brief 39

brief 39 December 2009

Editor: Michael Arnold: mishenica@gmail.com Post: brief, PO Box 102, Waimauku 0842, Rodney District.

Michael Arnold KM Ross Janet Charman William Direen Vaughan Rapatahana

Jack Ross Janis Freegard Jennifer Compton John Parkyn Marion Jones Scott Hamilton

Richard Taylor

Belinda Diepenheim Ted Jenner

Richard von Sturmer Sarah Jane Barnett Stephanie Christie Brett Cross David Lyndon Brown

Andrew Burke

Michael Estabrook Lisa Samuels Richard Taylor Ross Brighton

Jen Crawford

Hamish Dewe

Editor’s Note Thrash ‘look behind you’ Hyperbaton [ctd.]

Aotearoa blues, baby – Encounter – Rata villa, Ngawhatu – wharenui The Puppet Oresteia Speaking of the Balloonist Bungundah Does Things A Little Differently Night of the Elephants Apparition St. Joseph’s – The Suicider – Self-criticism – The Inland Sea Cold Moving Coldness – It Would Be a Mistake Not to Rise Lake Rotoiti Mandolin – motuihe midden Yes The Picnic – Greece – Contours Electroencephalographia Latona Sugartown 7 a.m. – Te Henga – Florilegium – Under the Museum – On the Jetty If the World is thought – Linfen Morning – From The Centre Out 5 Snapshots in the Rain Envoi – Love story – adorno – from Tender Girl Reviews EMO by Jack Ross Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot by Kate Durbin Built, project. by Emma Phillipps – Wood by Jeanne Bernhardt Free Fall by Rogelio Guedea

brief [ISSN 1175-9313] is published by the Writers Group.

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Cover: Green by Ellen Portch brief 39.indd 1

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Editor’s Note When A Brief Description of the Whole World first appeared in 1995, it was intended as a platform for work by New Zealand’s less well-known experimental writers, through which they could share new work with their peers. Contributions were by invitation only, and the writers were the magazine’s only readers and subscribers.

Since that time, brief has undergone something of a grand evolution, with semiregular changes of editor, open calls for contributions, improvements in publishing standards, and of course, the abbreviation of the magazine’s name. Throughout the years, however, its only means of survival has been through the support of the community it serves in terms of subscription fees and donations. That the magazine has survived at all demonstrates that the need for such a platform still exists, and that the Writers Group as a community continues to grow and produce new experimental work deserving of recognition. At the same time, the relatively small size of the community does mean that brief ’s capacity for growth has been limited under the realities of a tight budget.

This issue of brief is the first ever to receive external support in terms of Arts Council Funding from Creative New Zealand. Whilst this does mean that brief ’s position in the Kiwi Arts Cosmos has received official acknowledgement, in practical terms it also means that brief can afford to target a broader readership, serving the writers it publishes with a greater audience, and allowing for feedback from a larger number of New Zealand’s literary enthusiasts.

Whilst CNZ funding will not take away the need for support from our subscribers and donors to ensure the continuity of this platform, it does allow the editorship to make the magazine more widely available. We hope that this will encourage new experimental writers to make their voices heard and to contribute to the magazine, enriching the existing dialogue and allowing brief to continue to publish challenging and thought-provoking literary art.

M.A. - December 2009

Contributions for Issue 40 – May 2010 Issue #40 of brief will be guest-edited by Ted Jenner. Please forward all submissions by email to solopacustj@yahoo.co.nz or by mail to our PO Box address brief, PO Box 102, Waimauku 0842, Rodney District. Submissions should be received by April 15, 2010 to be considered for publication.

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Michael Arnold

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THRASH We were woken up in another country, in metal-land, the Metallicheski, to hear the chug of the engines grinding away and feel the threat of electricity in the gun-blue haze and see the rain of razor-sharp fucking deciduous filings falling gentle as little snowflakes out of the dog-sky, the dog-sky, and think, ‘well, this is it,’ only place we’ll ever be, only rack-up we’ll ever see, just look at that converter, this favoured theory of international economics, that positively Russian expanse of factory flooring beading at the edges with grime and building rust and the bollocked air aflay with dust of old processes, this is where we’ll live and have our loves and fuck and spend and evacuate and try to find a flat, no rest or haven for the mind no exponential curvature in the old dog days, a lock there and a clank of automated surfaces until the dogs come home on us or at least shit downwards with a perplexing vigorous myriad menagerique effect of pastel colours and interesting faecal reeks. But Joy (we called him that, actually he had a name as well which was some sort of Randall Ekaterina but who’d use that) was already up and maundering back and forwards looking for the least trace of a coffee-maker or even one of those old fifties industrial percolators that produce a blackened scurf of gritty river-sludge and a little brown water, but you can use them with Instant, and behaving as if nothing had happened at all, after all, your head gets tamed or outmanoeuvred or cheated at cards or just belaboured with something massy and barnacle-encrusted at the climactic moment of the film and what happens? here you are in a disused atomic breeder bundled up on the floor in heaps of sacking and the remnants of what used to pass for quilts stinking of body-fluids and the need to hock or vomit and clanking around among the submarine-porthole wheel-locks and major piping looking for the vestiges of breakfast while small white almost-weightless peelings of paint and zinc appear at blink at blink at blink for magical instants on their way to the floor. That was before he found the sign in red over the notices of workers’ procedure and quarantine periods for percentage exposures announcing that this right here was an ‘Aluminium Free Zone’. ‘Oh right, Aluminium Free Zone,’ he remarked fairly peaceably, while the other one massaged his head and felt the flattened curvature at nose-level and sat there silent in his robes for a second, but then Joy began to comment, ‘Aluminium fucking Aluminium’ and things like that, and Horse crept further out of his bedding to raise himself a little little higher towards the chemical overcast of the exposed sky, noting the two legs and fleshy feet K. M. Ross

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at the ends, exposing more than he might of his glamorous pinkish-brown physique as he did it, looking at everything as if he was seeing it for the first time, and what would you expect from a Horse that found himself here says the Urtrje of dreams; only then the absent and disconnected commentary became a storm, and that’s what we’re here to report, the thoughts of Joy who was just right then cocked cockaded and coffee-bent on their fucking remarkable, their proven effective, their mighty and ecologically inviolate Aluminium Free Zone in an antique accelerator pile.

Now by rights the next paragraph of Joy’s little rave should be set in a kind of crumpled paper shell with a broken metallic cross blinking through it, blink-blink, flashing on and flashing off, like a you know cross, that the guy was crucified on, and maybe a dim charcoal sketch of a head without any flesh on it behind that, anything for the visual effect, the correct presentation and media-flatulent braak to the eyes of man. At least that’s how it was when first I saw it in the dream, but so who oh well go on.

Oh alu alu alu, begins Joy. Oh alu alu ill allah. An alu alu alu-minium free. Well boys and girls, tickets and horses, isn’t it nice to know you’re protected, bless my irradiated pustules, we’re Aluminium Free, we’re Aluminium Free! Not a trace, not a zip, not a coffee pot here of that ol’ bugger-me-trenchant blight on the face of dear old humanity, nothing, so you can all sleep safe in your rotting sacks and pick your bundles of scabbed flesh up off the floor and look around for that blasted human remains bucket can never find the thing when you need it in a hurry all the while knowing that it won’t be made of anything resembling aluminium, whoop-de-fuckingdo, not a molecule of it in the alloys, not a stray toy truck wheel bobbling in on a baby’s fist, no tools, mouldings, frames, surgical equipment, meters or lever-pulls, oh no, not hai-eer, what us, oh nasty nasty nasty! Banned, cleaned, every little jigger of it burned away, aren’t we all grateful? And why? Well, fuck me if I know, I just got here, haven’t even eaten, haven’t had my fucking coffee, just like all of us, only just got here, so we can only guess can’t we? Well, it all began, me old hearties, Horse and Tiquit bloody oblivious there in your greasy bedding in this wonderful, wonderful meta-meta land, wake up, y’old bastards, it all began with the rabbit blight in South Australia, didn’t it, where all that beautiful bauxite lies flanneling in the sun waiting for the good brown cobbers to gouge it up and distribute it in containers throughout the known world. So anyway, someone starts noticing that the rabbits are dripping at the eyes around just that particular unfenced region of the flat bloody red raw material for industry, they start 4

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K. M. Ross

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examining them, and wouldn’t you know it but the old myx virus has been rendered ineffective and killed off entirely by mineral trace element action, alooo- loo- looooo go the ukuleles on the radio in the old station shacks and rabbits come staggering in blind across the floor, can’t be bad eh, diggly dog, fucking up and in the pot with ’em, don’t eat the head anyway, fuckin’ A. Start digging cities. Everywhere else, jibbo. Right, OK, then soon, ah, y’know, this half-deformed brown kid in Bolivia is found to have an immunity to the local infection Coccocoxia Extraviagummie that’s killing off all the male population at the time, brown round the eyes too, and the only difference is his daddy was out digging the bauxite in Oz around that time, ate a rabbit? is a rabbit? so then the batteries of scientists move in, funded by the benevolent organisations of the massive fucking colossal oh ye on high Cheeryble executive directors of the Federated Planet, I mean the international corporations, thinking there might be something in it for them, eh, and what do they discover but that if you keep one of these rabbits or Bolivian children in very very controlled conditions for a statisticallyextrapolated twenty million years or so it doesn’t or wouldn’t or won’t die at all, just go a bit scaly around the blind eyes, but does develop toxins in the course of its material exchange of gobbling and pooing that tend to break down all large molecules, which molecules of course being and is the matter the human earth is sort of made of, according to the latest theory, star-stuff, atomic necessity, what else mate? Or not, but that’s what they tell us. And so what’s more bloody obvious than to ban it everywhere it’s ever been found, though of course it’s impossible, look at asbestos, and so you get your toothpaste tube ‘NEW, WITH HYPOBECCACHLOROPHENIC ACID’ but ‘ALUMINIUM FREE’, all the roof salesmen go out of business, whole factories have to clean up and retool, plastics are extradeveloped to make up the shortfall, don’t work eh, but that’s all to the good, Du-this and Generalthat make quadrillions, good as a war economy, every unemployed geek is set to working the aluminium damp-courses out of bridges, uncountable deaths, just the fucking thing. Everything’s suddenly aluminium free or Allieogenic, allergy becomes alliergy, people’s movement storms the White House demanding the new live-forever mineral trace, religious sects start singing to it, Muezzins in Ethiopia change their song and get involved in a mutual jihad with neighbouring Saudi, oh what a circus, but we’re all right, world’s gonna pack up, but we’re all right, drive our electric cars allplastic-construction to work along the depleted highways and don’t break down, jibbo, never know what metals might have sunk in accidentally to this K. M. Ross

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roadway when it was constructed twenty years ago, Allieinsurance, Antiallie-funds, We’re all right, A we’re all right, Bugger, bugger everyone But we’re all right by which time Joy was screaming at the top of his lungs and thrashing the air with the whole length of his arms, seemed to be blathering on on automatic something like an accelerated radio station, wiping the contaminated freefall out of his eyes as he ploughed sightlessly on in everdiminishing loops, not one single thought anymore for coffee or my toes in their sack or Horse doing a few morning stretches or the dull bloody menacing underthrob of old mechanicals, speculating at twenty thousand miles an hour and going red in the face with the Strength Of His Conviction saying something or anything but what he was meaning to say, sorry Horse, sorry Tiquit, and all and all and all around round oh god yeah, what was that all around us. Some old fractured TV set looking blindly dustily down from a shelf, screen remnants goggling out at us like screwed-up eyes, like metal crosses fatigue-fractured, can’t tell me there’s no aluminium in that by the way. And water, falling water. Around round and all around there was nothing but kids and old specimens leaning their bones on the floor, white at the scuzzed hair, hair falling out in tufts, couldn’t hardly stand up, grey and naked, radiation-sick, watching water drip; there they were, lying around, something fragments phantoms of the last world war, lookathem, where’d all these people, sores all over them, with that something peculiar in their eyes – here’s where I can’t, y’know – but more than suffering, less than hope, a sort of sadness or something I don’t know how to put it something beyond both of those, stripped sadness, sadness and zilch. Joy beetling in among them and waving his arms around, never seeming for some unanalysed reason to plant his boots on one of their poor old crotches or kick ’em in the head while he went repeating and repeating ‘we’re all right, we’re all right,’ building his insubstantial castles against this, against that, against it all, you know, THE BULLSHIT, THE BULLSHIT. And oh yeah. What am I thinking? I’m thinking, We’ll still be prating our fucking philosophical appreciations when the world looks like that, boiled ants, like an anthill scalded with streams and rivulets, steaming runs and eddies, drips and splashes, feeding reasonless yows of water, all tinkling down, water, hot and teeming water, laboratory-heavy precipitation 6

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K. M. Ross

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from old pipes.

Through tubes, through pipes, in factorial ever-expansion, blownout water sodden and heavy with elementals, though washboard tubing and new clipped-polyethylene extension arms about a fifty million miles down up and around and down again from country into country.

So here we are, in the office of one Vicenze Tintinelle, where air’s a lotta cleaner, water’s fucking radiated to smithereens, looking at the bobbling of the boats in the Marina outside and the dubious passage of the sunlight a tiny bit too shiny past halyards and light-alloy mastheads which dominates whichever way you look at it the air and light and colours inside the dullass room, slick bloody wafer-enclosed Space, a Space of planned effectiveness, yeah, utterly immaculate side planes and a few built-up counters for utilitarianism (hey, human beings still have to live and shit here). Just at the moment we alight or splurge out wetly into the alien space, the Plastic, Plastico, that new impresario Cavallo’s leaning his square arse gently against the edge of a scanning camera, the great Tintin himself is pensively regarding a gaudy flag out the window, and everything’s lost, greyed colours, subfusk tones, designer shimmers, attitudes of body, in the unnatural glare of the world outside the inner. Cavallo makes a gesture. Expands, lets his chin drop, ponytail unconsciously shrugs free.

‘Well, Jesus, Vince. Any one of them, anything. A main player’s after all a player,’ or something along those laconic lines and the other one doesn’t move his head or even apparently his jaw when he answers, ‘Mm. Financial backing. Still a problem,’ well, you know how it is in the Plastico, words aren’t words, but something shinier, fishier, altogether realer, signifying some ultrabeautiful outbeyond extravagance of slippy thrills that you could just maybe get hold of if you had a bit more money. Horse, I mean Cavallo, Drops through the ocean to rivers to speckled dappling fall of droplets out along the side of a precipitating machine-body, humid here, water again; and back into the socialistically massive ruined castle-shell of that atomic pile. That’s how I dreamed it; take it how you like.

By that time someone’s gone for a walk and found some coffee, which is easy enough to say. In fact I got a little bit shy of wondering how Horse might be taking this, sensitive animals, can’t go taking anything for granted, K. M. Ross

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he looked bemused enough, just as if he didn’t realise that for all intents and purposes we might just as well not have existed in any form at all until the last six instants, and decided to abscond myself y’know down along the inner and seminally interesting (lawsy me!) bloody decaying corridor-systems some of which still had a bit of roofing left in huge drooping ferroconcrete plates overhead, and found some technicians’ living-quarters all set out, with cupboards and explosively violent smells that just about veep your head out to Mars and beyond even when you keep breathing through your nose and took a couple of paper bags of powders nipped with clothespegs at the top and tried not to sniff them or anything near them or anything else, I can tell coffee by eye eh, fuck yes, wandered out and found a bit of a hydraulic converter by the edge of a wall that I thought I could jigger up into a coffee machine at a pinch, main thing was it did boil water, and had some hilarious hurrah’s-nest of pipes and tubing sitting up on top of it like Hydra herself, probably hot as pie, used for sheesh knows what and never cleaned for the last few decades or centuries, but it couldn’t I reckoned bugger us any worse that we’d been or would be buggered already in the nature of things in that good old Metallischeski biological farm resort, so I brewed up. That’s it.

Details, leave ’em out shall we until that someone found himself back in the main converter room alongside Horse I mean what was he called here? and Joy and himself, Tick, coffee-brewer, universal pacifier and would-be saviour of mankind.

So Horse seems to be doing quite a lot of the talking which worried me a bit since it was bloody obvious he wasn’t secure or happy with all this, transplanted summarily into human shape, given a scrappy little nose to breathe with and hands to grasp a pair of dividers and legs that wouldn’t hardly walk at all let alone run in any acceptable sense of the word, not hide but skin, not even a back but some bit of upright christmas tree fragility behind him, no fetlocks or hooves or chestnuts at the knees or any of the other sorrel pertainencies or a bloody mane and even precious little hair and a pretty sorry affectation for a dick to boot. What was there to talk about? Fuck knows, devil knows, Russian politicians of two centuries or however long it was ago certainly would have known, but there’s us, lost inside the world, blowing flakes away from our noses, rumbling already in the sinuses and bellies to the thunder-hum of electric generators shuddering the air, alternate, alternate; trying to keep the little specks and zincfalls out of our coffee by waving it here and there desultorily. No, fuck desultorily; frantically, desperately, already-given-uply, and it still didn’t make a 8

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K. M. Ross

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shitshow of difference, but but but but but, so ‘Did all that really happen,’ says Horse, and I should let you know when I describe what he says that in those few beginning minutes and hours in the metal country he was full of nose-noises and brrmms and broooughs that seemed to issue from everywhere except his mouth and even there as well, though the essence of what he said was always devilishly simple, so we should just like cut the details and get down to the words in the manual, kept throwing his head up, seemed to think he had to do that to see, the manipulative faculty was none too overdeveloped, though there was plenty more coffee to brew and he never paid any attention to the burns on what I have to admit was a well-formed pair of legs draped in a bit of ragged bedding like a bathtowel and what’s more he Tiquit was quite enjoying messing with that defunct equipment to try and yield something approaching a human-consumable beverage by that time. What was he saying. ‘Did that that really happen?’, and when he got no answer in reply he just begins to precisify more narrowly like with a ‘that Bauxite thing, and the rabbits and children in Bolivia,’ or something of the sort. So Joy, Randall, he’s a bit dulled by now, staring into his coffee like he didn’t go ravening off his head for it in the first place, and shakes his head and says, ‘Nope, it just sort of came to me. But whatever fucking happened it can’t have been a million miles removed.’ And Horse, tranting, gesticulating, somehow keeping his mind securely off what might possibly have been really bothering him, says, ‘Why?’ and Joy just takes a hot gulp with his eyes closed tight. He mumbles a bit but doesn’t say anything, so I conclude it’s up to me to supply the answer, believing as I do that in the first all-important minutes of mankind’s congress in the pile again you don’t want to let a horse develop any sort of complex.

‘Because it’s bullshit, that’s all. That’s why, Horse, bullshit,’ and remain there unaware whether any of that got through or not, but the next thing he’s looking around again and asking us, ‘What’s my name?’ Now that’s a difficult one, easy as it may seem, because he’s horse but now as it is nothorse, and I seem to know Joy’s, my own I’ve never considered because there’s too much else perambulating and percolating in here to give it human space for, but as I speak to answer and ’m interrupted by the voice again of Joy who’s already contributed so much, I seem to be catching remnants or imaginings of some sort of history behind it all or as it might be pseudohistory that tends to give each one of us a plan and purpose. Hallelujah.

K. M. Ross

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‘look behind you’ in our church there was no Mass and Mum found communion tasteless so the first theatre they took us to was a Christmas Panto which took to us every tier stuffed with kids as if kids are all that matters hung off balconies risking death in falls to the orchestra pit you could not help but think of it on this occasion we all chose to postpone the indignity hanging on to our gold fringed velvet swagged boxes with their hollow chocolate moulded fleur de lis back home some contrary Methodist impulse has me hunger for the minimalism of tights and boy-chick boots to sing in with a switch to get the lyric dot hopping along that line my sister wrote starred and directed a play for the neighbourhood we fought over which of us would wear Mum’s wedding dress blue-i’ll-tell-you-about-it-when-you’re-older-lace and crushed plush whose grown out of this? we ask she won the show goes on

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Janet Charman

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Madame director has her heroine spring unbeknownst from a cardboard box the children in our terrace audience astounded save the smarty pants it was a triumph but Mum makes us give the collection money back idiot said their parents might resent it offered them instead raspberry cordial and shortbread then we shift to Taranaki where there are Tangata Whenua was this Waitara? we got free seats revealed to be for guests of honour who are we? in the centre of the dress circle Dad whispers ‘thank goodness we turned out’ a night of karanga waiata action song haka poi whirl flaming satin shifts lines of metrical piupiu shudder into the world of light drop dead gorgeous a head school prefect prances the aisle with a taiaha but doesn’t attack us we live in New Plymouth to settle our excitement on the voyage back they rehearse the dying-language mantra ’stifles Maoritanga

Janet Charman

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here we’re occupied by the opera house with its gods The Music Man’s seduction Annie Get Your Gun control him Brigadoon heaven in transit you can have it dry ice mystifies the real rounded up and set alight all the prop words marching out their mouths a little dog performs its obedience sits down stage a bicycle ridden into the wings off stage vanishes suffocated with feathers choral singing to doze in the programme warning Act Something something interminable reprise then in the emotional wrench of one speech we’re all wound up as the pool of light empties on a blonde drenched at a bar with white couture yet according to him their affair has not a thing to offer that rates with the suspended disbelief of the angelic choir warbling ‘The Heather on the Hill’

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Janet Charman

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above in the black i think Manhattan looks pretty cool way scarier than any tartan farm girl while i live that Brigadoon dude won’t be back so let me choose and though my father never ceased to marvel at the genius of the electrified cream separator ‘you don’t know what it was like’ shaking his head ‘hours to get to butterfat’ and when our class tour the Eltham dairy farm and cheese factory i too admire its sweated silver nevertheless he left the land other than Christmas never returned and apart from the farmhouse with its third storey demolished and the packing shed burnt to ashes all the rest was sold to pay back debt it’s because of city work that we can afford to pinion these astronomical theatre programmes with golf tees to our pegboards which cannot damage the bedroom walls in case we have to sell this place for Dad’s career and move along but how do turn cheek photos of soloists and mouse meek front of house lists unfold what it is to be alone in the dark with an audience? here radiates above our heads great brackets of manufactured illumination trickling even unto the uttermost basement wherein there is a boxing ring

Janet Charman

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its louring dustmoted with testosterone and that’s quite apart from the annual knock-out oestrogen Competitions run all above board by a married woman who isn’t paid anything indeed her husband agrees she must employ a cleaner to buy herself time to produce the festivities Mum disapproves of this expects to see to all our housework herself though she hates it so much that for the rest of her life she can’t finish a stay in accommodation without stripping the linen ‘to save the staff’ yet at the Radio Station work gets our father free tickets to everything even The Queen work somehow different for men although they both go out in the evening she accompanies him Prince Philiping to show willing attending the recital by the Russian soprano at the museum starlight symphonies in the rain sheet music gusting into the lake the violinists chasing it but tonight she is zippered into a red mineral dress she’s constructed ’tailors everything she has to make it look as if she is serious about music the Russian conductor kisses her hand the billeted ballet lay down their arms The Maestro not to know she only plays swing tunes and saved her housekeeping to buy the piano

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Janet Charman

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whatever species of alarm her look attracts masculine animal vegetable feminine she’ll not appear like this again and by the time they all come back to our place for the celebration when The New Radio Station opens no–one but another woman would guess she’s baked and stockpiled bread crust savoury cases in the tins for two weeks which now she’s crammed with smoked fish mushroom bacon and creamed corn spreads the golden tablecloth with white poppies on the one which every Christmas morning i still iron in the only regular ironing i’ve ever done because this cloth was eaten off just as my mother scoffed to herself when she put it on lay-by by the Director General it is the Director General’s table cloth we kids kneel on the stairs to watch as they crowd about with their drink all the combed heads below in frocks and suits and through the stair rail she hands us an éclair each then the nobs are off to dinner somewhere else leaving Dad and Mum to clean up the mess and do the dishes argue fierce as if an idea could pierce you in the guts

Janet Charman

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HYPERBATON (or The Ballad of rue Belliard [ctd]) From PART THE SECOND Containing TOUR OF THE MARKETS TOUR OF THE INVIRON FOUNTAINS And THE BEATING OF ROL Monnie is reading contraception, Yab Yum wondering if summit is up, Eg is at his fire-lessons, fidgeting with cuticle, Phoeb is short and long-changing the bread queue till the books balance… & in the evenings the couple take instruction from the wonky monk.

Rol’s brow wrinkles anew and out comes what’s left of him. A labrador in the rail valley takes up the antiphon of Rolle’s vomit-cry, alarming neighbouring chihuahuas. Taking shelving retrieved from a bankrupt bookshop, he feeds it to the drumfire gazing into the flames and remembering the tristful prophecy of Lysistratus: “The Coldian women shall roast their barley with oar-blades.” He then takes his pricket and moistens the soil whitefly, shaking thus,

. . .

.

. . . .

He is spitting a coherent fragment, warbling order out of illogical induction, when Eg arrives from Fire School. Rol will press him to hookie. A full tour of the city’s inner springs must complement knowledge of the firehoses. A sign! Whitefly upon the stagnating rainbow slick spell out the words TOUR INVIRONS! Phoeb late from Abdul with wholemeal reads the writing. She will claim her holidays — propitious, for it is Ramadam and business light.

Rooftops, liftwells, the streets of Rol’s bankruptcy, the Tuileries, Medicis and hectares of troubled trees. How the three will party-oh!

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William Direen

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TOUR OF THE MARKETS At the first market Rol identifies Oligopolyp 1, the vending of the little to the many.

Power falls to the sellers and all bartering is deafened. When a few control much, many believe they deserve little and so the way is clear for Oligopolyp 2, “the ruse”. You see, a few oranges overpriced. There are plenty of tomatoes for sale, and the price is low. But look, in the truck, is that not a crate of oranges concealed from view?

Eg and Phoeb take heed of Rol’s economic theories. Rol sanctions Porto on the forbidden lawn before the Church of Holy Hurt.

TOUR OF THE FOUNTAINS OF THE INVIRONS In a forgotten corner of Abbesses Rol lays oil on wine, takes a swig and foresees that few without papers will be granted amnesty. At the Fountain of the Zapped they pass among crowds whose faces seem prematurely aged. They rest on their flanks smoking pipes wondering how to rip off the authorities. One collapses.

“Should we call an ambulance?” Eg asks. Rol will not. ‘He has suffered enough.’ He has heard talk of the incinerators of St Ouen.

The dying one lifts bleedy eyes at them. His eyes meet Rols and Rol knows — he has been through the hoop, the scalding hoop. Zapped! Eg does not understand.

Rol knows too well. Correction! His brain is on file, Rol explains. And hearing the truth about himself, the zapped one’s eyes weep blood. That’s where it hits you hardest, in the lachrymal conduit. Ah the old Rol-haunts!

In the next courtyard steps pass. It is the courtyard of Having to be Getting On. They leave behind — faces botched with trying to be young. In the centre is the fountain sculpture of those who gave much, stonewhite bloodless; and the Fountain is that of the Never-Arrived. Empty memory water of the clandestine dead. With heavy tread and sorry hearts Phoebe and Ego follow Rol towards the Fountain of the Future.

But by the Chapel of the Anointing Trollop they hear a hush not of idleness but as of preoccupied industry, like a meadow in summer. Here are no bodies lounging in filth, no clip-clop from lane to landmark of purposeful planners. So why do our voyagers feel afraid? They hear a breathing, heavy like that of a dream animal. It William Direen

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is a man and his daughter jogging, the man looking at his watch, the girl puffing to keep up with him. Rol says that this is the Fountain of Child after Guardianship, the burden of the bourgeoisie. Lacking hours for existing, they run like an eye after time.

To the Fountain of Permission now, where much is written upon paper brigs.

When wind ruffs the waves, waves swamp the decks and paper sails and ink runs, readers, ineffective the temporal against eternal forces.

The Fountain of Phony Promise is undergoing renovation. A voice intones,

Wish and be dashed hope and be disheartened grow and fade rise and fall command and be enfeebled have faith and to hell with you.

Rol is a-shiver, but just then water flows. His voice is dry, he cannot warn them! Eg and Phoeb cup their hands and drink and — afterwards are thirsty. A stale breeze!

It is not the kind of used air that rises from the underground but that staleness of voices lacking words, the speechless of broken promises.

Before the Chapel of St Sulpice hundreds of students in woollen pullovers are drinking from the Succour Fountain. They raise chins, spit gum, join hands and sing Stars and Stripes. Each pullover has a number on it, and each student carries a peace pipe. Backpackers declothe and dive into a dangerous concoction of bleach, insecticide and Coca Cola. Not often have the homeless and vagabonds seen so much carcass in one screening. Rol sees gastric antelope flu in waiting any longer.

They abscond to the Montparnasse lift episode.

The lift has windows but a small memory. It can go one floor at a time or all the way to the top. They enter the lift with a resident who explains that the floors have been rearranged. The lift stops, confused. They hear a song rising — the weaver of the liftwell. The resident tells them they must choose between stairs and waiting for the weaver to finish her tune. The song is about a lift that is being held by a cord, a thin fraying cord, and about a height where man cannot breathe. Two words—or 359 Ezekielian days—later, the weaver surprises them by finishing.

Apertures open and the lift floods with light! See! There, below! The Cathedral of the Little Fisher Brothers and there! the Hutch of The Three One Legged Children 18

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and oh! the Chapel of the Apparition of the Griffon to the Acolyte. See the lovely shops, and the impending acquisitions in the fervent shoppers’ eyes. The statue of the Virgin of the Disappearing Pebbles diminishes as they rise, as does the People’s Palace of the Nude of the Extra Vertebrae, of Our Medieval Lady and the Young Blade with Gloves. And yet… passing strange — these apertures show no police-protected murderers, no diplomats above the law, no glassy-eyed derelicts clutching leftovers and pissing down their legs, no mothers slapping whining fidgets, no amputated fingers of thieves, no legless victims of land-mines ….

Much is there not. Eg and Phoeb have seen the Fountain of Not Looking Back among the unliveable hutches, but Rolle cautions them, —Regret is meaningless.

Carry the best of the past with you. Many are those who carry the worst.

The doors open and they are at the topmost point of the city. They take in the panorama. Rol says, “Students! All this is someone else’s”, takes fuel and slumps in a corner. The couple hold hands to the music of Rol’s sleep cadenzas.

A security guard has seen them on the telly and he is having none of it. They drop at lightning speed to their proper level, ground, praising the sonority and harmonics of Rol’s snoring. There was another who appreciated them and Professor Novotny was his name. They resolve to find, to refind, Novotny’s Studios of Pirithoüs.

But on the way to Novotny’s old atelier on rue de Renard they digress into Bourse where Rol identifies the columns of Staple Stocks, Star Lines, and Undecideds.

Each has its categories of Continuous Demand, Short Life Massive Demand, and Long-Life Slow Growth Demand, Perishable, Durable, Imaginable and Coffee. Some vendor boxes are marked Greed, some Aggrieved, some Unfounded Hope, some Landscape, Design, and others Development. Buyers have labels announcing their interest in stocks, dress and past-times including Arts, Internet and Intellectual Demeaning. Eg and Phoebe hear about all the bargaining techniques: depreciation, demoralising, mock agreement and counterattack, yes-but, neutralise, rotten praise and flatter-barter.

Politely, they remind him about Novotny, and Rol is away like an arrow to the hidden trapdoor behind Cafe de la Gare. They shift rubbish containers till Rol finds again the nose-ring of the entrance. He inserts an ancient key which he carries always on his person and a tumbler turns. Unopened for years the portal takes the strength of the three to free it. They draw breath and descend a spiral staircase known only to the last of the resistance fighters. They skirt the laboratories of IRCAM listening William Direen

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to a muffled music clearly in the tradition of figurative approximation, and this deceives their cochlea into thinking they have risen towards ground level, as to the light and photosynthesis. All is subverted. Now Eg and Phoeb believe the notes have been rising when they remained at the same pitch, varying in ways there are not words nor notation to describe. The deepest point. Silence pure. They enter a blacked-out vault where Rolle strikes a match. It is a cleaner’s store, no more, the one he used to sleep in next to the studio of Novotny. Here Rol learned to listen, which did not preclude sympathetic sleep — and his snoring caused history.

Out of the broom cupboard and into the very, the ancient, the once-was soundproofed electronic studio he darts. Here it was that Rol’s fluctuating frequencies at the rate of human inhalation inspired Novotny’s greatest composition and gave birth to the school of hearing that led to the labs of IRCAM. Novotny at first thought the sound was naturally occurring, a short-circuiting of faulty patch cords. He found the source sleeping in his broom closet, the key of the last of the Resistance fighters around his neck, one of the very keys that had passed between the hands of heroes. Novotny promised the sleepy drunk anonymity and gave him unlimited rights of descent by the spiral staircase. He recorded him whenever he came there to snooze it off. Novotny’s experimental sounds were soon embellishing radio waves from Wagram to Wellington, neither major nor myxolidian, miaou nor ladeda, but the pure notes that seed within when the mind yearns for ignorance without. The secret of Novotny’s success died with him — Rol secured no royalties.

All is dustmites and cobwebs, the good professor is a musical footnote. His console remains underground, ignored by the architects of the new IRCAMopolis, left to the rootrats and reminiscing proud philosoafers. Rol takes a pause, slips into sleep, and the loving two hear Rol with different ears, inslinging and outhaling, his ribcage the instrument of a superurge as sonorous as bugle of godly boscage.

On waking Rol cries, ‘As seeds seeking dark we have sprung! I brought her nothing but brevity. Fie on me! Fie Eg. Fie Phee, fie!’

Eg and Phoeb would know more of Rol’s fie but the merry has gone from his mystic.

They hurry his simplest kidney out the hatch and make for the periphery.

A familiar landmark! The rotunda with seventeen soccer balls on its eaves. Sky a dawn peach. Rotunda gutter of homely brackish languid-toned bong-water! This is a place of allowance, where the water cannot be prevented from filling the centrepiece, nor prevented from leaving lion-mouthed nipple-pieces and falling arc-wise to the dark pool.

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At the rail lines of Belliard they pass glass over snout till the philosoaf needs no coaxing towards paradox.

‘Mature is to hold within all that is im—. Complete is all that is in—. The work finished is completely unachieved! Beware resolution.

Compulsion the bind of volition to speak the acme of silence silence the ear’s definition to hear the root of deafness actor imbiber of laxity! rulers mewlers in idleness!

When nothing is willed no beep no message.

Finish not, and all will be done.

‘Vae soli, lovers! Stick together! Incendium Amoris will consume. Woe to gluttons!

For youze the good love!’ Rol spits on the pan—end of matter.

Truly, argument pointless.

After snarlers Rol cites the stomach cramp till they share in healing proof. He rolls weed and his mood lightens. He sings a rumramble of twohead and threepeg.

girlheens and garsœns’ garsœns swig ye hither before you give out yours to give each other

dance each true the merryfoot off neither poke ye feed him fully

have no fear yet of the great door Rol before ye, tinterramble

Eg and Phob take great heart for this is singable. They retire to the narrowcot.

Embrace of soon-to-be weds knows no discomfort! Is it at this moment that Phoebe conceives? But will they never have a home to hove in?

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As they sleep the winter woman throws seeds about the railway tracks and the ground hears her singing. The winter woman wears a garland of ice flowers whose centres are coagulating. Eg walks towards her. She drives her hands into him. He freezes. His toes have the cramp. He wakes smelling smoke, red thyme, Peru balsam. Yab Yum is home and cooking up. He rolls out the door the soul of stealth. He cannot sleep. He wanders about the deserted flea market, a ravaged landscape. Despondent Eg! He calls his own number on the mobile. He is busy. He nears Rol’s bridge. And to his eyes Rol’s canyon all is Hibernian oxide, yet the banks are sending up shoots of lilies and apple saplings. He descends to the lines.

THE BEATING OF ROL A groan born of splatter! Rol is leaning against the great iron door under the Bridge of Poteau, his face a froth of blackening bubble. Beaten. Beaten, reader, and mauled. Hauls him to the light, fireboy. Carry water. Rinse his blood and seek nourishment.

Now on Tuesdays the fishmonger throws Friday’s fish. Eg warms the pan and adds fennel. He props Rol on his elbow — but Rol will have none of it. Eg has liquor for the pain — but Rol has no stomach for the flagon!

‘Who was it, Rol? Who beat you senseless?’

‘Just a philosoap’s fallout, Eg.’ Eg throws fists in the air, ‘What manner of man? And who didn’t see it? O! neighbourhood blind to beatings! I’ll call my firemates, Rol.’ ‘Take the path of reason, Eg. To understand is to accept! The plough is a complex ox. Retaliation the dull of barbary. Fire burns books, etcetera. To see injury with the slight of the false-seeking eye is to worsen it!’

The hole in Eg’s head closes up. Bloodshot blocks his eyes. Yet Eg thinks, ‘There’s lots in his losophy.’

And Rol: —Being is the isness of beings who cannot be otherwise. We sense light through a crack in the bridge but may not behold the sun… —nor look upward when dust slips through the bridge-crack. Socrates was stargazing when the 22

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Turkish astro-gecko excreted in his openmouth.

All true, but Eg blunderkind has seen no gecko. Roll is out. The strain has been great. I, our Ego, ever selfless, brings fags and crouches by the tramp’s cleavered sorebody. Earth by the lines has been savaged. Nature’s wounding! Will sprigs of budleia shoot ever from the soilbed?

Rol’s past has rent him, as the budleia is mutilated. He is weakening, humbled and dirt. O earth! Cloud’s casement. Rolley has deserved forgetfulness, his sleep is poetic.

Honeyed flame Never from thee abstain I have heard thee My remembrance Of four words “I am your body” And four more “My body is thine” You my nicotine I your fresh dough Where was that, and when?

A century ago!

Hush, dear, here it is!

The ring!

She comes!

Countessa, I arrive!

Rol is out to his burned banknote of a youngtime.

The birds of the air take to trees in compassion .

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Aotearoa blues, baby ‘typical bloody Maori’ she snitched, assuming me one of her kind; ‘you don’t look like a Maori’ her brazen shibboleth, when I protest… [smug & spiteful, &

bourgeois blinkered.]

another of the ilk = my own cousin, on the pakeha side = pukes out the familiar dead homily:

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‘Maori are lazy, they don’t want to work’ (where?) ‘and end up in jail anyway’ (you wonder why?

e mohio ana ahau!)

she should have known better, her nasty sneeeeeers fulcrum of some caustic core rage.

OTHER

she didn’t intuit my own inner tube, swell fulminating, just about ready to rupture, r e a c h

o u t Vaughan Rapatahana

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& strangle her in irredentist fury… but then ‘that brown one’ (taku hoa wahine) would have been tino mokemoke – (maybe) - with me just scratching tats up in ^ Pare - where I’m supposed to be. got those damned Aotearoa blues, baby slicing through my soul keep a man way down under, baby never can be whole A report on the welfare of children in OECD member countries has found New Zealand to have the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world. The suicide death rate for Māori youth (15–24 year olds) in 2006 was 31.8 per 100,000, compared with the non-Māori rate of 16.8 per 100,000…

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Encounter a counterscrew turns obliquely, despite.

you

reverse

all

revolutions

with pressure from those who would be your courtesans, in spite of. screwing firmly forever

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any rampant possibility into early demise,

aeons ahead of any bedding, without respite.

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Rata villa, Ngawhatu one was doing whe cart ^ els a c r o s s the sunlit compound c a r p e t, infecund smile s t r e t c h m a r k e d as w i d e: others squat forlorn statues in shaded crannies, their eyes wine gums far b e y o n d expiry date.

If I ate there I cannot recall more than a TRUCKLOAD of ativan arriving weekly,

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while my sp lint er e d brain roiled k brea in g, b o r k e

n,

abnegating x

sleep.

x

x

x

x

x

after Ngawhatu the jigsaw jags never quite gelled again

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wharenui out

b a c k

lion red or some palsied surrogates stood firm in the arms akimbo tribe, circling the perimeter, regaled in faded-black singlets/conjugating/ with refugee abattoir boots never returned 14 years before. no more spuds to peel hangi ready a while back,

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dishes can wait ‘til after whaikorero have stripped senseless those captured inside the stockade; stymied by protocol & age & duty… & hunger.

AAAaaeeeeeAA light up another kai paipa some fellas’d do anything for a feed eh.

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Speaking of the Balloonist he had a balloon for a head so to start with I didn’t trust him his lips made rubber sounds when he spoke he always rode a bicycle and I was concerned his head might catch in the spokes of his wheels and burst (this never happened) he dressed formally immaculately turned out in trilbies with pheasant feathers on the side and bespoke suits I wondered if he had to be periodically reinflated like the economy he was well-spoken, the richness of his consonants and globularity of his vowels a constant source of pleasure I got to know him a little through my work at the academy he was old as a vampire, he told me and had spent time in the speakeasies of Prohibition America drinking bathtub gin and playing the trumpet he stood for mayor in the last election for days driving up and down my street announcing himself through a red loudspeaker I told him I’d vote for him but when it came down to it I didn’t vote at all I meant to but I didn’t get around to it in time then it was too late I have failed democracy and don’t deserve it

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someone accused me of trying to make him laugh I can assure you that was never my intent I have always been serious about this stuff I have always spoken the truth (I am not smiling) this is how we shape each other: with every word we speak once, while we were smoking opium together I had the urge to undo the little knot at the nape of his neck and blow and blow until we were both cloud-high at times I look back and wish I’d done it in the way we regret what we failed to do more than anything we ever did I aspire to be free of regrets and console myself with the promise that next time such an opportunity presents itself I will seize that balloon with both hands and will not be stopped Answers to FAQs 1. it was blue 2. with a slight Estonian accent 3. only in the beginning, then it faded somewhat

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Bungundah Does Things A Little Differently.

From time to time they have a run on suicides. Nearly always men and boys. We don’t do suicides out in Merrimba. Can’t remember one. But just up the road in Bungundah, they’re at it. They hang themselves. They shoot themselves.

The most gruesome and tragic was the older guy who unhooked his trailer from his bulldozer, looped fencing wire around his neck, attached it to his trailer, and put his foot down on his ‘dozer.

Whoops! You might say he lost his head.

His machine lodged against a tree and kept on running, so a neighbour went to have a look, and vomited for nearly a week. Not pleasant! But it is not always older blokes. Younger blokes with everything to live for, you would think.

Who knows why they do it. It’s like there is something in the water.

Just a bit of background. Bungundah was, back in the olden days, like the hill stations in India. You got on the train to leave the heat and humidity of Sydney and stayed at a guest house in Bungundah. Some of the larger ones, like Bonnybrae, fell into disrepair and are now the abode of people wearing beanies.

Hostels? Halfway houses? Dumping grounds? Holding pens?

But the air is good and they are free to wander around, and if some people call them the Bungaloonies, then at least they are not harassed. You could do a lot worse than end up in Bonnybrae. Wearing a beanie. With dentures that don’t quite fit.

My boy plays with a band called Rocky Hill. Jacko got it going. He used to be in a pub band called Enigma Jelly. Now wife, house, job. Very nearly the full catastrophe.

He saw a few kids at a loose end around the place, and … good on yer, Jacko. He’s got a shed where they can practise, up on a – you guessed it – rocky hill, and a van. To get them to gigs. And Rocky Hill do get gigs.

The Bowlo. Bungundah Bowling Club. New Year’s Eve. Going all right for Bungundah. Things never really go with a swing. The men sledge each other unmercifully. Then get very very drunk until they want to dance.

The bolder ones stand on the dance floor with their beer tucked up under their chin and sway. Or go into the hallway and jig a bit on their own. The women shout and laugh at the tables. There is always one woman who really really wants to dance and she cuts loose. On her own.

Well, there seemed to be an old fart who was running the show and he kept going up to Rocky Hill and asking them to turn the sound down. But there is a limit to how far the sound can be turned down. If you’re a rock band.

So at 10 to 11 he took $100 out of the till, commanded them to stop, and said – “Here’s your money. Now f*** off. “ Jennifer Compton

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So the stalwart Bowlo members got out their old cds and cranked up their sound system as we packed the van.

Two bewildered young people from Sydney stood out in the rain wondering what to do now. The pub had closed. I knew that because a few refugees from the pub had turned up at the Bowlo (I told you Bungy did things differently. Ever heard of a pub that closed at 10-30 pm on New Year’s Eve?) Jacko had been stung into making a comment about why young people in Bungy might commit suicide, and there was much flouncing and remarks about how uncalled for that was! Really uncalled for! Unnecessary!

I found myself listening to an ex check-out chick’s sad story about how she had been fired from the supermarket for Absolutely No Reason.

We offered the two young people from Sydney a lift. They were grateful because the road seemed very dark to them and they were a little daunted.

It struck 12 pm as we pulled out of the drive and we could hear loud hallooing and – “We are the champions of the world!”

What can I say? It’s the way Bungundah does it.

Richard and Jasmine will be dining out on this experience for months.

Talk about culture shock.

We were standing out in the rain in the car park, sorting ourselves out, and I had said to them – “Are you guys from Sydney?”

Just as two really old, gnarly drunks walked in front of me.

“Huh?”- they said.

“No. Not you guys,” I said. “I know you’re Bungundah guys.”

Credit where credit is due. I will give Bungy the credit it deserves.

They do not care what they say to anybody. Even though I was the mother of the keyboard player, many people felt free to comment, without checking if I was related to anybody, just how crap and loud they thought the band was.

And any other personal comment they felt moved to make.

The only taboo subject it seems is suicide.

Here is a review of a gig Rocky Hill did down the coast.

‘These guys were my pick of the evening. After they started, several people ran for the door holding their ears. Not me. Let me set the scene for you: A lead singer who looked exactly like a 70’s porn star.’

(That’s Jacko.)

‘A bass player of unknown gender wearing a constant frown.’

(That’s young Hayden.)

‘A keyboard player, with a Farfisa keyboard (circa 1975 Italy), who looked as if he was about to commit some sort of atrocity.’

(And that’s my son.)

‘And a fairly normal looking drummer (unusual).’

(That’s young Mario. A real sweetie.)

So they’re not completely crap. But loud? Yes! They are really loud.

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NIGHT OF THE ELEPHANTS ‘The problem,’ said Todd Martin, as we sat drinking ice-cold Corona beers beneath the wide green parasol I’d erected on my lawn, ‘is that Linda’s getting bored back home in New Zealand — and not only that, she’s becoming bored with me, too.’

I felt sorry for Todd, and more than a little annoyed with his wife. They were both old friends of mine, but she seemed bent on ruining their holiday. They were staying with me for a short while at the house I rented in a picturesque southwestern Mexican city — the state capital, in fact — where I made a reasonable, if sometimes boring, living teaching English as a second language.

‘I don’t want a divorce,’ Todd said. ‘I don’t even want to think about it.’

‘Don’t then,’ I said.

They were both in their thirties now. Todd was a computer engineer I’d known back in high school, Linda a dress designer. An energetic, attractive couple, both were eminently successful in the material world they inhabited so stylishly.

They’d made a pile of money, had three young children (being looked after by Linda’s parents during their trip), owned three or four houses in Wellington, and each ran an expensive new car. When they wrote asking if they could visit me at the end of a Latin American tour they’d embarked on, I hadn’t hesitated to say yes.

As I was still single, there was plenty of room in the house for visitors; and they, being fellow New Zealanders, had been especially welcome.

I’d held a small dinner party in their honour when they first arrived two weeks earlier and today Linda was strolling at the foot of my garden with a man who’d accompanied one of my guests. Gerardo Camacho was a wealthy property developer who’d made his fortune buying up slum houses in working class barrios, tearing them down, then putting up apartment towers which he then sold to the upper classes. Twice married, twice divorced, he was rarely seen without a glamorous woman at his side. At the dinner party, his partner was a young journalist on a local daily, Valentina Dávila, whom I’d only recently come to know (and wished I knew a little better), but during the evening he only had eyes for Linda.

Gerardo had a great deal of charm. When he rang the next day to invite Todd and Linda to lunch at his country club, they accepted the offer, albeit with a certain reluctance on Todd’s part; and when Linda had asked if she could invite him to my place for dinner on Mexico’s Independence Anniversary night, I could hardly say no.

‘Wow, Gerardo!’

Linda’s exclamation and sudden peal of laughter drew my attention to the pair. Gerardo, a physical fitness fanatic, broad-shouldered and darkly John Parkyn

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handsome, had removed the jacket of his white cotton suit and performed for Linda’s amusement, and to indulge his own exhibitionism, a perfect handstand.

His trim figure now formed a splendidly executed, immobile human statue. Linda, slim, blonde-haired, and wearing a flowing white Mexican dress of colourfully embroidered muslin, circled around him, smiling, laughing, sometimes studiously examining him from various angles as part of her joke. Gerardo spread his legs apart, scissored them a couple of times, then proceeded to walk on his hands in a quickening circle. Finally, he somersaulted back onto his feet, landing perfectly still, arms outstretched, beaming a triumphant smile at the applauding Linda.

‘Bravo, Gerardo!’ she cried. Gerardo bowed solemnly then led her back to join Todd and myself beneath the parasol.

It was early evening now. I loved the view from my house, high on the Santa Maria hills. From where I sat I could see the lights of the towering cathedral downtown in ‘el centro histórico’ where the celebrations were to take place, and the traffic moving steadily along the wide avenues and narrow streets.

I recalled how during the welcoming party for the Martins I’d managed to chat with Valentina while Gerardo flirted with Linda. Petite, earnest, and always very fashionably dressed, Valentina already had her own daily column. She was quite a few years younger than myself, with strong opinions on everything under the sun; but try as I could, I could never get her to talk about her own background.

That evening, she spoke mainly about the particularly brutal phase of drug-related violence the state was suffering, and the effect it had, and didn’t have, on her.

‘The trouble is,’ I remember she said, ‘we Mexicans are becoming immune to what’s happening. I get blasé myself. I write about the murders, the kidnappings, the extortion rackets nearly every day in my column — but it’s just words, I feel nothing. Then I go home, mix myself a piña colada, and watch some stupid soap opera on television. It’s absurd, escaping into the fantasy world of telenovelas!’

‘What are you really trying to tell me, Valentina?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t it obvious? I’m losing faith in my own writing.’

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘You’re a damn good journalist.’

‘I want to be,’ Valentina said.

‘What we need,’ said Gerardo, overhearing our conversation and turning his attention from Linda for a moment, ‘is a hard hand — mano dura! — by the Government.’ He whacked a clenched fist onto the tabletop. ‘Right, Valentina?

Mano dura! Get tough! That’s what I’d do if I were President.’

‘The Government has been trying, Gerardo,’ protested Valentina.

‘Trying!’ Gerardo scoffed.

‘The Army launched a big clamp-down recently.’

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This was true. Some prominent arrests had been made. But there were at least three huge cartels fighting for control of the state’s drug trade and it had become a ruthless and bloody battle. The shootings, the beheadings, the tortured bodies found in roadside ditches, were almost daily occurrences, with the innocent often caught in the crossfire. I sometimes wondered why I continued living in this city myself; a lot of other foreigners had already fled. But it would have to suffice until restlessness overcame me once more, as it inevitably would.

‘What’ll we do after dinner tonight everybody?’ Linda said, interrupting my depressing reflections and bringing me back to the present.

‘I suggest, señora,’ said Gerardo, ‘we go downtown to the Government Palace, to hear the Grito. I’d like to take you and Todd, and Rick too if he wants to come.’

‘I’ve heard quite a few Gritos,’ I said, ‘but I suppose another won’t hurt me.’

The Grito was a re-enactment of Father Hidalgo’s famous cry as he rang the church bell in Dolores that signalled the beginning of the War of Independence in 1810. It was given every year by the President of the republic in Mexico City and by every governor of the state capitals.

‘I don’t really mind what we do,’ said Todd, rather preoccupied.

‘Let’s go, then,’ said Linda. ‘I’d love to hear the Grito, especially with Gerardo to accompany us in case we get lost.’

She cast Gerardo a quick flirtatious smile.

‘Rick’s coming too, so how the hell can we possibly get lost?’ said Todd irritably.

‘Don’t be so touchy, Todd. Why can’t you be a little more laid back, like Gerardo?’

Gerardo chuckled. ‘Me? Laid back? What a nice compliment, señora.’

‘And you’re a strong man, too, aren’t you, Gerardo? Strong like a panther!’

Linda gave what she considered a panther’s growl, formed her hands into paws and clawed the air with her fingers. Gerardo laughed heartily and threw his arm round Linda’s shoulders, but then, noticing Todd’s surprise and sudden frown, thought better of it.

‘I’ll get the maid to put on some dinner,’ I said. ‘We can go downtown afterwards. The Grito’s not till eleven o’clock.’

I went inside and told the super-efficient Angélica, who battled with the disorder of my house twice a week, to cook up sopa Tarasca, some steak fajitas with fried nopales, peppers, onions and green tomatoes, a chicken molé main course, and to prepare some of her great guacamole. There was also a lemon pie for John Parkyn

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dessert. I wanted to do Todd and Linda proud as they didn’t have much time left, only ten days, in fact. But I was becoming irked by Linda’s flirtation with Gerardo, and its effect on Todd. To be fair, she’d worked just as hard as Todd at their fifteenyear marriage; maybe more so. But it seemed to be at that delicate point now when one indiscreet move could ruin everything for ever.

I put a Compay Segundo disc on my stereo and smoked a quiet cigarette as Angélica prepared the dinner. Poor Todd appeared to be increasingly left out of Linda and Gerardo’s conversation. Linda’s gay laughter rang out whenever Gerardo leaned close to whisper in her ear. Todd, less than amused, would turn his head away and pretend to be admiring the emerging stars.

‘What a glorious meal Angélica’s made,’ Linda remarked when they came in.

‘She’s a champ,’ I said.

Angélica, who lived nearby, smiled shyly from the kitchen door.

‘It’s so romantic here,’ Linda continued as we took our seats around the table in the sala. ‘Why don’t we come and live here too, Todd?’

‘It’d be a huge change,’ Todd replied. Angélica lit some candles and I poured everyone their choice of wine. ‘Besides, financially it’s out of the question.

I’ve still got years of work ahead of me back home.’

‘You could work here.’

‘Me, with absolutely no Spanish? I don’t think so.’

‘Very well,’ said Linda after a thoughtful sip of her burgundy, ‘we could get a divorce and I could stay on here alone until I meet a nice romantic Mexican man.’

She smiled teasingly at Todd.

‘Haven’t you already done that, Linda?’ he said archly.

‘Don’t be nasty, Todd!’

‘Please, amigos,’ interjected Gerardo, ‘let’s not quarrel! Not on such a special night as this.’

I wondered how sincerely Linda felt about Mexico. I myself loved the country but you can only really begin to appreciate it when you more fully understand it. There’s a great deal that certainly isn’t romantic and it’s a big mistake to think otherwise. I remembered what Valentina Dávila had spoken about at the dinner party.

‘It would be a big change for me also, Todd. For any woman, in fact…’

Linda broke off voicing her troubled thoughts. She finished her wine, stared moodily at the empty glass, then refilled it quickly, drank deeply, and refilled again.

Todd shook his head with concern. It was not like Linda to drink so desperately.

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‘Decisions like these are always hard,’ Gerardo murmured.

‘Who said she’s making a decision?’ said Todd.

‘Tranquilo, amigo,’ said Gerardo. ‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

‘Yes, Todd, stop being so rude to Gerardo,’ Linda snapped. ‘You’re making an idiot of yourself.’

‘Is that so? Am I an idiot, Rick?’

‘Of course not,’ I said, and Linda pulled a face at me.

‘All I want to say, Linda,’ said Todd, ‘is think of the children too. To hell with me, I’m not that important. But think about them.’

‘Now you’re being self-pitying.’

Todd sighed with despair. Linda was bringing to a head whatever had gone wrong with their marriage and it was my misfortune to be hosting the outcome. I liked Todd a lot, even though we hadn’t seen much of each other for several years; and Linda, at heart, was basically a fine person, too. But she was on dangerous ground, and didn’t seem to realize it. At the conclusion of the meal, soon after Angélica had gone home, the phone rang in my hallway. I was pleasantly surprised.

It was Valentina.

‘I can’t talk long, Rick, I’m in a hurry,’ she said.

‘You’re always in a hurry, Valentina.’

She laughed. ‘That’s true. But listen to me, hombre. We’ve heard from the police there may be some sort of attack on the desfile — the military parade through town tomorrow. So take care if you and your guests are thinking of going.’

‘Thanks. We’ll give the parade a miss then, just to be safe. Are you going to cover the Grito tonight?’

‘No, I’ve got the night off.’

‘I see. Can we have a drink together some time?’

Valentina laughed again. ‘Maybe. I hear Gerardo’s seeing Linda.’

‘You hear everything, don’t you?’

‘Just about. I have to fly now. Buenas noches, Rick.’

‘Buenas noches.’

Gerardo and Linda, highly energized, were dancing a close-quartered tango when I returned to the sala. Todd watched gloomily from the sofa. It was clear they were putting psychological as well as physical space between Todd and themselves.

‘You know,’ Todd whispered to me, ‘I can hardly believe this is happening.

Perhaps it’s my own fault.’

‘I don’t think so, Todd.’

‘I’ve done my best for her, pay for nearly everything, never forget our John Parkyn

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anniversaries. I’ve never strayed…’

‘Ever been tempted?’

‘You bet! But you only get one real chance in a relationship, don’t you?’

He was right. I’d learned that bitter lesson the hard way. When Linda and Gerardo’s sensual dance came to an end, Linda let herself fall into Gerardo’s arms, acting as if completely out of breath. He held her close, just long enough for intimacy without being exactly inappropriate, until he caught Todd’s affronted stare. Then he reluctantly released her.

‘That was wonderful, Gerardo,’ Linda laughed, her voice a little slurred, as she helped herself to yet another burgundy. ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for ages.’

‘You’re a great dancer, señora. You’re part Mexican now, I think!’

‘Am I really, Gerardo? How nice, but don’t call me señora any more. Just call me Linda.’

‘I’ll be delighted to. Linda’s a name that suits you very well. It’s one of the Spanish words for beautiful.’

Linda blushed, but her eyes sparkled. Todd’s sense of isolation, however, only seemed to increase as the evening passed.

‘Let’s go downtown now,’ Linda finally announced, rather abruptly. ‘It must be nearly time for the good old Grito.’

I looked at my watch. She was right. We only had twenty minutes.

‘My car or yours?’ said Gerardo. He’d come, of course, in one of his BMWs. ‘Mine,’ I said. ‘It’s smaller. Easier to find a parking spot.’

Todd and I hastily finished our drinks then the four of us squeezed into my cramped old Volkswagen Beetle, Linda and Todd in the back seat, Gerardo beside me. A light shower was falling as I sped down the hill through the Colonia Vista Bella. It eased up as we passed through the narrow, shadowy streets glistening with drizzle that led to ‘el centro’, the heart of the city. As we approached it, a mass of people were flocking into the Calle Abásolo on foot, all heading in the same direction — to the Avenue Madero and the two plazas.

‘It’s so exciting,’ said Linda. ‘Aren’t you excited tonight, Todd?’

‘Perhaps excited is not quite the right word,’ Todd answered drily.

‘Oh Todd!’

‘I’m excited, Linda,’ Gerardo broke in. ‘We Mexicans love this anniversary.

It’s when we’re all united for once.’

‘Well that’s wonderful!’ Linda laughed.

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plaza, the Plaza de Armas. Gerardo scrambled out quickly and opened Linda’s door for her.

‘Why, thank you, Gerardo,’ she said, beaming at him.

‘De nada, Linda,’ Gerardo said, his voice husky as he returned her smile.

‘Come on, let’s get moving,’ Todd gritted.

We melded into the swelling crowd which now completely jammed the street. The mood was joyful, as it always was for this great national fiesta. The tragic history of the country’s lost territory to ‘the giant of the north’, and the eternal blow to its self-esteem by the Spanish Conquest, were peremptorily banished on this night. All around me many were dressed in traditional costume: men wearing huaraches, ponchos and wide sombreros, women in colourful ankle-length skirts.

Small boys marched along proudly with toy rifles and bandoliers slung over their shoulders; little girls perched high on their parents’ backs squealing with delight.

Strolling vendors hurried to and fro selling tamales and hot dogs, tacos and candy floss. Some of the crowd linked arms and sang ‘Cielito Lindo.’ ‘Ay, yay, yay, yay, canta, no llores’…sing, don’t cry…sing, don’t cry…

We crossed the spacious Plaza de Armas and joined the thousands thronging Avenue Madero, where a mariachi band was finishing its performance.

Then, just as we reached the gates of the cathedral, there was a roar from the crowd as the state Governor came out onto the floodlit balcony of the Government Palace on the opposite side of the street. Proudly, with raised arms, he acknowledged the cheering multitude below.

‘Let’s move along a bit,’ Linda said.

‘You’ll get the best view from here,’ I told her.

‘But it’s so cramped and crowded, Rick. Come on, Gerardo.’

Gerardo grinned, only too happy to comply.

‘We should stick together, Linda,’ Todd said sharply.

‘I don’t want to stick together tonight,’ Linda answered. ‘I want to be Mexican.’

She took Gerardo by the hand and started to lead him away.

‘I’ll look after her, Todd,’ assured Gerardo. He waved goodbye to us with his free hand and the pair of them disappeared into the throng near the corner of the smaller plaza on the other side of the cathedral, the Plaza Melchor Ocampo.

Crestfallen, Todd followed them with his eyes.

‘Look!’ he said suddenly. A gap in the crowd had opened and we both, simultaneously, glimpsed Linda and Gerardo caught in the floodlights. Gerardo had his arms around Linda. He pulled her close to his chest and kissed her full on the lips as she looked up at him. Linda drew back, then the crowd closed around John Parkyn

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them and they were lost from sight.

‘Did you see that?’ Todd said.

‘No,’ I lied.

‘Yes you did.’

‘I’m sorry, Todd.’ I was just as shocked as he was, and felt part of the fault was mine for throwing that fateful party in the first place.

‘I need a drink,’ Todd said.

‘Wait till we get back, man.’

The revelry was in full cry, nearing its climax. The crowd waved ecstatically their tricolour flags of green, red and white adorned with the legendary eagle clutching a snake in its beak. The military band struck up a sharp tattoo on its beating drums. The grinning Governor swung his own huge flag back and forth on a long pole as the crowd applauded wildly. A bell rope dangled down beside him. The bell itself hung high above, beneath the palace’s protruding stone eaves.

It was exactly eleven o’clock.

‘Viva Mexico!’ the Governor shouted.

‘Viva! Viva!’ the crowd roared back.

‘Viva la independencia!’

‘Viva! Viva!’

The Governor declaimed a third time and as the crowd replied and cheered he began tolling the bell. Rockets shot into the sky; triumphant music blared on the outdoor sound system. The crowd was bathed in a brilliant white light from dozens of catherine wheels spinning on a ‘castillo’, a huge wooden castle-like structure.

Suddenly, there was a sharp explosion at the Plaza Melchor Ocampo.

‘Fireworks,’ said Todd. But the Governor had stopped tolling the bell.

The celebratory cheers of the crowd ceased just as abruptly, replaced by screams of agony.

‘That was no firework, Todd,’ I said. Then I heard another explosion towards the western end of the avenue.

‘Christ, where’s Linda?’ Todd shouted.

Chaos broke out all around us. People were running in all directions, bowling over the rows of seats in a mad panic. I saw a short, fat man trampled to the ground. Todd and I pushed our way through the fear-stricken crowd to the smaller plaza. The dead and dying lay all around. The bomb had wrenched off limbs, torn clothing to shreds, ripped off pants and dresses, jackets and blouses.

Blood-filled shoes were scattered about, blown from their owners’ feet. Men and women were shouting and screaming, children howling.

‘Oh my God,’ Todd groaned. ‘Where is she?’

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Police and soldiers converged on the scene. Red Cross paramedics from a van nearby bent over the wounded and dying. Sirens of approaching ambulances shrilled, news cameras flashed. The heartless white lights of a TV crew illuminated the horror.

Just then I heard Linda crying out. She came racing towards us through the carnage, half her dress missing, her face and arms splattered with blood. She stopped short, shaking uncontrollably.

‘Oh Todd!’ she sobbed, then collapsed into his arms.

‘Christ, are you injured?’

‘No… No, I don’t think so.’

‘But all this blood?’

‘It’s from a woman who was standing beside me. She’s dead! Dead! Take me home, Todd. Please take me home!’

‘Where’s Gerardo?’ I asked.

‘He ran away,’ said Linda. ‘He was terrified, he just ran off. He left me…’

‘Bloody coward,’ said Todd grimly.

‘I don’t blame him,’ Linda said. ‘It’s horrible, I can’t believe it... Take me home! Maybe there are more bombs…’

She was too shocked to walk on her own. With Todd on one side of her and myself on the other, we frog-marched her through the mayhem. Fleeing people hurtled past us and by the time we reached my car, I was covered in the dead woman’s blood also. I jammed the accelerator flat to the floor as we raced home.

When we reached the house, Linda undressed in the bathroom then spent about an hour in the shower.

‘Don’t ever leave me, Todd,’ she kept crying. ‘Don’t ever leave me.’

‘Of course not, darling,’ he reassured her. After he’d put her to bed, he sat beside her holding her hand tightly, whispering his comfort. I poured myself a stiff whisky in the kitchen and listened to the news reports coming in on the radio. Two fragmentation grenades had been thrown amongst the revellers, one near where Linda had been, the other a few blocks away. No arrests had yet been made. At about 4 in the morning the phone rang. It was Gerardo. His voice was subdued.

‘Rick, is that you?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Is Linda okay?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Tell her I’m sorry. I…’ ‘Couldn’t you tell her yourself?’

He made no answer. There was only an awkward silence.

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‘Buenas noches, Gerardo,’ I said, before hanging up.

He didn’t ring again, or call round; someone from his staff collected his BMW. Linda and Todd hastily advanced their return to New Zealand and I drove them out to the airport to farewell them just two days later. We shook hands, exchanged platitudes, and I sincerely hoped things would turn out well for them. But you never can tell, can you?

The morning after the grenade attacks, I drove down, alone, to the Plaza Melchor Ocampo. The scheduled military parade had been cancelled for the first time in its history. Soldiers and police stood uneasy guard behind roped-off areas of blood-stained pavement. Workmen were busy repairing the blown-out windows of a nearby building.

The attacks had intimidated the state and federal authorities, and perhaps this was their sole intention. The local Press said it was obviously one of the cartels’ response to the clamp-down — but which one? And another still-unanswered question was why hadn’t security been better on Independence night when threats to the next day’s parade had been known.

As I walked towards the plaza, a flock of pigeons swooped down from their roosts in the cathedral and settled beside a group of about twenty people, men, women and children, who had gathered at the site of the first explosion. They were praying tearfully before a makeshift altar covered in burnt-orange cempasúchitl flowers and two rows of burning votive candles forming a cross. Laurel wreaths lay beside photos of some of the victims.

Moving closer, I saw that the grenade had carved a vast hole, several inches deep, in the paving stones. Seven people had died on this spot, one at the other.

More than a hundred wounded packed the local hospitals. Curiously, overnight, mysterious banners from one of the cartels had appeared around the city, hung from overpasses, blaming a rival cartel in their turf war for the attacks. But the truth, as so often in the republic, would likely be a long time coming, if ever.

Suddenly, I recognized a young woman amongst the huddled mourners.

She had a black shawl drawn tightly around her head, and was praying on her knees beside a very old woman. Both were weeping. The young woman turned her head and spotted me, with surprise equal to mine.

‘Rick!’

‘Valentina!’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m with my family. These are my parents, Francisco and Alicia.’

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glanced round at the sound of their names and nodded courteously to me.

‘And this is my Aunt Ximena,’ Valentina said.

The old woman held out a clawlike hand for me to shake. Age lines were etched deep into her grief-stricken face. As I crouched down beside her, she pointed to the faded wedding photo, on top of the altar, of one of the victims. Beside the smiling, handsome, tuxedoed man of about twenty-five was his attractive young bride in her white wedding gown, holding a spray of carnations.

‘The groom in that photo was my uncle, Tío Enrique,’ Valentina explained, her voice almost breaking. ‘He was a carpenter, like my father; and that’s Aunt Ximena in the photo with him. Tío Enrique came down here alone last night because Aunt Ximena wasn’t feeling well — and now she’s a widow.’

I put my arm around Valentina’s shoulder.

‘He was a good, kind man,’ Valentina said. ‘Just an ordinary Mexican without an enemy in the world. You didn’t know I came from such humble people, did you, Rick?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘I know what I’m going to write about in tomorrow’s paper,’ she said. ‘I’m going to write about him.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Only you can.’

‘Have you read that note over there?’

She pointed to a hand-written, anonymous message someone had placed on the altar amongst the flowers. I bent closer, in order to read it clearly. It was written with a ballpoint pen, in black ink, in tiny, almost illegible, letters. ‘Mientras elefantes pelean, es la hierba que sufre,’ the note said. ‘When elephants fight, it’s the pasture that suffers.’

All of a sudden Valentina’s old Aunt Ximena turned to look directly at me.

All the misery of Mexico seemed to be reflected in those ancient, melancholy eyes.

She grasped hold of my hand.

‘Hasta cuándo, señor?’ she said. Her grip tightened, her quavering voice rose as she repeated the question, over and over, until it became an anguished, terrible lament ringing out all around the plaza: ‘Hasta cuándo? Hasta cuándo?

Hasta cuándo!’

How long…until when? I wished I knew the answer, but I didn’t have it.

There was a sudden collective beating of hundreds of wings as the flock of pigeons soared high into the grey sky. I watched them circle the cathedral then veer away to the south, until they were out of sight.

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Apparition

Midnight

In the darkness waking, yes, she had locked the door; folded the day screens away.

Gnawing his hand. My shoulder hurts like hell. Given you a fright?

In scarlet night gear, he rises.

You’re leaving?

I have my reasons… conceived beneath an ill star, mouth deformed, defective speech, my law career, cursed my mother, never pleased. arthritis from her genes, I am three-score and penniless.

Along the street, she hastens past the eyes of vacant houses, windows closed, chimney bricks falling.

She thinks repairs would not take long

Morning

At home, her door knob turns?

Locks or systems cannot prevent an intruder’s return “to rage about feathers growing from his arms, his house of dust with clay for food, devoid of light.”

Remember to open us, say the screens.

You have seen yourself.

Do not forget we will shield, strengthen, and cause you to stand.

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St Joseph’s (for Nathan and Amber) The cross was cut from driftwood dropped on Island Bay: some pohutakawa that leaned too far off its cliff, or a kopi trunk washed northwest from the Chathams.

You sit for a few minutes, squinting in the rush hour light a low window barely filters.

You are imagining the resurrection of the tree - the smooth tumourous swellings, and the twigs extending like antennae. The blossom foam, and viscous leaves.

Outside, beyond the pamphlet rack and the poured concrete walls, a diplomatic flotilla floats up the street, disappears into Mount Victoria.

Christ arrived sometime after supper. He pitched his tent in kanuka on the other side of the broken-legged fence that kept goats out of the churchyard and off the footy field.

In the morning He walked past the hall then the chapel, and the infant lemon tree, pausing to lay hands on Josh’s pregnant tabby.

Christ joined the work bee beside the creek, swinging a machete someone had saved.

Gorse and thistle were laid low.

At the noon He joined the rest of the boys beside the chilly bin in the shade.

He rolled a smoke with one hand and opened his beer with the other.

Nobody heard the sermon except Josh, who was hanging around the chapel, and a couple of kids who wandered in.

When it was over He stepped outside and ascended. The little lemon tree tittered in the wind.

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The Suicider

 The stars are lumps of fire a few kilometres away.

We could reach them, touch them, if we wanted.

The could teach us nothing, they could teach us the same eternal truths as the secondhand bookshop, the bus strike, the blocked urinal.

The stars will not fall unseasonably, the way that infected apples and empires fall. Â Now the old-fashioned rocket eases off the asphalt, with its sharp end aimed at a piece of fire as far away as the next service station.

The pilot wears a uniform as dark and bulky as an old-fashioned diving suit. He will fall through his portal into the freezing dark, into the fire, eager to know about nothing.

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Self-criticism (for Jen Crawford)

Every word in a line must work for its keep.

Commissar. Kalashnikov. Mosquito net. The line is more important than rifles, more important than rice, more eloquent than the boulders the river brings down.

If the line is correct then the gorge will echo and empty of birds.

If the line is correct then it will feed us our baskets will fill with sweet potatoes until they sag like the hammocks the commissars hang.

The line grows as quickly as andesite.

The line grows one word one task at a time.

I am your comrade. This is my position.

You may attempt selfcriticism.

The line may find you in a hollow tree or at a desk Scott Hamilton

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on the city side of the mosquito net, as the words fall in together proposing themselves, in the commissar’s report, in handwriting as fine as the window’s wire.

The line is a stone worn smooth in our mouths.

Every word in a line must carry its weight, must carry a sack of potatoes or a comrade’s body to the head of the gorge, where goats are scattered to disguise our tracks, and the commissars argue with andesite.

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The Inland Sea Look at the gulls, shoals of them, steering over the Barrier Ranges, aiming for the tip behind the Miners’ Arms aren’t they symptoms of an inland sea?

Sturt thought so.

A water truck goes west, over the range, past a station where the camels throw tourists for a fee. * The mulgas on the creekbed are flowing south.

The boulder on the bank is busy thinking. * What if Burke returned, filled with time and space? * Leichhardt went into the wilderness the way Hegel went into his study. * The space builds rather than relieves pressure. The air hugs you too tightly, the way the water hugs a deep sea diver. You look up at the sun, which is tiny Scott Hamilton

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and bright, the way it looked from the sea-floor. * Sturt entered the wilderness the way a vicar enters his wife. * Burke found the wattle cowering in a creekbed. He swung the axe, slew the shrub, flicked it roots first into the fire.

The world was a little larger. * Sturt’s horses pulled his skiff up Dolo Hill.

Stones scratched, dented the oak hull.

Two of Sturt’s officers marched behind leaning oars on their shoulders like rifles. * On the edges of clearings Abos and roos stand on hind legs and stare, holding their young against their torsos so we won’t fire.

We fire at their heads. * Becker and Wills fiddle with instruments, scribble calculations, trick insects into bottles, disembowel toads, pursue the sun and moon 64

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across muddy paper fools, both of them.

The sores on my legs calculate distance better than a chronometer.

My mouth and nostrils collect insects every minute.

My body is the laboratory in which nature is known.

I, Robert Burke, am scientist, sample, and experiment. * They called it Dieri.

You call it the inland sea. * Leichhardt married a bluegum west of Coopers Creek.

He clung to the tree, climbed it, carved L L L on its voluptuous trunk.

The upper branches shook with pleasure.

Leichhardt groped at them, grasping seeds he would bury in the scrub, so that his wife might bear a child. * In the rear view mirror a vein of silver, flowing west to Broken Hill. * In the bush behind Menindee Scott Hamilton

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Burke met a blackfella called Karl Marx and asked him where they kept the water, up north.

Marx drew two circles in the dust then traced a line across them.

Bull ants crawled in the old man’s beard.

This is the big snake, Marx said, in Barkindji, the language of political economy.

And these, he gestured, are the circuits of capital, as money passes from miner to publican to bank. Sometimes when the creek has crawled up into the ranges and the cockatoos have flown away, the snake gets hungry, and curls up, and begins to chew his tail.

Burke wiped his brow, drew his pistol, fired into the air.

The cockatoos flew away. * Sturt sat in his skiff and waited for a creek the way he had waited for a horse and buggy.

The officers leaned on a gum stump and smoked. * On the road to Wilcannia a galah flashes like a distress flare out of the scrub.

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* It takes three days to sail to Broken Hill, steering north, across the red swell of the Mallee, guided by the great mullock heap, the two rusty sails of the miners’ memorial. * Sand leaked into the skiff. * Burke’s camel was nothing unusual to Marx, just an overgrown emu with four legs. He watched the beast bolt as Burke emptied his pistol.

He watched a bull ant mount the sheer face of Burke’s left boot.

He watched capital circulate through the dust. * Sturt fell off his horse, which was already becoming a statue, and began to swim over the stones and dunes. He scooped up fish ribs, otoliths, fossilised oysters, as he worked his way north, across the great Inland Sea.

Scott Hamilton

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67

19/03/2010 8:44:45 p.m.

Cold Moving Coldness

cold moving coldness / cacophony of quivers (circles) or sparks in dark and oxymoronic vision of flowing ice in sparkle / transilluminates dark supple silence when the chuncks again as he edged until crevasses plunged / the viol stroke not so bad as Winter plays in bone leaves and bone speech and the spectre of sand / vast ones without cause except the creeping of old force the steps are heard and who and the cause of cold coagulant / until there is a new kind of death sprung out of coal and basalt of every sparkle shivering / and something there / the cruel creaking cold in the masses of the thinking things

and the things thinking coldly examine the cold light of the existence of their possibleness who somehow in fury became

and the thought of things thinking set up new movements until firelight brush dead to hand

the hand from cold caresses the nothing if not thought the illuminating stipple as ideas enter

beginning a bird enters dives in bullet drop to the sea seeking fish and things thinking or being thought revolve in concept

the number is studied and the massive mind meanders as huge light brings fresh thoughts of flowers and ever new ideas bud

and again the thoughts of breath are cold in a warm new explosion as if thinking was

when thought pierces the spires of inversions in the chromatic fantasia where fish are said to reign in sea of green sex death

again death ugly head rears and the patient horse is there awaiting oats of kindness inside a thinking mass of gorgeously embellished flame

for the deadness of the horse is famous is the living brain of a golden rain out beyond clatter or the coldness of cold where clack

because you also reach to caress the ice mountains and the thoughtful head as it grows as huge as death of life and the sea roars like a wand

and indeed a new kind of clack clack is heard in the block land where even Eros froze the hand extended in mock forgive all this light useless the 68

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Richard Taylor

19/03/2010 8:44:46 p.m.

eternal wound and smoothly writhes

the gash of truth is the beginning of armies whose death is blue red and gold glory for where are we is the question stamped on the imperious report

the question raised is mocked by the King of Trees or Corn and all now dance unrigidly in giddy light of lust whose ancient times were as merry as young women on a boat and there is a great mercy for it drops as gentle as the soft rain to engender the thirsty roots whose new quick is now the thinking thinking thing whose fire is the crack of the sun the sun lunatic polarizes the clown of the puppet moon as all things begin to dance as if Saint Saens in macabre scenes when erotic boys to erotic girls do press

when the quickness of lust is lost in microwave hush as a pulse rebuilds the blue blocks of ice who bend with black the tongue of song

whose voice by tongue is lizard long in ancient songs where hermits thrash more secret than exit stone

and stone recalls the cold and the fingers, stretched, of their duty to the gold and the light, and the cold moving thinking things erupt again

for thinking is thinking and no height can be more than wall for the roar of time is vast and consumes the smallest sip of love

rise

for love is not cold as blocks yet hate has power as spears are seen to

nor do the molecules disturb the black machine who in steel is alive when huge the claw

for who is that shape that sea of sky and when do the gongs resound?

and sand and gobs and endless the hours and gold the seas illuminate and, and …. the fire …. the thinking fire leaps again in the aeronautic night… and no one is yet or pyro … or emerge for colours explode inside the howling head, whose single eye is mad with time

Richard Taylor

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it would be a mistake not to rise early to breakfast and to walk within the city or in the great Earth to go forth into the sounds the huge day and the curses and the voices and the clouds and the women and the men of all ilk or being; to rise and go; and maybe first the fried liver the bran the oat the milk the nuts the tea the coffee the aqua; and to set out like a small god or a thing; anything huge or small; anything of dirt or light or being, any possibility; it, not to go, a terrible waste of the sky and the lungs and the light and the motor cars, the gardens, and the old man by the bus stop or the cat the fly the air the your the you of me or the lungs the heart the legs; to go and not to miss; for there is the no final Yes infinite in meaning or sound or the wind and the sweet girl sweet flower sweet songs; and the harsh menace the secret and the rocks to avoid; but it would be error to lie abed silly head for the brain is your brain and it is your hand, for the Now shall hold it in clasp and the menace of eyes / the yes of eyes / and the no of eyes / and the No of those who fear or who do not fear to embrace the tumult of the shout and the words and the works the days; it would be wicked to lie or yet to die for we and me and your and you could venture the bran the honey the bitter death the blood the sirens the sure soft sucks the dangerous scents; and the all bright ambiguous yield of the queer beginning of sound and the perfect imperfection of day and eye the pain; the crave the hunger the swirl and the great sea the child the things the road and it all; stepping out in the city or the world the dark dust the what is next; for out of the enigma of ending and the surety of starting out and the manifest of cessation of the uncertain step as the egg holds vital the Nothing where things begin or die; but the dappling splashing light is now russet now green and now it is a cascade of man-killing ice and now the fire spreads beyond anything your mind could imagine or your ear could hear; or the clack of stones and the miasmic mesmer of the especial silence; and colours imply the plunge into the sea or the tramp of mighty boots or the quiet scratching of a match to start or stop; and yet we breathe we breathe we breathe in all tortures of joy – for there is no truth whose lie we cannot ache for in our huge aloneness; and the girl and the man or the woman or the child or any being or thing that is or imagines or images or is the dust of the potential ghost or the sign or the song or the music of create who would search; endless endless the stopping start who it wakes us and it lurches and they sup in expectation of the thing shall come; a fire in any being’s eye; the eye of all things the beating things or the soft thud in the dull sad hope as rouge and grass and the things moving always and always but never still as the grey light and the whiteness spreads and the white and the breast the muscle the stare the dog the limping man and the dripping tap the beat the great gush and the storm begin the sad wind and the huge joy of the child the heavy boot the thud the grief and the wing and the sting of song and the strange of truth and the knot and the seed in soil; the minute and the uncountable the stars the milk the flow beyond all moons the Cow of knowing the ignorance in the great library of towers where the nodding smile is a book on a beach of dreams is the truck and the blood of the what of all things are beyond all arks or shelves and the sea and the songs and the many musicks and the capering antics of ancient Man… …. and the eternal lust of Woman and the power the power the power and the all generative regenerative mighty Deathlife ka’ora of the Two

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Richard Taylor

19/03/2010 8:44:46 p.m.

Lake Rotoiti Two cars one long drive down metal roads your sister screams at her husband who swerves the car stops dust swirls settle on windows block my view a storm of dried clay and words they both turn to laugh We’ve shocked her I am still green, dumbed by my polite religious upbringing although I’ve a vague recognition of their strange complicity.

I blink like an impala in the glow of their eyes.

My face numb as you smile mindless, comfortable from the other car.

In this scooped out tourist spot Belinda Diepenheim

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abandoned in winter blood veined grey stones smooth and oval from friction the water an aged slab.

You hold our child to shield her from the Antarctic wind as it cuts my skin We skim stones mine hops and sinks through mountain ice melt and choppy waves but yours keeps going on the surface skipping crests until we can’t see it.

That’s how you do it, you say flick your wrist, it’s easy.

Except no one else can do it like you.

My belly aches I look for midden sites find rocks and a moment of solitude.

I hear your sister say From the air Lake Rotoiti’s the shape of a skinny heart but a bit distorted.

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Belinda Diepenheim

19/03/2010 8:44:46 p.m.

I laugh and you turn in surprise.

Your sister asks what’s funny?

You forgot icy, I say.

Oh, but that’s a given. She smiles as if she never screamed with fear on the windy one lane hill road sheer drops to the side near sending us over the edge.

I say, so it is.

We walk back to the cars and I get in with her and her husband but this time I choose it.

You frown as through the rear window our baby and I wave goodbye.

Belinda Diepenheim

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74

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Ted Jenner

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

motuihe midden (for scott hamilton) motuihe midden in scoria and ash clay waste & cinders: if we suppose we found 2 or 3 flake adzes a spatula & trowel from last year(!) a clavicle buried hair teeth pressed into the bilious greywacke with a mineral vein running down the middle hard solid argillite do we return to that blessed state from which we fell at birth do we do you think? or is it silence you prefer?

Ted Jenner

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75

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

Yes shrimps limpets crabs clams he barknuckled the rocks cracked his skull at the back of a cave spat clots of blood into the clear waters of a tidal pool now he rests among thick strands of kelp nudged by the currents of a warm ocean mist haze dew clouds the rain always falls in torrents when the god of fire comes looking for fire ~ 76

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Richard von Sturmer

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

featurelessness is her true form raindrops glide across her smooth shoulders beans crack apart in the cold ashes delicate and close dense and tight coming out of the water her shadow on the sand could be African could be Chinese rice stalks flax bamboo shoots reeds ~ in Venezuela the red ibis of the Orinoco in Hawaii spurts of lava flung from Kilauea

Richard von Sturmer

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our tongues, our lungs, our cells molecules atoms electrons as the light fades from the magnolia blossoms she switches on the lamp ~ rain sleet hail ice frost on the ground the tinkling of spoons and bowls yes the way snow collects under the railings of a balcony yes

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Richard von Sturmer

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

the sharp scent of pine needles before a thunderstorm yes a straight bridge that casts a curved shadow yes pinecones opening as the smoke clears away yes and washed ashore a leather wallet— no name inside just pebbles and sand

Richard von Sturmer

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79

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

Greece The wide estuary mouth is lazy. Spun with silt and clay, unseen eddies ripple treacherously in from the ocean floor.

Into the lull a horse trips, submerged to his white splashed throat – he is beautiful, dappled chestnut coat dark with sweat, bulbous eyes like ripe, black mulberries his knees pop the sea’s surface,

hooves hurry for ground to answer, ears a tensile line along his neck. He lurches sucked under out to open ocean, to surge – to surface, limbs bolt and quiver, mane a beating wing, pupils a blossoming cactus.

He tries to learn this sea-bound body from archaic memory born in muscle, but in the throes of an awful transformation, the propeller kick and pumping head are not yet his. As a child I heard of sea eels, their larva leaves of flesh dispersed like seeds of an idea. Transparent, they were a mystery to people, so unlike eels they were.

Flowing for years with the gulf stream, the glasseels filtered beneath the Baltic sea, migrating on lucid currents to the Mediterranean. They scrambled into the mouths of rivers answering to no-one, apologetic to no-one, ten thousand slivers as fluent as water over stones and between the detritus of branches, they encountered, for the first time, sand and burrowing through to higher inlets, gills and hearts just now visible, they pigmented into the eels they did not know they were.

Look! people yelled, pointing down to the blue, clear ocean, a horse swims.

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Sarah Jane Barnett

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

The Picnic We climbed up the gorge once, to Samuel Butler’s hut, which happened to be a memorial plaque set in dense gorse.

Yellow flowers on a khaki hill.

It is a story you embellish in company add the sighting of a Tarr, his quiet black face rotating in slow motion; the picnic where we laid goat’s cheese, apples and sweet sultanas on a home-spun jersey that you still wear; or the encounter with a skink, skin wrapped around his skeleton, which when you reached out slipped into the rock.

Contours She is relieved to change the furniture around. Her shoulder slides the queen mattress, bridles it to fit along the wall. There is a calmness in any clean level: a sureness that comes from the line of the bed flowing into the smooth bedside table.

Real or hypothetical, the sky outside is either blue or heavy with clouds or as it is that morning, a pinkish-grey punctured with cascades of rain. There is no lull as she walks up the bridle path and down its sliding gradient.

From this elevation the city soars symmetrical, a far off island in relief against the furniture and shoulders of the horizon. Her body is a flat grey line.

In the wind the botanical gardens lift up, unequalled above the city’s given level. The trees mix their easy lines with the sky. She cannot estimate the number of branches where animals and birds cascade along their gradient. Elevated above their tops is the dome of the observatory. A white round ache, like the shoulder of a man, hypothetical.

Sarah Jane Barnett

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81

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Electroencephalographia 1 The Law Met the Coast Her city provided guidance our volume is a merci Tolerance of semiotics produced an extraordinary diverse sample or commentary.

Students of signs gather and become abstractions ideas are interested in. a group sense and working embody in engaging something called whose name said “around” we were to be less… (the person “a force of nature” in Philosophy) A time featured an important community she retired / ran / died - this led to an expansion Our lineage is international.

A body was closely with the Law. Because to carry people like producing what follows is short and various - it celebrates the joins 2 Substance Foreign facts treat foreign laws common sense choices needs opposition / its dictionary “tolerance” to indulgence or differing exists / Practices are abnormal.

A thing is shifting to match a place for setting aside analysis.

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Stephanie Christie

19/03/2010 8:44:49 p.m.

A pure status is absolute there.

When a authority authorized relativity be found legal the duality might wish to tolerate and only be non-law nature but the standpoint is an intermediary between social space and a threshold acceptance as a binary) and hierarchies can be a capacity for range…

To answer the study the spheres rise through the transactions.

A meaningful relationship is why we work.

3 Our Iran Schooled to think about an ideas is an challenge we do not explore epistemologies.

Covering the globe together we are legitimate but not helpful a civilized body kind of critical of us as a bridge

is part of our collective

our conscious our ideas entail came free… trouble interests ideologies.

Colorblindness is true also of language, movement encouraged into consequence - we are willing even where the surface is better.

Follow the stark Medicine point of view (how key to “otherness” and trade) this criminal court “brain fingerprinting” - for reversing, apply the sake and the construction of deliverance and security.

Tacitly turn to fix identity. / a step poses / able to intertwine Stephanie Christie

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tension pertains

/ tackles

A Rhetorical European model Uses Argument to shape the Right of Human conclusion - post is blocked denial of the fear under scrutiny shifted a progression towards disillusion.

He referred to co-existence.

Wake the space of a fact

4 Post-traumatic Willingness is Subject Terror: Handicapped Armed the politics in ordinary national September’ America crystallized to Boston Red Sox to a reasoning rooted in vacancy The stadium symbol is governance (not only of the emptiness of the few...) the removal reveals nothing in the Act that trumps / / Disability has prioritized all members has rendered the real intoxicated emergency Fear’s dominion of upheaval is Your Enemy. chronicles discover a cohesive minority “Other” Asian Jews and gays are all xenophobic in tandem prosecute artists hate-speech by regarding subways relating persecution of free majority religion…

Provided are attempts to shape the new exclusion of her essay this volume of image, in bigotry, forms.

5 Trading in Medicine abstract Lawyers are words Life issues reinforce one to power the theory.

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Stephanie Christie

19/03/2010 8:44:50 p.m.

hardly harden these emperors (robes relevant as becomes the Courts) Today’s identity in social groundbreaking otherness is what the person has stored in his brain. “brain-scan” for the famous is in each “fingerprint” The mechanisms of the other chain shows inter-discursivity itself. //cyberspace in the virtual effects …last quick hotel lost year sheets...

Ask where behind the question?

Everyday objects perceive the dead that left peace flake of hair control markers to my perception.

The guest may be ingredients and feel essential.

My tree traced the hands of illnesses survived, my saliva cannot future in this room (unfold as I leave 6 Support was Foundation Aristotle the individual is Reading the embraces a conscious consciousness even invisible frames such genetic trivialities. make yes did could all innocence memory are my existence (like) (like) Libido/desire do not master indeterminacy.

Our dominated walls form content we question new sciences …casualties are nested in law…

Observe how a web fortifies important political strategy.

Future ethical refinements are upcoming surgery.

The research became clear of facial bioethics these are linked with the character of a play the trading intertwinings correspond Stephanie Christie

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primarily expressiveness is of major relation Issues show the inverse Issues are language on hand Nowadays an ethics of life levels motives modern,/ danger,/ features yet underlined how rich speech is so there appears reason capabilities of a mind in mimesis this concept embraces those better : post-verbal always 7 The Liaison shows a science of missing.

Knowledge emerges in view of electronic human sciences.

Remain silent about forces of the case of fit dynamics of the skein together three threads alike in our identity discourses undertake : determinacy, security, insight‌ The sign exploited so well alive since the images of his brain set him free murder / the fact was breaking / news suppressed The scene is only a fragment since 1977 (see the pictures) Murdered in a car in a year of testimony a juvenile status was parallel with the accomplice recanted testimonies lied after he maintained his conviction.

Pay his privacy what his self-incrimination envisioned.

New readings developed the technique.

The science must be tested‌

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Stephanie Christie

19/03/2010 8:44:50 p.m.

LATONA worked from the book Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier. pub. 1618.

In traditional alchemy emblems form a progression: the white milk/sulphur at the beginning of the cycle is also the black of putrefaction, the siblings who rise to kill the dragon, and the red of successful transformation.

I

Wind carried him in his belly he whose father is Sol and mother is Luna must before he comes into the light be carried in fumes —

~

grand theme of Boreas in his wind is a scale too large for me — urban trees, graffiti art, women’s jeans crossing the street is more my century a nurse, the earth as her torso wolf suckling infants — animal milk converts into the thing nourishing not the element of earth — which is dryness elemented earth — nurses through accumulation, coagulation, fixation, conversion — I no longer question I know what this means

~

Brett Cross

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87

19/03/2010 8:44:50 p.m.

go to the woman washing clothes make after her manner — namely water faeces and crudities purged as a beast’s bones dried and drenched repeatedly in a field reject to polished stone the stone will float on water the manuscript says the water is philosophic fire

~

a brother and sister stand on a wide mud road leading to a city, they link arms face-to-face, a stranger stands beside them toasts them with a cup of love incest is celebrated on the by-way like-with-like you have led her into a room without the philtre love would not last they produce an offspring that is spurious but legitimate

~

sister coddles a toad to her breast as it swells gross with her milk she falls weaker and weaker, dies the monstrous birth is her child like the toad described by William of Newberry 88

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Brett Cross

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that lived underground by the bishop’s curse an artificial chain around its neck — so this toad is embellished, but not outwardly, inwardly with natural gold — to wit the stone which far exceeds gold in virtue, and is commonly set in gold for its protection

II

sew your gold in the white foliate earth as farmers have their soil so do chemists so that which cannot last in an individual is continued in the species —

~

in order to become young the Old Man locked himself away in a House of Dew with a single tree as his companion as a deer sheds its horns, a crab its shell, a snake its skin — philosophers say that the Stone is like the Old Man — it starts white but as a young man — it becomes red they also say the tree is his daughter

that it came from him and they also say that some remedies are more troublesome than old age itself

Brett Cross

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~

such are the difficulties of allegory different authors using the same words to mean different things and different words to mean the same things that such persons as search often despair to find any end to this Art — so lest a man should tax himself with overmuch study or vex himself with experiments philosophers use this emblematic speech — that Latona must be whitened and their books torn lest their Hearts be broken for most books are so obscurely written they can only be understood by their authors but their chief work is how to whiten Latona Latona who is the imperfect body of Sol & Luna — mother of Apollo and Diana –— if found in filth must be purified if found worthy must be corrupted placed in dung she will grow white and from the White Lead can be made the Red which is the beginning and end of the Work

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Brett Cross

19/03/2010 8:44:50 p.m.

III

take an egg and pierce it with a fiery sword external heat is the first mover which introduces a new form an embryo freed from the womb obtains another more perfect shape —

~

the patience of the potter his methods of dryness and moisture the clay sets in warm air then the violence of fire condensed to durable stone resists both heat and water as the philosophers the result is the same a common stone the moisture and heat joined are a winged lioness and a red lion — and if you ask ‘who ever saw a winged lioness?’ you should journey to a deep valley near Mount Cythaeron, where are seen none but flying lionesses — you should take the red lion from his place on top of the mountain and lead him down into the valley, where he will couple with the lioness to produce a whelp both genuine and generous, who may easily be known by his paw

~

Agua Permanens is made after putrefaction and the separation of the elements ie: brother and sister [Sol & Luna] created combine to kill the Dragon which begat them from its corpse is extracted Argent Vive that is the Agua Permanens of the philosophers the Dragon cannot die unless killed by both siblings — the Dragon denotes Mercury Brett Cross

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both volatile and fixed — hence two serpents spiral Mercury’s Caduceus, whereas Saturn has only one which devours his tail — the Philosophic Dragon is vigilant and lively and is not easily killed, the safest approach through trickery is befriend it, though this deceit in other matters is a crime, it is not in this situation as in death Agua Permanens collected is used to restore life

IV

if you kill one of the four they will all die three faces beheld in one Father according to Hermes— if one perishes the others’ suicide so as not to live in infamy and sorrow —

~

the Philosophic Rosary has a medium-high stone wall surrounding it — some have thought to sneak in and steal the treasure, only to find themselves in darkness, no single thing discernible to the eye — others have imagined a divine fire behind the walls, or wild beasts patrolling a wilderness where only a mad man could walk untouched; others still Gods or their ghostly subordinates speaking foreign tongues that disperse as you approach — the truth is the philosophers talk of a garden, simple and ordered symmetrical beds of complimentary colours, four locked gates he who tries to enter without a key is like he who would walk without feet; on a hill beside the Rosary five figures watch— Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Orpheus and Hermes—Father of knowledge

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Brett Cross

19/03/2010 8:44:50 p.m.

~

the King is swimming in the sea battleships anchored before a vast city in the distance if you rescue him he will prove a great reward if you rescue him he will fill your palm with rubies if you rescue him he will not rule with tyranny or force but with a clemency that is genuine and peculiar to him

~

out of two waters you will make one, sanctity — I reached the river of Sybaris where I sat down cattle were wandering up to the stream and lowering heads to drink — as they did their hides turned black I grew tired of blackness and left Sybaris to walk to river Crathis, there I sat down and watched as cattle wandered up to the river and drank — the water turned them white I followed Crathis down to where it mingled with Sybaris, at sunset whiteness began to appear on top of the river, this lingered to midnight when it was dispersed by red of a wondrous nature, this lasted till dawn when a chill blackness coated the river like oil, this lasted till sunset

Brett Cross

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SUGARTOWN 7 a.m.

See the blond boy with the sleepy eyes lighting up at the bus stop fresh from the shower, dressed to kill in his radiant skin.

And that redhead - dream tousled, smiling sadly, the memory of a hard-on smouldering in his shorts.

Look at those boys straggling home from a night on the town shagged and shattered, sore and soft, triumphant in the panoply of youth.

And that boy over there – see the one with the pale eyes, blinded by his lashes in the Autumn glare, panicked by his own beauty and the splendour of the future.

Darling boys of Sugartown I sear in your heat.

The weight of you buckles me.

I tremble for you at 7 o’clock on the morning of Thursday the 16th of April, 2009.

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David Lyndon Brown

19/03/2010 8:44:51 p.m.

TE HENGA 16.8.09 0645. for Sue and Chris Today all may be well.

All may be well today, (or at least ok) because the dawn rises up from the bush, because every leaf on every tree is, because the stream comes down, because that bird crosses the sky; because the door opens into the lit room, because that chair rests upon the floor, because the chair is revealed.

All may be well today; all manner of things may be well.

David Lyndon Brown

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FLORILEGIUM I will leave in August when the first freesias arrive; their anaesthetic breath perhaps will ease the‌ transit.

I will leave when the camellias are lit by the frost and the azaleas, also the magnolias and the holy rhododendron rises up unimpeachable.

I will leave shouting I will leave shouting in a conflagration of beauty.

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David Lyndon Brown

19/03/2010 8:44:51 p.m.

UNDER THE MUSEUM dawn: a conclave of saints lights up under the museum must be el greco’s boys louche and lanky blue with cold turn around and eye up that caravaggio gang faggots pass the joint bro turn around and crack up turn around and check those robes bro totally gay fuck off the sun strikes the harbour ignites a bell chimes the saints ascend: opening time.

David Lyndon Brown

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ON THE JETTY: BARKER’S BAY High tide ‌the wind has dropped.

Time to pray

to the ocean to the far headland to the promontory that bird those two

islands.

Listen: the past

flows

the future ebbs

over there;

here and here.

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David Lyndon Brown

19/03/2010 8:44:51 p.m.

(How can this be explained?)

The sky consults the sea on the colours of the day.

The sun leans on the hill.

In the fathoms something shifts, turns, surfaces – a small flotilla of illuminations.

I remember now.

I remember.

I remember.

I am here.

You are elsewhere.

I am here.

(What is it about water?)

David Lyndon Brown

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If the World is thought im Viv Kitson

doves dine on last night’s rice such little things make a life make me realize you’re not here or there * I play vocals today – Tanita Tikaram & Dylan Billy Bragg & Wilco when Elvis Costello catches your breath my breath suddenly * my mind is racing remembering our flat in Mosman 100

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Andrew Burke

19/03/2010 8:44:51 p.m.

up from the ferry wharf and that mad dog running around the yard and jumping up at the quarry face and jumping up and jumping up at the quarry face where Buddha sat in an alcove Time reported Ginsberg saying ‘I’m wild like a wild flower’ and Corso chorused ‘And I’m crazy like a daisy’ living in Sydney in ‘62 the Rosicrucian upstairs with an old lady face and a young woman body convinced me the world is thought & I’ve thought it ever since

* in Viv’s last email to me A strange incident in the hospital: I was wheeled down to the charge nurse in the X-ray unit for admission and she leaned over me and said: “Who wrote these lines – ‘Jazz at the El Rocco and rats at Circular Quai’?” A rather bizarre Andrew Burke

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moment, given the circumstances! After the initial shock, I replied: “I did. But I wrote them when I was 20.” Charge nurse turned out to be N…. B…. who started 1st year uni just as I was completing my last. She apparently came to some reading you and I organised (did we?) and is a friend of T…. H….’s.

Don’t know if you recall her.

I’ll have to go now. I have to email my sister to discuss how we break my cancer news to Mum. Then I’ll have to phone my sister-in-law tomorrow for ditto. In fact, after nearly a fortnight in hospital, there are a lot of things to sort out…

Love, Viv * you’re not here or there beware of darkness * you pay for the smokes somebody should pay for this not you you pay too much for smokes *

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‘I would delude them all by dialing backward.’ - Jerome Rothenberg when I was young and you were young did you try walking backwards to stop time? like ‘I wish I could go back and change things’ I wound a family clock the other way and broke it time kept on * your wife blames your body for your death – she said We’re cremating the body today but her tone was accusatory she may have a point your body your ship your horse your house your cave your clubhouse Andrew Burke

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your friend your lightning rod in the mirror you looked nothing alike * when when the double-you hen ‘Y’s a crooked letter and Z’s no better’ the scrabble of our mouths from our mothers’ tongues * I wrote to a friend: ‘So I am released as he was released.

He isn’t here anymore for me to love and disagree with, but once you’ve snicked a catch to slip it’s best to walk. & he’s back in the pavilion now.’ * if the world is thought and you are gone has someone stopped thinking of you?

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Linfen Morning (China) 6.30am. The overture to day in Linfen is played with household hammers on commercial building projects. Cicadas sing gently in madrigal phrases. The irregular rhythm of the hammers gradually joins the first honking vehicles of morning, various toots on a full range of flutes. The street vendors put out their vegetables and fruits and squat beside. A few have weighing machines for basic conversion of goods to cash.

There seems no hurry here, no anger, no overt competition, no conflict between workers and bosses. The town grows daily, and the shops change hands overnight. One man is gone from the streetscape. He wrote an anti-government message in his shop window and was not there the next day. A new shop has opened there now, selling fashion for young ladies.

By 8am the town is a bustle, going about its business. A pale grey smog hangs in the air which a light morning breeze seems incapable of shifting. Three mature citizens sweep away the remnants of last night’s fireworks with bushbrush brooms. at night, fireworks. at dawn, torn red paper shells dye the gutters pink.

Andrew Burke

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From The Centre Out It felt very strange, putting the needle down.

Was she black or white? It felt very strange, putting the needle down. I once knew a guy we called King.

The story evolves from the centre out, not linear like written language, so keep your eyes and ears peeled. Was she black or white? When it comes down to it, I think various tribes came from various sources. It felt very strange, putting the needle down. Jimmy insists he is not partially deaf—just has a hearing impairment. I once knew a guy we called King. Birdsong is linear, except kookaburras when laughter falls out like a split garbage bag.

Once I thought jokes held our family together—and music.

The story evolves from the centre out, not linear like written language, so keep your eyes and ears peeled. Time is a measure of change. Was she black or white? It’s a different form of creativity for CD covers. When it comes down to it, I think various tribes came from various sources. I’m upstairs now with the turntable and they are downstairs with their family stories. It felt very strange, putting the needle down.

My father brought home a turntable, a pick-up he called it, which coupled up with alligator clips to the radio speakers.

Jimmy, our host, insists he is not partially deaf—just has a hearing impairment. The album cover shows her to be white, perhaps. I once knew a guy we called King. Billy Thorpe was big news, singing with the Aztecs at Surf City up in the Cross. Birdsong is linear, except kookaburras when laughter falls out like a split garbage bag. They are climbing out on limbs of the family tree, identifying and shaking their heads in love or mystery.

This table is made from the jarrah floorboards of Jimmy’s old office, you know, when he had the yard. Once I thought jokes held our family together—and music. Way out here in the bush, trees grow unfettered by powerlines and ancient ideas of English gardens. The story evolves from the centre out, 106

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not linear like written language, so keep your eyes and ears peeled. More wine? Time is a measure of change. Because the old dualisms of melody and beat shift and change, each generation (each decade for the marketing gurus), has its own music. Was she black or white? Most times you can hear the emotion in the voice. It’s a different form of creativity for CD covers. Globalisation is reducing popular music to muzak, don’t you think? When it comes down to it, I think various tribes came from various sources. We used to dance and sing these songs at the top of our lungs! I’m upstairs now with the turntable and they are downstairs with their family stories. Morgana King goes with an Old Style Red. It felt very strange, putting the needle down. What’s keeping you up there? My father brought home a turntable, a pick-up he called it, which coupled up with alligator clips to the radio speakers. Years later I had a tranny-six on the beach, hearing the Hit Parade through tinny speakers against the sound of the surf and the whistling wind. Jimmy, our host, insists he is not partially deaf—just has a hearing impairment. My wife is downstairs talking about their childhood with her sister, how she protected her, the time when, and all the memories overlap and the tales become one Big Tale like a patchwork rug. The album cover shows her to be white, perhaps. For some reason, the unreasonable linking of memories, a twisted limb of family history, I hear Noel Coward at Las Vegas as I turn the volume up on the Tijuana Brass.

I knew a guy we called King once. My first fulltime job in a manufacturing factory in Sydney, King was a monosyllabic pencil-thin boy in his late teens, with long blonde hair and tight jeans. Billy Thorpe was big news, singing with the Aztecs at Surf City up in the Cross. I spent my nights at the El Rocco listening to John Sangster, Errol Buddle, et al.

Birdsong is linear, except kookaburras when laughter falls out like a split garbage bag. They are picking through the tip of old times as I walk downstairs. They are climbing out on limbs of the family tree, identifying and shaking their heads in love or mystery. The past is present and the future is history.

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5 Snapshots in the Rain in the rain - 1 blonde in a green parka eating a banana walking beneath an umbrella staring at the ground in the rain - 2 blonde eating a banana in a green parka walking beneath an umbrella staring at the ground in the rain - 3 blonde in a green parka staring at the ground eating a banana walking beneath an umbrella in the rain - 4 blonde staring at the ground walking beneath an umbrella in a green parka eating a banana in the rain - 5 blonde in a green parka walking beneath an umbrella staring at the ground eating a banana

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Envoi Waking without refreshment, no shine to, no mirror images. Lopsy tide, then, and the list of friendly rape in the dreams. My hovers feet and solves the constant world we have ideas, food, friends, help, abandonment libraráos de mil enojos we have postponement, sounds to your side fires coughing, hills, bruises, cold grounds risk harangue. The clouds collate mid-year your head a tiny effort to see past.

Mommy plaid in scape, the magnets lost your pockets, your skin left hanging open and you cannot see for circle close or hiding curled toward waves a girl even with the tops of foam tips the girl you scrutinize she curls you are cured she rocks the bottom with gone eyes not yet thinks she’s individual she won’t real be real she will think she is intact she cures her state deciduous, perfect, self-met que como ladrón famoso she will never smile with invidious wherewithal given

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Love story Underneath the freeway he was planning things apartments temporary in the brain long avenues of water strung completely

We held our hands dripping significance as though waiting for a plug to universalize an inner storm that beats beside his head Take this, said gesture hard awake in the cranium bellows fresh circles drew around his mouth a man gone sleepy in the cloth like animated dolls that understand Where we are music threatens to disintegrate scissors paring back our point of view the fence of courage, nominals, little light bent down to fake it while she stands arms akimbo, sliding acidly through troth

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adorno

your tongue is not flowers speech I’ve heard as other than what you constantly the hands fluttering in air as I know the slightest whiff of deviation from the mean circumstance the words have caved outside of stone fallen off the edge of the sign your hands are making with your body I ask the question fervour when you moved like that you say a slight peak of the fingers outside a swoop of arms I want to do that with the room’s sore terminus push its beacon out aligned with the missed ingredient from the fine flesh trembled coldly when the spear followed its legend all the way from this rainy building to the ground

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From Tender Girl (a novel) New neighbourhood She speaks without ambition flags all over her eyes. Palmate hussars, fenced guests, dragonfly wastes very near the university in town. They are finishing the building nearby and her tassels keep getting tangled in the architecture when she passes. The lid curls are arterial in the faces she goes by, glancing with their own ideas passing. The tiny holes for breathing diagnostics. Her hands hold out precise lines blood lines, floaters, grains in the vessels, tiny valves in the lenses, in the harnessed trains half-tread kind of released, the skin trawling derisive abnegation, the woman with the phone on her ear in the reflection across the street, teeth officed, gardens upright with the cow lines historically ghosting, the poke of old exultations mixed right up with the sparrow hawk who pesters out your light. Duration, the moon they will ask the ruddy boys nervous Girl raspberry hat drooping slowly from her head.

Town crier She uncovered tears inside her she manifested a crier all alone she was not with a program but rather lamenting the town she had to leave. A basket now, serviette stall and plain weaving, reading Geraldine of the Passions, organizers all cooing birds, deserted rail station at 8 p.m., a man walking with some idea of what’s next, someone who meant well who has teeth in the alley of circular progress, tickets as a replacement for fantasy. The cold way out for a fly perched on the book in her hands, he told her we have a dream of rescue from our lives what does that mean. A stranger comes in to smile without reason wants to tell his story he doesn’t work but knows his life is

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good with beauty sharpness pleasure bid more fair more beautiful magnet more a chance than act exceeding age more death too fine, he leans and lovely smiles his eyes and posture exceedingly as not having to give ideas more direct than softly hollowed grid, as instruments fair play entanglements as runaway gambit silver hair more gracious than revealed as though the gods were real tomatoes alveolar. The laughter of a will gone fabula, temperate as though immensely could give her something solidly he asked the flowers all over his face veils walls perfume. Her head swells like candy. Your stories charm me out. Without sin or promises the jeans hold up finer than syringes grace as allocations inside guests, soft and yielded like fat dreams no one remembers without relation comes the train.

Bleeding Love pouring from her veins the metric being achieved. The liquid forms the giant tethers the men like balloons floating up there the city fortunate in having no tall buildings people who are all so tread. On her feet armies, carving through the volunteer dirt.

Perky Her face had fallen off and she was groping around to get it. The men attached to her were floating around in the air on giant tethers, she struck talky since they were far enough away hello hello, she found her face and hatched it back on upside down, it twisted easily and the strings get close she wiggles she undoes the notebooks strapped to her side and begins to strip out pieces of paper floating up for consider, renewal. The giant earth is tentacles, is hologram.

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Revelation A book she picked up in the doctor’s office promised her she would not be in this small town forever. She read it tenderly, missing the import but inventing a new series of events that tied quite nicely with the insistent narrative whose sounds were flat against her waist when she tucked the book inside her homemade dress to think of later. The doctor had nothing to do with touching, he was all ears, so the exchanged value of their talk was far from the book pushing into her flesh. At home she slept with it, rolling over on the bed on the pages whose ink made no transfer.

Pavlovian Cold clay gentle formed on her chest to convince her linen paper in spite of lost originals that she had really written that telegram it was already on its way with its silly code enciphered it is crazy recognizing for the sake of your own genuine understanding of flaws as though the mountain Latin would be missed not so much blue jeans as chilly isosceles I have had to disemulate to get my honour back too otherwise today especially in the spare curiosity of waiting it’s absurd there’s a thickness to the declaration after writing what will you take the paper to the funeral and show them then like truth’s the irrelevant floater in your eye when the ashes are floating happily away?

Pageantry Decked and clocked, cleaned and stroked, the punch card settled in its pocket so she can go on break and lie like a bag in the sun, skin stripped of salty varnish, ready to roll. Her compatriots glued to the television for the latest,

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leaders whose tongues hang out like dogs on fire, their tails being slowly consumed from behind, the flames rolling forward like small bits of news, waste pieces, the total hunger of the ears that burn the sun whose passage much like replacement parts can make a mock-up elocution the whole square would listen to, but for the hostel kids whose tempered smiles like cubicles can soothe her parching skin. Go back. Don’t go back. Go back.

Aisles She has no money, she must forage in her baggage, the wet insides, the leaves.

The little holes for breathing spoke their parts inside her ears tiny. Click click, click click click. The red door, beyond which is the sea. Her new friend brought her little holes for breathing. On the forest floor she pants, she coats herself.

Her new friend is on the speaker, is the speaker. Hello. Hello hello. Girl smiles.

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EMO by Jack Ross Review by Richard Taylor Jack Ross’s EMO may be seen to be book three in a trilogy of post-modern and innovative novels (or texts) of Joycean or Nabokovian complexity and intricacy. In the journal Pander I reviewed the first book, Nights With Giordano Bruno; a violently new, extraordinary and vital work. Gabriel White in brief 37 gives a longer, more detailed and highly informative analysis of the second book The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis.

I found EMO to be more problematic than Nights. While with Nights I found I could follow the discontinuous narratives (an ongoing “story” as compelling as anything by Ovid or in the 1001 Nights), EMO was more resistive. Unlike White, in his discussion of Atlantis, I largely ignored the abstruse and mysteriously arcane symbols and images that appeared on the verso of the book with reference to medieval and religious codes and mysteries. Largely ignored, but not totally – these images and diagrams, as with EMO, add to the fascination of the text. All books in the trilogy are immediately “eye-catching” and the visual effect (even without any concentrated interpretation of its meaning) is itself like that of experiencing visual art – art that does so much outside the tidy bounds of “normative” writing and becomes the totality of many media, rejecting being either a “novel” or “poetry” or “painting”. In fact, it is a complex of all genres, or at least potentially so, reminiscent of Joanna Paul, whose work Ross references in EMO and who was largely misunderstood in the way she brilliantly integrated language and the visual.

My previous review focused on the raison d’être of Nights. EMO, however, seemed a much more difficult book – indeed, at an immediate level, none of Ross’s books are easy. Very few significant, disturbing (and EMO can be disturbing), challenging, or important literary works are “easy”. It was inertia that held me back from “getting into” EMO, and once the train of my ennui began to move, I was goaded by my confrontation, my struggle with EMO the text, work, novel, or project, to wrestle with its meaning.

I engaged with EMO; it threw me to the ground, I rose up and cursed it, I struggled again, I launched into Google, I consulted books, I read whole books, I read much on Ross’s many blogs… finally I was thrown to the ground and stunned into awareness, albeit one with some reservations nagging me, of the immensity of this book called EMO. 116

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In terms of pure formal complexity, “visual beauty”, originality of form and intellection connected to a strong underlying ethic, EMO is a unique masterpiece of an innovative and original kind, rarely seen in N.Z literature.

Jack Ross has long had a very real and intense fascination with stories and tales: in particular science fiction, horror, fantasy, stories of Borges and others, along with other literature; and most prominently in EMO, the stories from 1001 Nights, and those of Ovid’s Metamophoses. Despite an extensive and sometimes disturbing use of sex, violence, Fantasy, Gothic, and of irony, it is an ultimately engrossing and enchanting tale, or a tale about writing or of writing magical tales. And whatever else it is, EMO is homage to Story, and the pure magic of The Tale.

For a while, EMO seemed to me to be so replete with a bewilderment of so many images, themes, symbols, and ideas that it caused me, as above, to wrestle with it. As one proceeds, the book is ‘redeemed’ by an intensity of concern and a powerful conscious presence, felt or experienced in the dialogues in the opening section between the protagonists (who I will refer to as The Writer and Eva Android), and the sad letters of Eva to Eva von Braun or the strange one-sided e-versation by the “helper” who is assisting “Ovid” or The Writer (again) in the final part of the book. The book has wonderfully crafted dialogues, and the effect of these is almost eerie in its subtlety, an illumination of thought and feeling. Together with the richness of its structural complex, and Ross’s fascination with The Arabian Nights, Ovid, his exile, and his Metamorphoses, and indeed with the “transformation” book The Golden Ass, EMO is itself a book of stories within stories. It also has or is “generated by” magical myth inside its main “story”, like The Golden Ass by Apuleius – which has a major, beautiful mythological story of high love and mystery: the famous Cupid and Psyche chapter which influenced a major poem by James Merrill. This story, like the story of Beauty and the Beast, which “interrupts” the first part of Ross’s book, is both sheerly beautiful and redemptive (given the rather hostile and near inhuman atmosphere of that and other parts of the book).

While it is complex, and may seem weird or bizarre to many accustomed to less “tangential” literature in structure and form, EMO is ultimately about the human dilemma. It asks questions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the writer, writing, ‘art’, mystery, personal relationships, the occult, cloning, robots, the incursion of technology in our lives, “high” and “low” culture, history, Richard Taylor

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horror and Sci-fi, fantasy, consciousness itself, compassion, and madness.

Madness and ‘blindness’ in their real and mythical or symbolic aspects play significant roles.

Blindness is major leitmotif throughout the work. Blindness as moral blindness, blindness as blindness: and blindness as in “seeing”. There is a history of great thinkers and poets who were “seers”, or who by becoming blind were given the gift of prophecy (like Tiresias), writers such as Homer, Milton, and even James Joyce (who was very nearly blind most of his life).

In the first part of the book, The Writer (unnamed), is blinded by women crying that he is (as Ted Hughes was accused of being), the murderer of his wife. He was, but as it turns out, blindness is linked to madness and his act of murder could have been one of mercy. His wife was driven mad when she witnessed her own father (another Ovid / Oedipus figure) performing vivisections on clone-androids who spurt real blood to the thrill of most spectators – but when he sees his daughter in the crowd he immediately blinds himself. Her husband is himself later blinded, paradoxically, for his compassion (although this isn’t clear), and he is executed after there is a revolution. Eva, however, remains loyal to him – so we have another theme – fidelity.

EMO is not simply a modern or postmodern rerun of various Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. While I want to emphasize the essential, almost pregnant question of ‘being’ in EMO, I have to say that my own reading of all three books, and the analysis of The Imaginary Museum

by Gabriel White, reveals also an intricate and remarkable configuration of interconnecting ideas, symbologies, word and number play, duplexes and symmetries, mythology, and the use of various fonts, pictures, and the image itself in, or of, or as text itself. Image becomes text, text image – or it can as the reader proceeds. Hence, as above, the book’s text, as it appears in its totality on the page, is art: but that ‘art’, appealing to the eye, also includes its underlying design, appealing to and stimulating the mind / eye.

Added to all this is the theme of metamorphosis, change, and thus translation, and hence that of translation in the book and translation of texts and poems (Ovid, French poets, and many others). As things transform in nature, so does language itself – and so does EMO itself. People seem to die, places are indeterminate in place and time, and we are not sure whether we are in a dream inside the novel, or inside a story, or inside a story inside another 118

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story, or an infinite set of stories; and neither are we sure who the author is!

The first Writer or author dies in what may be a literal re-enactment of the Death of the Author, but as we are forewarned in the “subtext”, Jack Ross has disappeared (in another novel not necessarily connected to EMO). This is comical in the way Umberto Eco’s postmodernism can be, but we (or I at least) are fascinated by this part of the complex cryptic of the author’s or the non-author’s work. Meanwhile, the tragedies and events, while disturbing on one level, are hilarious on another. On Mars, for example, women are executed by guillotine (another “sign” of Revolution?) in the act of sex and a protagonist is “discovered” walking at night into Otherworld holding the head of her decapitated friend and ex lover. “Other world” is not only “other” “world” but the other world Ovid experiences in exile in Tomis, and it is also a novel by F S Flint, a poet, imagist and friend of Pound.

Many many “cutting edge” and multidisciplinary works of art or literature (however defined) involve visual, musical, kinetic and multi-dimensional phenomena. EMO, in so far as it can be classified as a novel, would sit uneasily on shelves with normative, or popular contemporary novels. It may never be a ‘hot seller’, and I am not saying it is “better” than those popular novels. But EMO, whether it too becomes a good seller or not, is brave attempt in that it acknowledges the artist’s struggle for freedom of expression; and by being what it is, it confronts us with contemporary reality in new ways.

How is this done? EMO is structured orthogonally. That is, the main text, which is vertical and in bold, is ‘undercut’ or intersected by another text, which I call the “subtext” at right angles to it. This subtext traverses what is virtually the entire book. This subtext includes huge lists of the 1001 Nights’ stories, and many (almost all it seems), of the commentaries and numerous versions of the stories. As the book moves to part two, different subjects appear in the subtext – there are images, poems from Sappho, science fiction and detective novels, quotes from Hawthorne, Henry James, to events in the life of the author and so on. In the third section there appears to be the entire text in Latin (much of it translated also) of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while the main text includes at intervals poems from Ovid’s Tristia and other works. The whole text block of the book has many images, photographs, symbols and diagrams which “comment’ on both texts, and in fact help to “join” them. Meanwhile, the main text seems (as I see it), to ‘grow’ from the substrate or fertile ‘soil’ of the subtext. This Richard Taylor

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generating subtext (which itself is all on a blog, as are all the other texts) could be said to be itself derived from the life and reality and reading of its author. In the subtext there are constant clues or hints as to the ‘why’ of the main text itself. This main story begins with a deliberately unnamed author being blinded at a literary launch for his new book. Then it shifts to his relationships with Eva Android, who is cloned from Eva von Braun, and their discussions about her feelings and his “power” over her to have sex at will, which disturbs him, and also he explains that he is working on a book about the 1001 Nights, which in fact are running in the subtext as the book proceeds. Then, in an ‘echo’ of the “Cupid and Psyche” story in that other book of changes, The Golden Ass, in which the hero is transformed to an ass, the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is set as a story inside a story.

And this is to be the pattern throughout the whole book. The translated or un-translated subtexts generating stories which in turn generate stories and stories within stories, and then many changes and transforms occur in the main story itself, while the author, who may or may not be an example of the postmodern idea of the “Death of the Author”, is variously killed off or transformed or “translated” in the various stages of the book.

All these stories are on Jack Ross / Homer / Ovid / Milton / Oedipus’s many blogs, where they are displayed in clear text and set with beautifully clear and coloured pictures. On these blogs, the subtext is much larger and much more readable. So in this “parallel” universe of texts and images and music – the internet itself continues the conversations and stories and a connection in what is potentially an infinite number of texts or stories. It thus echoes 1001 Nights itself.

Ross’s EMO, built from text and experience, is thus a novel or construct of and for the age of computer technology, which both challenges and is ‘in love’ with the enchantment of story: as much as it is a larger story, or stories, which are, sui generis, about emotion – as in the term ‘emo’ of the title, and thus of questions of what it is to be human (this is seen in the conversations between The Writer and Eva Android and in her story of the cat), of questions of power between men and women, love, of authorial reality and reality itself and so on.

There is much else in this book. There are many “couples” and symmetries, as well as echoing leitmotifs throughout EMO – Eva v avE, Hitler who loves dogs and loves or interacts with Eva Android’s sister (and these 120

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Evas are also the “first women” – which means one or both are Sherazade, who might be seen to be generating the whole world of her text, and that of EMO entire, through her stories told endlessly to save her life); and Eva von Braun who is almost non-human coupled with the “non human” Hitler who contrasts or echoes The Author, and Eva herself, who seems to struggle for human touch, and learns to love (and not to trust the love) of a cat. Later, Ovid is seen as being in The Third Reich, (so that Hitler is now coupled with, or is opposed to, Augustus Caesar, who exiles Ovid (and the crime is “love” – supposedly (or it could even be the chaos of Ovid’s wonderful Metamorphoses…?), and of course we have Geoffrey Hill’s great poem quoted or referenced by Ross as it in turn references Ovid. The poem, the first poem of Hill’s great book King Log (which is about history, the horrors of war, and in particular the Holocaust) is “Ovid in the Third Reich”.

Are we then in some monstrous intellectual monument with no end – can this book not be read and enjoyed? Do we all have to read all works of literature and so on and read modern philosophy to enjoy or deal with this book? Do we have to wade through all these codes and complexities and cryptics? I must confess that this was my own doubt. But the main text’s story, or stories, makes up what is in itself a narrative of extraordinary adventures, and indeed the central section is set on Mars, involves intrigue, seduction, sado-masochism, drugs, murder, as well as codes. We are in a labyrinth, but it is compensated for by the very enchanting language that Ross uses, and the intensity of the many episodes in the book.

I found it difficult at first, but once past the “bumps”, I enjoyed its multiple references, and found the book was greatly absorbing: as to whether I understand such a book entirely – which is doubtful – I love the sense of mystery such books evoke, and I love the fascinating mix of the many texts and symbols. It taught me things – I read about Ovid, I read a book

by Kathy Acker (who Ross confesses to having been much influenced by) and she quotes or discuses Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter… so I read stories by Hawthorne (whose story “The Great Stone Face” is quoted in EMO). I read about the various films quoted. So the answer as to whether it is monstrous is both yes and no – I think we have here an outstanding and wonderfully interesting and original book by Ross that completes his cycle - or seems to do so. If it is ‘monstrous’, it is a book of near monstrous power.

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Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot by Kate Durbin Dancing Girl Press, Chicago IL, 2009 Review by Ross Brighton Kate Durbin’s Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot provides a fragmentary narrative, the conceit of which is its purporting to be from the lost journals of Amelia Earhart, the aviator of the title. It is an arresting image, the aviatrix stuffing papers into her boot, on a meagre hunk of rock, where there are “No boats. No planes.// Only bruised arms and legs. Paper and pen./ This waterlogged heart.” (“Water”) and “The dull slap of water striking rock” (“Rock”).

The boot, that by which she navigates the land, an unfamiliar territory, becomes the refuge of the narrative threads that plead for direction in that unknown country of her final journey, her final hours. Indeed, this reminds us that the language that we inhabit, that we employ in the cartography of our day to day lives, is just as alien as that rocky atoll.

These journal notes imply a sense of voyeurism, an eavesdropping, that is made all the more uncomfortable by the ensuing death (or simply disappearance?) of the (supposed) writer. However, there is also a feeling that “Amelia” needs to be read, to have her words brought back to life, as some kind of testament, however meagre, to her existence. This is manifest most powerfully in a single line poem, entitled “Radio”, two thirds of the way through the volume: “This is Amelia Earhart” A plea of identity, attempting to tear through the metafictional matrix of the page. But language conquers all, and alone, outside of the social matrix that mirrors and contributes to that of signification, doubt creeps in uninvited (even as the noise in the linguistic channel brings with it the unintentional, the semi-intentional; the semiotic of Kristeva, the protosemantic of McCaffery). Thus: AMELIA EARHART is no longer my name. Belonging to a ghost.

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Was it ever her name anyway? Who is this ghost – is it the spirit of Earhart, marooned, haunting some rocky atoll? Is it the idea that she has become, a cultural icon, a mystery, a story bigger (and simpler – something Durbin shows a keen intelligence in demonstrating is that no story is ever as simple as it seems) than the woman ever was? Or is it the ur-Amelia that Durbin conjures here, vocalising (or textualising) words and fragments that are somehow alien to both, stuck in a tangled textual web.

This seems to be one of the issues at the centre of Durbin’s poetics: the figure of the mythologized woman who has become both more and less than what she once was in the discourses of history, the scribes of which tend to be universally masculine. This occurs through various means – some out of her control, some not so much (she writes on/through Marilyn Monroe in several poems in The Ravenous Audience, her debut full-length collection that also contains the poem of this chapbook).

Rather than an out-and-out political project, some feminist agitprop (not that such deserves the scorn heaped on it in general discourses), this is more subtle – an attempt to free the protagonists from these totalising narratives; and, rather than the conventional mode of ventriloquising historical figures, there seems to be more of a dialogue – the ventriloquism goes both ways.

If, as Heidigger proposed, “Language speaks us”, then the characters in Durbin’s poems also have their own spectral voices.

As the situation of the ‘protagonists’ (for there are none, in the real sense of the word – simply textual representations of fictionalised historical characters) becomes more dire, more isolated, so too do the sentences – they become fragmentary, flicker in and out of silence. In the two penultimate poems (before the final “Home”, which imagines escape, and a return to the communicative possibilities the title suggests), white dominates. The penultimate poem is “Amelia Earhart”, cited above, in which neither of the short lines is a grammatically complete sentence.

Preceding this is “Loss”, simply a white page. Loss of life, of love, and of language (and the social structures that produce/contain/enact it) cannot be represented, or, can only be done so negatively, by a hole such as this. The title swims in white, like an island, or a sinking plane.

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Emma Phillipps. Built, project.

Dusie Kollectiv & Necessary Press, 2009.

Review by Jen Crawford See http://www.necessetics.com/necessarypress.html for details.

This book is a little smaller than B5, landscape, with a dark blue construction paper cover bound by two bolts with nuts. The flyleaf is part of an architectural blueprint for what appears to be a renovation to medical offices. So I read this book as a built project. A ‘built, project’, with interrupting punctuations asking that each syntactical term be considered in a kind of muscular isolation, a suspended pre-operational presence. The interruptions also open layering sense, as in the title as directive: once built, then project.

The 27-page poem unfolds in strophes of one to five lines long, each positioned at the top right of the book’s recto pages. This gives the effect of a flick-book, of lines in motion, while the blankness surrounding offers its reflective capacity – “underneath there is light – coming through and gaps/ between the strips’ .

It seems important to attend to the book’s physicality, because the poetry itself directs us to material craft, from building construction to sewing to grammatical assemblage.

In the process, language talks of and to itself: deixis points to deixis, creating perceptual reverberations as looking through/with language and looking at language displace one another other.

Describing itself, by doing that (that, action) within that (as a structure). two points separate but close and over the other. Intervention is another – as – sectioning Subject positions, when not occupied by deictic pronouns, are often taken by abstract nouns – often nominalizations or gerunds – such as “intervention” or “Describing” itself. Concrete nouns do appear, but they too are often in forms which allow a shimmering movement through syntactical roles, so that they are also concrete verbs, or concrete adjectives: “metal grating as squares of light”, “replacing surfaces”, “Insisting metal mesh shapes”. On this foundation of denotational and positional punning, Phillipps creates an encounter with language that is as slippery and mobile as fabric in motion.

As these movements suggest, the poem’s invocations of the material world are always consciously located in language. Phillipps puts this awareness to use through the unmediated interactions of material and conceptual signifiers: “Sewing pins pressed 124

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into slowing, projected – facing/ like centres,/ the open folds.” Words like ‘facing’ hold their simultaneous material and immaterial significance with assurance, allowing the proliferation of paths through ideas to enter corporeality as undifferentiated from thought. This mobility refreshes awareness of how deeply Cartesian dualism is embedded in familiar language: the lines retain their potently unsettling quality. The unsettling opens the way for an engagement with poiesis that is both very alert and enjoyably inventive.

Jeanne Bernhardt. Wood.

Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009.

Review by Jen Crawford The heritage-craft styling of Kilmog Press’s gorgeous hand-bound editions suits this collection of short stories very well: WOOD is printed in wood-cut on a grainy, leafy hard-cover backdrop, and when the first story opens its Waldenesque landscape, the match of textual and physical aesthetic alone offers considerable pleasure.

A number of the stories draw out the loneliness of the North American rural.

Characters retreat to mountain cabins in sickness or return to impossible farms. Via her protagonists’ cross-country journeyings, Bernhardt’s pastoralism admits Kerouac’s influence with an easy self-consciousness – so a friend accuses a protagonist of ‘“turn[ing] every room you’re in into a beat environment,” pointing to the typewriter, ashtray, open books, strewn clothes.’

The accusation seems likely to hold for many of the characters, who write, drink, fuck, get high and get ill as they take temporary shelter in sublime emptinesses. I suspect that reader enjoyment of the book will largely depend on how much warmth of feeling one can find for – or distinction one can see between – these characters, whose intentions and emotions are very frequently eviscerated by loss, love and hard living.

I found my sympathies frustrated at times by a resigned, almost glib presentation of alienating surfaces: “He tells me of fucking his niece when she was thirteen. Every act of penetration takes on meaning. ‘Did you see any boundaries?’ ‘No!’ I laugh. ‘I think you must love me a little,’ he grins. He puts the phone in the BBQ pit. ‘When you dance with the muse kid, you always gotta pay the amusement tax.’”

Bernhardt comfortably inhabits the range of perspectives presented here, and the firstperson narrations of her stable, home-making men are as convincing and dimensional as those of the evasive, freedom-seeking women and the terminally lost addicts of both genders. The characters seem well known, perhaps too well known at times; though the credibility of each character held, authorial intimacy with the creations Jen Crawford

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sometimes seemed to exclude the reader from information that might bring them into vivid presence. At times the material becomes so internally focused that it feels claustrophobic. Elusive emotional insight follows elusive emotional insight - “The direction I’m tuned to is in,” says the narrator of “Coyotes”, and this is the orientation of many of the stories. At times the effect is a vertiginous looseness of association: “I had a secret crush on the worm at the bottom of a margarita. America was an evil queen and I didn’t have enough American one dollar bills to go to France or wherever it is freedom isn’t. I followed my feet and my snake would chiffon around my throat.

I polished my pens and filed my face and drank in dark mum houses with tulip veined men.” – Hugh Beller There’s a certain hip distractedness to the shifting focus of the sentences, but their diction is more closed and compressed than Kerouac’s – and often their elliptical imagism is more evocative of Jean Genet, another tagged influence.

At times the persistent emotional orientation leads to an ontological flatness: “What keeps people together? It’s not love. Man, don’t tell me it’s not love! I used to think it was unhappiness itself. The fixed thing of it. Joy comes in so light, never seems as if it’ll settle round long, always drifting off towards other light things, only despair digs in. But the truth is I don’t know, I’m forty one and the patterns I’ve drawn in place around my life look like life now.” – Coyotes To my mind the stories are at their strongest – because most distinct – when they locate themselves in landscape and firm situational detail. The abandoned farm-wife of “The Other Picture” introduces a refreshing third term to the intensity of the dyadic interactions that threaten to close in this and other stories. When the narrator and her lover (the errant husband) return to rescue the farm, setting detail operates effectively as correlative to the relationship transactions.

“In the corner of the squash field is the storage hut I lived in. Robert told me Elizabeth hasn’t entered it once since we left. We turn towards the house. ‘Close the door behind you,’ she says sharply. ‘The cats.’ Smoke from the fireplace issues into the room, Robert crouches down to fix it. ‘Leave it!’ I hiss. He looks at me blankly, continuing to take out sticks and reposition them.” – The Other Picture Between the physical clarity of such descriptions and the ranginess of the psychological imagism elsewhere, there are certainly pleasures to be had in this collection. Though it seems a more constricted and self-conscious affair than Bernhardt’s free-breathing poetry, it will still offer plenty to those who can tune to its particular emotional pitch.

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Free Fall by Rogelio Guedea Titus Books, 2009.

Review by Hamish Dewe The Borders of Intimacy For some reason, Brett Cross of Titus felt that this book of translations would be, somehow, a good fit for me to review. Perhaps it’s the side effect of having had a Pessoa craze some time back, or that I’d done my own small collection of translations and adaptations from Spanish and Portuguese, neither of which I remember now. Or maybe it’s the slight air of mustiness, reticence or tantalisingly delicate failure that surrounds so many of the characters in these poems. I’ll be presenting a few poems from each of the book’s three sections, but first I’ll start with a couple of pieces that remind me of nothing more than the Aphorisms of Ramon Gomez de la Serna, this first able to rescue failure from even the most outwardly successful of lives: HOMAGE TO THE POSTHUMOUS The triumph of this writer – said the master of ceremonies – was, precisely, having died a few days before his failure. and the title poem of the book, suffused with almost spiritual anti-clericism: FREE FALL To leave oneself in the hands of God or of chance is the most irresponsible form of leaving oneself in one’s own hands.

The first poem of the volume hints at a recurring theme, the disengaged flaneur as seen through Walter Benjamin’s disenchanted eyes, or perhaps in imitation of Benjamin’s death in the process of exile: ENCOUNTERS AND MISENCOUNTERS It happened to me while I was reading a book by Walter Benjamin at the Berlin airport. When I looked up from those deep, deep pages, I realized I had forgotten if I had just arrived or was about to leave. I tried for a moment to reflect on it, but it was useless.

People entered and left, arrived and withdrew. A woman smiled at me just at the moment of my confusion. That woman looked like my mother, but perhaps she wasn’t my mother. She looked like my country, but perhaps she wasn’t my country. I was alone, with bags leaning against my legs. I gave in to absent-mindedness, I slipped into its shadowy corridors. Could somebody provide now a calendar and its own room for that unique sensation? Encounters, misencounters, that was all that life began to mean to me.

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and now leaping to the very end of the book, second poem from the last, just before the author in disguise effaces himself completely. Not because of a definite absence, which would at least be an observable ‘act’ and hence positive in itself, but through a protracted dodging of the calls of life or the temptations of ‘belonging’. Anyway, back to that second to last, flaneur poem, in which the flaneur has been so successful at his own effacement that he is only observable in the remembrance of another: THE MAN WHO WALKED THE STREETS OF PARIS He had known men who had as an amusement putting a very fine thread through the eye of a needle. Or they enjoyed themselves watching from the fifth floor the women who were returning from the market. Who were returning singing, obviously. Because a woman who doesn’t sing, he thought, is sad like the tear that falls from the eye of a needle. But he had also known a man who walked the streets of Paris. Going coming along those unknown, uncertain streets at an unforeseeable hour in the night, the man walked with an elongated gesture and a solemn gait. More than once he wanted to go down to greet him: just to shake the hand he wrote with. Or to invite him to come up to the fifth floor. Or to point out to him with his index finger a corner or bus stop. To say it without words, as one does in love. But he always also realized that the game was in other hands. And that life consisted in not crossing the line. One foot behind the border. As if staying halfway down the road were precisely getting to the end of the road. As if the man who walked the streets of Paris with a live lobster on a leash were no more than the announcement of new prophecy.

This man, slightly ridiculous, falling just short of the actually Absurd, is a familiar figure throughout the book. Guedea rings the changes on the theme frequently, particularly in the third section, Fables. But traces of the pose are just as strong in the longer central section, Autobiographies. It’s a misleading title though, as many of the poems show a slippery authorial pronoun’s reactions to others, and deny any attempt to get at the writer’s central personality except as reflected in the response. Let’s take this aphoristic fable as exemplar: SUNFLOWER Not long ago, my wife planted sixteen sunflower seeds in the garden at home. I watched her while she turned over the earth and pulled out the weeds. When she finished, she came to me and said lovingly to me: “I hope they all flower.” I, I remember, didn’t know how to answer her, I just hugged her and read a few paragraphs of the book I was holding to her. Weeks passed, or months, until one day, when we got back from visiting my grandparents, we saw with a certain sadness that of the sixteen seeds only one had produced.

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There it was erect, imposing, solitary under the all but faded sun of the afternoon. My wife leaned down to caress the little leaves with her fingertips. That night, in fact, we were talking with the lights our about the destiny of beings and things, and then we lost ourselves in each other’s arms until the storm began. The thunder was so disturbing and the rain so heavy that we had to bring our son into our bed. My wife sheltered him against her through the weeehours until the rain stopped and not even an echo was left of the thunder. The next morning when we opened the door to go out shopping, we saw that the sunflower, which hadn’t even flowered for the first time, was lying flat oon the grass, broken in half like a bone. My wife immediately tried to stand it up, again and again, but it was useless. When we got into the car, I no longer felt like saying anything; I just kept watching my son in the rear view mirror during the whole trip as if trying to thank life for everything it hadn’t taken away from me.

And now, it seems like there’s nothing left but that final effacement I hinted at earlier, the author’s final victory, which I can’t help but feel is modishly Pyrrhic, it’s superb handling of the possibilities of the list wresting the phantom of control from the jetsam of the world: SHORT SUBJECT The man hangs a “For Rent” sign in the front window of his house.

He is determined not to go back. From loneliness of boredom, this time he has chosen to leave definitively. For a few days he receives many people interested in renting the house: elderly people, students, couples with children, street vendors, businessmen, men with no visible means of support, single women, widows, lovers.

Apart from showing them the house (“this is the bathroom, these are the bedrooms, this is the dining room, and the living room, etc.”), between the man and the potential tenant a conversation develops that touches on the borders of intimacy. Many times he talks to them about his mother or his dead father, and many times they talk to him about their nightmares or their walks in the garden. When the man realizes that loneliness doesn’t exist and that boredom is a mere fantasy, he abruptly decides to go back. He will no longer rent the house, he’s sure, but now he’s convinced that the sign he hung in the front window of his house ought to stay there, unmoved, until the last day of his days.

Hamish Dewe

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brief 39 features work from the following contributors: Sarah Jane Barnett is a writer and tutor who lives in Wellington. Her work has appeared in a range of literary journals, such as Landfall, Sport and Takahe and on the e-zines Blackmail Press, Snorkel and Turbine. During 2006, Sarah completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters and is about to start her PhD in Poetry at Massey University. She is currently working on a series of poems about being executed. You can find out more about her at http://theredroom.org.

Ross Brighton is the author of the chapbook A Pelt a Shrub a Soil Sample. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Catalyst, Side Stream, Otoliths (Aus), Reconfigurations (USA), No Tell Motel (USA) and Action Yes (USA). He is reviews editor for the US-based journal Tarpaulin Sky, and blogs on poetics and contemporary art at ignoretheventriloquists.blogspot.com.

David Lyndon Brown’s anthology Calling the Fish and Other Stories was published in 2001 by the University of Otago Press to critical acclaim. His crepuscular novella, Marked Men, the dark secret of NZ literature, was published by Titus Books in 2007 and Skin Hunger, a collection of his poetry, in 2009.

Andrew Burke has had seven collections of poetry published, short stories in literary magazines and newspapers, small plays and tiny films exhibited in the 70s, and a novel out at a publishing house. To feed a growing family he worked in media and advertising for two decades, then developed a career lecturing at Edith Cowan University and other tertiary institutions, including a year lecturing in China, followed by a year tutoring indigenous students in The Kimberley area of Western Australia. He writes a blog at http://hispirits.blogspot.com/ Janet Charman lives and writes in Auckland.

Stephanie Christie (formerly Will Christie) distributes her work through zines — the latest one is named CRZY — and has a book out with Titus Books.

Jennifer Compton was born in NZ in 1949 and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. Recent work has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), Quadrant (Australia) and Poetry NZ. This year she will be the Visiting Literary Artist at Massey in Palmerston North.

Jen Crawford is an Aucklander teaching creative writing in Singapore. Her recent poetry publications are Bad Appendix (Titus Books, 2008) and Napoleon Swings (Soapbox Press, 2009).

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Brett Cross lives in West Auckland where he manages the publishing company Titus Books.

Hamish Dewe lives and conducts his literary experiments in his home town of Auckland, having returned, perhaps for good, from the Middle Kingdom earlier this year.

Belinda Diepenheim lives in Ashhurst in the Manawatu and has published her poems in journals including Trout, Snorkel # 2 and # 8, Southern Ocean Review and Poetry NZ. William Direen is the current guest editor of Landfall. He is a song-writer poet who writes literary texts of all sorts and releases collaborative musical work under the appellation The Bilders. He has two bases, “home” in New Zealand and “away” in Paris.

Michael Estabrook is a baby boomer who began getting his poetry published in the late 1980s. Over the years he has published 15 poetry chapbooks, his most recent entitled “They Didn’t Leave Notes.” Other interests include art, music, theatre, opera, and his wife, who just happens to be the most beautiful woman he has ever known.

Janis Freegard was one of three poets featured in AUP New Poets 3 (Auckland University Press, 2008). You can read her blog at http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com Scott Hamilton is a writer and researcher based in Auckland. To the Moon in Seven Easy Steps, a collection of his literary writing, was published by Titus Books in 2007, and The Crisis of Theory, a study of the British historian and poet EP Thompson based on his PhD thesis, will be published by Manchester University Press this year.

Currently, Hamilton is working on Smithyland, a book which retraces the life of the late great New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman by visiting places he wrote about.

Hamilton’s website, Reading the Maps (http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com), which features a mixture of travel writing, literary criticism, critiques of anti-semitism and other forms of pseudo-history, poetry, and silly photos, received over sixty thousand visitors last year, and was ranked the twenty-third most popular blog in New Zealand in a recent survey.

Ted Jenner published Writers in Residence last year, which is mainly a book of poems and prose poems about imaginary writers and real (sort of ) travel. He is now working on an introduction to his translations of the ‘Orphic’ Gold Leaves.

Marion Jones lives and writes poetry in Brighton, Dunedin.

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John Parkyn was born in Dunedin and has worked most of his life in the news media, in New Zealand and England. He has travelled extensively in Latin America, including time spent in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution. He now lives in Mexico with his wife, Elizabeth Romero, and french poodle Hermione, devoting himself to fiction. His novella, The Ambush, was published by Quoin Press in 1999, and short stories have appeared in the NZ Listener and Takahe.

Vaughan Rapatahana was born in Patea, raised in Papatoetoe most of the time, with a home in Te Araroa, East Coast, but has spent recent years abroad, partly because of his disgust at the state of race relations in Aotearoa. Currently Rapatahana lives in Hong Kong. Rapatahana’s poems express his commitment to Maori culture and his critique of contemporary New Zealand society. He has been published frequently in both Aotearoa and in Hong Kong, and was longlisted for the Proverse Prize in Literature.

Jack Ross teaches Creative Writing at Massey University’s Auckland campus. Together with his wife Brownyn Lloyd, he runs Pania Press [http://paniapress.blogspot. com/], a small publisher specialising in NZ art, poetry and fiction. He is indebted to Bronwyn and designer Ella Sutherland for the innovative layout of the play extract included in this issue of brief.

K. M. Ross is a New Zealand-born writer who lives and works in Scotland. His novel Falling Through the Architect was recently published by The Writers Group. He is currently working on a novel, The Blinding Walk, of which excepts have appeared in brief and Percutio.

Lisa Samuels teaches at The University of Auckland. Her newest poetry book Mama Mortality Corridos will be published by Holloway Press in 2010. Current projects include a novel, Tender Girl, and essays on poetry and theory.

Richard von Sturmer lives and writes in Auckland. His collection of prose works, On the Eve of Never Departing, has just been published by Titus Books.

Richard Taylor. Bn.1948. Auckland. Labourer to Lineman & Technician. NZCE (Electronics & Comms), 1985. BA (English) 1995. Published in local mags. Published ‘Red’ 1996 and ‘Conversation with a Stone’ 2007 (Titus). Blog: EYELIGHT http://richardinfinitex.blogspot.com/

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