Par ĂŠcrit: poetry of the feminine
Helen Hagemann
There is a thing in me still dreams of trees, But let it go. Homesick for moderation, Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away. If any find solution, let him tell it. -- Mary Oliver
2
Contents Publications
Page
4
A Game of Singles
Page
6
Auto-man in Ray-Bans
8
Becoming Woman
11
Betty Parker
15
Broken Sandals
17
Camping Out
20
Country Gate Swings Back on a Country Girl
23
First Failed Boyfriend
24
First Sex
25
Girl with a Pearl Beach Ear
26
Harvest Festival Dress
27
Liberty
29
Park Love
31
Perfumed with Black Intentions
33
Photographs Always Remain the Same
34
Portrait of Edith
35
Saucy
36
School Days are Like Bad Hair Days
38
Sewing
40
The Doll’s House
42
The Only of Only Being Woman
44
The Shadow of You
46
The Skillion
49
Unconscious –v- Consciousness
51
Wherever They Hang
54
Acknowledgements
Final Page 3
Publications
Some of these poems have been previously published in chapbooks by the author. First Failed Boyfriend, First Sex and Girl with a Pearl Beach Ear were published in Evangelyne & other poems (APC, Melbourne 2009) Camping Out (also an audio poem) can be found at http://www.wildhoneypress.com/voices/Hagemann.htm The Skillion was published in Going Down Swinging #23 (2004) Becoming Woman, Betty Parker, Portrait of Edith, and Unconscious –vConsciousness, were published in Hecate (University of Queensland) Broken Sandals was published by The Drunken Boat online journal The Shadow of You was published in the Southern Review (1999)
4
5
A Game of Singles
Season me in sauce for a little while separate the fruit and add the sour cream quantities of the necessary − such beauty in our needs and I’m in the mood to straighten out pepper and salt a sexual boy find a bit of lost improvement a fondling stampede to make the sugar leak − explore before I buy. Damn! he’s in bed drunk! I hesitate to call again kill the memory separate the syrup of the night there’s room enough for strength it’s obvious he’s full of bone and rugby matches − exotic full-back prefers a beer and a smoke. Still, there’s always Gordon playing vintage with the cool hair piece sticks, at least impresses heaps of reliable tarts 6
after his nutty riches. Gordon, ‘top of the bubbly set’ guest observer at the tennis match paying $90 for a seat − hissing dentures non-stop to red heels in lips. I have to radiate contemplate my potential this lack of twenty two. I must resist this sudden urge of photocopy hunting images of my younger self. I’m not surprised I rang Gordon who suggested more than a game of sport!
7
Auto-man in Ray-Bans for Patrick Rafter
He has a ponytail pulled back strands hanging at the nape earlobes exposed hot-blade mouth a sweating aura of half nudity black tank-top follicles of almond oil sultry at the neck. His embattled belly button glistens deep within a torso to be auctioned off to airlines and motor firms. The sex appeal arena dims. When it comes it’s cerebral boyish Miami skin in Bermuda wood − explicit look for film. A baseline chin brings an electric sense of self. A sculptured Samsonite leans in Ray-Ban’s for the shoot peeling tennis socks − hot property athlete adept in games of getting off his kit.
8
His belly button sneaks a look in dark places of recovery; a body-hair of wunderkind wall dangerous, sultry pout − a grad slam for the ladies with advertising men in the company of Foxtel Prince or Reebok.
9
10
Becoming woman i I write myself on the page not as the universal I, but 'woman' padding the tide's morning surf. a camera lucida of memory catches Broken Bay in the earnest scurry of soldier crabs, the whoop of rod line and sinker, rows of paddleboats, dinghies upturned metres from a young girl/becoming woman. on the bow of a boat, she ripples film into surface water tilts the cabin's channel observance before diving in ii she is woman now, remembering the real that-has-been before the lens, first crack in the sepia edges of an Ettalong shore, pylon cling of a Wagstaff ferry its fluxive rub, seagulls shouldering flag-line their white calligraphy of tarp. silent beach empty as a lonely dune waits for the first child out of school waits for the ringed plunge of blood worms summer's shifting canoe. only the bay gives out a different call when the seaweed's parted and a fisherman casts an angry fist, buries the globe of his belly in water iii while ratcheting his dinghy there is no need for the ebb and flow of his outrage when there are machinations of a better catch, bay offering the martini of her sex, olive flesh, oblique lip, the aftermath 11
of radio silence, channel marker showing signs of deeper water to come, inlet anchoring ideas into a dark grid of trees, barnacled shore
iv there on that sea the boat's voice erupts churning silt into the engine's memory scuttling the gelatin-still surface, silver glide of whitebait. on the sandbar's thin back there is no one, no rock. only the sound of halyards clinking mainsail and jib, the scum of mutineers darkening the page, Phantom busy clapping heads off the coast of Martinique. she can't wait for the scrub slide, prickly foothills, his breath stinging her with last night's rum. she is Daisy lifting feathers from a comic book frame, spur-winging waves, the way waterfowl do, sending out an adrenalin of colour, though her aim is to run
v she has become nineteen contemplating the way it was, ghosts under the bed voyeurs skirting her legs, flasher at Central. Liverpool beanie on a train journey, coercing his fingers under newsprint, thinks he can tunnel the black hole of her knees. Phantom's Diana symbolically vanishes from the platform, as the day lingers in the hem of torchlight, in the descent of theatre stairs. the hushed expectancy: tunic in storms of sweetness, candy pulp in miserable alleys, pace of streets under raucous shoes, the Saturday gaze of grimy men. the one from the bay still crunching his boots and black singlet into the words of her poem, over and over, his loose tongue ripping into the motor of memory, the lost harbour of her youth
12
vi a faint scent of the bay returns like entrails and fish-heads in the stern of a boat. this time, his image is the one the older woman releases into water catching the sunlight before it sinks and drowns.
13
14
Betty Parker She was, my Father said, a Bible Basher. Her kind never gave up. I wished he hadn’t said that because I believed in God and miracles. Jesus had made a cripple walk, while my father was an undistinguished man. I was too little to tell him to hush his rowdy tongue in a provided house. I eavesdropped a lot, and wondered why Betty made my father wild. Perhaps, she taught him drinking was a curse. I came to this conclusion. Whether inside or out, he always hid his amber glass. I thought of Betty, whale-boned and pale, ambling up the street, taking her time to pigeon-toe her shoes on a narrow Richter bus. I heard the kids snorting, making a meal out of ‘slow’, her titanic thighs settling size already in the margins of their minds. Betty Parker went five days to a little factory northeast of town. Filing manicured hands through her seed pearls, she quoted Ecclesiastes to busy factory workers. But she never understood the empty seats on Sunday mornings, ignored their time at winning seasons at the footy, everyone under heaven at the picnic with sausages and buns. By Monday teatime she was at our kitchen window crying failure at the job, and getting back her dusted sponge. My Gran and Mum gripped with the fits, made me ask, Why? What did Betty do? Well, it wasn’t just the onions bringing tears to their eyes. It was the fine carb soda she must have shifted in the pantry’s dour light. I knew Miss Parker more than most. The kind of life she lived. Like any night bird, she had a lonesome sound, living with a father who couldn’t stretch suspenders let alone his toes. He kept a tight bible on her wedding plans, while she pushed his wheelchair to that little room with flies. In her kitchen, passing chocolate cake in my direction, she’d trail her silken voice and skirts across the room, give me a stunning vision of the future. Good, looked pretty dangerous on that wall print, if I remember, walking with the tigers and the lions, sunbeams 15
poking over distant mountains on a lonely northern road. If bad, I’d be in the hothouse with those corseted ladies, smoking, getting drunk, cavorting with the devil. I didn’t care for either. Her world was quieter than mine, choir practice, Sundays at the Assembly of God, baking, stoning fruit, figs brimming a metal bucket. I loved the tealeaves that floated in my cup, green Aeroplane Jelly we never had at home. I liked the way she sent me round the corner for Manning’s special devon, the meaty string he gave, and telling me when I opened up the parcel, to keep the change.
16
broken sandals you drive to work, hear the falling of war horror, horror at arm's length heart too irascible, too helpless to assuage this bludgeoning of New York streets all you can do is sharpen the instrument appease this senseless act in the life of a poem forgive, forgive these humble words, dear reader that think only of a crying field dresses/suits drenched in goodbye arms crossed under cotton stars you pen alpha and omega catches up moments in someone else's war an assignment on personality brought you the Colonel - Perth surgeon with a long term memory, his book To war without a gun he knew war, he said, like a doctor sewing back — a man's face transient medico dodging sniper attacks shifting camel-humps of sand arguing, at thin attention, behind wired huts for rice to sate men's bellies in this woman's body I've known anger, mostly fury children slamming wire doors brought melodrama skirts protected their crushed knees of bewilderment you offered anything in bed for happiness—
17
while yours arms lifted and imagined unzipping the sky a sparrow falls is a poem, is a hint of death but nature has no memory or fault half a bed is all you remember of thirty three years you could loose yourself to a woman an inn and a donkey follow the magi, some endearing star but your heart wouldn't be in it you'd only skirt the tracks in sandals bought from a second-hand store heaven never wanted it this bad laugh lines swollen in disguise polite sisters chewing veils of endurance like those burqa women too beautiful for words, hovering sand in bazaar and stall like mythical eagles in dark sunglasses could there be some universal misery between lonely girls who want to soar above the date palm? (future poets perhaps, ready for voice and shelf) it's all the same, east or west imperialism traps us orientalism traps others and the rest designed by cranky patriarchs in 'control' laboratories 'suppression/subjugation' of voice of skin of mind of personality of THE imagination some damaged at the neck
18
zippered at the roots slits for eyes we'll all pass on their seed down the line like blisters in radio silence
19
Camping Out for Emma Chisit
Strewth! It looks like a dog's breakfast. Eiche nardly bleevit. Tent's karked it and the billy won't boil. Stubbies and tinnies around the camp oven and the donk's gawking holes where the egg nisher was. Course, we gave it a burl, four by four, flat to the boards, chucked a u-ey at the creek, hit a roo, some thingamajig, whatchamacallit, black stump dooverlacky. Nardlyseeit. Jerry can sweatin' like a wet season of petrol, so charged, engine's cooked, clapped out. The big smoke's ten miles off, as the crow flies. And Strine's stronger than a scorcher, out the back o'bourke, somewhere near bulamakanka. Yobbo, gives me the ear bash, spits the dummy, downs the amber fluid. Says, don't come the raw prawn with me, this is a kick in the teeth! We can make tracks, I say, give someone a tingle. I was zony sane lar snite, it's not like the old days, eating cackle berries, having one with the flies, cuppa near the Murri. Aussie skies like a blue soft road, sweet silk moon spreading sheets of light, night barking like an owl, keen as mustard at the old hanky panky. But tomorrow'll be the same. He's weaker than a sunburned snowflake. Icon ardlywait! Old wobbly boot, up the creek, picking off pink
20
galahs with his beebee gun, crook as a chook, laughing in a technicolour green. Jeer that noise? Wodger reckna itiz? Corrugated road, road train hurtling down the tracks. Gotto go, get me swag, cooey!
For an Australian translation write to Helen at hagemann(underscore)helen(at)hotmail(dot)com
21
22
Country Gate Swings Back on a Country Girl
Imagine a radio playing. It’s the Voice of America and the moon is above a country cottage in green and cream weatherboard. Somewhere in the pulsing landscape, a child swings on the front gate that is strangled by the heat of December. Parents tap you on the shoulder, send you off to church. Funny way of bringing God into your life when you preferred the beach. The sky’s too bright to strap you in. You shed school bullies down the beach, by drowning their faces in a flap of coats. In the midst of family chores, the stars are crazy in a storm. You haven’t forgotten the huntsman spinning music on the gramophone. In the fork of a wooden gate, you holler at the boys dragging timber up the lane. A tree-house allows the blue of clouds, tinted leaves and only birdsong in. You still hear father stacking bottles near the shed, mother feeling every cotton drop from the Singer like egg shells breaking when he passed. There’s only one woman you hold most dear, Gran in floured hands, clipping hedgerows in the heat. Sundays she boiled stone fruit sinking everyone into silence. She left me scrapbooks filled with cake, tobacco days of rum and horse-drawn carts. She left me tins of buttons and precious things, the house and all the land we traversed on. 23
First Failed Boyfriend
Fearless, he drove his Austin to Patonga. Steep mountains, rock-slides, wash-aways and slush. He travelled through these treacherous hills on winter mornings, on his way to work. Ambitious, he worked in Woolworths. I fell in love with his movie-blue eyes above the beets and sprouts. He had a cute radio-voice when he announced the specials. I got to know him, his face cocked in terror when I asked him out. ‘Elliot Ness eyes,’ my mother said. We did the courting thing, car ride to Patonga every Sunday morning, hand-brake cuddle, his hands going down, where I thought he’d be exciting – Instead, he raised static on the radio’s lit face. After six months, his heartbeat flapped over a new girl in town. Lined up at the Regal pictures, dressed in white socks, sports shirt. She pranced and spun like Elizabeth Taylor. I tuned-in to Sunday night TV, The Untouchables – Robert Stack. I fell in love with his undress-me eyes over Coca-Cola and a bag of chips.
24
First Sex
After we got into bed, and after he told me ‘I’m glad you’re not wearing lipstick,’ he lay across me like the map of Australia. I’d heard about ‘the battle of the sexes’ but knew little about naked bodies rolling, sweating like Sumo wrestlers on a mat. You could liken my first sex to martial art. His sword was searching the scabbard of my mother-of-pearl. Glaring – pushing my legs apart – he fingered the little slit between my legs. He was hard against me, giving off little grunts and puffs of air. I remember lying flat like the map of Australia, thinking about all the male dogs in the street, how they did all the work.
25
Girl with a Pearl Beach Ear
This morning they’re bringing in netted carapace, cooking them over coals till scarlet. I’ve been told some are under size. So let’s not tell the holiday-makers something they already know. Especially when we’ve packed the esky, tote bag, umbrella, plucked lettuce leaves for rolls, loaded up the wagon, forcing the cozzie into new and exciting rainbow auras. By midday I have sunk my feet into Pearl Beach sand; faced an old memory of a diabolical earache swimming in the estuary, aged nine; rapture of a xylophone gift still tinkling in the eardrum of a hospital bed. It’s inevitable when you enter the Central Coast that blue veins meet goose bumps on the follicles of your skin. It’s aquamarine and windy without forgiveness. I choose to walk the rocks, so cleverly filled with pools, that you can dip your sandy feet, swirl them about for clean slip-ons. Somewhere a radio is playing Lana. It’s all coming back, the undisrupted past, my brother and I, young in castle sand, playing Moby with a paddle-pop raft, while the sea crawled from a rock. Other days we sat under pines, hot pies on our lap, baking full stomachs before lapping bodies in an over-arm slap. Today I meet the cold again, elements stripping you down to winter, rock-shelf pool forcing teeth to chant involuntary mantras, pierced ears under rubber cap, sighing with relief, when you let the water out.
26
Harvest Festival Dress
A church table assigned to spring. The greatest number of sunflowers, almonds, beans, you’ve ever seen; packed in sheaths of wheat, rice, barley stalks, ascending the altar. The display is larger this year, a gathering of strawberries, peas, artichokes, a month's work of citrus sweetened in jars. Impossible to align with comedians, but they are here; three vases of pink gladioli, some in white arranged in wisps of maidenhair. Harvest festival is a day of memory, a choir of children returning. One girl in apricot, delineated, arches her heels in black-patent. All eyes are on her. She is a flower in a field, hand painted in bellflower, sweet pea, tulips. Her dress demands a signal, a swirl – stimulating communion with her feet. Rarely is she chased, except today, flushed out of hiding from behind the church. The adrenalin is high in her overreach for glass, creaming soda dropped to her knees like prayer. A ruby moonbeam staining her skirt.
27
Sunlight won't bring it out. Mother & Gran each having a turn. Her eyes burning in their own private fire. 'There's only one way,' the women report. 'Two pockets sewn on each side of the skirt in bellflower, sweet pea, tulips.’ Concealment or words to that effect before a terrifying end to a beautiful dress.
28
Liberty
I want to climb inside your love machine There we would make mystic love Let's ride the sky where the air is thin. I'll bring the chocolate, strawberries and cream Flowered pillow from the big brass bed I want to climb inside your love machine. I want to climb inside your love machine Open portal door to where it's warm Let's ride the sky where the air is thin. Now that spring is nature's limousine And birds and bees are the steering wheel I want to climb inside your love machine. We've spent the years in bitter mien Shed our tears in a village scene I want to climb inside your love machine Let's ride the sky where the air is thin.
29
30
Park Love like lovers do once we parked in wired valleys shook leaves from lemon gums hid in Cimmerian myth stirred the river oil while the motor cooled obsessed with love we warmed to faded sunsets opened our ripe bodies to the silky underworld while the radio hummed furtive we climbed over bulging Holden seats toyed with our bareness tangled love in knots while the wind wooed we claimed the back seat a hard travesty of lost space, feet and perspiration while we pressed at midnight flashing lights caught us laughing to cover our young bodies blowing smoke rings while we cooled
31
32
Perfumed with Black Intentions
the oil of a piano bar leather jackets of idleness voices in a poker card cigars that look too high as she smoothes her lipstick dress and tapered leg where nights are black stockings dressed in a body of intentions daring enough to wave goodbye to a white suspender a wrecking pink thigh sensuous girl in a hurry of g-string grinning like a roll of wire customers waiting for the nipple of night lace at the edge of the stage a bald man, losing his front row seat reaches for the holier grail like a memory of her scented life his mark of affection her last season
33
Photographs Always Remain the Same
All the little girls gather round, school girls with bad haircuts, mother poor in her school photograph. In teenage years, waistcoats hug her skirt, black waistcoats, white bobby socks, arm in arm with friends on the promenade. Only in a photograph does she look like Lauren Bacall. Only in a photograph does she smile with Humphrey Bogart. Humphrey Bogart is father, cool, blowing smoke rings as he walks. Why keep them walking I do not know. Around town, round in my head. You have to keep walking when "WAR ENDS". Tickertape, tickertape icing soldiers' heads, hats in the air. White trails on mother's three-piece suit. White confetti on father's tuxedo coat. White icing on a swirl of silk, mother pretty. She hugged her first, loved her first, kept him safe on her knees. Move down the fender please! Knees, knees I never had a rock like a rosy chap on weatherboard steps, only with Gran, it was unplanned. Father's stiff from all the drink. I imagine them in heaven, up there rocking on verandah chairs, avoiding one another. 34
Portrait of Edith
You can tell before she faced the camera, my grandmother had dressed all morning for the man behind the black hand-held box. Edith is tomorrow's vision, turning her face from kitchen stove to a camera that might connect a man's eye to the flash in hers. Her hair is straight, dark, homespun in a swirl at the neckline. She is sitting on an old fashioned high-backed chair, half smiling into the lens. Although her lips do not part, her features are complete. Deeper than sepia, her dark eyes dilate inside each frame of steel-rims. Her thin arms hold a notebook balanced on her lap. Perhaps she stopped knitting her thoughts and hid them in the body of the book, as if in this artificial moment her collected works are caught forever. Edith sits beside a covered table. The cloth weaves a certain linen, watermelon perhaps to match the window's decoration; rose voile, flounced and lace-edged like her blouse. On old parchment, her skirt and bodice are lighter than the room, ivory, cream, or bone with tight three-quarter sleeves. A bodice decoration sits snugly at her chest like a velvet doll. In the faded light, imagination turns to the viewer's puzzle. Is it a lock of hair, a black-ribboned brooch or false necktie? This afternoon she is seduced by jasmine that falls outdoors, random kisses in the raucous basket of a lake, in the somnolent stroke flowers make at her chin. Edith has a honeycomb smile, a woman waiting for a man who would never disappoint, never touch alcohol, leave her nothing, save the memories, good times and the short duration of himself.
35
Saucy
This man with the sauce bottle has great hands his shirt a neon sign but it suits his silver hair carved, brushed skin. I imagine undressing him in a room where he smiles etches information into our private sleep. Perhaps we're drinking coffee from each other's lips buying chips and fish enjoying layers of the day. Then I return to my first draft of Lake-side Friends. The rest of my poem I gift to him.
36
37
School Days are like Bad Hair Days
O boy, you thought, a chance to get away from the toughies for a while. O boy, away from the cardigan stretchers and kneecrackers at Ettalong Primary. You need this voice to describe how you marched around in front of a mirror, tongue flapping lists, stacking scary textbooks, a wooden pencil case into your Globite, then re-wrapping Saos that sludged tomato on the sides. You laughed crazily, belting leather into side loops, knotting a striped sky/navy school tie. You stood cringing, your prefect-look gone crooked, skirt drawn at the knees, looking down at something worse than the lino’s pattern of scars - your brother’s boots in the shape of Popeye’s bulge. What hadn’t dropped off in the scuffle of fights over the years was already opening onto the road. They weren’t too bad really, the cracked uppers took the black Nugget, but you knew just socks would find double-gees hard going. You couldn’t wait for dad to appear with a silver salver of country wages. About six weeks hence. On Woy Woy station, Bronwyn Hobbs with her mouth in the shape of a scream hugs you and Wendy Ballantine in a gale forced head wind. You know why the boys are hovering. Bronwyn has these huge raisings on her chest bumping out bodice and box-pleat. You follow them into the Ladies, while boys flush heads under outside taps. The girls flutter out their hair and hoist up shoes the colour of ravens. ‘Where’d you get them?’ (You shaped that question for hours). ‘Anthony Hordens,’ they smile, raising railway lips. That was scary: not the division of teeth, but the hole in your shoe discovering the consequence of tracked water.
38
The train noses from the Woy Woy tunnel. You follow a jealous path to the front of the platform. Boys, still high on holiday camping, quickly sink tickets into pockets. Kevin Cable flings himself on top steps, eye-balling the flower cones of Bronwyn’s perfumed breasts. The line ends at Dennis Lester who leaves diamonds of spit on your half-read Tom and Jerry. You glare back preferring three stupid expressions: Queenie in who’s got the ball, fatty Parsons with his bag-busting lips, Gloria’s secret stash of smokes. You know you’re inside a Hanna Barbera, bumping on tracks, segmenting table seats. Settling on the train with sunlight on the tracks, windows holding onto the last moment of high-tide, you crunch into frozen cordial. Crisscrossed and interwoven in carriage mayhem, the whole shebang in crinkled shirts and slung blazers, a future classroom of sorts, approaches poster walls, the next platform, Gosford ticket-gate in a company of briefcases and papers. And, O boy O boy, the final slog of hill, cardboard doing a double-shake inside your shoe, Mann Street discovering how boot leather winds through a discussion of mathematics, how gravity pulls down cotton socks, and the street paints a school gang like tomorrow’s laundry.
39
Sewing
In her hilltop house, my Aunt Bea pins a hem to my knees. Her machine clatters like the clock in the hall. I wait for a second fitting, pink taffeta over pink net, itching as it falls. The bowling ladies arrive, pass my statuesque physique; their puff-powder sending sneezes in the room. Coffee orders rattle in the kitchen, biscuit tins fill with shortbread, cup cakes, macaroons. There’s a hunger, and a thump in my head, as I stand with pins in my shoulders, pins at my knees, pins beside me waiting to let the blood from one of Simone De Beauvoir’s babies. Aunt Bea swivels me like a ballerina, shows off her shop creations. I skim across the verandah in crepe-de-chine sparkling salmon in the light. Beyond this dress rehearsal, my cousin’s pressing hands into the street’s gate, chatting to a group of boys, all clowning in her direction. I could go out there in this voile creation except Aunt Bea has another mouth of pins, ready to stick them in like a voodoo doll. I could go outside when the lavender ladies leave, lie down in the warm grass, run my cool hands through four-leaf clover. I could make a daisy chain of frangipani petals, pull blades of buffalo grass, throw daggers to the sky.
40
41
The Doll’s House
Today, because I’m sicker than sick, I’m having musk sticks for lunch with freckles and pink arrowroot biscuits saved over from some hall do. Were it not for Auntie’s dressmaking, she couldn’t travel overseas for ages. But, hey! They’re really rich. Uncle polishes his green no-dents FJ in the drive, chrome mists-up and disappears when you lift your finger off. They live in a shop-filled house in Sydney. Then there’s my very best cousin who gets everything Queen Anne, tulle dressing table with bat wings, silver brush and comb. It’s her birthday Saturday, pin the tail on the donkey, pass the parcel, serviette cake in a take-home lolley bag. My cousin is spoilt, but she’s not bothered. She prefers to hunt four-leaf clovers in the buffalo grass. Probably this time she’ll get that bike hidden in the shed. That’s why I’m playing tables and chairs quietly, while my cousin’s in school. I just want Pollyanna to stop telling me what to do, just when Mr. and Mrs. Jones want to lie down on their chaise lounge, and Baby Bunting’s done wees on the bathroom floor. Oh, these dining room chairs have to go upstairs. You naughty fridge you shouldn’t be there! Now she wants me to blow the stack from my nose, just when the gas burner is making tea. And now, oh, Auntie, Yuck! She pouring syrup down my throat. “This’ll make you better”. Liar, liar, pants on fire. If only I could swing off this verandah like Tarzan over buffalo. I want to get away from aunt’s blue vein elasticsuspender grip. I want to swirl my cousin’s six silver bangles, and prance seven pink plastic babies up these purple stairs. Look! There they go, swirling and giggling and gazing out of my pretend doll’s house while I close two cream double doors, because I’ll be back tomorrow. Right now I’m tired of sitting on squat knees. My legs have gone numb.
42
43
The only of only being woman
I want to write the language of my sex hear the crack of rope again a childish squeak of crosses into desk I want the oranges and apples of my chest to be those grown-up watermelons I want to feel the crack and split the burrowing erotic trip between two thighs I want the moment when a raspberry splits my teeth the naked juice cascading open lips I want the bulging sweet fecundity of birth again the unconditional taste of love that opened every pore of earth earth's sweet parlay of flowers happy birth that barefoot walk of motherhood. I want to feel again those suckling lips swimming sleepy in my milk that gentle calm of dummy rocking on my hip I want a new un-written law of 'woman' at the washing board where stooped she dyed the sheets with blue and hung them on the travelling hoist or dropped them water cold to copper hot
44
I want to talk about the nothingness of being backyard bound the claim that wife and house are one take out the flack, the jokes, the puns the only of only being woman
45
The Shadow of You
She has that look about her the one you envyvogue shapes, fine lips, curves of beauty, head cocked to one side sashaying just ahead of you between thin and schema. Her caramel thighs dance and shine and you can almost catch her light as it falls on your oversized stretched lycra bike knees chasing the teasing shadow. At the top of the hill a thin, parked figure waits for the larger you. At night, the light of shadow catches you leaning in cool cake-shelves. The only touch you feel is the cream on your fingers as you hold the layers of cherries wedged between chocolate and rum liqueur. Your mouth moistens to bite down into what you know is warm, whipped ecstasy. Your tongue salivates on thick white dusttilts a morsel of crushed almonds over effeminate lips. Thoughts drip like chocolate syrup. The plate is washed and stacked. Hot water stirs a mist between frame and moonlight.
46
A fluid fog chases the shadow of you out into the dark night. And the space between your left and right looks to a distant past through streets of thinness when you did lose weight, could lose had every reason to lose the first time you loved.
47
48
The Skillion
The boys look on as I squeal into the prickle grass. We have climbed Terrigal’s Skillion, digging knees into its slope. After you look over the country, its estuaries and shores, there is only one thing left to do and that is to roll screaming into open space, hear the whisk of sheer descent, like the undercarriage of a Sea-Eagle’s wing. Everything is crushed when you let go of this world, when you push your seven years out into the weather, where momentum is a hand pulling you on, when the mind’s shot with the wild smell of sea and fishing bay. Your neatly ironed cotton frock becomes a series of squares joined dot to dot, like a restless blanket you once slept in. Now it’s embroidered in a palace of green-leaf tea. Your undies have moved several spaces to the left as you tumble pockets to the right. Of course, the lace has lifted from its hem. Perhaps, you don’t care about scraped knees. You’re ready to hear waves curl beneath a sky’s blue sheet. Even a Tawny Frogmouth plops from a bed of leaves. A flower flicks petals in the wind. Maybe, you’re a paper-kite in front of your eyes, a dandelion in the wicker basket of spring. You hear shouts above, as your cardigan piles, as socks burr, as shoes seed. Slipping into valleys and bumps, you miraculously juggle all your possessions, pink bangles, hair ribbons and clips that clamp themselves somewhere else, not exactly on the ear, but the lobes feel the pinch of tangled hair. At the bottom you settle into a soft field, flick hair from your tongue, feel the billowing pleasure of clouds overhead.
49
Rising giddy like sleep, you sense speckles of flight, a Heron singing in the wind, the Whistling Kite’s eagle view. When the tilt of the Skillion stops, there is that lovely way you feel when you stand like Sir Edmund Hillary, shouting instructions to the rest of the white-faced group, halfway down its peak.
50
Unconscious -v- Consciousness
speech is shrinking individuals are quiet they know their place inside a bottle zonked against a wall of 21 year-olds entering heaven at 90 degrees powered by technology high speed, ecstasy, super highway, nerd brigade folding dollars at the ATM bank clerks desperate for a pee clinging to our processes advancing to the end of our lives we're pushed along by corporatism lack of time, free time, no time victims of disquiet the submissive condition disequilibrium at the marketplace of self-loathing
I speak from a woman's point of view tonight I languish in memory reason, imagination I'm worshipping words looking for legitimacy, intimacy with you, dear reader I'll show you my breasts as they rise and fall between each Adam's rib I'll spray your nightmare with my passion rough and tumble you with crude self-interest biologically implied and all the while, stagnating in new worlds of global Luddites, roof lines, tilt slab walls 51
I look back through passageways of crushed flowers love sonnets and angry men guide a tear over diminished rock and riverbed ask in ten years what I did for you in the field of this poem did I move you beyond the center of left and right did I talk to you, dear reader, like death a human solider severed at the head or did I give you a hint of passion a langue of female voice blonde hair blue eyes do you know outside this poem I look good in red
52
53
wherever they hang for Stephanie
she landscapes four dresses on the wall chooses black to colour art black, the darker side of pale black, the unlovely colour of roads, night hazards, flashing lights, dead-end signs. in a laneway a woman sleeps while the mood calls her runaway, wife. curbside ladies hang on lamp-posts, flee a hooting owl, some drive up lonely highways find the river closed. some make it to the station or midnight plane. others leave before the egg is born, snatched from brutal hands. some artists wall a movement others rally girls.
54
55
Copyright © 2011 Unless for the purpose of study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the written permission of the author. http://members.iinet.net.au/~helen.hagemann http://helenhagemann.blogspot.com Front cover and back cover design and remaining photographs are the author’s work.
56