and at the Chelsea College of Art, London. Frances also produces handcrafted book cards for the V&A Museum Shop, London.
Frances originally trained as a typographer and designer and worked for many years as a designer and art director/editor in advertising and publishing.
Photography taken at the Sanskriti Kendra gardens, New Delhi, India during a residency January 2010. All images copyright © Frances Kiernan
Banyan Tree Roots: 1
Banyan Tree Roots: 2
Leaf On Water: 1
Leaf On Water: 2
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. Awarded a Fulbright grant as a Senior U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009, he has had poems and essays published widely in journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, Ninth Letter, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction, the Beacon Best and Language for a New Century. His work has been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net, among others. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won
the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.
He has served as visiting writer at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, and the University of Texas, Austin. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. He has read his poems and performed around the United States, Argentina, the UK, the Philippines and South Africa. His poems have been featured in film and media projects screened in Germany, Italy, Argentina, New York and Los Angeles.
Boneshepherds’ Lament
A boy who played Chopin for my parents one afternoon
led another boy to the woods and hacked him in the neck
forty-two times with a knife
hoping squirrels would run off with the skull.
He and his buddy went back with slip joint pliers
to twist and yank, but they couldn’t pull out the teeth.
When the fat-fisted teachers of my childhood spoke,
they told us the soul’s ushered finally
to some bright space beyond a grand entry
where anonymity is a kind of wealth.
The sentinels, they said, are neither benevolent
nor cruel, though, as a fee, they take your name
in exchange for spending all of eternity looking at God.
So I aspired to be nameless and eternal
until the day I got enough balls to tell
those nuns and brothers in baggy cassocks
to go to hell, and in doing so, I was really committing them
to perpetual memory, the inferno being a place
where such spirits are never forgotten.
Let me begin again.
In the barrios of Ilocos Norte
there are precisely two words for slaughter.
In some languages, there is only one word for the sound of the tides’
trillion dice set loose on shores. In other languages
it is the sound of smashing chandeliers . My parents were born
on an archipelago where they worship salvation and ruin,
where, even if you can’t see the waves,
you can keep the sound of shattering glass on either side of you
and never be completely lost
though sometimes
you can wake up half way around the world
in the middle of the night, in a barrio of Ilocos Norte where you hear
an infant cry but see instead two men in jeans and flip flops,
hoisting onto their shoulders a 200-pound sow
bound to a spit, which howls all the way from pen to block.
The men, then, laughing, will slay, bloodlet, and gut the hog,
which gurgles, which is the same sound, my cousins say,
that is pressed from a man’s chest
during one drunken night of bad karaoke,
when he is stabbed five times through the armpit
until he’s leaking like a bad jar.
It’s true. You can ask a dead man’s son, watch him sweep
the masonry floor to his father’s crypt,
as he buffs their tiles into the kind of deep
blue that fills up small, unlit rooms by the sea
just before a typhoon starts swinging
its massive hammers down.
You might never get a second chance
to interrogate the accomplice, so ask him too,
and you’ll know the accomplice is telling you the truth
if he hands you by the neck that dead man’s only guitar,
all the bone inlay pried off, the body painted blue.
I know who killed his father. I’ll never say.
Have you ever taken a gun
out of the hands of a murderer
as a gift,
just to shoot a few live rounds into some slapdash target
fashioned from calabash and deadwood?
And in return do your ancestors expect you
to simply shutup and bring to the murderer a bottle of rum
and—god help you—a song?
I don’t remember much about the Chopin that one boy played
or much about the other boy he killed, except
he had brown hair and was the only white kid on the field
during our pick-up football games.
I remember the summer he went missing,
I stopped going to mass. And then I fell in love
with a girl as faithless as me, how she could sing
the devil into a Jersey cathedral choir.
Sometimes I dream of a city inside me, specifically
the edge of one, where a few low-wage grunts marshal
through hip-deep waters of a flooded street
a flock of bobbing carnage, bloated to sea-deep proportions of pink.
No one in the dream asks where they’ve come from.
No one mentions where they’re headed, and the workers,
they’re too exhausted by shift’s end
for more than a crude joke or a six-pack
and a half hour of Chopin on public radio.
I once stood twice that time in front of a Goya painting
in which soldier and civilian alike face off, point-
blank in a skirmish. They shoot and slash one another down,
their eyes wide and juvenile, the tender yowl
of their faces, their soft bodies rallied to battle – they seem boys
of snarling matter. They are men, women too, darkened
under the sky’s forty-day gray. In the far background,
on a hill, a single figure of ash appears to raise
both hands, the human pose of victory and surrender,
and maybe what Goya wants us to see from this distance
aren’t arms flung up — but wings: an angel
waiting to transport the grave bodies off the battlefield,
over the bright hill where he stands,
where no one will see them in good light.
Naima
Mothers,
a sudden fog of honeysuckle
will guarantee you
no sadness
you can deny your children.
Let me tell you a story.
If you know how the A train gores
the dark with a steady hum,
perhaps you’ve come across
an old Caribbean man
patting his ass, his lapels,
first his front pockets
then again the back, looking
apparently, for a wad of bills.
He mumbles inward,
then reports to you,
Three hundred dollars.
I had three hundred dollars.
He looks you in the eye to assure you
he’s known crueler losses,
and even though heaven likes to bore us,
a woman dressed in tattered
black makes her entrance
as the old Caribbean leaves, and
at the same time
a trio of gradeschool boys
(the first chaos of spring in them
about to erupt)
fling down
a canvas sack
foaming with fresh-cut honeysuckle.
They place, too,
on the subway car’s floor
a radio. They bounce
on their toes
with a kind of pre-fight
jitter. The woman in black, in fact,
has a boxer’s under-bite
and announces herself
like this: Ladies and Gentleman, please
find it in your hearts to help a starving artist.
So you can’t blame the biggest boy
for slapping the middle boy
on the back of the neck
when the younger one reaches
for the radio’s play button,
can’t blame the older one
who sucks his teeth
at the younger one
as if to say: Let her sing.
By now,
you’ve almost completely forgotten
the Caribbean man,
when this woman eases out
her first, perfect, raspy sob;
there are only a few of us who don’t
recognize the tune,
and since we think we can own
what’s beautiful
by disdaining it,
we try to pretend we can’t hear
the city’s legacies of misery
trembling the tunnel walls.
How explain you’re watching
a stranger hobble by
and that you have to lift
your eyes twice
to make sure it isn’t
someone you love?
I’m old enough now to understand
every silence is remarkable
not the least of which
is the silence of boys
swaying side by side
as a woman in black
walks the length of a train
with each crystalline note
poised in the air that trails her
and there isn’t a scowl among us
when, behind her, the end-doors
gently smash,
signaling the boys
to blast the train with a backbeat,
then throw their bodies
down
in dance
as if to translate everything
we’ve lost today
into a joy
we can finally comprehend.
The boys shut off their radio,
gather their capful of dollars
and rabble of white blossoms
and pounce out at the next stop
in single file, but not —
I swear to you–
without unfurling
the first four notes
to Coltrane’s gorgeous groan.
The subway doors close.
This is the end of the story.
We ascend one by one from the dark
and beneath us
Harlem’s steady moan resumes.
Finding Water
That was the year I cursed my father
for wanting to be alone
his entire life
and for falling into my arms so suddenly
one afternoon I felt the full brunt of a grown man’s weight
once he no longer breathed for himself,
but for the crowds of ghosts whose misfortunes
he’s pressed into the service of his name and mine,
phantoms who’ve abandoned love
the way one gives up salt or laughter
or the mad thrash of the heart
which is a fish
in a bucket of stones.
I too have given up on love
forty times
in the last week —
once when I saw myself in the breach between
the cupped hands of a beggar
and I dropped what I could into that empty space
to rid myself of that nothing,
as if a gesture could make me simply
disappear, as if I were nothing.
There are species of quiet I choose not to love,
the hesitation, for example, with which
a man will harvest berries he’ll feed his brother
in order to kill him
or bring him back from a long sleep,
or the way such berries sit
on countless tables of countless people
who can be blamed for the kinds of things
that merit punishment
far kinder than poisoning.
That my father’s brothers dug
their own graves is not a myth.
When people ask if
the imagination can return us to the scene
of its own crimes, I’ll say
I once walked with a woman toward water
without knowing where the water was.
I’ll say, the two of us turned around
without finding it,
and we sat together on a stoop
until it rained
and the fragrance of the bay
fell through a city whose sky
turns the color of berries
at dusk. I’ll tell them
I’ve walked since then with no one
but the ghosts of my forefathers.
I found the water.
And I wept for everything.
And I learned to tell the world
how gorgeous it is to be alone.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jan Dean lives at Cardiff, Lake Macquarie. Her work has been published in newspapers, journals and anthologies including The Australian, Blue Dog, Famous Reporter, Hecate, Quadrant, Southerly, Sunweight (NPP Anthology) 2005); The Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Inc); The Best Australian Poetry 2004 (UQP). Interactive Press published Jan’s poetry collection With One Brush as winner of IP Picks Best First Book in 2007; it was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award in 2008.
Cranes fly on my blue and white porcelain brooch
People take several paths and transformations
to find and leave a closer view of the summit.
Some wait until mid-morning. Others
depart with pilgrims and lose themselves
in the mists of dawn. None may go further
than halfway. The summit is simply a frame
for platforms that cling to the slope.
I began at the launch pad and proceeded on foot
up the river of light, reminiscent of a ramp
on the face of a Mayan temple.
Close to the entrance souvenir shops crowd
the road into an avenue, confetti-bright.
Kindly avoid temptation until the return journey.
A few, as feathers floated by a gentle breeze
take the thin path on the left hand side facing the city.
In which case, they choose the time
of ancestor reverence, when final resting spots
marked by tall stones of charcoal flecked with white
diffused over the vast curve, enjoy blessings;
single red roses, mingling with companions
to set the sweep ablaze.
The right path is narrow and steep enough
to persuade a caterpillar persona. It is pleasurable
by sheen on cobblestones, heel-clack & feet-shuffle
or navy & white noren, damp yet aflutter
and the women
who surge into doorways and turn to face you
as parasols collapse into narrow vees
under facades; compact, mature, ghostly.
Back on level ground, you should meander over
to Gion in time for twilight, when lit paper lanterns
proclaim trainee geishas, who perfect their art
of fragility hovering on platform shoes.
Ruby lips and mime-like faces emit no emotion
yet receive the respect reserved for dolls
preserved in museums. They pose then disappear
silk kimonos rustling rainbows, and somewhere
along the way, I found my prize.
Note: A noren is a “doorway curtain” hanging in front of a shop to announce
the specialty within.
The Red Room Nightmare
Somewhere in Europe, 1925
A painting I saw in Paris provoked
this: A stranger persuades me
to strip to the skin, removing
all the protective layers, worn
whenever I venture outdoors
and follow him into his studio
with just a light robe to cover
my innocence.
Inside, I see red on everything;
the carpet, ceiling, tablecloth
and walls, only broken by swirls
of black and blue
which should warn me
what is in store.
The maid arranges food
on the table; a light snack
she says, which consists of fruit
wine and bread rolls, before
she departs and I am left
alone with him.
The man is a BEAST:
He rips off my robe
and tickles my nipples
with a paint brush
which sends me wobbly;
all the easier to bend.
The room is PASSION
but I’ll remember it as BLOOD
on my pale and perfect skin
lost and never restored.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Chris Brown lives in Newcastle. He is writing a collection of poems to be titled hotel universo.
chekhov
the first coffee doesn’t wake you
you sleep in then go out
09:26 and or 28 degrees
but that was minutes ago
cooks hill books every room
in the house its own genre
half of fiction skimread
like a stylus skating dust
in the audible distance
know the song not the title
nor the words no more
than the melody really – the song?
on tiptoes handpicked the lady
and the little dog and other stories
alternate title try future cruelties –
tonight ol’ petrov’ll tell the beggars of Ukleyevo:
god’ll feed yer – at which political point
i’ll say no more or fall out of the poem
Hesitant Apostrophe
Don’t apologise for your ideas –
I actually liked that one, the way
you describe the light, rounding
the corner, the ice only vapour
on the glass. Things this close
to you. The irises and therein
the kind of longevity we quantify
in an afterlife! The early game.
The wind like nothing we’ve ever seen.
And things we know. I like it. I mean it.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mehnaz Turner was born in Pakistan and raised in southern California. She is a 2009 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow in poetry. Her story, “The Alphabet Workbook”, is forthcoming in the August 2010 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Asia Writes, The Journal of Pakistan Studies, Cahoots Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Desilit Magazine, and An Anthology of California Poets. She is currently at work on her first poetry manuscript, Tongue-tied: A Memoir in Poems. To learn more about Mehnaz, visit her at www.mehnazturner.blogspot.com
Mugged
This morning a bird mugged me,
its beak pecking at my hair for twine.
The oven mugged my ginger cake
this evening. After thirty-four minutes,
it was shaped like a canyon.
For years, Iraq’s mugged the television,
oil hungry despots have mugged Iraq.
Last night, the sky mugged
by 1200 clouds, signaled an apocalypse.
California’s mugged my Pakistani roots,
mugged every square inch of Lahore out of me.
My mother says, nothing can mug a person’s
memories. I say, the empty suitcases
in my closet have mugged my optimism.
The last time I tried to visit Lahore,
the airline mugged my ticket, the computers
had mugged my reservation. In London,
I had to make a U-turn.
That December I spent two solitary weeks
reading in my apartment. The homes
in Ventura had been mugged by Christmas lights.
Snowmen with carrot noses grinned
clown-like on the front lawns.
One night, near midnight, I drove
around town looking for something to mug.
My pockets were empty. I hadn’t spoken
Urdu in months. I ended up at a diner
where a shiny waitress brought me a mug
of coffee. When she asked about my eyes,
I told her they were waiting to look
at everything I’d ever lost.
Once when I was sixteen, I was mugged
after mosque. A philosophy book shot an arrow
through every minaret I’d seen. Snow gathered
around my heart. For years, it seems, I’ve been
scraping pans, drinking fire, dodging birds.
Everything New
That night, I couldn’t escape menace.
I stared down at the dripping faucet
in my kitchen, cursing under my breath.
The evening had been a fickle light bulb.
A long conversation with my mother sparked
by the flame of our tongues, the phone
heavy in my hands as the light seesawed
on and off. The whole house shook like
the belly of a lamp nudged by a careless hip.
I had worn a night like this before where
darkness thickened behind the shades, where
I was the skin and the veil, the neck
and the wrench. I spotted a spider teasing
out a web in my dining room, and later
sifting through saris in the closet, my fingers
pressed over dust, and I imagined each garment
in the tomb of its own unwearing,
like the weeks when no light bulbs glowed
inside me, and there were piles of memories
on my desk. I had managed with my khakis
and cotton tees, the odd dress which suggested
I had the fleeting charm of a tourist.
But that night, in Los Angeles, I made sure
to touch the green-lipped hems, even the turquoise
shawl my mother handed me once as a wish.
Scarf by scarf, shoe by shoe, I spelled a prayer
with my hands, making everything new,
even the belts and the caps. Even that too small
ruffled skirt I once bought from a clothing store in Lahore
with all the white of a summer cloud
between my eyes, light fusing with my breath.
China Silk Shoes
I womaned my way into fourteen pairs in the rack.
Three more in the coat closet and four under my bed.
My husband hums the math, skims a puzzled look
over my feet. His favorites include the red sneakers
and flamenco heels. Men are simple, he says with
a shake of his head, as if complexity were a tarot deck.
And I wave through the twin response: part zen
teacher, part succubus. How can I explain that city
women live in the clickity-click of their imaginations.
The sidewalk’s a runway, a yellow carpet spilling
into countries of leaf. How can I explain, when there
are the other days I wish I could pivot barefoot
through the weeks. But my soles would grow restless.
Nothing like a leather strap over each ankle to make
the dinner wine taste like meat. It’s not just a pair
of shoes. It’s that weeping woman in Picasso’s oil
on canvas, getting up and stepping out. She gives her
hips a purposeful shake. I’m headed crimson, she says,
reaching into a kitchen bowl to grab a handful of cherries,
before she puts on her china-silk shoes and colors free.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Ghosts from Elsewhere
By Tabish Khair
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2009
ISBN 978 0 230 23406 2
Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL
http://us.macmillan.com/thegothicpostcolonialismandotherness
Tabish Khair’s, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Ghosts from Elsewhere provides new readings of how the colonial/racial Other is negotiated through Gothic tropes in the work of colonial and postcolonial writers. Khair describes how the Gothic genre first emerged in a Eurocentric context as a narrative engagement with displacement, terror and the racial Other. He is less concerned with how postcolonial literatures reconstruct identity using Gothic characters and settings, an area that has already received much attention. His concerns are with the “invasion” of the centre, rather than with depictions of the racial Other in the colonies. This interest leads him to evaluate the theories of subjectivity and difference, of emotion and identity which are relevant to Gothic and postcolonial literary texts as they test the boundaries between Self and Other, between home and elsewhere.
Khair’s career as an expatriate Indian poet, novelist, critic and academic equip him to write the kind of book that might appeal to both the creative and critical reader. He writes with clarity, restraint and erudition. There is a fluidity to the way in which he references the relevant historical, philosophical and literary influences and traditions which shape his arguments. The book’s ordered structure comprises essay chapters which develop a hardly surprising binary dialectic that weighs the strengths and failures of the Gothic against those of the postcolonial. The scope and frame of the research here is sensibly delineated to Gothic writing from the British empire in English and its postcolonial counterpart. Khair’s interpretations of how the Gothic arose and how it may be read is, to his credit, always appropriately and carefully referenced. These interpretations extend beyond theories, to a review of historical research, such as the work of Nabil Matar and R Visram which documents the presence of Moors, Jews, Arabs and Indians in the port cities of Elizabethan, and later eighteenth century England. Khair’s own research in travel writing acknowledges the entry to England of black American soldiers, slaves, servants and lascars after the American War of Independence, as well as settlers returned to the motherland from the colonies.
Further historical excavation is undertaken to locate colonial Gothic texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is read with consideration to Malchow’s theory that slave revolts in the Caribbean were contemporary influences. The negroid depictions of Frankenstein, the racial depictions of Satan and the racial associations of cannabilism are elucidated with purpose. A chapter devoted to the evolution of the Satanic imaginary describes its gradual emasculation from the era of the Middle Ages when science and alchemy, when piety and barbarism were not seen as absolute opposites. Sketching the development of Gothic literatures as a reaction to the logocentricity of the Enlightenment, Khair shows how, as a literature, it engages with Otherness, and the fear provoked by the Other, be it Satan, demon, vampire, monster, immigrant; racially or sexually different.
The “invasion” of England by outsiders from the colonies, and the terror this stirred in ‘the literature of nightmare,” to quote Elizabeth MacAndrews, is narrated as a half-presence, a ghosting of the racial Other in Gothic literatures. Khair adopts familiar critical perspectives in his book, observing how these characters and presences are partially narrated. He argues that either they have hidden origins, like the protagonist of Lewis’ The Monk, or they remain obscure and mysterious, like the Indians in The Moonstone, or like Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad Creole wife in Jane Eyre, who becomes the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea. Khair alludes to how this reversal of dramatic tension as a narrative choice is a familiar and potent postcolonial strategy.
Influenced, perhaps, by Terry Eagleton’s Lacanian analysis of the law in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Khair gives an insightful reading of Heathcliff as a terrorist, a displaced and disturbing persona from elsewhere attacking the centre and the heart of English civilisation:
Imagine an intelligent dark-skinned person, slipping into the countryside of a peaceful European country from somewhere disturbingly ‘postcolonial’, lying dormant for many years and then snaring the families that harboured him in a net of violence, revenge and terror. It might sound like an account of the so-called ‘sleeper agents’ that organisations like Al Qaeda are said to send into the heart of Europe, but actually it would be one way of describing Heathcliff. (p 64)
To know the nature of terror is vital to a deeper understanding of globalisation, this book suggests. Moreover, we are reminded that terror has economic causes; the choice to be local or global is essentially one of the empowered. Khair’s concerns expand thus into contemporary colonial encounters and to social contexts of racial and religious intolerance. Terror is that which threatens or complicates identity. “I am Heathcliff!” Catherine speaks, in what is arguably one of the most profoundly disturbing and beautiful passages in English literature. Drawing from and quoting notions of alterity proposed by Levinas, Buber, Bhabha, Todorov and de Certeau, Khair convincingly shows how “the relationship of ‘elsewhere’ to home is also the relationship of the Other to the ‘Self’.” (71)
Khair’s analysis of the philosophies and critical studies on emotions draws from the work of Nussbaum, Punter, even Aristotle. Emotions which arise when the self interacts with the Other have the potential to destroy or complete. Emotions are evidence of alterity, exceeding the language of the speaking subject. It’s an engaging theme in the book, and a turning point for its premise. Khair shows how this is problematic for postcolonial narratives, which seek to narrate the Other predominantly in language, and to avoid what he describes as “the negative half of the rationality-emotionality binarism.”(97) The Spivakian question of whether the subaltern can speak facilitates his perspective that the Other exists in a language beyond the language of the Self. He argues that since the subaltern is constituted by a relationship of power, and since language is an agency of power, so the Other, when narrated in the language of the Self, becomes the subaltern, reduced to the same.
Some repetition of these ideas in the book borders on tautology, and perhaps an inclination to over ponder the philosophies at the expense of textual analysis. This is noticeable in the analysis of Peter Carey’s eponymous Jack Maggs, a novel which intertextualises with Great Expectations. According to Khair, the alterity of Magwitch is created by Dickens’ gaps and silences, whereas, Carey’s Maggs is narrated with such detail that his otherness is erased. Yet Carey’s novel is also a contested space. Hermione Lee notes the many overlooked Other(s) in Jack Maggs: hurt children, freaks, prisoners, the displaced and the dispossessed. Khair’s analysis does expose the problematics for transparent or easily consumed narrative tropes. He is critical of conflated forms of hybridity which are deficient in, or careless about structure, having no cause for a relation to the real. While he gives due respect to writers like Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee, who narrate, speak and write back to the Empire, he highlights their extensive reliance on the language of the Self. This materiality, while being a strategy of empowerment, carries with it, for Khair, a predicament of its own. The Gothic, with its transcendent elements creates a space of ambivalence. It locates an imaginary for the excesses of terror and horror, where the Other resides.
This book may be open to criticism for its very binarism, the way it pivots Self and Other, materiality and space, verbosity and the non-verbal as opposites, since this establishes a criteria founded on dialectic tensions. There is a subsequent tendency to shape the author’s analysis towards the philosophical and away from the literary or the cultural, although he is always responsible and careful in how he negotiates this path. In some instances one wonders if a more literary analysis of postcolonial texts is warranted. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness is intrepid and objective in its critique of postcolonialism and in its defence of the tangential possibilities of Gothic narratives. The book is an important text, particularly for its transhistorical (and ethnographic) analysis of colonial Gothic fictions. With a compelling scrutiny it explores how the ambivalences and tensions of consciousness are constructed and narrated.
WORKS CITED
MacAndrew, E. Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, p3
Eagleton, T. Heathcliff And The Great Hunger.Verso: London: 1995, 46
Hermione Lee reviews Jack Maggs by Peter Carey http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1997/sep/28/fiction.petercarey
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Jorge Palma, poet and storyteller, was born in 1961 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he still lives. For many years he has worked for newspapers and radio stations, and has also run creative writing workshops, both poetry and prose. His poetry collections are Entre el viento y la sombra (1989), El olvido (1990), La via láctea (2006), Diarios del cielo (2006) and Lugar de las utopias (2007).
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Peter Boyle (b. 1951) lives in Sydney. His first collection of poetry Coming home from the world (1994) received the National Book Council Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Award. Other collections include The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997), What the painter saw in our faces (2001) and Museum of Space (2004). His most recent book Apocrypha (2009) is an extensive collection of poems and other texts by a range of imaginary authors.
Un Rio Ancho Con Sabor A Otoño
Del rojo al verde
se muere el amarillo
G.Apollinaire
Tú que tienes la precisión
prendida en la solapa:
¿a cuánto estamos hoy?
El olor de la tierra húmeda
trae en los bolsillos
noticias del mundo:
del rojo al verde
se muere el amarillo;
de mi casa al mercado
se mueren los niños
en el desierto.
Los noticieros hablan
de la guerra
y el cielo avanza.
Los noticieros hablan
de tormentas de arena
en el desierto
y los pájaros emigran
en mi cielo de otoño.
Mientras enciendo un cigarrillo
mientras la ropa
se seca al sol
se mueren los niños
en el desierto.
Del rojo al verde
se muere el amarillo.
Y las casas son abandonadas
por sus dueños,
y las viudas dejan flores
en la mitad de las camas
y se marchan,
se cubren la piel
con sus trapos de viuda
con sus pañuelos de luto
con sus ropas de humo
y caminan
por el borde del cielo
y caminan por las orillas
del mundo.
En mi patio con macetas
caen flores del cielo
y caen también
pájaros atravesados
por el sonido de la guerra,
y se despiertan las madres
bajo otro cielo
y en los mercados
las frutas, los pescados,
los pregones, no tienen
sonidos de luto,
ni hay viudas huyendo
a las fronteras
ni hay temblores de tierra
ni nadie sacude vidrio molido
de las mantas
ni los curas barren los escombros
de las catedrales y las iglesias
ni en mi cielo de otoño
contemplo esta mañana
la inmensa peregrinación
de ataúdes y pañuelos
que en algún lugar del mundo
se desatan; el polvo, la arena,
el desierto abrasador,
donde dicen estuvo el Paraíso
el Paraíso anhelado
a punto de perderse,
donde un niño sueña todavía
que tiene brazos
una familia, y sus piernas
inquietas de doce años
corren por las inmensas
arenas y salta, busca
nubes, desafía las leyes
de la física, soñando
por las tierras de Ur
a la sombra monumental
de las ruinas de Babilonia.
Del rojo al verde
se muere el amarillo.
Entre tu pecho
y el mío
se muere el amarillo.
entre tus alas y mi sueño
se muere el amarillo.
Entre tus piernas
y las mías
se muere el otoño,
a cuatro metros del cielo
por venir
a cuatro gotas de lluvia
o de rocío
a tres días de un disparo
demoledor y ciego
a dos minutos de la gloria
o el fracaso
a un segundo que aguarda
goteando el alba
tu boca de luz
tu llama
para contrarrestar acaso
ese grito que vuela incesante
entre dos ríos que llevan
la muerte
ese aullido que cruza el cielo
las tormentas el calor
un grito que cruza
el desierto, tu pecho
tu morada
y golpea como un puño
de acero
las ventanas de mi cuarto,
aquí, en mi pequeño cielo
de otoño,
demasiado lejos
de los hombres recién rasurados
que no volverán a sus casas,
de las mujeres
que conversan en la puerta
de un mercado
sin saber que esa noche
dormirán con la muerte;
de los que cantaron
en las duchas
por última vez, hermosas
canciones de veinte siglos,
y no supieron nunca
de nosotros y este río
ni del nombre del río
que nos nombra y atraviesa
con su mansa identidad.
Aquí en el Sur,
donde envejecemos
mirando los ponientes.
Wide river with autumn fragrance
From red to green
yellow dies.
G. Apollinaire
You with the latest essential
glittering on your lapel,
do you even know what day it is?
In my pockets
the smell of damp earth
brings news from the world:
between red and green
yellow dies;
between my house and the shops
children die
in the desert.
The news speaks of war
and the sky moves forward.
The news talks of sandstorms
in the desert
and birds migrate
in my autumn sky.
While I light a cigarette
while the clothes
dry in the sun
children die
in the desert.
From red to green
yellow dies.
And the houses are abandoned
by their owners,
and widows leave flowers
on the middle of their beds
and walk away,
their skin covered
in widows’ rags
in handkerchiefs of mourning
clothes of smoke
and they walk
along the sky’s edge
and they walk by the shores
of the world.
On my patio with its pots
flowers fall from the sky
and birds fall
transfixed by the sounds of war,
and mothers wake up
under a changed sky
and in the marketplaces
fruit, fish,
the cries of people buying and selling,
don’t bear the weight of any
sound of grief,
there are no widows
fleeing to the frontiers
and no earthquakes
and no one removes ground-up glass
from their shirt-sleeves
and priests don’t sweep rubble
out of churches and cathedrals
and in my autumn sky
this morning I don’t contemplate
the enormous journeys
of coffins and handkerchiefs
that in some place in the world
will fall apart; dust, sand,
burning desert,
where they say Paradise was,
the longed-for about-to-vanish Paradise
where a child still dreams
he has arms
a family and legs,
the restless legs of a twelve-year-old child
who runs across immense sands,
leaps, looks for clouds,
defies the laws of physics, dreaming
in the lands of Ur
in the tremendous shadow
of a ruined Babylon.
From red to green
yellow dies.
Between your breast and mine
yellow dies.
Between your wings and my sleep
yellow dies.
Between your legs
and mine
autumn dies,
in four metres of sky
where four drops of rain
or dew
are falling,
three days from a blind
blast of gunfire,
in two minutes of glory
or disaster,
in one second of watching
dawn fall drop by drop
your mouth of light
your cry
to counterbalance perhaps
the scream soaring without pause
between two rivers
that carry death,
this howling that comes to us
across skies
storms dry heat,
a scream that crosses
the desert, your heart
your dwelling place
and like a steel fist
pounds against
the windows of my room,
here, in my small
autumn sky,
too far
from the freshly shaven men
who will never return home,
from women
chatting in a shop door
not knowing that tonight
they will sleep with death,
from those who have sung in the shower
for the last time, beautiful songs
gathered from twenty centuries,
those who never knew of us
and this river
or the name of the river
that names and crosses us
with its gentle identity.
Here in the South
where we grow old
watching the sunsets.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Patrick West has been published in The Penguin Book of the Road (Ed. Delia Falconer, 2008), The Best Australian Stories (Black Inc.) in 2006 and 2008, Southerly, Going Down Swinging, Antipodes, and many other places. Besides being a fiction writer, he is also an academic, essayist, scriptwriter and poet. Patrick is currently a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne campus.
Spurned Winged Lover
Someone, somewhere, switched a radio on, switched on a kettle for tea, adjusted the volume, and . . .
“. . . in financial news, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Martin Gould, announced today that he would be taking early retirement and stepping down from his position at the end of the year. Analysts have been expecting this announcement for some time and market reaction was muted. Interest rates are expected to remain on hold for the eleventh consecutive month after Tuesday’s Bank meeting despite recent strong housing market indicators combined with wages growth and inflationary pressures. Meanwhile, in other news . . .”
. . . somewhere, someone, a woman, switched a radio off. Alice Gander had her books to attend to. ‘Observed this morning’, she wrote in copperplate, ‘a white-fronted tern (non-breeding) cowering half dead on the back lawn. I was able to approach almost to touch it. According to Slater, the species is an accidental visitor, or vagrant, in these parts. Some of the locals have been giving it a hard time. The storm must have blown it in from the ocean.’
Alice sugared her tea. What twitcher could be better blessed? Airy doppelgängers in the mirrored surfaces of Sydney’s skyscrapers aside, the squalls blowing hard off the Pacific met with no obstacles before they gusted into her closely watched garden. How many lost souls, rare fowls borne high over NSW, had dropped on Alice’s doorstep down the years?
Martin’s face still itched from the pan-caking before the media conference. The make-up girl always laid it on too thick, he thought to himself, made him look like—he wasn’t sure what it made him look like (owlish perhaps?). He got up from his office desk. A small mirror hung on the back of the door. But before he could get to it, a sharp knock sounded.
When the Asian crisis hit, and every galah with column inches to fill was screeching for one thing one day, and the very opposite the next, not many on the board had sided with Martin. But Lloyd Collins had. Former blue-chip speculator with the blue eyes, and ambitious as hell underneath, his next birthday was one of those with a zero at the end. His enemy? Time.
“Fronting those press bastards gives anyone a mother of a thirst. A man’s not a camel. Are you up for a beer or several?” The two men drank at The Waterloo after success and after failure. And the bigger the success, or the bigger the failure, the more that they drank.
As he grabbed his jacket from the hook behind the door, Martin suddenly glimpsed himself. Read my lips, he thought: “Not a camel and not an owl.”
Instantly Lloyd swivelled as if a skater on (thin) ice. “Got something to say?”
Martin thought he hadn’t said it, but he had said it. . . .
“No mate, nothing to say.”
The announcement of the tern’s presence could wait until the club meeting on Sunday evening. Alice had a feeling it could do without the ocean for a little while.
It was warm for the last days of autumn. Martin and Lloyd undid the top buttons on their shirts, and tugged slightly at their ties, as they walked to The Waterloo. Jackets were slung over shoulders. Journalists and other financial types were at the bar, mobiles like amulets, and they decided to sit outside—although lunchtime’s news was already stale.
“Beer?”
“Thanks Lloydie. Get one for yourself too.” He could still smile.
Stepping into The Waterloo from the glare was like falling down a coal pit—not that Lloyd had ever been into one of those. He tripped a little on the way to the bar. “Are you next in line?” Lloyd took a second to see who was asking. It was no-one. Just some cub reporter.
“Can’t you see that I am?” A moment passed before he got it. “No comment. Get lost.”
Alice’s town was high on a mountain on the slope facing the sea. The sea, which was out of sight. Population of town: 2 854. Height above sea level in feet: 2 854. The tourists were wrong to think that someone, somewhere, was having them on. The sign was right. And it made the inhabitants feel chuffed, as if somehow they each had special possession of twelve inches of the mountain responsible for a view that reached almost, if not quite, to the ocean.
Lloyd held the frothing glasses high out in front of his chest, like offerings of frankincense, incense or myrrh, as he backed through the door, and once more into the sunlight. One elbow brushed over the sign ‘No Work Boots, Dirty Clothes or Singlets Allowed.’ When it came to getting plastered, Lloyd was the perfect nationalist. Two VBs clattered together.
“Get that down you.”
“Just watch me. I’ll murder it.”
Yellow Caterpillar machines were chomping at the earth on the work site across the road. The clinking of glasses was lost in the roar of machinery. And in the yells above the roar.
Martin gently blew the froth of his beer across the street. Lloyd could never resist a metaphor—in every monthly meeting there was a bit of poetry. “That’s all we’re doing to the economy. Blowing bubbles at it. We need to scare the markets badly before New Year.”
“I’ll make some noises on Wednesday and that’ll be enough” Martin said. (And then: “Can I be straight with you? With Patricia gone my heart’s just not in it anymore.”)
‘Observed a pair of spur-winged plovers feeding by the dam,’ wrote Alice.
Martin thought he had said it, but he hadn’t said it. . . .
“But they’re onto you mate. The proof’s right before your eyes.” He pointed. Two men in white shirts had pulled up across the road. One of them was getting a pair of hard hats from the back seat. Martin jolted into alertness just in time to see the men grinning at each other as they entered the work site. Cigarettes were being offered to the drivers of the Caterpillars.
“Do you really expect me to nudge the rate next week just because I saw a couple of developers handing out smokes on a Friday afternoon? That’s full moon stuff, Lloydie.”
“There are worse reasons,” said Lloyd (who was trying to think of one).
“And much better. Any high school economics student could tell you. I’ll say that we’re monitoring the situation constantly.” (Can’t he hold his horses a bit longer? I’m not gone yet. This bloody politics is exactly why I want to leave.)
That and Patricia’s death, of course—six months, two weeks, one day ago now. . . .
“My shout, Lloydie.”
“You’re a legend.”
The white-fronted tern had finally found the bird-bath and Alice was settled in at her living room window with a pair of binoculars. Its chest was trembling. “I’m sorry you had to end up here like this,” whispered Alice. And although it was only a whisper, and she was fifty feet away behind glass, the bird seemed, for an instant, to cock its head in her direction. Alice shushed herself. A good bird-watcher should appear never to be there at all.
From autumn ending, to summer beginning, Alice watched her white-fronted tern survive in her backyard. One night she woke, as if from a nightmare, with the thought that it had gone back to the ocean. “Why am I so concerned about you?” she said to herself. There had been several further entries in her list of new birds for the area since the tern. Just yesterday, a rare species of wren that you normally didn’t see until you were on the plains far below.
All the members of the local bird observers club had been around to see the famous tern that had rejected the ocean for the terracotta billows of Alice’s bird-bath. Once she’d been a new arrival herself. Each member had added her then, at that first shyly joined twitchers’ excursion, to privately kept lists of exotic creatures encountered. Now she was the club secretary and very good at it too. Sometimes she dreamed of even more lofty promotion. . . .
In the end, Lloyd was it. And that evening he did his best to drink The Waterloo dry.
And summer came to a sudden end, with an out-of-season storm, and just as suddenly, although he could have afforded to live anywhere in the world (Bermuda, Burma or Belgrade) Martin was there in the town, at his first meeting of the local bird observers club.
For he needed new pastimes now. And as a boy he’d kept pigeons once, riding his bike great distances through the suburbs, with the birds snugly in a wooden box with breathing holes, strapped to the rack. They always beat him home, but would sometimes circle for hours, before entering the loft made of packing cases sawed in two, as he watched from the ground. “So who got home first really?” his mother had asked once, pouring a red cordial.
“That’s a wonderful story. But domestic pigeons are a real pest up here,” said the club secretary, as she took down Martin’s details and made up his membership card. It was the first new member in two years. “Gould, you’ve got the right name for our group at least.”
After introductions, there were the reports on fresh sightings and strange behaviour. Martin ventured that he’d seen some magpies while he was driving around town yesterday, looking at houses. They had smiled not unkindly at that.
Finally the president cleared his throat. It was the meeting to elect new officials for the year ahead. “Unlucky you,” whispered Alice to Martin, who was sitting alongside her.
Everyone was happy to continue as they were, except for one, who had a funny feeling about money.
“I’ll do it,” said Martin.
(Lloyd would have loved this.)
“Are there any other nominations?” No-one spoke up. “I therefore declare Martin Gould elected treasurer,” said the president.
“I can show you the ropes if you like,” said the ex-treasurer.
“I’ll manage,” said Martin.
As the meeting drifted into chit-chat about chats over coffee, the president came over.
“Do you mind me asking what you did before retirement?”
“Mr President,” replied Martin (he who had spoken to real presidents in his day) “once upon a time I did very boring things with numbers.” He typed in the air as if at an imaginary keyboard. “Now, tell me more about these binoculars I should be buying.”
“Now he’s one of us,” said Alice, and walked towards the window to gaze at the sea that couldn’t be seen, even on the clearest of days, at 2 854 feet.
The next day, the sign at the entrance to the town still gave the same population figure, but who can doubt that the residents would have walked at least a foot taller, if they had known that the ex-Governor of the Reserve Bank was now living amongst them?
‘It’s funny how little we mean to people up here,’ Martin emailed Lloyd, who didn’t reply.
It was almost a year before Alice worked up the courage to invite Martin to her place to complete some paperwork for the club. “I suggest that we get an ABN but don’t register for GST,” said Martin, as she showed him around her garden. By the bird-bath was a little cross. Having forgotten it was there, Alice gave the cross a casual tap, as if it were only a gardening stake or the like, when she saw that Martin was about to ask something or other.
Of course she knew by now that he used to live in Sydney. “Do you miss the ocean?”
“It’s much better up here. I’m not sure why people are so keen to retire to the coast. Once you get used to the sound of the waves what else is there to do?”
“Our little town is dying. They say the bank is going to close down next year and we’ll have to drive over an hour to do our banking. Don’t they make enough money already?”
“It’s no good, I know,” said Martin.
A honeyeater had alighted above the grave of the white-fronted tern.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing. Martin still didn’t know all the names.
“That’s an eastern spinebill,” she said, and swallowed hard. Soon there were three of them, using the cross as a perch to make dashes across the bird-bath: Father, Son and . . . Alice caught herself before going on with a thought she couldn’t be certain wasn’t blasphemous.
“You’re not happy, Alice, are you?”
“I’m not happy, I’m Alice,” she said, and smiled at the sheer silliness of that.
They shared a pot of tea in her living room with views towards the ocean. Swallows and swifts were silhouettes in the sky whose precise species could not be determined under such conditions. Their darting flights were like thin black cracks along which segments of heaven might suddenly fracture and fall to earth.
Alice wasn’t sure if she was drinking with Martin after success or after failure.
“Would you like another cup? Or perhaps some more of those biscuits?”
“Don’t get up Alice. I’m perfectly content as I am.”
In The Waterloo, so close to the ocean you can almost smell the salt over the scent of beer when the wind blows from the east, Lloyd was drinking with a crew-cutted journalist.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“I think I told you to get lost.”
“To be precise, you said ‘No comment. Get lost.’ That was the day Gould said he was going.”
“Thank the lord for that!”
“He stuffed up pretty badly, don’t you think?”
“Off the record?”
“Lloydie. . . .”
“Anyway it was obvious to anyone who knew him. He took his wife’s death pretty badly and made some poor decisions. We’re all still suffering from that. He’s up the bush now.”
The courtship habits of hundreds of birds were no mystery to Alice. On the next club outing, she pointed out to Martin the remains of a nest that had once seen the birth of an oriental cuckoo. The others weren’t interested and had kept going along the winding path.
Should she risk it now? No-one could be closer than two or three turns of the track away.
“I know you’re still in love with Patricia.”
The next moment the sky was full of martins. Martins everywhere. Swarms of martins, cutting the sky into the tiniest of pieces. Surely, surely, it was going to fall now. Her one hope had been pushed over the side of its nest by an impostor. She had seen a cuckoo actually do this—the cruel kindnesses of nature. Alice felt as if her heart were swarming.
He could be firm, Martin, when he needed to be. Quite calmly, he made an echo of his previous question: “What bird is that?” And this time Alice looked where he was looking.
“It’s called a spurned winged lover.”
How foolish, how embarrassing, to have said that. . . .
“Alice, I. . . .”
“I should never have said anything.”
The spur-winged plover took to the air. Now the ex-treasurer of the bird observers club (the woman who felt funny about money) was rushing back with news of an exciting discovery just up ahead.
“It’s a first for us,” she gushed. “Do come and see it.”
“Alright,” said Alice. But there was something she wanted to point out to Martin first.
Broken shells of cuckoo and another species of bird were pressed into the dirt by the edge of the path. But that wasn’t what she wanted to show him.
“The spur-winged plover is really quite unremarkable around here,” she said, and, for now, Martin Gould and Alice Gander each agreed to leave it at that.
Then began a cycle of wild swings and outlandish corrections, predictions of disaster topped by predictions of catastrophe, compensations where none were required and the loss of resolve where resolve was all that anyone had. The numbers told the story but a million wild acres of newsprint made certain no economic hornet’s nest was left unprodded. To fall harder than your neighbour had fallen became almost a badge of honour. People really did end up sweeping Wall Street who once had worked there. People really did just disappear.
“International conditions . . .” Lloyd Collins started, but even he knew that was hopeless, and on TV and radio you could hear the hesitation in his voice as the words spilled from his mouth in increasingly confused combinations. At least, as one journalist put it, the end, when it came, was clean. The Governor of the Reserve Bank fell on his own sword.
As for interest rates? Well, what was Bradman’s test cricket average? “Smart arse,” said Collins, under his breath, at the journalist with the crew cut and the premature baldness. Then, just a fraction louder, “What’s that on your head? The recession you had to have?”
A couple, somewhere, switched a radio on, switched on a kettle for tea, adjusted the volume, and . . .
“. . . in financial news, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Lloyd Collins, announced today that he would be retiring from his position effective immediately. Analysts have been expecting this announcement for some time. According to the ABC’s chief financial commentator, Ian Peacock, ‘once the tortoise got away the hare was never going to catch up. The Reserve Bank was blowing bubbles into the hurricane.’ Meanwhile, in other news . . .”
. . . somewhere, two people, a happily engaged couple, switched a radio off.
“What will happen to him do you think?” asked Alice.
“I don’t know,” Martin answered, smiling. “Maybe he’ll move in across the road. After all, ex-Governors of the Reserve Bank are quite unremarkable around here.”
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Solrun Hoaas spent formative years in China and Japan. She discovered theatre as a student in Oslo and Kyoto, where she also trained as a Noh mask maker. An award-winning film-maker, her work was experimental, exploring cross-cultural themes. Her short film At Edge was a discovery of the Australian bush through the eyes and voice of the poet Judith Wright. The film can be purchased from Ronin http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/753.html Solrun submitted work to Mascara Literary Review four months before her death in December 2009. This is the bio she submitted to our editors:
Melbourne-based Solrun Hoaas has returned to poetry after years of filmmaking. Her poems appear in Going Down Swinging , Holland 1945, Arabesques Literary Review, Softblow Poetry and Writing Macao.
http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/hoaas.html
The Tailor from Noumea
My favorite winter coat
was made by a tailor from Noumea
at ninety-four, yellow cravat
beret cheekily cocked, crooked smile
wide as a welcome.
My coat one of a kind
patchwork of the finest fabrics
remnants from a factory long closed
midnight blue and grey wool blends
mustard suede for rubbing elbows
elegantly tailored, inside pockets
lining stitched with equal care.
The pattern was his own design
fashioned for civilian internees
sent from the northern pearling towns
and scattered Pacific islands
to incarceration at chilly Tatura.
Undaunted, he set up a sowing factory
for women in the camp, and there
the coats were made, all uniform
in maroon-dyed heavy wool,
to keep them warm through five
or more long wartime winters.
The tailor himself, born a Japanese,
was shipped from New Caledonia –
his first involuntary visit to Australia –
as a civilian, but enemy alien.
A lifetime business left behind,
his French no currency here,
he made the best of his confinement.
And when the war was over,
and he was ‘repatriated’ – not home,
but to impoverished Japan, a stranger there,
he started up again, stich by stich,
his handwritten sign in Yokohama,
still there –
‘Murayama, Tailleur Elegant.’
He had retired, but showed me around
the remains of his small factory,
ends of fabric still on the shelves.
One day a heavy coat arrived by mail.
A tailor-made Tatura model, lined and
multicoloured in thirteen different fabrics.
I wear it often, cloaked in memories of
his cheeky smile, wide as a welcome,
and tales of proud resilience
to injustice, his story still untold.
The Key
I am standing at a castle.
There is a map of an archipelago.
This is where I want to go.
The quickest way to get there
is to sail around the world.
I try to open the door of the castle,
but can’t work out which key to use.
There are so many on my key ring.
A Eurasian girl walks past and
opens it for me. Easily.
She has her own key, bent in a V,
and shows me how it fits
in the hole. She hands me
her key and a guidebook.
I step through the door.
I am standing on a cliff
with a steep drop to the sea.
A man and a child were with me
and have gone back down.
They called me. I didn’t answer.
Wonder if the old walls might crumble.
The Platform
I should have been dead at eight
if logic governs destiny.
A heavy wooden platform fell on me
in the camelia garden at Aotani.
But maybe many years ago,
before a war had devastated
a thriving shipping port
and the ruined owners of a
Swiss-style Japanese mansion
were forced to sell my childhood home,
their platform held an orchestra,
violinists, sax and piano players,
as guests flirted and danced.
Why it was propped up outside
along the wall I still don’t know.
Most days it held up God’s word,
sermon, cross and organist.
As often, it was my incurable
curiosity that got me into strife. I pried
a wooden stopper loose at base.
Precarious already, the platform toppled.
I still remember the thud, the cries,
the breath squeezed out of me.
My mother’s amazement that
I was not dead, not even a tiny rib
crushed with the sudden impact.
‘She’s a tough little girl,’ they said.
But even now I hear the gasp,
a moment when breath was suspended
and feel the ponderous weight
of that preacher’s platform
crushing down on me.
What music of ancient delight
was it, that carried and lifted its weight?
My algae
1.
My nights are star sand
sifting too slowly
through the hourglass
of diminishing dreams.
They could cut through
a mangrove forest once,
clearing a path to
a shimmering source.
Now, haunted by hollow accounts
and birds of credit pecking
at each lidless moment,
capturing the pitiful sandman.
Nothing left by morning but
drained waking and
marinated memories,
the shamisen serenades
of a tousle-headed fisherman
with a towel around his head,
who says, ‘You’re hard
to take with chopsticks.’
2.
Peardrops on eyelids
swollen with purple curses
persimmon percussion,
the taste of tart guitarstrings
too taut, snapped
brittle as bone ballads,
a yellow weeping violin
harmonizing with
the azure blue smells
of early morning
synthesis of sleepless nights.
3.
Bones of flimsy fibres,
my algae entwine the body
locking it in a brutal embrace,
every step inviting a bolt
of lightning to strike jolting
flames into tender joints.
Better sing for your breakfast
than beat your head
against the bedstead,
waking fibrous with myalgia.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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James Stuart’s most recent works include: online poem-world The Homeless Gods (www.thehomelessgods.net); Conversions, an exhibition of poetry in translation (Chengdu, Suzhou and Beijing); and, The Material Poem, an e-anthology of text-based art and inter-media writing (www.nongeneric.net). He was a 2008 Asialink Literature Resident in Chengdu, China, supported by the Australia Council and Arts NSW.
Guangdong sidewalk
It’s time to savour your European life. At the airport
she combs her hair back into the Third World War:
Style is effortless the same way it’s easy
to have something unless everyone wants it too.
What emerges from urban pixellation is the greyest
of mysteries, furtive glance down an original side street.
You take each such image & let it vibrate
beneath the weight of two dialects, a single script.
I would join the chorus, though here
we pass only as much as one remains.
Soon the administrator’s garden, meandering,
revelation in the updraught of a smog-free sky.
Unfolding
May 2009 – Chengdu, Sichuan, China
A private celebration: mother
weeps; string of cameras carries
this likeness to row upon row of the remote.
What can you feel when the day turns to stone?
On a white beach south-west of Santiago
they feel it too: goose bumps in the cool sea breeze;
frosted glasses of Piña Colada; space afloat,
emptied. Handfuls of silence that pock-mark the air.
Then the unfolding of tides, lightly creased
linen of a surface which entombs
such reactions: nameless black water
layer upon layer of the stuff.
Skimming back across oceans to where a coordinated
wail rings out, appeasing humiliation
with pronouns & possessives
igniting public squares & campuses,
propane fists, their uranium hearts:
emotions when definite become
sharp, cut through whole crowds. This atonement
for the reckless anarchy of earth.
Against a sunset human shadows are
as paper dolls, barbs of phosphorescent light.
Finally, the arrival of the dead in wave
upon wave of photographs, spliced
narratives: unfurling,
an open wound, its destructive pomp.
Immortal
Dim sum, the city’s great tradition: the captain of the steam cart
makes a beeline for our table across the vulgar carpet
then zig-zags port-side at the last minute.
We conceal disappointment behind the rain checks:
what can’t you find in a supermarket these days!?
In Aisle 4: plantation palm oil & the latest flavonoids.
Aisle 6: a numinous stream of crockery & chopsticks.
Ours was a world less innocent than such winding threads
of fluoro strip-lights & the gradual advent of disposable nappies.
For old times sake, let’s label our prejudices for the sample jars.
We’ll examine them tomorrow, over an ice-cold mango drink
in the laced shade of these hat brims,
though such a colonial taxonomy is sure to kill the mood.
Today remains your day. From his shrine, the North God
delegates aesthetic decisions as to the appearance of his idols –
that old fraudster! When the whistle blows, migrant workers
swim beneath the bridge and back to their dormitories,
a procession of orange hard-hats and flip-flops.
If you have ever seen such a sight
you are either immortal or a liar – for only now,
in the fragrant patio of dusk, do a pride of rosewood lions
pad out from the razed mangroves & prowl the foreshore
pawing at a rattan ball marked Made in Burma.