October 9, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Naming the Ruins
by Dinah Romah
Vagabond
Reviewed and launched by MERLINDA BOBIS
What do you do with loss? Or with the violated body? Or the devastated dream? What do you with ruins?
You name them. You story them. You incant them into ‘oracles of love.’
This is what Naming the Ruins and its poet Dinah Roma have done: ‘Make oracles of love.’ Even if the poet herself says, ‘No more’, in the opening poem Coda—
The first call
after the pain exhausts—
the voice valiant
in distance. No more
the need to pull in,
to muse on what
could have been.
Or make an oracle
out of love.
(9)
So, the poet protests: ‘No more’ to ‘make an oracle out of love.’ Even as each poem in this book is, in fact, an ‘oracle of love.’
Of course, there is a marked distinction here: To make an oracle out of love is to make love a portent or a promise, a harbinger of something else. But to make an oracle of love is about the loving in the making, as when a poem is loved into being, so
The words are uttered,
each syllable freed
for what it is.
(9)
So the loss, the violation and devastation, the ruins fall away, and what remains is
The sound of heartbeat,
crisp on the verge
of song
not of misery,
nor of joy,
(9)
But of desire, as desire is always on the verge of, which is the very locus of this book—this body re-instating desire that was once violated, devastated, lost.
But how paradoxical that this song which the poet verges on is, in fact
… the silence
of great cathedrals
as the last note
falls
in praise.
(9)
It could be the silence of relief, rest, or illumination after loss and lament, or even after reading a poem. It could be all of these silences, but more compellingly, it is also the silence of praise. That hush of awe.
I hear it in this collection—and strangely, or perhaps aptly, in the white space after a solitary word falls.
I, too, hear Rainer Maria Rilke coming into this white space, as if coming into the light in his Sonnets to Orpheus—
Only in the Realm of Praising should Lament
walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain,
watching over the stream of our complaint
that it be clear upon the very stone
that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.
—(The Sonnets to Orpheus, 237)
So I am led to ask: What right do we have to lament if we cannot praise?
Lament there is in Dinah’s poetry—and always, always praise. And even in the lamentation—whether it is for love betrayed, or for lives wrecked by superstorm Haiyan, or for the loss of a culture in Angkor Wat, or for a mother being laid to rest—lament becomes praise, when it becomes a poem.
In ‘Consuming Sorrow’, the poet raises both query and command—
Why waste the rites
of lament when they can be
put on show? Inside the pantry,
sorted out in cans, labeled
with fancy fonts. Each name,
a use. Or beside a vase of blooms,
magnificent in minutiae,
an exotic figure hand-picked
from a bazaar of all lost
and transported. Or let it
hang from your neck, the sheen
of gems guarding an order
of value, their shores and hills
polished after the silhouette of bone.
Or let a ring grasp the full
diameter of eternity in vows
engraved in indelible death.
(16)
There is a self-mocking stance towards the making precious of grief and its performance—something to be consumed—even as the poet strategically makes sorrow flesh, real, touchable—
Its nature is solid. Its measure
is mass and volume. So let it stand
among your prized possessions.
Let it say: here, touch me,
don’t be afraid. …
(16)
Hear the doubleness of the invitation: ‘Touch me’ and touch the grief (it’s out there, on display), and this body-in-grief (it’s me before you, reader). Make me solid too.
don’t be afraid
A call to courage like a call to arms, in a bid for kinship: from solid to solidarity. So with her reader-witness, the poet is brave. To lament, to wail, to speak of ruins, to make them seen and heard as incantation—as Philippine shamans would. They who know how praise and transcendence are organic to lament; they who live by oracle-making.
So as we “witness” each poem in this book, we too are co-opted into this oracle-making.
… We [become] bodies
circling into radiance unimpeded
into the trail of sudden tremor.
(34)
It is this sudden tremor of consciousness after each poem that astounds in this collection. That returns us to the silence of great cathedrals.
So witness the lived bodies in this book—utter them, incant them.
Yes, Roma is a Philippine poet. She writes about her specific culture, its world and worldview—that she expands beyond this specificity, beyond the white spaces around her spare lines, beyond the page, the book, and into the air that we breathe.
Roma writes from the voices of her own home. And yet these voices can come alive in our own mouths: other breaths suddenly in our breath. Because—
I am the story told many times over.
I am someone in someone else’s
body of someone else.
(12)
Lest we forget: all of us are that ‘body of someone else.’ But only if we are willing and unafraid to acknowledge it.
NOTES
The Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 8),’The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans & Ed Stephen Mitchell. (1989). NY: Vintage, 1989, p237.
MERLINDA BOBIS is an award-winning Filipino-Australian writer. She teaches at the University of Wollongong
October 9, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sea of Heartbeak (Unexpected Resilience)
by Les Wicks
Puncher & Wattman Poetry
ISBN: 9781922186348
Reviewed by JOHN UPTON
Before you open Les Wick’s latest collection he’s already playing with your eye and your mind: the title is a joke and an admonition: it’s “Sea of Heartbeak”, not “Heartbreak”. A sentimental cliché becomes a warning – take nothing for granted.
Inside is much serious intent and more jokes, but the most immediate feature is Wick’s striking poetic technique, developed over 35 years of publication. Consider this:
Feed the stairs
roll the corridors like
your last smoke at this edge of lamps. Someone chose
this wacky orange for the waiting room.
An “array” of tests (military language).
Cancer is coming. Cancer has gone.
Moles bloom on atom geography.
Amidst a darkling fever
we delve.
Double barrage, his cinched levis.
Our bones aren’t a cage.
Armour, defence,
these constructs our words have mortared-in around
the pledge of mortality.
No-one would vote for this
but it’s ours.
(‘Calibrated’ 29)
A visit to a doctor’s busy waiting room is deconstructed and re-cut, slightly askew, so that we remain aware of the elements as well as the divinity of the whole. Wicks’s obliqueness makes us search for meaning. (Though one must admit this chopped reality sacrifices the elegance and sensuality of a long, voluptuous line).
Wicks’s style loves a different image in each line:
Silver whistles slept.
Trains had abandoned
that brittle underlife.
In the empty waft of untapped electricity
he was somewhere up the way
& I
in my plastic-bucket-blue uniform
was afraid.
(‘The Hinge’ 13)
This is the opening of the third poem in the book – the situation is set rapidly, there’s dramatic involvement for the reader, but each line is a separate idea, its build is subtle. An employee in the railway underground, perhaps Wicks, is sent to find a vagrant sheltering in a tunnel. A common situation made uncommon by the illuminations. This poem is a long narrative, unique in this collection, and it catches another important element in Wicks’s work – his sympathy for those marginalised and fighting for urban survival. Sympathy for the dispossessed links arms with his suspicious disrespect for authority, the same disrespect captured by his aggressive, choppy style that jiggles your elbow for attention. His poetic is personal but manages to wear its heart on its sleeve without being mawkish about it. Towards the end of “The Hinge”, the narrator finds the NFP (someone with No Fixed Place of abode) and brings him back to the railway office, where the police are called:
He was put
down on a stalwart vinyl chair at the security office,
a bent & filthy hope. The police
smashed his head
into a matching grey desk.
……
All our days are numbered
moral failure impotent vicinities.
Rills of snot,
NFP leaked scared & crying –
the constables thought they had a simple solution,
No point laying charges with fuckin’ NFPs
YOU will never (bash)
come to Central (bash)
again! (bash).
Another moment caromed past,
into the linger of weight
like stone above air, late shift lives on lines.
Still or in flail,
our culpable hands.
(‘The Hinge’ p 16-17)
Violence occurs elsewhere in the collection, but it’s never as explicit as here. That exploration is of a different kind – of perception and reality, of morality, of the emotions. The world is glimpsed in vivid flashes, sometimes from lightning at night, sometimes from passing cars, or in glimpses in harsh daylight from the corner of an eye. The flashes are then edited into sequences that are sharp but puzzling, familiar and yet disturbing, dramatic but amusing:
Leaving the apartment block, note
Barry has a buzz on, a brim.
He sings & howls seamlessly. Down the street
a couple whisper like wire brushes, their love is a nail.
Later, on the train two troubled blondes
from a wooden part of town
exhaust what credit they have on the phone.
Some graffiti – Acpopulus Later. Yesterday, I was served by an assistant
in Islamic scarf & Santa hat. I fit in here,
this country when it works … no worries.
At Rockdale the promissory Black Garter Escorts
sits patiently beside White Lady Funerals.
(‘The Necropolitan’ 18)
Wicks works his ideas through images rather than argument. The poems are visceral; each shaped towards an emotional experience. As a technique for examining history, society and art, postmodernism excels; as a form to illuminate feelings and experience, it can drain the essence if poorly applied. Wicks understands that.
A different aspect of his work is his attitude to words. He’s as exuberant as James Joyce with a spray can and a wall. He plays the punster funster, having a ball: “we are a crowd of trees, awestruck / a crowd of fleas, hungry fleeing / crowd of pleas, more”; “eulogies of eucalyptus”, “lantana manana”, “plucked the snake out of sass”, “suit yourself or suture yourself”, “sprinkle wrinkles”, “[a cop] blocky blond and aerated with action”. His titles include ‘Magic Nihilism’ & ‘The Problem of Splendour’, ‘The Necropolitan’, ‘On The Nature Of Wickedness And Plums’, ‘Ted Near Dead & the New Lyricism’, ‘Flotsam Ahoy’. He’s like a biblical prophet caught doing stand-up, who can’t believe his luck.
But mostly his eye is quick and exact:
The desert wind wears a blunt dust
cantankerous yap
lifts sheetmetal
from the deaths
of the snub-nosed Silverton buses all
cut like raw opal
pressed into a humiliating servitude
windbreaks for camels.
Punctuation of crows
affixed on air.
(‘Aeolus at the Mulga’ 49)
One reason his postmodern re-cutting works is because Wicks does a neat line in aphorisms. They’re scattered throughout the poems, but in “Secret Saids – Everything I Know” he piles up three pages of them, heaped like strawberries: “Certainty is fickle”, “Your dreams will wake you up”, “One can find truth in a bottle / but the light’s a bit distorted”, “Money isn’t everyone”, and my own reflexive favourite, “Nothing belongs to us all”.
Wicks has an aggressive and striking technique but what, ultimately, is he on about? Well, can you evangelize secular humanism? Wicks believes so. But he implies rather than lectures, his vision accretes through poems and instances, in nourished glimpses rather than a steady stare. And though the tone is knowing, cool, a bit sad, it’s also alert to fecundity and wonder. World-weariness is still a few drinks away.
Usually, though, wonder is understated – ecstasy isn’t cool in these back streets and corner pubs so the verse doesn’t soar –as, say, Murray can – but prefers its urban irony.
Wit is on the prowl, however, and can be warm, sly and cheeky or savage and judgmental: an evening railway station with “scratchy girl-less gangs / with all the hate that Saturday / had thrown up all / over their denims” (‘The Hinge’ 13)
Although the voice is vernacular, the intention is literary, sometimes mysterious and deliberately difficult. ‘Healed and Hurt’ opens:
I blame you and the island. There’s an electronica,
champagne-strange tinnitus
that I wear like a lei. Feint complaint
from our hearts, all the uniforms are bleached.
(41)
Wearing tinnitus “like a lei “ is good, but I don’t know what the rest means. Which island? “Feint complaint”? Over-compression can reduce a poem’s impact, like a clarinet heard at a distance, where the melodic line comes only in phrases.
For the most part, though, exuberance and wisdom shine through, as in this celebration of the annual migration of bogong moths:
Small deaths serve simply to mark the way
another diaspora pit stop
on this acne-string of peopled coast.
Bogongs are fooled by trashy suns that humans make;
our floodlit, foodless acres of town.
But they leave this bleak cover
ride again
the lightstained indigo of evening.
(‘Shied’ 78).
Throughout this book, a sharp poetic eye works with practised skill to celebrate newness in the everyday.
JOHN UPTON’s poetry has been published in SMH, The Australian, Canberra Times, Quadrant, Cordite, Best Australian Poems 2014 and many other literary magazines and anthologies. He has had five stage plays produced and has written for more than 20 television drama series. His political comedy Machiavelli won the Australian Writers Guild’s award for Best New Play.
October 9, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lillian Kwok is originally from Philadelphia and now lives and studies in Sweden. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hawaii Pacific Review, Off the Coast, burntdistrict and other journals. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
.
Hunger
We spend that summer with our dad in Hainan. My sister is nine and wants to spend
all her time with me, but I want to bike along the water alone, look for seaglass and
dead sea animals without her. So she cries and dad becomes cross. My sister gets
Saturday candy but not me. To punish him I refuse to eat lunch and dinner. But my
father, the oldest of nine brothers and sisters, knows a thing or two about hunger and
is not afraid of me. Whenever I want to starve, he lets me starve.
October 9, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sputnik’s Cousin
by Kent MacCarter
Transit Lounge
ISBN: 9781921924675
Reviewed by DAN DISNEY
If you are looking for narrative sensibilities or lyric sense-making in a narrow sense, then Sputnik’s Cousin is not for you. About as far out as its Russian satellite namesake once was, this is a book of astronomically strange experiments delivered as ‘poems and non-fiction’ (back cover). MacCarter’s texts are a kind of otherly reportage fed through deviant, garbled syntax, and these little machines of momentary expressive orbit are built to record the fetishistic weirdness of their human subjects. Indeed, and as if Sputnik-ing from the sidereal, MacCarter’s excursive and idiosyncratic inventions sputter heartily to their own trajectories; this is literature but not as we have known it.
The book is organised into seven discrete packages of high-octane oddness: in Sputnik’s Cousin we find prose, faux-sonnets, prose-poems, strange verse, even an historical melodrama. ‘Fat Chance’ is pure gallows humor, an enumeration of unexpected death which has less to do with the darker satires of, say, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 or Vanessa Place’s Statements of Fact, and is more like scrolling randomly through liveleak.com scanning for Darwin Awards nominees; ‘Pork Town’ is a Bataille-esque psychogeographical romp across the patina of Melbourne’s inner-western badlands, and both these non-fiction sections offer generic (but not stylistic) variation from the poems. ‘Stencil’ is a suite of 23 non-accentual ‘sonnets’, ungainly but measured, mostly rhyming; here, we may be forgiven for thinking MacCarter is lapsing into his own version of neo-surrealism. The eighth ‘sonnet’, ‘Geiger-Müller Counter’, seems at least initially to want to party hard with the oeuvres of, say, James Tate or Russell Edson –
A little pony of a man with a tiny pony brain
trots up floor after floor … (42)
But unlike the willed madness of surrealism first championed by André Breton in the 1920s and taken up by Tate et al toward the end of the 20th century, MacCarter is up to something more state-of-the-art than playing out processes capturing (as Isidore Ducasse framed it) a ‘fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. MacCarter’s anarchic fervor is instead sustained by distinctly contemporary experimental impulses –
detecting blocks, an office tower
the jaundiced shade of gristle Geoffrey Smart wars, reconsiders
chews over, measures. A centre freeway oyster blade Vein
this man’s contraptions pulsate along clot hot in kitchen space
tallying ill the zap gone microwaves serve wet tantrums
at employee-meat like a tennis star’s frippery of spectrums
re-heated from the United Colours (sic) of Benetton’s face …
(‘Geiger-Müller Counter’ 42)
Such is the sheer quantity of chopped and mangled imagery in ‘Stencils’, and indeed throughout this book, that instead of rocket like missile-missives, these poem-vessels propagate a ‘rudiments of barnstorming’ (40) more akin to a poetics of image-as-displacement, or the recording of random detritus. Perhaps echoing Kenneth Goldsmith’s notion of ‘language as junk’, these texts are remnants and remainders, repurposed in a cut-up and readymade mode: a new spin, then, on what theorist Marjorie Perloff brands as récriture (that is, literature as recycling). And it is this that makes Sputnik’s Cousin such a difficult but welcome arrival.
Rather than staging surrealistic mayhem, MacCarter’s poems speak from a different order of assemblage; so often the poems are located somewhere between récriture and reconnaissance, played out in this collection as a repurposing of random snapshots, a mixing/ switching of registers, and the recalibrating of canonical forms. In ‘Smoke Odes’, a multiply-epigraphed suite in which a perhaps-augmented MacCarter nods to his influences (literary and elsewise), we see just how many filters overlay the viewfinder –
Oddity, your small army
of guerilla cosmopolitans and pomegranate cleverness
keeps our gossip sugary and tasteful
in forums
and under Magritte’s derby
cluster our prized ruby gems
… Neil Gaiman, Osamu Tezuka, Eddie the Eagle, Tom Baker, et al
(‘Kissing Frank O’Hara [not on the mouth remix]’ 23).
As promised on the book’s back cover, these texts ‘hum a progress charged by humanity’s witless pursuit of technology and civility’; Sputnik’s Cousin charts a progression from Darwin’s Beagle (87) to near-future potentialities and, at heart, these meditations (at times hilarious, at times confronting, at times outright confusing) promulgate a particular and peculiar worldview churned through eccentric grammar – gerunds, denominal verbs, split infinitives, subjunctives – swirling into vertiginous non-unity. Prosodically then, if after Pope the sound must seem an echo to the sense, these poems are loud expositions of a world falling to pieces.
MacCarter writes how ‘I swear at times I know’ (130), and this book is suffused with deliberately destabilised processes of deliberation. The texts are always fast-paced and straight-faced, but also cockeyed – the poet ‘will oilspill/ your salted waters’ (16), and ‘tip the cup for sip’ (16); these are not so much ‘plots of gibberish’ (125) as febrile examinations of meaning-making (and where that has got us so far, circa 21c.) by a poet who seems altogether at ease as an outsider expressing the contours of exile to his ‘fellow travellers’ (this the literal translation of ‘Sputnik’) –
corroding its circuitry, the hairdos of maniacs
cut to its verb
to be
remains. What remains (?)
of the grammar and me
oxidize behind
arse factory
supine from its unstoppable whispering
of why?
(‘Mergers/ Acquisitions’ 93)
MacCarter is exploring expressivist possibility here, and indeed experimenting with the plasticity of his material (that is, language); this post-po/mo jongleur is a free range radical stuffing his texts with images not so much fragmented as purposefully blurred. These are snapshots of an existence undertaken at velocity where even affect is bleary, vague, and out of focus: ‘I had bang lick wow they was abject’ (134). MacCarter’s is a savvy but also risky experimentalism, and by intentionally defocussing the image he will certainly be misread by some. But the great value of Sputnik’s Cousin is that it is not derivative (despite the many references to literary influences throughout the book), but instead opens intelligent new heterotopic possibility.
Indeed, Sputnik’s Cousin is a laboratory strewn with sensible inventions, where precision seems to have been intentionally deprioritized, and the view defocused to imitate the speeds of contemporary existence. The broken syntax echoes current conditions of consciousness – multitasking, distracted, spanning surfaces without the depth-experience of connection – and these poems are plausible models, a collection of ummwhatwasIsaying sayings. When surveying the persistence of older modes of the lyric impulse, arché-Conceptualist Christian Bök tells us how he is ‘amazed that poets will continue to write about their divorces, even though there is currently a robot taking pictures of orange ethane lakes on Titan’. File Kent MacCarter’s book under ‘feral’ or ‘HAZCHEM’, and expect the dizziness that can happen when accustomed modes of understanding shift, or the vertigo of non-comprehension when a mutant genus first arrives. Sputnik’s Cousin is voicing the everyday in ways that are lyrically, indeed generically, challenging: a feistier means of having the tops of our heads taken off.
DAN DISNEY teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University (Seoul)
October 9, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Onkalo
by Bernice Chauly
(Math Paper Press, 2013)
Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE
‘Say it loud, say it silent’ (Socks)
Bernice Chauly’s Onkalo begins with an extraordinary quotation in the preface from Michael Madison, director of Into Eternity, a documentary on Onkalo, a nuclear fuel repository being built on the coast of Finland:
You are now in the tunnel. This place is not a place of honour. No esteemed deeds are Commemorated her. You should not have come here. You are heading towards a place where you should never go. What is there is dangerous and the danger will Still be present in your time, as it is in ours. Please turn around and never come back. There is nothing here for you. Go no further
This sense of a forbidden place, a place where entry will cost you, where there is no reward and only risk, is an apt vehicle for Chauly’s collection, which documents the poetic idea of bravery and risk, not in the sense of the confessional but in hard-edged reflection of decisive moments in a life; it is a place where the social, personal and political intersect. This place of intersection, this Onkalo if you will, reveals itself through the poet’s mastery of form, whether it be in the refinement of the love lyric or in the exhortation of the political cry. It also reveals itself through the apt placement of individual poems.
It is of interest to reflect on why the quality of bravery is so inherently important to an appreciation of Onkalo. In an earlier collection, The Book of Sins (2008), Chauly challenges her readers by writing with a starling lyricism of incidents of violence (This Love) to tenderness (Forgiveness). It is difficult indeed both psychologically and technically to write of what is inflicted upon us, or indeed bestowed upon us, but the poet succeeds in this regard through the concision of language and image.
In Onkalo inquiry is placed decisively in the political realm as a kind of political ecology, effectively underscoring the personal. The first long poem in the collection, Jerit, speaks to Malaysia as Ginsberg spoke to the United States of the 1950’s in Howl:
Will you let us write of new pages by those
who in yellow-infused riotous colour
betrayed the hallowed streets of the city
in the hundreds, in the tens and tens of thousands
who fought back the tear-gassed alleys
with brave tears and Maalox
Following on from this is Still, a rhythmically concise poem questioning where ethnic divisions may lead:
When does thought become action?
Will the keris strike yellow flesh?
Will it know when it is satisfied?
The emphasis on what I have termed the ‘political ecology’ of the collection is revealed through apt thematic placement. The title poem Onkalo for instance appears straight after these two overtly political poems, and segues into an evocation of the personal at once endangered and exposed. Onkalo, a place of ‘eternal thirst’, of ‘spent eviscerated/energy rods’ is called to rest ‘until the fiery skies/call out to you’, captures the sense of flame and risk that appears in Untitled 1 where rest suggests protection and renewal:
I am better off like this
in between the gnarled roots
the folds of black earth, the hands
of fertile leaves that are now in bloom
In Untitled 2 the city is portrayed as a site of metal, fuel and corruption, an Onkalo of now:
The city is tiresome
it vomits interminable streams
of coloured metal, engaged
on roads that toil underneath
the weight of the familiar
But it is also a place (Untitled 3) where one flames, one lives, a place you are compelled and indeed willed to inhabit:
The irreverent thrill
of a wanton evening –
on the flat road to home.
All under the gaze of a malevolent heaven:
The concrete sky
aloof, adamantine
decapitating the haze
With Signs we find an extension of a Persephonian trope, where the poet leaves the Onkalo of a landscape ‘translated by fear/ruled by pain’ to become springlike and ’green again’, ‘populated once again/like pollen’.
This is not to suggest that the collection is subsumed under this conceit. Poems of love, travel and challenge (see the brilliant The Snatch) follow their own trajectory, but with the motif recurring like a theme in musical composition. Mood and climate weave their own variation in such poems of chill winter as The Nut House and In Amsterdam, or in the love lyric Novo Tel. In the exquisite Luang Prabang, longing flows through blossoming nature in order to define what the poet must say, must apprehend:
Maybe this is enough
I tell myself – perhaps longing
is enough
As I imagine reaching out
for your hand, across the
continental drifts
across the long banquet table
pierced with white lilies,
sugared roses, the spirals of jasmine
and the scent of a new world.
The penultimate poem, Sometimes, takes us to the world of death and grieving familiar to reader of Chauly’s fine memoir Growing Up With Ghosts, and in the concluding poem, 1973, she writes:
I chose my suffering
I walked with it
I ate it with deliberation
I breathed it, I drank it all
in its brief longevity
…….
I chose my suffering
but I did not choose to see you die
I have paid grief its price
from the realm of the living
to the dead who still haunt me.
In the scoring of this suffering, Onkalo brings us the complexities of a life, the nerve of being.
JENNIFER MACKENZIE is the author of Borobudur (Transit Lounge, 2009), republished in Indonesia as “Borobudur and Other Poems” (Lontar, Jakarta, 2012). She has presented her work at many festivals and conferences in Asia, most recently at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Myanmar (supported by the Australia Council for the Arts) and at the Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators Conference in Singapore.
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Radiance
by Andy Kissane
Puncher & Wattmann, 2014
ISBN: 9781922186522
Reviewed by ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON
Radiance is Andy Kissane’s fourth collection of poetry. In my view this collection is a subtle change from, but consistent with, his previous books of poetry (1).
Kissane may be setting out his thesis in the poem ‘Summer’, in which he writes:
Poets are always searching for how things might fit together,
the tongue and groove illusion, the Fibonacci sequence
that can be found in both nature and the sonnet…(61)
The Fibonacci sequence is the mathematical term given to number sequences which progress like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. You add the penultimate number to the ultimate number to get the next number. It’s applied for computer algorithms and graphs. The sequence can also be seen in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone. (2)
It seems apt that Kissane refers to the Fibonacci sequence in his work. The sequencing, the attention to lineation and homogeneous stanza lengths, and the appreciation for the organic qualities of the natural world: all these things are present in this beguiling, deceptively off-hand, careful poetry.
In ‘The Bluetongue as an Answer to the Anxiety of Reputation’, Kissane writes:
When I take the poets on a tour of the garden,
Liz comes out from under a log, a life model
unveiling for a portrait. She’s happy enough to bask
in the warm afternoon sun and soak up the attention.
Why fret about where you are in the scheme of things?
Instead, cultivate the blissful solitude of a bluetongue,
grow fat and warm on the exposed rocks
that nature bequeaths you and occasionally open one eye
to gaze at the theatrical manoeuvrings of those
whose blood is thick and cold with unfulfilled ambition.
From ‘The Bluetongue as an Answer to the Anxiety of Reputation’ (36)
The documentary method brings its readers news from the world. In the book’s first poem, ‘Flight’, the poet gives a tantalising prescription: ‘take the afternoon off and head out past Kurnell/to Cape Solander. There, on the white sandstone cliffs/above the vast flood, look for humpbacks’. You are not above the sea or the ocean, you are above ‘the vast flood’ to witness ‘the corrugated whiteness of [the humpback’s] wobbly ascension,/the dark certainty and blazing glitter of its fall’. And in doing this, even though ‘you cannot name the endangered species/growing in this headland heath’, ‘you can close/your eyes, you decide to do this simple thing,/…/ aware now of this immense, unknown life/going on around you, within you, as the buffeting,/lunging wind picks you up and gives you wings.’
As Kissane writes, these are poems made as a result of ‘A radical attention to the world’(3).
The particular Kissane quality that results from his radical attention to the world is the manner in which he shows us what he has sensed. It is conversational, deeply versed in the Australian vernacular and delivered with a light touch. The reader is never far from a gritty humour and follows the long lines and chatty everyday-ness until they are deeply, unwittingly, in the numinous, the spiritual and the wondrous. The wings the wind gives to the whale-watcher at Cape Solander appear and reappear in many guises, as ‘two tiny bumps forming/near your shoulder blades, the beginning of wings, perhaps,’(4) and ‘when I first loved you and we soared over the harbour, our wings stretched out in effortless, astonishing flight’(5).
To give context to the ‘radical attention to the world’ quote:
… A radical attention to the world
leaves much that cannot be understood, let alone described
no matter the facility with language or craft.(6)
Kissane makes a terrific fist of both. These are elegant meditations, perhaps prayers, which have a touch of magic realism—by which I mean, and probably inaccurately, a little of the sub- and un-conscious—which move us organically toward an understanding. Kissane achieves this with detailed, nuanced description:
The mist seems to lift a little and I notice a woman
wearing an ankle-length dress and a wide-brimmed hat
walking beside me on the strand. I realise that I’m out
perambulating with Virginia Woolf who is talking to me.
“What are you doing in my Cornwall diary?” she asks.
“Well, at least you’re not one of my characters.
I’m sick of the way they think they understand themselves
better than I do. But if we’re going to spend any more time together,
you’ll have to stop that infernal overwriting. What did you do,
swallow a Latin thesaurus? Perambulating? Really, it’s too much.”
I nod at Virginia while dodging an incoming wave
that’s about to soak my Converse runners, but she’s already
striding up onto the headland where she says
we might catch the purple shadow of the pilchards
as it slides across the face of the sea like a blush.
From ‘Three Visions of Virginia Woolf’ (36)
The result, as this quote intends to demonstrate, is a poetry which is revelatory, humorous and intelligent.
The persona of these poems is a man in maturity, ensconced in suburbia, driving, cooking, parenting, arguing, writing; his social conscience is not jaded, he is able to understand what it is to love the women in his life, he’s not scared of being compassionate, not scared by long-dead writers (such as Virginia Woolf) communing with him, and he is attentive to the madness, the incomprehensibility and the deliciousness of what takes place inside and outside one’s head:
…people of hard muscle and freckled skin,
friends I’ve lost contact with, writers whose work I love,
all of them clamouring for fish soup and conversation,
as we suddenly stumble on what we really think
here on the balcony within the visible and vanishing air.
from ‘Prelude: Angophora Submerged in Fog’ (24)
Kissane understands and accepts his place in the world: ‘I perform a role/crucial for adolescent wellbeing: efficient driving.’ But his place in the world is also as witness and curator. He stays at the Canterbury Ice Rink, watches as his daughter goes off in her electric blue jacket to practices her Lutz:
I can see her as she concentrates on the long backward
glide, digs her toe pick down hard into the ice, lifts
and spins into the air, striving with her whole body
to land this difficult jump for the first time
from ‘Trip to the Ice Rink’ (61)
In his curatorial role, he selects material from his ‘radical attention to the world’ and he selects the quantity and manner in which it is presented. Kissane excels at using what he calls ‘the grit and gyprock of words’ (60). He fashions the poems into elegant patterns on the page and is fond of three-line stanzas. All this apparent ease of expression, rather like his daughter at the rink, is practised and wrought. He has divided the book into four sections and each section has within it a narrative of meaning, with the poems carefully sequenced to develop the thought. Within the poems, the flowing lines have careful line endings, the words at both end and beginning of the lines selected to bear the slight emphasis of their position in the line and there is plenty of enjambment to lead you (often literally) down the garden path, past the joke to ‘suddenly stumble on what we really think’, and to radiance. This poise, this hard work in selecting and arranging, brings a subtlety and structure to this mature poetry. It makes for a very elegant book.
The final part of the collection, The Sea of Tranquillity, is a long riff on the metaphor of Kissane being married to the Moon, which he personifies effectively.
‘Like an umbraphile, I drove a pale green Corolla
up the Hume Highway from Melbourne to Sydney
with my belongings in the boot and a rolled-up futon
crammed into the back seat. Arriving at a friend’s house
in Croydon Park, The Moon opened the front door.
I saw shadow bands, a single intense diamond
and a fluttering corona pulsing around her outline.
When she stepped forward, I realised she’d been blocking
the light in the dim hallway. She smiled and her top lip
glowed with these red spots, but when I blinked
they were gone. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick.
I was launched into blissful orbit, stranded in the trackless
heavens, unsure of the right angle of attack,
how to come down to earth without burning up.’
From ‘Total Eclipse’ (67)
The Sea of Tranquillity brings together the components of Kissane’s very particular style which are at work in this collection: his magic realism; his ability to describe love and adoration, warts and all; his humour; his long narrative line and his unveiling of radiance/Radiance. The collection as a whole is slender, elegant and well-constructed.
1. Facing the Moon (Five Islands Press, 1993); Every Night They Dance (Five Islands Press, 2000); Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
3. From ‘Summer’, p61
4. From ‘Beloved’, p31
5. ibid
ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON‘s second book, Possession, received the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Prize and Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2011 it was shortlisted for the ACT Judith Wright Prize and the NSW Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. She trained as a lawyer, lives in Sydney and is on the board of the national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry.
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark O’Flynn has published four collections of poetry, most recently Untested Cures, (2011). His poetry and short fiction have appeared in many Australian journals as well as overseas. His novels include Grassdogs (2006), and The Forgotten World, (Harper Collins, 2013). He has also published the comic memoir False Start. He has also written for the theatre, including the popular play Eleanor and Eve. He lives in the Blue Mountains. A collection of short fiction, White Light, was published by Spineless Wonders Publishing, 2013.
Jerry Stand Up
Remember that you have chance and possibility
Paul Dempsey
‘Where’s Jerry?’
Jeanette looks up from her screen to give me a funny kind of look.
‘Who?’
‘Jerry. Jerry Burgoyne. Have you seen him?’
‘I thought I saw him earlier,’ she says.
Jeanette’s heavy-handed eye shadow resembles the lingering bruise of a couple of black eyes, like over-fried eggs. Her ear rings are Christmas decorations, even though it is July.
‘I haven’t seen him,’ I say.
‘Maybe that was yesterday,’ she says, unsure.
Jeanette’s cubicle is decorated with photos of her pets: a tortoise-shell cat and two dogs. The dogs, a Dachshund and a Doberman, have ribbons tied about their ears to make them look like cartoon characters of dogs, perhaps at a rodeo. They look rather sad and humiliated about it. There are no photos of her children. I do not know if she has any. She turns back to the figures she is poking into the keyboard with bright pink nails.
I take my piece of paper to the next booth where Ken McKendry is doing something similar. His booth, comprised of purple office partitions, is decorated with pictures of his family whom he never talks about. Ken keeps pretty much to himself, for better or worse. In the cubicle sound is muffled, like being in a church made of fibre glass or builders insulation. It makes you want to whisper. His personalised coffee mug stands on the desk, at the moment filled with pencil shavings like the fins of tropical goldfish.
‘Have you seen Jerry?’ I ask, shaking my leaf of foolscap. All it needs is a signature and my work here is done.
‘Not since this morning.’
‘Are you sure it was this morning? I haven’t seen him all day.’
‘Er, no,’ says Ken. ‘Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him at all.’
I glance at the spreadsheet on his computer, but it doesn’t mean much to me.
‘How’s the family Ken?’
‘Fine, thanks Geoff.’
His return to his typing I take as my cue to leave. His fingers, minus the pink, sound like a stampede of miniature horses over the tundra, or perhaps birds in the ceiling.
I take my document and move down the corridor. No one has seen Jerry. Some people think they have but they can’t be sure.
‘Maybe he’s gone for coffee,’ suggests Trudy, in stores, but I find this idea preposterous.
‘Maybe he’s in the dunny with the runs,’ offers Dale, the office clown, from HR.
The security guy doesn’t know who I’m talking about.
‘Maybe he didn’t come in today,’ says Mrs. Hyland, our supervisor, who is preoccupied with getting her accounts ready for an audit. ‘Maybe he has another unexpected funeral?’
There’s some sort of snide tone in her voice, which I don’t respond to. Her face looks red and thwarted, like a wrinkled balloon with half the air leaked out of it.
‘Jerry was very rude to me the other day, which I didn’t appreciate, and you can tell him that from me when you find him.’
I refrain from pursuing this issue. Would the Jerry I know do such a thing? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
I go to the toilets and thrust my head in the door.
‘Jerry?’
My voice echoes, as in an empty railway station. There is an intense silence, as if someone has taken a sudden breath and is holding it.
‘He’s not here,’ a voice comes from the end stall.
‘Is that you Jerry?’
‘No. It’s Mike.’
‘Sorry. Are you all right?’
‘Of course,’ he says rather indignantly. ‘Why wouldn’t I be all right?’
I leave, wondering what if Jerry is in the Ladies? What if he’s injured somewhere, waiting for the cleaner to find him?
The lady in the cafeteria, Mavis I think her name is, hasn’t seen Jerry either. Maybe he has stepped out for a breath of fresh air? Or is eating his sandwiches in the gardens across the road. I rack my brains to think where Jerry might have got to. I ring his mother. Jerry still lives at home, (or rather has moved back home again after a disastrous dalliance with Sonia from the pay office).
Mrs. Burgoyne says she did see him off this morning bright and early.
‘He looked so smart,’ she says, ‘wearing his nice new suit.’
She expects him home at six. It’s Thursday. She’s cooking rissoles. Jerry is forty three and he is still eating rissoles cooked by his mother. That will certainly show Sonia where she went wrong. I ask if she would mind if I come round to see Jerry this afternoon – evening really, as I have to stay at the office until five. There is something important I need to ask him.
She says, ‘That would be fine dear.’
After work I stop by the pub – The Cricketers Balls – where Jerry and I sometimes meet for a drink, also to disparage the gossip and office politics that somehow surrounds us and infects the culture of the working day. The pub is decorated with deep plum-coloured drapes that absorb the light and muffle the convivial chit chat of two or more friends after work. He isn’t there. The barman hasn’t seen him and, in fact, there is no one here I know apart from Sonia, over in a corner who gives me a glare, and I quickly take my leave
I drive to Jerry’s house in Glenferrie, but he still hasn’t returned. Mrs. Burgoyne lets me in. Her hair is tightly curled like a piece of brain coral. She thinks for a moment that maybe Jerry has gone to bed, he’s been feeling peaky.
‘Let’s look, shall we?’
When we open the door it is pitch dark in the musky room. She turns on the light but the bed is empty. She crosses the minefield of the floor, and opens the curtains, however even with the extra light spilling in the bed is still empty.
‘Is he happy at his work Mrs. Burgoyne?’ I ask. ‘Apparently he was rude to Mrs. Burgoyne.’
‘Do you know Geoff, I don’t know the answer to that. He used to be up bright as a sparrow, singing in the shower. But he hasn’t been doing that so much lately.’
‘What would he sing?’
‘Oh, songs… Come to think of it he hasn’t been running so much either. He used to go for a jog after work every day. He’s terribly fit. And then he bought himself a new suit. I thought it was to impress that Sonia. She’s a piece of work. But I was wrong about that.’
‘Perhaps that’s where he is now? Running.’ I suggest trying to fill the awkward, unexplained absence that occupies Jerry’s room. The air is stale. Private air. She tries to pull the door closed. I notice on his bedside table a book I cannot read the name of, I think it might be Chinese, and a little knotted piece of string. To an unfamiliar eye such as Mrs. Burgoyne’s it might look like nothing more than a sex toy, a garrotte for Jerry’s penis for instance; but I know it is for him to practice his affirmations, a ritual he has enjoyed for many years. I have seen him at it in his office cubicle muttering under his breath:
‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.
Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’
However I have no time to explain this to Mrs. Burgoyne. She asks if I would like to stay and eat some rissoles but, tempting as this is, I have to get home to my own tea on the other side of the city, a far cry from rissoles let me tell you.
I ask if she can get Jerry to ring me when he gets home. He has my number.
He doesn’t call.
The next morning I phone Mrs. Burgoyne who informs me that Jerry is still asleep. He must have been late in. He’s a grown man, she can’t dictate what time he comes home.
‘Oh no,’ she corrects herself, ‘I think he’s in the shower.’
‘Is he singing?’ I ask.
‘I can’t hear dear. The radio’s on, and I’m a little deaf.’
At the office I visit Jeanette in her cubicle. The air smells of Spring Mist.
‘Have you seen Jerry?’
She gives me a funny look. Her two brown eyes like an astonished owl’s. Christmas in her ears.
‘Not since the last time you asked.’
‘I need him to sign this report.’
‘Sorry, I haven’t seen him.’
The cat and the two dogs look at her from the cubicle wall, framed by the unlikely stage props of a wagon wheel, a hay bale. Am I the only person who cares that Jerry has vanished? Ken McKendry hasn’t seen Jerry either. Someone told me a long time ago, maybe it was Jerry, that in the photo of his family on the wall one of the children had passed away and that is the reason he doesn’t like to talk about them. Well that’s probably a pretty valid reason, I told Jerry, if it was Jerry.
‘How’s the family, Ken?’ I hear myself asking.
‘Fine.’
Trudy in stores hasn’t seen Jerry.
Dale in HR hasn’t seen him either.
Nor has the security guy.
It’s like he’s just turning the corner in the street ahead of me, disappearing from the tangent of my eye. It’s like he has vanished into the ether
Mrs. Hyland, who is getting her accounts ready for an audit, can’t remember if she’s seen Jerry or not. She puts down her pen. Her red face looks like a – like a – I can’t remember what it is it looks like.
‘What’s on the piece of paper Geoff?’ she asks.
‘What piece of paper?’
‘That piece of paper you’re carrying around.’
‘I need Jerry’s signature. In order to finalise this report.’
‘What’s on it? Show me.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Show me.’
‘I don’t want to bother you.’
‘I insist.’
Reluctantly I hand it over. I can sense the others have been talking behind my back again.
‘Geoff, there’s nothing on it.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s blank.’
‘It must still be on the printer.’
‘Why do you need Jerry so badly?’
‘I need him to sign it. To finalise things. He’s missing. Aren’t you concerned?’
‘Well Geoff,’ she looks at me strangely over the top of her glasses, ‘yes I am concerned. You keep looking for him, and when I finish here I’ll come and help you. We’ll get to the bottom of this once and for all.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
I back out the door. She doesn’t know where Jerry is. She hasn’t got a clue. She says:
‘You just keep looking.’
I don’t know which way to turn.
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ben Walter is a Tasmanian writer whose fiction has appeared in Overland, Island, Griffith Review and The Lifted Brow. His debut poetry manuscript, Lurching, was shortlisted in the 2013 Tasmanian Literary Prizes.
Winding the Land
I had felt a skin of regret at being compelled by party policy and the tidal whims of my constituency to vote against the private member’s bill tabled by David Beveridge, stemming as it did from the now-infamous arguments attributed to my former son-in-law, Ian Davey. Ian’s motives in marrying Sally had always been cloudy to me, forced as I was to acknowledge her lack of charm or beauty, but until the revelations I’d always felt a margin of gratefulness to him, tempered by concerns for his dynastic ambitions.
While Ian never sought the endorsement of the Tasmanian people, nor made inroads into my own convictions, Beveridge, the youngest member for Denison, so came under his sway as to table the bill that was to founder so spectacularly. I have searched my memories of dinner parties and summer barbecues, and I can’t recall facilitating the introduction; what’s important is that they crossed paths, and Beveridge was in the mood to make a difference.
The essence of Davey’s arguments centred on the economic and social benefits that had flowed from the Tasmanian innovation of daylight saving. Allowing for an extra hour of evening sunlight had minimised electricity usage and widening the evenings, bringing a little of the Mediterranean to our idiosyncratic local summers. Could this revolution, which had gone on to fiddle global clock faces, be applied to space as it had been to time?
How was the land to be moved? So scoffed a Braddon sinecure from my own side. Did Beveridge propose to up the ante on continental drift? Did he imagine the land would up and beg, roll over like a dachshund? Davey was quick to explain through his elected mouthpiece that just as daylight saving had not altered the movement of the Earth around the Sun or the planet’s rotation on its axis – merely our conventions relating to it – the same could be attempted with respect to our experience of space. Was the entire population of the state to be moved to the east, the west, the south or the north over the first weekend in October, the first weekend in April? Would this lead to seaboard populations sleeping in dinghies and those nestled in the mountain valleys breakfasting on the peaks of the Wellington Range? Yes, Beveridge intoned triumphantly in parliament, that’s exactly what he was proposing – he was delighted that the honourable members had understood.
Ian was insistent, that far from attempting to dry the southern winds or cool sweaty shoulders through the brief, unexpected heat of summer days – this was popular whimsy, incidental to his goals – he was advancing the proposal as a spur to the development and innovation. Imagine, he would say, a whole second layer of infrastructure. Consider the policy revolutions for zoning and land ownership, the redistribution of wealth, energy flexibility, housing design and material efficiencies. Think of the growth of the construction industry, of the community blending and growth in social capital, of the tourism branding. Who wouldn’t want to spend and invest in the new, overwritten Tasmania?
“Just think,” he would insist, “an entirely fresh start, but one that would co-exist with all that belongs to us today. It would be a model for us. An exemplar. If anyone can sway opinion on this, you can. Support David’s bill.”
The relationship we shared rendered any help I could have offered implicitly nepotistic; it certainly wouldn’t have done me any favours in the party room. Beveridge’s own side were unwilling to support the bill; it was obvious to insiders that he had fought and lost a series of unbalanced debates. When it came to the vote the proposal was predictably defeated. Beveridge resigned his membership of the party and was bundled out of parliament at the next election; the people of Tasmania taking its revenge on the wrong sort of independent.
But it was only when the national papers picked up the story that the matter took the turn that it did. Naturally, the analysis was as critical of the policy framework as the local tabloids, but their aptitude for digging led to the scandal that was to bring the family apart, and for which I am willing to share little responsibility. It had nothing to do with Beveridge, who had relocated to Melbourne to work in light consulting; it was my son-in-law who became the object of the nation’s ghoulish fascination.
It wasn’t that he had decided to embody his principles, moving five kilometres to the east at the beginning of every October, pacing out the exact distance and making a nuisance and object lesson of himself. Sleeping on the roof of an unfortunate retiree’s house, developing his status as an idiotic cause célèbre. Features on the more idle current affair shows, updates buried in the inner rings of newspapers. Nor did he radicalise an allied cause, swivelling day and night and altering the clocks by twelve hours. I was expecting something like this, a strident spectacle swiftly forgotten, a depressed, insomniac tendency justified after the fact by adaptations of his theory.
He simply seemed to disappear. Surprise gave way to genuine concern when we also lost contact with Sally; after several weeks with no response to our phone calls, no answer to our knocking at their West Hobart home, I made a call to an acquaintance in the force who uncovered the scandal just as the major newspapers began to pick up the story.
What really caught the national interest was the tattoos, tattoos that voluntarily or otherwise had been inflicted on Sally’s body. The maps overlying graphs, plans engraved against diagrams, casinos in Cremorne and brick flats jutting from the Organ Pipes. And images of Ian and Sally’s own possessions, their wedding gifts, displaced into forests and other people’s homes, crudely drawn and redrawn, carved with needles and ball-point pens, layers and layers repeated. When they finally found her, emblazoned in blue and white like dense china, she was unable to stop quivering at the thought of further redirection and displacement. What had steered Ian’s ideas in this gruesome direction? Why had he decided to map and remap his wife, my daughter?
The images left a wake of speculation and fascinated outrage; even now I am burdened by memories that set me searching of fresh appalled responses, the casting of blame and the passing of moods to the friend across the road, the stranger in Buenos Aires. I stay awake well into the night, the outline of my wife waiting at the study door, mopping myself in the outrage and confusion of others, as Sally sleeps quietly in the spare room. She has finally settled calmly in our home, quite content remaining where she is.
***
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
June Glasgow is an Australian poet and writer of short stories. She is also the co-editor of a sporadically circulated zine, Bir & June (see http://www.birandjune.com for her unprinted works). In her spare time, she paints and enjoys studying animal behaviours. She is currently residing in Adelaide with her cat.
A Tail’s Length
He sees her in her bed.
She sleeps with her legs parted slightly, her belly voluptuous and full, her nipples placed daintily round and stiff as flower pods on the icing of a cupcake.
Fat pigeons fly in flocks next door, cooing, grooming, shitting on the tiles.
His head is held high as he peers over the bed. He stands behind the door half ajar, careful not to wake her. If he could touch her, he would.
In his head, he often wonders what she would look like fur-less. Or if her fur takes on a different color. Black gives her lips a mystic sheen, which he desires in the female sex. He thinks of the soft underside of her arms when he humps the fleece blankets at night. He humps it until the image of her, an antique Egyptian Queen, tall, agile, majestically black, fades into cold clouds on a clear autumn evening.
But here she is, open, sweet, so unlike her when she is awake. He wants to be just slightly closer so he could catch the scent off her tail that dangles off the edge of the bed. He tries to place his paws as lightly as feathers as he treads the floor of wood.
When she is awake, she never allows him so close. She knows even eunuchs can rape. The dark alleys in the Eastern suburbs where she strayed as a kitten taught her that. Gender is a disadvantage.
So she disassociates herself from others, lives the life of a celibate god, and dreams of a paradise of birds. A door shaped as a sesame seed will open unto such a world. Only in death could she experience true solitude, in which no gender, no sex will disturb the spiritual, the intellect, allowing full and thorough meditation and understanding of the self and the universe that surrounds. Sleep, to her, is as close as it gets. She is only nine but she feels that she has seen too much.
And he, one of the many that come into her life, leer salivating at her in a distance, stands in the doorway like a fool. Seven years younger and almost reaching his prime, he does not know her philosophy of life. He dwells rather simply between his leopard print, proud and a little reserved. He is never comfortable with how high-pitched his voice is when he doesn’t consciously lower the tone. He sees her, yet he does not see her fully. A part of what he sees is a mirror of himself.
He knows if he gets any closer, he will try to rape her again. But a part of him does not know yet, so he slouches his back, lowers his tail, crouches on his fore and back paws, spinning towards her light-headedly.
If he is too close, he will risk losing an eye, or a corner of his ear. Another grey, long-haired female who was much bigger than him and more experienced than his had taught him that last summer in a herb garden. Now, he still has not learned.
Driven by the same dreams: her whiskers, her strong tail that throws her scent of musk upon his wet nose, her gait ever so seductive even though she tries so deliberately hard to be as disinteresting and unattractive as possible, he still comes prowling in her siesta. She is targeted whenever her guards are down. But her guards are never down.
The sun that blinds him is a bonus to him. Fat pigeons cheer. He seizes her in dreams and gives her what he thinks is his love, while she plucks out something sticky— an eyeball of his.
***
October 8, 2014 / mascara / 0 Comments
Navid Sabet is a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. He teaches creative writing at the University of Canberra, where he is also undertaking a PhD in cultural studies.
Names
I remember the really bad day. It was Monday and I hate Mondays and Mum asked me why I hate Mondays but I don’t know why. Dad prays on Mondays but he’s meant to pray every day I think that’s what Mum says but he doesn’t pray every day since we moved here. He doesn’t let me pray with him anymore because he says people don’t understand what praying is here and before I started school he said I could choose any name to call myself and I said I already have a name but he said I need a new one. He got me a dog from the RSPCA well he got it for my sister her name is Afareen but at school they call her Annie because that’s the name she called herself when Dad asked her and me to choose a new name. Dad doesn’t like dogs but he said Australian kids like to play with animals and we should also play with animals.
At recess Lucy said her dad’s country hated my dad’s country because they lost at soccer but I didn’t get it because her dad’s country and my dad’s country are the same things. I don’t know what she’s talking about but I think she doesn’t like me and that makes me really sad. I don’t know what soccer is but I won’t ask because I don’t think she likes me and she will think I am stupid and I think she is really pretty she has yellow hair and freckles and really shiny eyes. Sometimes I think if I had yellow hair and freckles then she would like me more. I like freckles I think they are pretty and cool they are like stars and I think Lucy should show her freckles at show and tell time. My hands get all sweaty before show and tell when I don’t have anything to show and tell or even when I do have something to show and tell they still get sweaty. If I had something cool to show and tell something cool like freckles then Lucy could not hate me so much and think I’m stupid but sometimes I think I’m stupid too. Sometimes I think I’m stupid because Mum says things to me in Persian like on the really bad day and she told me the dog died but she said it in Persian and I didn’t know what she was saying.
Dad got the dog from the RSCPA for Afareen but Afareen doesn’t like dogs because the dog bit her on the leg and now she’s scared of dogs so then the dog was mine after that. I think if I didn’t have a dog at all then the really bad day wouldn’t be really bad because if I didn’t have him then he couldn’t go away but then I get sad because I love him but when I think about him I get really really sad. Mum said dogs live for many years but my dog was only less than three years but it got sick I know that because Mum told me on the really bad day. He had big black eyes and they were shiny and I could see my face in them because they were so shiny. They were as shiny as a photo and then I remember on the really bad day in a second or less than a second they weren’t shiny anymore and they were like a poster that isn’t shiny like a photo. I couldn’t see myself in them when they were like a poster. When they were shiny like a photo I could see myself in them I was looking at someone through a window at night and then they closed up the curtains and then they were not shiny and they were really dry like a poster and I couldn’t see myself anymore because they were too dry. I don’t like that word.
Recess was over and we were on the floor and I was in the corner and there was a stapler on the floor in the corner and I picked it up and played with it behind my back even though I knew that Mrs. Drew would be angry if I was playing with the stapler when show and tell is on. I knew she would be angry and say go and see the principal but I wouldn’t care because then I wouldn’t have to do show and tell when I didn’t have anything to show and tell. She would be more angry because we’re not allowed to use the stapler even if it’s not show and tell time and even if we are doing arts and crafts. It’s a big kid stapler and most of the time it’s not on the floor it’s on her desk. Jeremy is doing show and tell and that means I’m next because he sits next to where I sit and he’s showing his Pokémon. My hands are really sweaty and the stapler is slipping around in my hands and I want to go home and ask Dad what soccer is and also ask him if his country is different to Lucy’s Dad’s country and if they are different then I want to ask him to stop beating Lucy’s Dad’s country in the soccer and then maybe she won’t hate me anymore. She’s really pretty I think the prettiest person I’ve ever seen except Mum and I think I want to marry her. She showed a doll and a necklace for show and tell. The doll was pretty it was like her but it was really small and plastic and the necklace was pretty too she got it from her grandpa.
One time last term I had a sore finger because Mum said the skin was too dry and it peeled off and it hurt but I thought I could bring it for show and tell because I never have anything to show and tell but I thought I could show my hurt dry skin. But when I got in front of the class to show and tell I saw my skin was all better and Luke said that I was lying and he said I never had any hurt dry skin and I cried in front of the whole class. That’s the only time I had dry skin like that and I still hate that word and I still hate Mondays. That word makes me thirsty and I always think about that word when I’m in bed and I have to get up and walk to the bathroom and get water from the tap that’s in there. The water tastes different from the tap in the bathroom than from the kitchen and I think that water is good for dogs because he liked that water better than his water from the bowl. His water from the bowl had biscuits in it and maybe that’s why he didn’t like it but then why did he put the biscuits in there all the time? His bowl was yellow and a bit green and it said XYLO on it but you don’t say it like that you say it like ZILO because X is a funny letter. It’s funny too because XYLO isn’t his real name his real name is XYLOPHONE but we called him XYLO because it’s shorter than XYLOPHONE and XYLOPHONE isn’t a name for a dog it’s a thing and dogs aren’t things dogs are dogs that’s why we don’t eat them. But we eat chickens and cows does that mean they are things? Dad eats bacon on his sandwich even though he’s not supposed to because it’s dirty but he says it’s good for him but I hate it and so does Mum but I don’t hate it because it’s dirty I hate it because I love pigs and I don’t think we should hurt them because pigs are not things. XYLO isn’t a thing he is a dog but I called him XYLOPHONE when I was only three and I didn’t know that dogs and things are different things. When we were finding a name for XYLO Mum says that we were looking at a book for names but it was just a normal book with words and pictures and no names and Mum said I pointed to XYLOPHONE in the book but then she said XYLOPHONE is a thing and we need a name for the dog and not a thing but then I cried and so she said yes. Now I know what things are I know that things are things like shoes and toys and keys. Dad bought me a keyring when he went back to Iran but I didn’t have any keys to put on the keyring and I lost it and I missed it for a while. Keyrings are things too and I hate Mondays and I don’t have anything for show and tell and I miss XYLO.
Jeremy is nearly finished his show and tell and that means I’m next because Jeremy sits next to me and now my hands are really sweating all over and the stapler is slippery in my hands because of the sweat. I closed the stapler on my finger and it hurt so much more than when I fell off my bike but I didn’t move because then I knew I’d be in so much trouble even though I didn’t care because I had nothing to show and tell but then I saw my finger and it was bleeding right next to the fingernail and there was a staple inside my finger and it was bleeding down into my hand. Mrs. Drew said my name and she said it was my turn and my heart was beating really fast and there was lots of blood on my finger and on my hand lots of blood and lots of sweat. I went up to the front to do my show and tell and Mrs. Drew looked at my finger and all the blood and all the sweat and she fell over onto the floor.
On Tuesday I was late to school because Mum said she wanted me to sleep in and that I would go in to school late even though she had to go to work. I missed assembly but I don’t care that I missed it because assembly is boring and the school hall is really cold in the morning. Mum dropped me off out the front because she was in a hurry but she said that I could call her from the office if my finger hurt too much but I said it was okay. The staple came out on the way home and Mum put some cold stuff on my finger that made it hurt more and then less after a little while. Then she put a bandage around it and kissed it because she does that when I hurt myself. Dad told me that Lucy’s dad went for the Australian team who isn’t the best team and he said that Lucy’s Dad needs to know that they’re not the best team but I’m not going to say that to Lucy. I walked past the office lady on my way to the classroom but she didn’t see me because I’m really short. When I got to the classroom the door was open and I could hear everyone being really loud and I knew Mrs. Drew was going to say quiet down everyone or something like that but she didn’t say anything. When I got to the classroom everyone was doing arts and crafts and I saw that Mrs. Drew wasn’t even there which is funny because she’s always in the classroom even at recess I think maybe she sleeps there too but that’s funny because there’s no toilet there. Luke saw me he was playing lego and he ran over to me and he wanted to see my finger and I showed him my finger and my bandage and he said WOW and put his arm on my shoulder like he was my friend. I sat down at my desk and then something fell over my shoulder onto the desk and I saw that it was a card and it was pink and it said I HOPE YOUR FINGER GETS BETTER SOON and then it said FROM LUCY. At recess Lucy asked me to play soccer because she wants to make a really good team and she thinks I might be really good at soccer because I’m Iranian. I told her that I didn’t know how to play soccer but she said it’s okay we can play any game I like. She told me that Lucy isn’t her real name and her real name is Lacramioara and it’s from Romania and she asked me if I could call her that instead of Lucy and I said yes.
