Paul Gardner

Flung Words

Paul Gardner

The artist warrior robed in ancient ritual, eyes – soft with anguish, languid moons averted – the grief of learning in torn times – tears in the diaspora, the schism of ancestry writ on an empty page –the complexity of displaced roots desire recognition: a sense to belong in a single space, to end coming or going – the circle of kin restored or anguish in loss –knowing a declaration to belong is admission of unbelonging; the irony of connection in the othering of others. Delusion is captive misconception of self, opportunity is loss too –a break with embellishment, and desiring another explodes constraints – truth is trust and faith, as you look in the rearview mirror to see where you are going; a glance from now to what will be in the instant of connection –walking in the effervescence of rain and snaking light, dancing in percolation of thought rising like bubbles in champagne –a tenderness that dissolves precise perforations, punctuated fabric of light, the symmetry of emptiness, a delicate frailty of illusion – in the art of rest.

The essence of what we are is change; in a speck of time the fleeting surprise of existence dissolves –we are the mere fluttering of wings on borrowed Country, the fallacy of hubris – some slight inhalation – an embodied chance, a brief displacement – held momentarily and exhaled in a single breath of joyless repetition – the laws of the cosmos open to possibilities and conflict of intuitive pull – a prosaic argument

between the living and the dead –in oceans of time we move with myriad souls – an endless journey from you to me to you, the constellation of all that has been before dissolves in a single moment and evaporates. In a mark is the essence of everything – a single heart-beat of infinite souls; it is the paradox of being – the infinitesimal calligraphy of the universe.

Time taken in the revelation of silence – the solitude of synapses, a meditation before incarnation in the circumference of light, a journey to learn the locus of integrity and wisdom. She enters the foundry, nervous with possibilities; a space of flung crud forged in the philosophy of heat –songs of pyromania incite the love of fire and choke of smoke, the intensity of heat incites meaning – intuition is the compass of inspiration, anticipating the embodiment of chance to mark the world. It is accident and the weight of the ladle that decides the detail of random flow, the expression of splash and ripple contained by a friction; an invisible hand that draws a boundary in time, indivisible invisibility fossilised in perpetuity, the essence of everything encapsulated in a single drop. In the blankness of mind is the ghost of bronze; calligraphic casts – illusions of molten gold, forge departure – a finality at the weight of friction.

The boldness of darkness emboldens light, a communion of stars, aspiration before dawn, between nothingness and being, not as dichotomy but one within the other – a folding on itself: one with the other, a continuous loop from the macro to the micro and back again, conjoined in perpetual existence of intimate connections –from a millisecond to infinity – some slight oscillation between being and becoming; a symbiosis – each revealed by parity of presence. There is less that separates and divides; a constant journeying from material to what is beyond touch, like grasping the shadow of a feather – the beauty of coincidence in the mindfulness of movement that avoids catastrophe – the shadow play of chance

Lindy Lee, 2020, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist, photograph: Anna Kučera

poured with practiced hands – each mark, the embodiment of precise moments of parts encapsulated in the whole, unified disorder, chaos contained – a frenzy of direction, molten murmuration – explosions of space confined by fire and rain, the gyre held at the centre, an invisible fulcrum – the core of the essence of stasis and change in the craft of knowing – the moment freed from perception, we see the unique shape of being in the chaos of a brushstroke, the purpose of chance is the essence of meaning.

Marks incite marks, forge intersubjective coincidence between strangers; the silence of a mark raises its head in the breath of utterance and flies from paper to live with you – if in the story you see something, it already exists within you; a time to see the cosmos in a grain of sand.

Author’s note As I observed Lindy’s work and attended her talk, I wrote words and phrases on an A3 sketchpad. My ‘palette’ of words were transferred from pad to screen, modifying as I drafted. Lindy described her intuitive random selection of shapes as she created the bronze circle (Echoing the 10,000 Patterns, 2020). I adopted a similar technique when drafting the poem. Although loosely based on Echoing the 10,000 Patterns, the poem is infused with Lindy’s artistic processes, philosophy and biography. I have tried to capture themes of movement and stasis; the infinite nature of things circumscribed at a single point: a mark on paper, a speck of dust, grain of sand or droplet of water. Ultimately, the poem reflects Lindy’s view of the world rather than a single work.

Paul Gardner Paul Gardner teaches English in the School of Education at Curtin University. He is an International Ambassador for the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA,); a director of the Primary English Teachers Association of Australia (PETAA), and also vice-president of the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research (WAIER). He has taught English and Drama across numerous education settings from early years to tertiary. His publications include four books, journal articles and opinion pieces in Arena. He has been a guest poet at events in Perth and in the UK. Currently, he is working on an autoethnographic verse novel based on his working-class childhood.