By Tracy Ryan
Another Persephone
There are too many.
Daughterly, you leave us,
still picking flowers,
descend not gingerly
but all at once
before we realise.
Darkness never knew
one so luminous,
flourishing, in each hand like
torch, like blossom, a poem –
our bond was through
poetry only and yet
I take this personally:
that Hades dares
to think he has you,
could quench that glow,
a voice no chthonic
silence could swallow.
Out of bleak earth, the bloom.
By Tracy Ryan
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| Andrew Burke (left) in 2008, with Tracy & John |
Nineteen-ninety
in memory of Andrew Burke
Frank: you were always that.
I’ll even admit things treasured but
never shared: the way my late ex-
husband nicknamed you Balzac
and it stuck till I almost said it
to your face, not because
you were prolific, though you were,
but for the half-walrus moustache
you had back then, & the nineteenth-
century boho longhair look,
though it was poetry, not prose, for you.
Now: the day I think we first really met:
Three teetotal poets out on a fortnight’s
well-paid country tour of schools, dodging
teacher happy-hours, though you’d
always sit over lemonade in a pub,
letting the dark side down,
trashing the writerly reputation.
Collecting me at Midland station, you
laughingly noted your then-wife had
asked around about us beforehand
(me & E.)
& been reassured I was pregnant
& E. was over sixty —
let’s not even gloss it.
But it was never like that.
On the wild drive through the Mid-West you played
track after track from your full set of The Poet Speaks,
E. upset & sullen in the back seat saying turn it down,
Plath is just not poetry; me, not long turned twenty-six,
wanting those poems blaring on repeat. Yee-ha.
You telling me off for over-and-over loud
Sinéad O’Connor on the hotel jukebox,
rooms damp and the tea-kettle full of ants,
asking nonetheless to read the MS
of my first book, and I let you, frail self
you slashed through with that rhythmic biro
till I heard jazz not mine, & arrogant, took on none of it.
But what I did learn from you: it mattered —
the way you wrote all detail, each day of the journey,
into your poetry, reprocessed every minute,
poems a mode of living,
regenerating.
Graphology Paraph 27: in memory of John Tranter
Sydney... not the bush!
Away from the country town
towards the city, away from the Jindyworobaks
towards the New York School of Poetry.
Sheen in a skyscraper’s window
till we look closely and see the reflection
of another window, then another —
a cascading advertisement for real estate
we might occupy in the lexicons
of a pop-cult industry always
threatening to consume,
a drip-fed Babel ingraining
images extracted from movie tones,
images stencilled into news
of icebreakers or satellites
within satellites within satellites.
John Kinsella
