Convent Mermaid [1 ed.] 9781922120915, 9781922120908

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Rod Usher

Winter hands on your bottom in bed, a lesson in global warming.

Rod Usher’s third collection, Convent Mermaid, is full of wit and sadness, love and loss. Many of the poems spring from his long experience as a journalist, novelist and from years of living and working in Europe.

Rod´s poems regularly appear in leading literary magazines such as Island, Meanjin and Quadrant, as well as in various anthologies, including Australian Love Poems and the UK´s Aesthetica Annual. His most recent novel is Poor Man´s Wealth (HarperCollins, 2011), a title which, not surprisingly, comes from a poem.

Interactive Press Author photo: Kico Sánchez Cover image: Rod Usher

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Cover design: David P Reiter

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Convent Mermaid

As Les Murray has written, Rod´s poetry inspires both tears and laughter. He’s equally at home in poetic conversation with Emily Dickinson, David Bowie and Federico Garcia Lorca, in revisiting Cro-Magnon Man, or portraying the to-and-fro of love and sex. His poems find their feet in Australia, Spain, England and the U.S., their rhyme typically embedded rather than obligatory, though he bows to the tight rules of haiku.

Interactive Press Convent Mermaid Rod Usher is the author of three novels, two poetry collections and three non-fiction titles. His novels A Man of Marbles and Florid States were published in 1989 and 1990 respectively. Florid States was short-listed for the MIND Book of the Year Award in the UK. Poor Man´s Wealth appeared in 2011. His first poetry book, Above Water, was self-published and illustrated by Geelong artist John Druce. His collection Smiling Treason was published in 1992. Since his third novel Rod has returned to writing poetry, and has been published widely in recent years, particularly in Meanjin, Island and Quadrant. His poems have also appeared in The Age, Overland, and Going Down Swinging and in anthologies including Australian Love Poems 2013, The Best of Quadrant 2000-2010, Aesthetica Magazine Annual (UK), Flood, Fire and Famine and The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (2014). His non-fiction books are Sleep: All You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Too Tired to Ask, Images of Our Time and Their Best Shots; 21 Years of the Nikon Awards. He has worked as a journalist in many countries and is a former literary editor of The Age, former chief sub-editor of The Sunday Times, London, and former senior writer for TIME magazine in Europe. He currently lives in Spain, making frequent trips home to Melbourne.

Interactive Press The Literature Series

Convent Mermaid

Rod Usher

Interactive Press The Literature Series

Interactive Press an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152 [email protected] ipoz.biz/IP/IP.htm First published by IP in 2014 © Rod Usher, 2014 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. Printed in 12 pt Cochin on 14 pt Corbel. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Usher, Rod. Title: Convent Mermaid / Rod Usher ISBN: 978-1-922120-90-8 (PB) Subjects: Poetry, Modern—21st Century Dewey Number: A821.3

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To the memory of Margaret Patricia MacLeod and Robert Austin Usher

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Acknowledgements Front Cover Image: Rod Usher Jacket Design: David P Reiter Author Photo: Kico Sánchez The following poems appeared in Meanjin magazine: “The House of Usher/Gutiérrez”, “Mere Cogs”, “The Mouth of Babe”, “Pursuit”, “Ages”. In Island magazine: “Z to A”, “The Voyage Out”, “While You Sit By a Hospital Bed”, “Hawks and Crows”. In Quadrant magazine: “If Not More”, “Moments”, “Typing World War II Letters”, “Orf ”, “Words”, “Whiteout”, “Sail”, “Border Country”, “Still Mauve”, “Flight”, “Susanna Who Plays Clarinet in the Band”, “Cuba Libre”, “Ms Groper”, “If I Go First”, “Bent as an Arrow”, “Mr Ah Am”, “Monteviejo Winter”, “Sorolla”, “Wool Nights”, “Sayings”, “Plums”. “Asms v Isms” appeared in Overland, and in the earlier collection, Smiling Treason (1992). “Summersong” first appeared in The Age, as did “Who in His Write Mind?” “Bent as an Arrow” was short-listed for the Aesthetica Magazine Award (UK) and published in Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, 2012. “Rin Tin Latin” appeared in Australian Poetry Members’ Anthology, 2013. “That Love” was in Australian Love Poems, 2013 (Inkerman & Blunt). “Before Science Stepped In” was short-listed for the Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Stars Award, 2011. “Home Editing” appears in the anthology Flood, Fire and Famine (School of Music Poets, Australian National University), 2014. “Btween the Lines” appears in the anthology The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (IP, 2014). Some of the published poems have had changes. vi

Contents First Hotel 3 If Not More 5 Moments 7 Hawks and Crows 8 Typing WWII Letters 11 Judgement 10 Orf 14 While You Sit By a Hospital Bed 15 The Mouth of Babe 16 The Voyage Out 17 Mr Ah Am 18 Departures 19 Mere Cogs 20 That Love 21 Masterblown 23 Joaquín Sorolla Museum, Madrid 24 Asms v Isms 26 The House of Usher/Gutiérrez 27 The Black and the Green 28 Monteviejo Winter 29 Group Therapy 30 Major Com 31 Sayings 33 Plums 34 Home Editing 35 Lorca Revisited 36 Caught Napping 38 Japanese Clock 40 Time 40 Ictus 40 Climate 40 Organic Gardener 41 Bent as an Arrow 43 Second Chances 44 Pursuit 47 vii

Rin Tin Latin 48 Home Expeditions 50 ‘‘the simple life of the lungs...’’ 51 French village, late 1941 53 Judiada 54 Notice 55 Words 56 Who in His Write Mind..? 57 Ages 60 Spanish Easter 61 Wool Nights 62 Giveaways 64 Aubade 66 Whiteout 67 D of D 68 Sail 70 Border Country 71 Before Science Stepped In 73 Middleweights 74 Still Mauve 75 Summersong 76 Flight 78 Ordinary Material 80 Z to A 81 Tomato Blues 82 You Must Be 84 Hard Rain 85 Ui the Unreader 86 Susanna Who Plays Clarinet in the Band 87 Convent Mermaid 88 Cuba Libre 90 Ms Groper 92 The Magnificent 147 93 Proof 95 Btween the Lines 96 Aftermath 97 If I Go First 99 viii

Convent Mermaid

Rod Usher

First Hotel Here in the deep red dark, the warm dark there is no language, no sight, no touch on skin, whatever that might be. Within, merely sounds of plumbing muted vibrations...notes? obsessively these nine months. Sometimes the craft does lose way, as though we’ve been through a star-storm and this sense of zero gravity, the buoyancy, it falters; we jerk from scheduled orbit. Say she’s eaten avocados again! Or, leaving aside wine and smokes, some mechanic palps, pokes, often catching me shadow boxing or training for the Tour de France and I take a stance, put my foot down. Then one day, happily napping after an in-flight re-fuel, these kitten eyes lidded, bells start ringing and, frankly, it’s like the end of the world. Apparently it is the start but picture a tennis ball being forced down a garden hose! The drag on ears, the flattening nose. Traumatic memories, those. I’m told they fade as in an interrupted dream but if so, how do I still have them? The so-called primal scream? I didn’t say moo at the time, 3

the noise was all coming from Her, caught between dilate and delight. Here I’d ask, if I might, is it kosher to clasp a fellow’s ankles quite so hard? to have one’s peach-sized bottom slapped? that mean clamp put on the fuel line? and then to be wrapped so tight in a rasping straitjacket? This small packet was wanting to shout blue murder in the fluorescent-lit substitute ‘room’. Maternity, I’ve since been told, comes to soothing rescue quite soon. All I can report first uncoordinated hand is that when the light hit, smells hit, my sound barrier smashed, senses waving like an anemone, some kind soul laid me on a full pillow and a warm bumpy device – without the required addiction advice – was gently inserted between thin new lips. This and that the first word to enter ears once wonderfully deaf in wet silence, the in-the-beginning word is: ‘Itsa!’ Some of the shocks were pleasant – if you’ve not gulped milk, gummed nipple – but if anyone had taken the bother to ask, I’d have stayed on in the all-included, five-star Hotel Mother.

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If Not More Beauty is one of the few things about which Cromagnon man knew as much as we do. – Arthur Koestler in Drinkers of Infinity

Our cave here is comfortable enough sandy floor, dry walls danger of rockfalls but the Dordogne weather isn’t too rough. All our children wear well-cut bison flay the wife does good fire. I’d like to retire but she says I’d only get in the way. So it’s keep on clubbing, set trap and snare long days in the woods. I know all its moods its smells, sounds, small changes in the air. My favourite time is Muyt, when the leaf dries and comes down the tree. It is telling me light one day won’t open my dawn eyes. The wife points out some leaves stay green all year: ‘Life might continue at least for the few who obey Sun and Moon laws while we’re here.’ I’m not much of one for such discussion: water where it flows fire to warm toes a wall for art, tight skin for percussion. 5

The offspring want us to move up a rung modernise the cave like the neighbours have cook with clean wood, not dried buffalo dung. I preach to them, as any father ought. Beauty, I explain, dwells not in the brain: By a deer, by snow, by sunrise be taught. Note: He lived about 20,000 years ago, according to the remains found in 1868 in Cromagnon Cave, France. His large cranial capacity is said to make him analogous to today’s European.

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Moments When haste meets dilation rising from well, soft fontanelle risking headbutt to firstlight. * Spineup book on midnight quilt Finisterre click of bedside lamp glutting the room with dry ink. * Mendelssohn’s violins vibrating Sunday air as do hawks, or virtue. * Homecoming penis in vagina’s warm embrace, innermost of outer space. * Coffin parked on trolley awaiting the jolly build of degrees in the oven not for cakes.

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Hawks and Crows Crow realised God loved him – Otherwise, he would have dropped dead. – from “Crow’s Theology” by Ted Hughes

Hawks ’n crows get more goes than any other birds in verse. Here at least Plath and Hughes saw eye-to-beady-eye Ted creating a whole Crow book Sylvia finding angelic muse out in rainy weather with a rook. Kestrel, kite and vulture overpopulate the culture. The raven ‘spake’ for poor Poe. Yeats gets scary when his falcon, Major Tom-like, loses contact with its ground-controller below. Another leading talon is the owl: pr owl, h owl, sc owl vole to disembowel. In just three letters so much vowel! Many a hovering bard finds it terribly hard to do without the eagle (which lands majestically on regal though let’s definitely skewer the next to soar one in ‘the azure’).

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Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn are hawk men to a quill emphasising with elegance the slightly morbid reverence so many poets bring to birds that cannot sing!

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Judgement This from above is not by God. A vector of 17 vultures, each to its turning screw is making light of gravity in early evening blue; broomless witches. On my back, I hold breath wait slit-eyed for one to descend and decide, run a closer check on this still-breathing meat. They don’t miss a beat, keep to their spiral staircases alert only for carrion’s fume past-it pig, fallen fox, keeled cow down for any dish that’s overdone. They lean away, not as one but in unruffled accord. I roll onto my belly, the slates’ heat now toward bony knees, fleshy parts up to chin. I have just passed muster or passed it, just. Inwardly I grin. Like Mr Yeats, I will arise and go now. Prepare supper. In blood-red wine put my trust. Be as wise as a vulture must about the here and the after. 10

Typing WWII Letters i.m. R. A. Usher

There’s a man naked fishing on a Guadalcanal beach one day when Japanese planes have paused their bombing runs and the U.S. offshore big guns are not plastering what remains of the Solomons’ vegetation. His mind keeps casting to a wife who is carrying the child he left in her on leave convinced he won’t die here desperate to receive letters in answer to all his, read by a censor in San Francisco then re-routed again so far to Ballarat, Victoria, Australia where he’d gone on R&R. Up the beach a soldier waves. Fisherman drops rod and runs thrashes Jeep along muddy tracks passing combat-weary men playing cards, cleaning guns who hoot to see the mail-grin of a Captain dressed as on the day he was born, in Brooklyn. The Corporal holds a batch. Nude hurries to duckboarded tent 11

table and chair he’s making from scavenged pallet wood when he and his don’t have to go wading swamps to pinpoint men awaiting letters from Tokyo. He reads his swelling bride. Months back he wrote his dreams of having her every imaginable way, one such ‘‘in a Jap pillbox, they only lock from the inside!’’ (the censor let that info go). He doesn’t see his daughter until she’s nearly one. Postwar, Long Island, NY, they produce another, and a son. H&S Battery, 4th Btn, 11th Marines and Pacific islands slaughter now fade to typical scenes of late-started domestic life: he gets a job, rents a house, buys himself a car, a Riley, goes dancing with his sexy wife. His letters were stored in a trunk, hers disappeared after the war. I know she once posted him a cake to Guadalcanal (and it got there!) that he sang beautifully. Little more. The typing has been a son’s fishing. When she lifted the phone that night her captain was 37, I was four. 12

Note: After Guadalcanal, where he got a Purple Heart, malaria, and complained that his hair was falling out, Capt. Robert Austin Usher and family returned from New York to Australia, where he had a job. He was killed instantly when a car in which he was a passenger crashed into the back of a timber truck in Western Australia on July 4, 1950, Independence Day.

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Orf How vairy English was Wystan Hugh Auden while far too tart to be labelled a toff who else but a Pom, in a poem on war could have mesomorph rhyme with off? W.H. was a word-rescuer and neologue obtemper, osse, glop...just a few he offshows ever so caustic with slop and the slip-shod: ‘No one hears his own remarks as prose.’ Wrinkled Auden, wrankled Auden forgiving as fog, disinfectant as bleach wielded his verb and his gin with a grin for ‘The Ogre cannot master Speech.’ Notes: Behold the manly mesomorph Showing his bulging biceps off – from a poem titled with this first line. Unrhymed, unrhythmical the chatter goes Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose – from “At the Party” The Ogre cannot master Speech – from “August 1968”

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While You Sit By a Hospital Bed A rudderless wind bothers the palms where grey doves nest. In mine, not blessed with your shape dawn is borne across zinnias potted on the sill for your return. Forlorn, I must celebrate your birth egg and spoon with absence. Bedside sister, sad but strong this halved heart repeats not-long-not-long you’ll ride back those cold blue rails. I count the stations of my cross: Lérida, Zaragoza, Madrid, Cáceres, little Cañaveral of your Dad’s youth where canaries shorten the waiting room. Waiting in our room I bow to your departed parents picture their girl’s push into life tiny hands that now hold as wife first felicitous breath into lungs which fill abreast of mine. For your birthday I would gladly give my lifetime’s share of air. Here, now mouth-to-mouth.

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The Mouth of Babe In the beginning, of the end, was the word fishlippery she blurted it he, oh yes, he heard. Athlete, adagio, neighbour-knocking the mutual lust they’d slaked decades of climactic slide and grip she’d Oscar-winning faked! It flew her lips at breakfast never the time or place for once to fold the peacock’s tail now ego all over his face. Her o-shaped mouth cannot unsay the zero before gasm their stripped-pine kitchen table now two sides of a chasm. ‘Don’t let it come between us’ (a pun she’d not meant to utter) but as the toaster popped its load both knew they were out of butter.

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The Voyage Out Carrying a hundredweight of distress and, story has it, pockets full of stones she stepped into the cold River Ouse. 1941, winter, another world war Hiroshima not yet melted her London house bombed. The private Blitz inside her head never mind that she was handsome well-loved, thought-full, prolific. Body in the river three weeks drained white of all human graces also of the blackness, the voices. Celan, Koestler, Levi, Plath... so many turn their backs, the pain mightier than the word. I like to think the River Ouse wrote the stones into her overcoat pockets talismans rather than weights.

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Mr Ah Am His hands shake. Speech. No longer floats like, stings like, but sits parked for the full-page colour ad, grandson with the gloves on. Only bag Ali’s punching nowadays, Louis Vuitton. The ‘Ah Am’ man, greatest fighter of modesty, Sonny L and Smokin’ Joe. Rope-a-Dope, Shuffle, Olympian who wouldn’t go down for Nam, (his best win on points). Boxing is bad for brains but mine will always have, okay, a soft spot. Not even Sugar Ray could rumble the jungle like Mr Ah Am the G. A sport of Nature, both butterfly and bee.

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Departures Their eyes speak ‘What’s left to say?’ Back-seaters on a rainy day. Turnpike taxi, stories flashing past. Tyres suck bitumen until cloth ears assume the driver’s nearing question: ‘Terminal?’

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Mere Cogs for Michael Gawenda

Walking wide autumn on Old Quarry Hill z-running dog deranged on potent scents a painted sign: Attention Bees At Work arresting rows of hives, a sudden chill. Déjà wooden barracks whose order stamps through florid sun-and-hum to black-and-white to documentary skin, the hollow eyes of ill-starred fellow beings culled in camps. Work really is freedom the troops insist as their million volts arc the loquat trees. Sick-smelling flowers give up in silence meticulous the purge, not one heart missed. Beelines don’t deviate for man or dog it’s always thus for all the thousand years down chains of command the click to obey cool shibboleth of acting as mere cog. Trudge home, hugged loads of wood to fiercely axe for day has fallen deathly cold at six. On the hill the barracks will be guarded no eyes peer inside, dark silence of wax. Firelight fakes ripples on this glass of wine no gay gypsy jew heartbeating my door or need to front the question bunkered here: Open...or deafly bolt? Think: ‘Mine!’ or ‘Mein!’

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That Love That love is all there is is all we know of it, wrote the wren-like poet with the sherry-colour eyes, claiming it is enough, the freight should relate to the groove – a railwayish metaphor romancing her away from her closed front door. Miss Emily, I beg to disagree. In your mechanical vein, as with tractors, I maintain we know something of love’s engine, its gears – the horsepower’s self-interest, the combustible is sex, that paint fades with years. That only dogs and mothers love unconditionally – not Mother N, for all she gave breast to your verse – Couples? Try Updike. Love of country? Often worse! Brotherly love? Merely note Arab-Jew, Hutu-Tutsi Sunni-Shii, Serb-Croat... Like a spanking new tractor, say of the John Deere brand, 21

love is governed by the factor of supply-and-demand. We also know, gentle Miss D, from history and first hand, that it’s frequently outlived by that which you never wore, the wedding band. Note: Emily Dickinson’s “That Love is all there is” was first published in 1914, twenty-eight years after her death.

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Masterblown Buried carefully in a loamy hole say with sand around the shoulders you would persevere intact indefinitely impervious to rot of meat and bone nuclear radiation’s mutations fallout of a dozen civilizations or a Champagne second coming. And yet just one quick tap from this hammer here, this stone would forever kill containment and reflection; gone to pieces faster than a madman. On days like this good sun praising the vineyards fantasize there might be one or two bright red hearts as masterblown as this poreless green flagon.

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Joaquín Sorolla Museum, Madrid for Katriona Fahey

Teacher looks too young for motherhood but is in full command today of 15 four-to-fives who have heard her say ‘No tocar, no tocar’ so many times the uniformed attendants need only smile upon her brood, barely beyond milk mew, too young to be smart, hand-holding twixt rooms, two-by-two their introduction to art cross-legged on the wooden floors of the home of Joaquín Sorolla, the very best painter of beaches. His mansion, given to the state in 1930, a leafy respite in the city’s posher reaches on Calle General Martínez Campos. .

Jeans, white belt, blouse, confidence, she orders her palette of little people to stare at just one painting in each room, so much light-on-sand, wet skin, sunburn, fishwives, sails to assume into wide unblemished eyes. Here, the famous one she tries is of the boy leading the horse after a swim, foregrounded on the water’s rim. She asks how can the boy, the horse be so much bigger than the distant boats? After a long pause she offers them a word as though it were ice cream: 24

‘Una palabra muuuuuy larga… per-spec-ti-va.’ I resist an urge to lift a few of her kinder kiss their perfect pale cheeks, ruffle thick hair. Can only wish them sunlit beaches, blue air full sails, lives lived in per-spec-ti-va. Later, on General Martínez Campos the children wait before different lights, the tall man walking out of their lives steadily becoming smaller.

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Asms v Isms Stand up for iconoclasm, orgasm, phantasm down with fascism, nihilism, gism. Wouldn’t you rather face a chasm than a schism? Savor an asm. Shun the ism. An asm is asmuch as an ism isminimal, heroism’s exceptional philistinism’s criminal. True, a prism is preferable to a spasm, Ismalia may be as inviting as Asmara, but generally isms are ripe for criticism; as an acronym: Introverted, Selfish, Mean. While asm comes acronymbly across as: Able, Soft, Mindful. Pass an asm. Hold the ism. Marxasm might have made it, capitalasm has more onomatopoeia, sexasm sounds sexier. Catholicasm is an almost credible answer to narcissism, egoism, sadism, that anachronism onanism. Put it this way: if you were dying would you want a transfusion of plisma or plasma? 26

The House of Usher/Gutiérrez for Angela

We began our humble homebuilding from the roof – by architects and priests it’s unrecommended – thirty-five years later, I trust we have the proof: surely love this long sees old Newton upended? Sadly we can’t boast any offspring of our bloods a family prefabricated, my two, your one Toft Monks in East Anglia where the Waveney floods old cottage, no quid, an ex darkclouding the sun. The older two barely reached their pedals for school little Jake backseat drove behind your Spanish thighs we scoffed loaves-and-fishes, Rayburn stove fired by coal nights that seemed so short hid your shyness from my eyes. Twelve houses later, you are pension-age, my sweet and it’s just on two decades since your one son died I admire your courage, each day incomplete my bricklaying heart by your still-curvaceous side.

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The Black and the Green Arbequina was the first though now so hard to recall then Morisca won me over, so black, so tight, so small. Picual, well you can imagine ah, we were Lorca green then Cacereña stole my heart that skin, the southern sheen. Gordal was a little heavy and here I am confessing infidelity with Aloreña that day I caught her dressing! Charrúa was a mystery subtle upon hungry lips then it was Muerta de Aragón cried for on northern trips. Rapasayos, ah what times they were my salad days! If I’d never met Nevadillo would I have tired of her ways? Now I admit to a new amor for Blanqueta I’d willingly die. I whisper, as to others before, oh you’re the olive of my eye.

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Monteviejo Winter Puddles bootcrunch, leaves once green are without vein, tobacco colour and staccato rain finds the unseen skylight leak, half a basin of tears crying onto our one-sided bed. Do not use the ladder, you’ve said, picturing me swallowdive from its rungs armed with gun and sealing silicone. You worry about me healing here alone, abandoned farms, no neighbours or phone as though if we are always together neither of us can ever die. But you choose not to come here until Spring begins its lie about perpetuity or Summer cooks the slates so hot we hopscotch to the green pool; salads, wine, friends, the living lot. Winter draws to stasis this off-duty fool, slogs me up the bogging track to solar panel, tricky well, iceblue days, black nights buckshot with stars, spine-straightening owl in the cork tree I lair here, muddy, stubbled, stovestuck, words kept to books, mumbled me-to-me, dry firewood my warmest care until, washed and anecdotal, to love again I repair.

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Group Therapy Not qualified alcoholics, prone only to the odd endorphin, A.A. and N.A. won’t have us to stand up and trumpet our sin. Thus we inaugurate here today – white wine and finger eats – Melancholics Anonymous, yes!, our patron the Honourable J. Keats. All present know melancholia comes from the Greek for black bile, it’s a slander we seek to redress, dove-grey ennui more our style. These badges may serve to unite us inspired by mentor Camus. The colours? They chose themselves:

Outings at sunrise or sunset in autumn, more aptly named Fall. Next week our inaugural lecture: Tempus Fugit v Tempus Crawl That’s all – which might be our slogan. Makes me feel...I nearly said glad to see all these pale serene faces anonymous, beautifully sad. 30

Major Com (on interviewing David Bowie)

Freezing day in Manhattan that´n minders outside the studio door clockworking their master’s voice which says morenmore his lyrics are his computer’s random choice just a byte of editing ´n add Reeves Gabrel´s great…gee ta I will avenuther Marlboro Light ziggy after ziggy. Minotaur´s cave he says (tapecheck, minor tour’s rave?) he can get Towie but today he’s all charis bizlike ´n nice to the photog those famous eyes lookinzif a computer also chosem. No girl-guy-bi spaced in, ground controlled. Spity he’s blown off Buddhism ‘sit on my karma dame meditation’ random computer got randy? more wear than software? don’t dare to ask that the story where we’re at’s Mr. B’s puttin his rock on the stock market shares in hisself.

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Hardly the man who sold the world but I preferred the music b4 com putas a-mused him. Drather a lad in sane than an ´ero to Walleyed Street.

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Sayings If you can’t stand the heat sit a while. He who laughs last has no one to hear. An eye for an eye will be glass. What goes up doesn’t always come down (e.g. sperm, or Jesus). Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow creeps as another 9 to 5. A rose is a rose is a hybrid. Nothing is ever so neat as the saying says (in vino it’s more often crapitas!) When the fat lady has sung when all’s said and done: Silence. Stillness.

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Plums The trees stand wild by the track public, anyone’s, free, surrounding farms abandoned: I reckon this fruit is for me! But quick now, here, now, always there are rivals better equipped; at the very moment of ripe the Air Force will have them stripped. Happened with the pendulous figs that in theory belong to me; blackbird, finch, thrush, pigeon… Is Scarecrow taking a fee? It’s the same irresistible lust thief William C. Williams did feel. I whistle under weighted branches birdsong for Let’s do a deal?

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Home Editing for Helen Garner

Daily bread gone verdigris, volumes of your recorded life die: ‘a bundle, a seethe, a swarm, a wisp, and then those soft grey feathers’ you write with unflinching eye. I picture you poker-wielding in your Melbourne garden – pages clinging to past – and would love to have browsed, secretly doused a year or two, mined the gold and dross of unexpurgated diary you. I recall your self-editing prowess as in the big field, permit in pocket, I burn nature’s clunky ms: chapters of wind-dropped wattle cliché blackberries, less-is-more prunings purple prose of the overwrought willow amid shootouts, piercing sapcries, florid tongue and grey billow. At midnight it’s rake and slake, embers briefly answering those overhead. Daylight brings an off-white page, all the ‘darlings’ now dead.

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Lorca Revisited You were 38 that fratricidal day

maybe several hundred verses away from a natural full stop. Who knows how many plays? The loss as if Yerma got with child then her infant died in its cot. Pianist, mimic, in student days the party trick you played a lot was to slump to the floor feigning death; friends sensed duende’s double edge caught their breath. Since that black dawn, August ’36, you have lain with four other men – in today’s Spain two may marry! – near an olive tree in a hollow in Andalucia: two banderilleros, those machos in sequins who plunge arrows into bulls, a tax inspector, a republican teacher. One of the Falangist firing squad claimed he also put a bullet in your bum bonus hatred for a maricón.

Far from where you decompose

there lies in a vault to flatter a Pope what’s left of F. Franco who outlived poetry by 39 years. The avuncular king he chose to succeed him monotones on TV about values and democracy 36

until eyelids inevitably close into Orwellian dreamspeak. It seems, despite your gift for faction, a plot too surreal for any play. However, if your soul’s ear can hear through earth near the olive tree in the depression where you lay this you should know, Federico: a las cinco de la tarde every single day somewhere in the world someone is reading you heart in mouth. While there’s a little general in a big tomb who God Himself will never exhume. Note: Federico Garcia Lorca´s is one of 114,266 documented `disappearances´ in Spain between July 1936 and December 1951. His remains have still not been located. The king referred to is Juan Carlos I, who abdicated in June 2014, in favour of his son Felipe.

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Caught Napping i.m. Margaret Patricia MacLeod

Sleight of siesta: an unusual pressure, position opens the half-submerged to the untamed volition of blood lapping the carburettor or deeper Davy Jones whisperings in the pillowed ear. It’s streamers I hear hissing out from hands in ’56 storybook tugs budging us from Port Melbourne wharf a young widow with three kids off to America via England red/blue/green paper ties leashing toward the crowded rail. The emotional goodbyes fail to reach a ten-year-old heart. While adults clutch the tensing twists and the Orcades booms ‘Never Ever Forever’ I dart through creased trousers stockings that are seamed to squirrel those farewells fortune hasn’t streamed unexploded bombs hitting the deck love collectable as bottle tops.

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Memory repaints the white ship: rival boys, fish that can fly widow-watching men by the pool the bucking Bay of Biscay John the gentle steward offering buttered bread on a silver tray: ‘Young man, another portion?’ Down the years’ rust and distortion so many seas and dropped anchors paper rainbows re-fill eyes. I take a breath, cast a streamer from the heart’s splintery quay across that gap too wide to Mother from me.

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Japanese Clock Each hour a small door opens and a little bird chimes: Haiku!, Haiku!

Time ‘In my day,’ rants the old man, as though he’d only had 24 hours.

Ictus In the nursing home garden mother’s speech briefly unintelligib.

Climate Winter hands on your bottom in bed, a lesson in global warming.

40

Organic Gardener His name was Andrew Bell. I don’t remember him terribly well from Norfolk, where I lived long ago. Dark, strong, low-syllable type, it sticks that he would always forgo one glass of red for a cup of tea: ‘With wine, best none or three’. His logic I shared and we drank multiples of my home-made, the glass siphons on the demijohns clopping away by the wood stove. That and the cider I strove to give a Scrumpy red hue via his tip: a slice of beetroot in the brew. It works, though I should note corked cider which hadn’t fermented out once produced a massacre-like mess in the little room where I wrote… But I digress. Andy grew vegetables for the Colonel, on the edge of whose estate I’d bought a ‘ripe-for-repair’ cottage. He worked in the high-walled garden – those fleshy Suffolk pink bricks – producing for the Big House table a fine root and leaf mix… potatoes a Heaney would envy. Few dug as well as did Andy Bell. One day he knocked at the back door of the Colonel’s ivy-clad pile. 41

Who it was he saw I can’t recall but the answer was No. he could Not go within to use the toilet. Andrew ambled in afternoon sun back down the neat well-weeded rows unhurriedly lowered his gardener’s garb and dumped what he needed to do on the rhubarb. It’s been decades now, and people think I’m drunk, but sometimes I thump the table: ‘Friends, raise a glass! To the Colonel’s crumble, and the working class.’

42

Bent as an Arrow Straight lines may look perfect on paper but all finally fail, veer or peter out. Find a line infinite in rectitude? Pope-to-God, priests quickly offer, but doubt this vertical too, words so fallible reverse-charge calls tending to cramp one’s clout. Going straight, straight-up, straight-talking, being -faced, -laced, sexually inclined or bent... See? All lines curve covertly off the page. Nature vetoed lineals, each try rent by reach or time, relieved to deviance of the richest random kind, heaven-sent. My true love has no straight lines upon her she’s callipygous, breasted, calved and lipped skin singing homage to arc, ripple, round. Not with a ruler was Eden’s Eve hipped nor her triangle made isosceles; never was geometry so well skipped. A woman eschewing fixed and formal shapes molding me to her and herself to life heart and mind, navel, nipples, mouth or spine unaligned with any math that would knife hard rules, correct answers, repetition. She surrounds me, nicely crooked, my wife.

43

Second Chances for James and May

Footsore, we reach the city to an unknown smell, neutrons, fission, evaporated people? Even our shock is grey, and the silence, the silence wide in streets, shops, the birdless sky. She shouts from the bank (which never lent us money), holding fists of notes smelling of...caramelized sugar? We could fill plastic bags. I picture a duo of BMWs, hers red, mine navy. We wander in dark supermarkets, wonder about use-by dates. Our own. How excited she is to discover two brown onions under a Whisper-Your-Weight machine. At a corner shop I pocket anchovies in a bowed tin. Lifetime levity addict, I keep trying: BMW – Beleaguered Man and Woman, Attenborough filming No Life on Earth. ‘Your humour’s still so bloody off,’ she snaps. Nightmares predicted the mantle of ash, particled air sieving sunlight but in these primal days it’s puzzlement: the almost-greeting of mannequins, dead traffic lights, double-parked vans Why us we ask? Why not? A miraculously re-fused couple because 44

we glitched Mutually Assured Destruction? Never mind we’ve offered each other marital M.A.D. this half-life? Mrs. Eve’s saying glean what we can, rucksack back to country. Water. Shelter. I want to stay; these streets are now safe! Why are we whispering? Can’t I let her decide something, for once? I acquiesce. No promises. The word makes us laugh, crescendo of nothing-left-to-lose no neighbours at auction, super-gnawing lawyers, electrodomestic disputes, side-taking friends... What’s fifty percent of zero? Her shriek’s the full hundred! A sleek rat on a shelf in the DIY shop, where I’m comforted by hammer and nails, her warped instinct taking rubber gloves. I pat her hand, say I hope there are also two, if so that they aren’t both girl rats, or chaps, which would be overdoing irony. The city an ink-shape, in a creatureless field we eat onions, peanut butter, anchovies. Will the puddle-water hasten mutations? We nap, or pretend to, on a ‘stolen’ blanket, under it the grass partially green. We try not to notice it’s becoming blue-black.

45

Late afternoon, it seems, we reach the lake, no swans, fishermen (what’s Sunday now?) Wash faces and feet, silt for soap. Then I see them! Shout and point. She says it’s fevered imagination, but since boyhood: Tadpoles! Yes! We resume the hike, our only direction ‘away’, sun backlighting grey canopy fencewire giving off that pinging noise. I find myself whistling through my teeth the Colonel Bogey march. She says do I mind? It’s damned annoying. My manufactured smile must be more so. No, another lie. Flippancy’s also bombed. In my chest the smile is genuine. Keeping face in the face of reason? Whoknowswhy, but this last hour I’m buoyed, my step to nowhere almost light, unfussed as that hardware rat, those new-spawned tads, brainless, heartless in the lapping water.

46

Pursuit Man is not the art he makes nor art a creator of men both a breath, a wingbeat which unbodied come to find their passing form the way the wide Zambesi deep in Zimbabwe falls or the rose’s passion play with blood the thorn annuls nightingale, thunderstorm halo adorning eclipse piano note no pedal stops phrase which leaves no lips until the heavy curtain rises a black hole cedes to math moon in water, ship in cloud takes up the painter’s brush tightly tunes the tenor’s throat cuts the poet’s cloth green shoot of chance ripe fruit of breeze the climb of light on sky hummingbird’s suspended dance sight beyond the eye captives of their capture paint and write and sing in hot pursuit of rapture deaf Beauty’s bells to ring.

47

Rin Tin Latin How well works interlaced Latin, the sine qua non of an argument that’s going or gone. One only has to whack in a few quid pro quos and suddenly a wilting case goes from pretty boring to pro bono. Take Scotland’s ageing cardinal accused of a sort of a tort for, prima facie, years ago, enjoying a lively version of habeus corpus, a bit of the old ad hoc, with four prim young priests. Not exactly homo sapiens of him. Tired old Ratzinger, outgoing Pope (who resigned in Latin, causing much dubito among the proletarius hacks) felt it might be wizinger if the one who might have dropped the soap didn’t cast a vote at the next habemus papa meeting of the clan. De facto, the cardinal’s resignation text was already done nunc pro tunc, signed before taking effect, like a will or a lay-by shopping plan. A priori the prelate’s delictum is allegation not quod erat demonstrandum and the old boy’s had more than quantum meruit from the media drum. The sequitur, however, is yet another RC scandalarum for the faithful, no doubt... 48

(um, um, cross that last one out, not bona fides on the poet’s part). Nunc dimitis, let us now depart with that profound Descartes dictate which a sui generis Latin ham one fine carpe diem did translate: ‘I’m pink, therefore I’m Spam.’

49

Home Expeditions Pale aureoles summit reachable breasts scaled each dawn if merely by sight. Home expeditions, daily Everests in love’s thin air giddyness of height. Base camp was left so very long ago heavy was its dew, lush those grasses. Now gentle the slopes, soft dunes of snow steady the climb through guided passes. Reach high ridges, her north face, south magnet there cold, a thin one-man tent. She can thaw black ice, frost-bitten mouth cover the tracks of breathless descent.

50

‘‘the simple life of the lungs...’’ Pessoa put the phrase in the mouth of his ‘semi-heteronym’ Bernardo Soares, an invented clerk who was a ‘simple mutilation’ of Fernando’s own personality. Pessoa had many other offcuts: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos...little wonder he saw anonymous lungs as uncomplicated as the Tagus its liquid breath entering, leaving the wide Atlantic mouth poet taking tidal pulse from his lonely Lisbon window. Pessoa, a stroller who could read so much into the shoulders of someone walking ahead of him, under-observed the lungs, which from slapping nurse to slinking hearse play a role which may be unsung but is hardly a breeze: those alcoholic Friday nights when certain couples wheeze for gasmic duet, Pessoa’s landlady lighting up the morning’s tenth cigarette, mad marathoners, Michael Phelps...

51

Lungs never sleep carry on in the teeth of garlic in Himalayan thin or traffic thick to underwrite the life of the heart their ‘simple’ trick. If pulmonary purpose is mere bellows for the blasé red cell why the teaching fellows of meditation and yoga and unpontious Pilates classes to show grown-ups how to keep one up on apnea hell? A ‘semi-heteronym’ for breath in these polluted post-Pessoa times might be that other spongy word with which it invariably rhymes. Note: Heteronyms are words that can change meaning with pronunciation, e.g. minute, refuse...enough to make students of English go mad. Fernando Pessoa gave heteronym a literary twist to refer to the writers he invented; not pseudonyms but pretend real authors.

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French village, late 1941 i.m. Irene Nemirovsky, Auschwitz, 1942

Blood has flowed thick and fast but not in these quiet rues redoling this last autumn’s air tension, tics, routines confused but few outward signs of despair. A hundred boots on cobbled streets uniforms by Herr Hugo Boss enter a hundred conquerers more helmets, badges, leather’s gloss oh, the handsomeness of war! Her pantry buried, wine in the sty village woman pins hope on Pétain defeated husband, caged or dead her unloaded weapon disdain (or reconquer on the field of bed). Billeted young officer, blond, polite plays piano, knows this flower, that bird listens to Mahler, reads in the sun says war is man at his most absurd – clicks heels, makes the trains run.

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Judiada The only thing more horrible than fascism is moderate fascism. – Croatian poet Marko Pogačar

Maria’s a teacher, intelligent, sings contralto in the local choir has a temper she’s known to vent, just the stereotype Spanish fire. When Maria is enfadada, furious at an act by someone her expletive is ‘Vaya judiada!’ – something a Jew would’ve done. I’ll wager Maria knows no Jew, our town is embedded RC. Many left Spain in 1492, centuries before Zyklon B. She who takes wafer and wine, where does her slur come from? So clear history’s red line: judiada, judiada…pogrom.

54

Notice The Notice, dated February 23, 1959, is printed on cloth: Simultaneous Destruction of Rabbits by Poisoning with Sodium Fluoroacetate shall be undertaken by every owner or occupier of land. Despite which, the rabbit nation survived. It beat 1080, Mixo, the Vermin and Noxious Weeds Act, went forth and multiplied. Adrift among my uncle´s keepsakes, so much global destruction later, the innocence I cling to is that of these furry little fuckers. The cloth Notice lies folded in the warren of my drawer. I ferret it out now and again, a reminder that the meek shall inherit the earth.

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Words Leap without thinking to the ice-floe page black rats at that stage when the ship is sinking. Logic’s flotsam to claw any reason they can get each one a Crusoe yet seeking inhabited shore. See how they run together a brook in full babble point-scoring as in Scrabble as trustworthy as weather. As rats will stop to preen curl to sleep in sewer nest words are often at their best in the silences between.

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Who in His Write Mind..? for Les Murray on his turning 70, Oct. 1, 2008

Would risk putting pen to you? First, the de rigeur de-mate: We’ve met only once, Sydney, SBS, what you probably remember as Press The Meat, a panelbeat about your poetry. Fifty pertinent questions prepped, I got to stumble two. Decades hence I know you a little more via your outpour of verse and your sometimes terse editor’s postcards from Bunyah which are read with acute joy: ‘I’d like to publish...’ Or, boy, can you write...clearly: ‘Standard Views.’ Between bin and enthuse You’ll offer: ‘This was a nearly’. As you near three-score-and-ten, ever closer to ‘the Absolute’ – ‘it happens’, as you throw off in your epic epithalamion High River – I’d like to say (grateful for your expletive-deleter): Phuoc Tuy! to the poppytopplers, the Carlton tipplers and the rest who grin to portray a cantankerous conservative Catholic prickly pear of ozpo. 57

Thanks. Thanks Les. Had you not quit ‘outside employment’ nearly 40 years ago and worked from your wide within the heart of Australia, Australian hearts would be drier. Without this Murray’s flow our language would also be lazier and Poms could continue to come the raw scampi with our coltish cultural ways. You’ve been called ‘an outsider celebrating community’ and Peter Porter posits a certain disunity twixt your rage against litsnobs and what he sees as your writing ‘at a level of elite virtuosity.’ True, sometimes one needs a ladder to windowclean your high vocab (epithalamion sounded like a rash!, those perukes, revetments, velleities...) but in these logophobic days of sht mob txt msgs let’s celebrate your copious cupboard, dub you Lex! In recent years your enemy R.L.S. (not to be confused with the R.S.L!) has been less hostile, the fuhrers of Received Literary Sensibility taking you more for what you are, a man of non-standard views 58

not aiming to flatter what Yeats called beauty’s ignorant ear or anyone else’s but with a catcher’s hand and eye bringing the ‘utter re-casting surprises’ of poetry to the page, wordnetting the butterfly. One that recurs as your birthday nears is your (non-elite virtuoso) reflection on a puddle’s reflection of a girl skipping, which reads in part and perhaps part-reads you: She is dancing light and water out of the cold side of the hill and I’ve brought rhyme to meet her; rhyme has been ill. A man who has described his approach to students as that of ‘a diffident Clydesdale’, may you long continue Les, our Poet Lorikeet, to dance as lightly as you do now on your seventy-year-old feet.

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Ages In the beginning was wasn’t. Speaking personally the great vacuity. Einstein was alive but I was not relative to him or anyone my progenitors hadn’t yet met at a Ballarat dance. Then by chance came is. Margaret and Bob did the liqueous job, the I of is became vertical, well, crawling, bawling centre of my universe. Was there any other? Only science said so. Now it’s will be, running forever like The Mousetrap or Les Miserables, more a one-man tent the winds of change flap madly between collapse and laughter. Was, is and will be, the unholy trinity reliable as dust. Still, I thank the three that on a bright day I can clearly see the tip of my nose.

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Spanish Easter Christ, millennia later this man and his donkey entering the village, no such palmy welcome as they return from small fields, otherworlding cars and vans. One back humped, one slumped, two clumpy boots, four still-dainty hooves. Rope over man’s shoulder as he peels an orange. They stop in unison, donkey knows what’s coming. The old man half-turns, flathands the peel all of a piece. Gone in two whiskery lippings of the quietest communion. They continue up the cobbles, enter a small white house through the front door to unsaddle the day. I trot on to the shop, where a poster boasts the coming event: after Good Friday, Bad Saturday. Not a cross but a circle. Six manforsaken bulls.

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Wool Nights for Andrew Kennon

A loose sheep in a paddock – possibly half the brain, definitely twice the legs as the cursing, chasing farmer – can be brought back to the main flock via an iron hook on a long thin pole, similar to a shepherd’s crook but more closed. Slipped on a hind leg of a flighty wether, feisty ram, poncing lamb the escapee is nicely tripped, tackled for the count, crutching, castration, drench or shear. (lonely farmers have been known to hold a Merino ewe unspeakably dear!). I trimmed and cast fleeces at a Raywood shed in my youth, can with Andrew chew the fat about the drought, ‘Struth!’, talk microns, his farm’s ‘green pick’, sing Matilda and the Click Go song, but somewhere life went wrong: I have no fat lambs to count. This distant land grows slate; no Border Leicester might ruminate its unfermentable grass. Nevertheless, in the village one day Contador’s shop I was about to pass 62

when I entered and bought, despite the questioning look, a black iron hindleg hook. Heat, heavy hammer, an oath or two, the hook I opened to ninety degrees, fitted it to a fine pine pole two metres 35 long, one screw. The device now stands tall by the bedroom wall (occasionally raising a visitor’s eye) and serves, tiptoe, to reach the skylight set in the ceiling high, opening it to breathe summer night. On my desk-bent back I lie and shepherd those wayward stars in unfenced fields of lush sky, a tally only a fool tries to keep but it farms the way to wool-cheque sleep.

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Giveaways In the letting go it’s not the going that is so hard, not the unfailing work of double-edged blood easily shedding as water, lifting family fists of soil, but snake-and-blowfly hates or this perfect summer night – rosiny fingers in the cracks of memory’s rockface the idea that love ocean-floors of missing that look which might have meant? lips a breast caressing the aftertaste of song a small bird’s broken wing… and no annunciate angel descending on a shaft of decent light to say it’s okay, it’s alright, in God-shaken hands less commands than giveaways: Unclench those mouthing eyes Forehead to unwailing wall. To an ant apologise. Sit still on a wooden stool.

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Wanting’s red scars will pale. Victory is returning geese. World and word lightly fall – the ripcord is marked Release.

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Aubade Your enemies are resting now the full-moon’s lunacy has burst noise and light abated by odourless night. Your head is swamped: Tioner and Paracetamol which we would re-brand tenderness and parachute were they not free lunches from the Unidad de Dolor as it’s called here, which has me teasing you, Dolores! Tepid dawn, your alba, patient at the open-window I read your breathing, lay hand on hip or cup breast placate electric twitches, envious only of your gift for olfactory dreams. Awake, you sometimes baulk; death at least is not chronic. Leaving me like the lawyer defending guilt, stretching fact to fabricate reasonable doubt. Sleep on, sleep in, sleep here again tomorrow for if you choose the soft width of absence I will be sentenced, convicted of insufficiency. And pain, unlike love, is transferable.

.

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Whiteout Death’s the brand, the dishwashing wonder for encrusted reputations men who the minute they’re laid in a box are elevated several stations. The widow who bit a lifetime’s tongue his arrogance, his armpits, his fears starts in at once on marital housework mourners helping with crocodile tears. Tight-fisted, short-tempered, belittler humping her mute, averted eyes wild Now: ‘Hardly complained at all at the end, soup and the morphine, cried like a child.’ Sixty years she sweeps under history’s rug revision unchallenged – Respect For The Dead. The hospital burned his stained blue pyjamas. She might have a decade. Wide double bed.

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D of D Of the eagle, mere jealousy. Sure, if one suddenly sings thrush sit in awe, but see him thermal lazy bustard!, easy rider doing what comes naturally is he any more admirable than skunk or spider? Value more the grit say when man first saw fit to wobble from four to hind deeds of the Hillary-Tensing kind in ’53, their secret so tough to keep. Or Armstrong in ’69, never mind his scripted Giant Leap. Gandhi, Luther King, Pankhurst... all those who knew first the uphill, the deadening ring of ‘never-in-a-million’, ‘no-way’. At a level more everyday my paraplegic friend the way he can defend himself in his kitchen get from wheelchair to bed his nightly Everest. Consider the sublime in the unsung sport of diving: brief climb, headlong fall the best make no splash at all. 68

A life metaphor hard to swallow but follow the Olympics and you see what separates perfect 10 from 3: the pikes, the tucks double back twists no eagle lucks Degree of Difficulty.

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Sail Firm wind flirts from cupping like a breast spilled in laughter and the man tilling the long blue field small as a comma from here slumps and loses way. He adjusts old geometry strain is remasted pulleyed back into hungry curve white plectrum again plucks air the yacht picks up its tune. Wet skin flenses from horizon as keel and sail cut their course both gashes healing instantly the tillerman steering to vanishing point his head crammed with air.

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Border Country Winter washes white these borderline days. Here, Spain and Portugal end or begin and within, a frontier notion a crossing back if not re-start, the heart’s foot wary. The hooted nights aren’t scary though this old house so remote death would require days to be reported, quoted (El extranjero, un poco raro). Kindly overcoated by frost? Gone grey the fire. With no sad wish to expire, a tenet of the path I weave is to toy with, envision the myriad ways to leave. Dotted line, small print of loss anticipation de-barbing the border all must cross from inhale to ex. Fancy a finale in sex! her skin melted to mine... No, decline such ego ergo I am lighter to be laid out laid up here at overgrown Monteviejo smoke yawning from chimney 71

fast-bowling creek the only haste cool scent from cone-heavy pine this sickle of mine singing to bracken. And when I slacken straighten, wrist light halo of sweat thrills the running-on-empty distant footfalls faintly yet – from hobbyhorse stampede? – Alive, finches fast in the holm oaks eagles slow in the stretched above. Call this silence love, all the heart attack I need.

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Before Science Stepped In Before science stepped in with its fancy footwork A raw youth, I’d scan nights for a shooting star Crooning like Como to catch one and pocket it Could it really do the magic? Unhook a girl’s bra? Ha! They’re not stars, mere fragments of comet Arcs of burnout in the black canopies of June Older now, sadder, I leave science to the boffins Rave on about breasts to an understanding moon.

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Middleweights It’s the Luther in Martin King, without it, the dream thing seems a mere suggestion. Auden’s H., Eliot’s S. Minus the Baines, Lyndon Johnson’s far less All-the-Way, or Hey Hey. Would you buy a design from a Frank Wright? Lloyd no! Bob Stevenson’s hardly treasurable. Emmy Harris? One-J. Cale? Would Mr. F. Fitzgerald make a sale of any ritzy ring? Take the same Fitz from J.F.K? …an airport down Jakarta way. Bill Yeats without a Butler barely rates one row of beans. Arthur Doyle? You can see him toil as a plumber. Plain Jean Sartre couldn’t pull apart even this little argument. Vincent Gogh, Daniel Lewis, W. Fields, A. Milne, R. Laing... subconsciously clang. Just G. Chesterton loses much of his bite. On the other hand, there is a certain delight in taking away the middle K from that bunch of racist freaks: Who’d put on a hood, burn a cross to join the Ku Klan? 74

Still Mauve A fine mauve moth wet-winged in the pool So lightly lifted out on a pole Plasterered there in the hot sun to dry Had little better to do than die. Or so it seemed from the midday shade With lunchtime ants all out in platoon But moth’s was the day, wings won the prayer On shroud-like gauze she rose into air.

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Summersong i.m. Damien, 17.3.1969-12.9.1989

Blackbirds tweak the slipping light dunes are rolled-gold bars the surf has done a good day’s work soon the first pale stars. A ship holds down the horizon gulls condescend toward sleep beach is miming desert the new moon’s task is steep. One last look, just one last look as The Man said on the cross at these so-solid strokes of paint on the wide white canvas of loss.

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Music on March 17 What would have been your 43rd birthday I listen to how nimble we all must be to keep foothold on Earth. Ludwig’s piano concierto No. 4, where Good, at its birth, is willing, so allegro moderato. An intermediary voice tells us more, the set battle will be touch and go. Violins stretch the measuring string, the oboe lays on yearning for you, forever-young man, your mother pinned beneath the cave-in of her richest lode. Enter the drums and brass of Death notes outlifting their own weight the way we ants sometimes can. Now Brendel’s long fingers again bless Beethoven’s Yes! days, acceptance such an expensive gift. If you were here you might argue even he struggled with ending, returning like the waves you rode, crescendos to yet another fall. Tonight this wine we’d have shared has me a fragile drunk dumbly thinking if you had heard more of a deaf man’s music you might have ‘got it’, we might have ‘kept’ you. 77

Flight Weight overtakes speed as cabin crew in thick make-up tong hot towels towards untanning faces. We are 33 thousand feet above perhaps the caste system Inter v Juventus, the Kurds Somalia’s hungry white teeth a school of sardines? in our given corridor among the aluminium birds when the engines stop. Woody Allen’s on screens or, as appropriate, Arnold S. Dutchman’s on his fourth whisky full-nappy kid’s catwalking the aisle her parents in denial outside the matchbox loos queues are extended by Mile High Clubbers poking fun at comfort. A 777-300 briefly glides before push comes to dive autopilot washes its hands and the one just woken by the co has no joy with flashing lights whup-whup alarms, amok altimeter. All systems down, as is the nose.

78

At 45 degrees the screaming starts. We’ve 90 seconds or so to re-wind then fast-forward through loves, losses, wrongs, pendings. But the review is not the book: my vision is just spilling orange juice recall is merely its medicinal taste the image, which should be God, or you is that of the eager gymnasts coupling in the ‘Occupied’ wondering if they will get there before we do.

79

Ordinary Material Each man has his own batch of poems. – Saul Bellow in Herzog

Mr Rashid Sunyaev is 70 and was born in Tashkent. The photo at the conference where he went to talk the scientists’ Greek of galaxies shows a smiling gent who dwells in realms we terrestrial poets cannot scan. Black holes, impenetrable, bottomless, actually shine like stars, explains the director of the Planck Institute of Astrophysics, which is why his ilk love to gaze: gas spirals at a hole’s greedy rim emit visible X-rays. The Uzbek claims these holes ‘each second devour material equal to three times the Earth’s mass.’ Hell!, I say, but counter that the being upon whom I dwell is more comestible by far, she’s Michelin three-star. Mr Sunyaev insists. The physics side of the universe ‘is so beautiful’, with its vast volumes of ‘dark energy’, untold curves of ‘dark matter’, ‘ordinary material’ making up a mere 4.9% of everything, poets included. My magnetic field, I reply, is of a body neither dark nor ordinary, but, yes, celestial. One seen without Hubble, sometimes even getting out of the shower. She’s bright, is neither bottomless nor impenetrable. The Banged cosmos is getting on for 14,000 million years old, the nice scientist can safely say. In it I sit for my nano-nanosecond, with one slight advantage: I can compare my universe to a summer’s day. 80

Z to A i.m. Alan Watts

I am an occupier of space within this thin skin I displace clear air that were here were I not. As a laden ship breasts the sea raising it imperceptibly this breath and that death ripple out. Given no separate I/you/we but what was, is now, might be: tilt up the full cup then re-fill.

81

Tomato Blues with apologies to A.B. Paterson

Summer’s saved seeds are laid in the diminishing sun upon headlines, stocks, sport – news guaranteed to desiccate. Into an envelope they rattle 3 ticks for taste, same for smell to sleep through Northern autumn kept from winter’s frosts or the slower death of compost. But no! To my hemispheres a modern madness flies on spec, I address the envelope: The Postmaster/mistress Nar Nar Goon Victoria 3812 adding next to the ticks ‘To whom it may concern to plant’ Season-skipper, deracinator I go to my village P.O. through mist silently apologising for the long shot the canvas sack, cargo hold, jet lag, such shock to arcadian rhythm. In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of the new settlers taking root while I wilt in Europe, 82

I see them flowering, blushing coming up redder than roses in the noon of Nar Nar Goon. And an answer comes directed in a writing unexpected and I read the laboured longhand of the postmistress at Nar ’twas (Mrs) Nancy Smith who wrote it and verbatim I will quote it: ‘The toms you sent are bonzer though we don’t know who you are.’

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You Must Be When the heart hits high tide flowing up the pocked shore of skin and within lungs squid their million red miles... When death’s a light year leap year, and failure one small wave spent on rounding pebbles... When mouths delta smiles gulls appear to wink their cruel pink eyes and crabs to walk straight... Don’t wait for brain to kick shin tear up all your tickets let laughter have its hair trigger few states are smaller, or bigger… You must be free... as a bird is of air.

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Hard Rain tongue-lashes the bedroom window, water talking its way in through the unsnug frame, pooling on the tile floor. I ought to get up, I say, do some caulking with the red towel that dried the dog before… In this flail of winter, this slit-finding rain, I miss her zealot´s eyes, so sure, so let´s-run-with-it, her single demand to have on her trembling neck in thunder my explanatory hand. While sunshine tends to gloss it, rain inundates missing. Were Hilda here she´d stare at me in bed, cock those soft grey ears, do her all to convey to a limited head that rain is merely bigger tears.

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Ui the Unreader The man sitting so still on that mat is not all there. One day thus he found an airy space had opened somewhere between the top of his brain and his hairline and into this no-ness biology could never map he unreads the pages of books. Words and their ingredient letters wobble, lose the safety of their lines then whole strings of sentences peel off, dismissed soldiers, into the edgeless cavity as through a re-opened fontanelle. Whole sheepfolds of words follow, never to be read of again. Ui Thant spends about an hour each day as an unwriter, letters at most shooting stars in the night atop his head. When a page is as empty as death, another follows. There’s no effort, no discerning, the bleed to white painless as the removal of organs under cover of general anaesthetic. So far he has never had the urge to save a departing syllable or make a mark on a page. He wonders – his Burmese giggle! – if the sensation of unreading might be better than sex? When he gets this far – some days are deeper than others – Ui is conscious only of the Braille of his breath passing the tip of his nose entering, leaving, entering, leaving. At this depth he is alive but empty. Not like being asleep because dreams are theatre and the brain must clap or hiss REM performance. You might see his own eyes open or half closed; they perceive only space; outer, inner. When he stops unreading the world and synapses re-flame, first slowly like candles then the full military searchlights, the cerebral parenthesis closes and Ui’s head returns to the caligraphy of another day. During which, you’ll have noticed, his lean brown body rarely stops laughing. 86

Susanna Who Plays Clarinet in the Band Two operatic breasts debilitating blue eyes two perfectly packed sit-upons above double-trouble thighs. Pair of prize ankles, equal of calves four lips, oh what a choice! But such is lust, all turns to dust: Susanna has only one voice!

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Convent Mermaid She arrives like a doe to water, the twitch in her neck so strong it jerks down along her left breast. Up close her eyes would be wide in unrest, nostrils agape for a voyeur other than him. She who nuns made shower in a camisón eases off fright, white bra, black pants, stance bent by boulders of upbringing, and moves for cover of green tiles, algae, safe depths of summer water, wasps by the first step a spur against demur. She does so for Mr Lush, seated wisely afar on the needles of a giant Pinus Pinea reading C.H. Sisson’s poems about deserts ‘heaped on all sides like mountainous seas’ or pretending he is, their unspoken accord her costly nakedness for his feigned nonch. Lunch ready inside, day florid with heat, from his seat he calls, faking distance, that he envies her ability to float on her back, crucifix made flesh, rare stillness in her. Flattered, she of the sunken esteem does so, cream of breasts, white toes all that shows above the dappled tension... No, also small birth belly surfacing, submerging, surfacing; the breaking of waters.

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Godknows he’d peel, plunge red into green but the scene is too delicate, he must defer to the bulge-eyed dragonfly. Not to be completely denied, he shouts: ‘A photo? From here?’ Guesstimating distance to darkness of pine, she treads the wrapping water, shrugs. Once more she is supine. He clicks before shyness can its shell resume, before Convent Mermaid has time to remember – our camera has zoom.

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Cuba Libre To Cuba’s ‘revolutionary’ rum

add the ‘freedom’ of Coke lemon, ice...an alcoholic joke. An unimaginable drink: Castro mixing with Bloomberg. After five you start to think you just saw Marx cruising the Malecon in a ’50s Caddy.

Havana’s Women in White gladioli aloft like blind torches marching, cojones alright. Curvaceous in that Cuban way that celebrates the oral, the aural their sons and lovers jailed, the new sugar crop, cruel trope, to trade with diplomats and Pope. Miami, where many fizz in exile

Rabbit Angstroms run and Vice gets nice reviews. The false hopes of Sierra Maestra raised by the rusted Leninist here drown in one word: More. This is the Florida of democracy the one that Bushed out Gore.

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Six Cuba Libres down the hatch...

pink elephants, men in orange suits cuffed and caged and Coranic chanting bad will for the infidel who marches in camo and counts and recounts, searches head to toe. Revolution meet Free World... welcome to Guantanamo!

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Ms Groper The beautiful big-lipped Blue Groper can change sex and turn into a male much more boyster than the grey oyster far cleverer than the shark or whale. It sounds the stuff of psychiatry but it’s common to the family Wrasse the switch is a feminist device a Groper lad can’t change to a lass. If Ms G. thinks the grass is greener or there’s a lack of spunks in her school she needs no scalpel or testoster ‘My body,’ she bubbles, ‘is my tool’. She knows she’s Martha and Arthur (no mermaid boasts power so mighty) the poor leopard is pale beside her she’s both Hermes and Aphrodite.

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The Magnificent 147 The one who claims I hog the remote mutters that she can’t stand the Welsh commentator’s voice calls the contest, and I quote: ‘Clicking bollicks’. She knows nix! Where else is there such choice summary of strengths and failings tricks of timing and measurement pace under pressure, the pure pleasure of geometry relieved of the flat page than upon this green stage smaller than any field? Soccer, even by Messi, can’t yield such tension. Not Rafa versus Nole neither the holy grail of cricket with its dotty Lord’s Te Deum. Baseball’s first syllable says it all and basket makes a similar case. Perhaps only chess can come close, the imperative of foresight the one-on-one brain drain but chess must remain black and white and here colour counts, and counts. Arm, eye and nerve unite to sit the opponent, bow-tie tight sipping cold water, poker-faced before relentless TV cameras holding inside as best he might the mantra: ‘Gimme a break!’ 93

What I always take from watching Robertson, Selby, the elegant Marco Fu… is that in Shanghai, Melbourne, York… looking down the barrel of a cue and never allowing themselves to talk back to the white-gloved referee these sons of Euclid prove true the optimist’s creed: When one seems totally snookered desperately in need... there’s always an angle. Note: Snooker’s maximum break is like a sub-10-second 100m, very rare. Mark Selby notched a 147 at the UK championship on December 7, 2013.

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Proof Due relief by northern Spring, Mafeking from Winter’s siege, is trumpeting to this infidel: all things end…some end well. Arrows of sun bounce crazily as lazily we cupboard the quilt and sparrows headline from the roof: Mankind Acquitted, Newfound Proof!

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Btween the Lines ‘Please note: Submissions do that not follow the guidelines...’

Elsewhere, of course, you’d say typo enthusiastic but overtired editors. No! In this galactic-scope genre ‘mistakes’ are not what they seem to be. do that not... a Shakespearian ring a sense of almost Biblical threat. The site’s guidelines surface read is as if penned by friendly beings, yet Surface! A treacherous word indeed. Clearly they subliminally say frustrated eds really want to dance pastoral, Manley-Hop’s godly gay or Keatsy stuff about cracked urns. Sci fi, magic-real, horror? No way! do that not follow... Btween the lines one can clearly see a suppressed almost Freudian ‘fantasy’. Given half an alien chance they’d change the title of this book to Outerspace Romance. Note: this nitpicking poem appears in the anthology The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (IP), eds P.S. Cottier and Tim Jones.

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Aftermath Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. – from Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”

Here in the deep dark, the dry dark, rain and memory blunt their fingers. Once a month we get the trim, grass short-back-and-sides, stone to plaque; it looks bad for us to be overgrown. We can’t hear the mower blades, of course, nor the rattle of the knives of forgetting but Thought has subterranean afterlife; while hardly uranium’s, it glows dimly, unenriched, at six feet. Neither limbo, bardo nor the anticipatory purge word but a disembodied recapitulation, chapter headings to a ghostly novel we might title Mind The Gap. (child entrants are invited to join dots to produce a more innocent picture). There are plusses to report: the boon of full unemployment, no neighbour’s midday Iron Maiden and Love, permitting a final flippance, we are above. No hunger, war, envy, ‘reality’ TV, track suits, skinheads, greasy chips… Forgive a regression to the vertical pronoun 97

but I’ve yet to sense the spirit of ‘Queer! Nigger!, Jew!, Arsehole!, Dumb!’ We seem to get along getting along. The down side, as it were, is no future tense to our grammar, the span until we are coal too far off (patience China, patience!). And there is, admit it, residual missing: night sky, birds, a branch wept to breeze, a voice, certain look, her skin… A poet, now with us – and who knows the subject better than a 20th-century Pole? – wrote: Before the invasion of the living the dead descend deeper.* Which, after all, is fine. Faint recall says the breathing was often shallow. * From “Warsaw Cemetery” by Zbigniew Herbert.

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If I Go First A living will

Where falls the petal of a poppy leaching its once-bright red lay down to fade in fallow this freshly emptied head. Don’t let my ash grey any flower draw circles, as with dry sand, and as you pour the finest of me love will steady your hand. The poppy is no bleeding heart though it gets pinned to lapels survivor of plough and herbicide against straight rows it rebels. Unlike the worthy lilac, poppies lack perfume and wilt in a vase but splash their blood across a field with abandon, as night does stars. So, typically, I am asking a lot while leaving you here alone: Wait for late summer, poppy, petal no Church, no grave, no stone. I see you now in morning sun on our narrow rutted track laughing at those wild red faces blowing kisses, getting them back!

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Rod Usher

Winter hands on your bottom in bed, a lesson in global warming.

Rod Usher’s third collection, Convent Mermaid, is full of wit and sadness, love and loss. Many of the poems spring from his long experience as a journalist, novelist and from years of living and working in Europe.

Rod´s poems regularly appear in leading literary magazines such as Island, Meanjin and Quadrant, as well as in various anthologies, including Australian Love Poems and the UK´s Aesthetica Annual. His most recent novel is Poor Man´s Wealth (HarperCollins, 2011), a title which, not surprisingly, comes from a poem.

Interactive Press Author photo: Kico Sánchez Cover image: Rod Usher

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Cover design: David P Reiter

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Convent Mermaid

As Les Murray has written, Rod´s poetry inspires both tears and laughter. He’s equally at home in poetic conversation with Emily Dickinson, David Bowie and Federico Garcia Lorca, in revisiting Cro-Magnon Man, or portraying the to-and-fro of love and sex. His poems find their feet in Australia, Spain, England and the U.S., their rhyme typically embedded rather than obligatory, though he bows to the tight rules of haiku.