Elegy for Brenda Walker (1957-2024)

Memoir

 

            in memory of Brenda Walker

 

(i)

Out walking

the relative cool

 

of the morning

and discussing

 

day’s unfolding

with the magpie tiding,

 

the loss of a friend

emanates

 

from the bush

of Kaarta Koomba

 

and follows the river

up over The Scarp,

 

traces river, brook,

and dry ‘winter creek’

 

to inflect so many

conversations

 

on writing, on how

to make a way

 

through memoir

and remember

 

all we have passed,

all we will sense.

 

 

(ii)

 

In discussing

the possibilities

 

of fiction

when Crush

 

appeared

in a city

 

retuning

or resetting

 

under Moreton Bay

figs in Hyde Park,

 

we extended

the conversation

 

across immediate

years

 

to the poetics

of death

 

and how much

we were both

 

going to make life

work the best

 

way possible,

whatever

 

the circumstances,

the conditions.

 

 

(iii)

 

This agreement

we had

 

about one day

meeting

 

on a street

in New York,

 

just to pass

and say ‘hi’

 

and keep

on going

 

towards

the lives

 

we were writing

into other

 

versions

of a story.

 

Or the agreement

not to say

 

anything after

you had a word

 

with authorities

to free me

 

from the lock-up

after my protest

 

to release

incarcerated animals

 

from their pain.

You merged

 

in and out of the shadows,

but always there

 

if called upon.

Not often, sometimes.

 

 

(iv)

 

So generous

when Tracy and I

 

married, to offer

a plate whose design

 

was a mandala,

an exposition

 

to the building

of a friendship

 

that could follow

the shifts

 

and resolve

however long

 

between messages,

catching up

 

even briefly.

We so delighted

 

in your next life, your

deep bonds.

 

 

(v)

 

Out walking

the relative cool

 

of the morning

and discussing

 

day’s unfolding

with the magpie tiding,

 

your wry, friendly

glance of knowing

 

replaces

a harsh sun

 

with a warmth

of insight

 

to what’s not working

and how it might

 

be made whole.

An impossible day.

 

Remember Iggy and the Stooges

playing riparian static?

 

Not your music,

but you listened anyway.

 

Remember Cambridge,

the river that could be drained.

 

Then later. Much later.

Peppermint tea. Another

 

river pushing

down to the sea,

 

but also looking back

over its shoulder.

 

Then different oceans

away from your

 

recovery, though

reconnecting,

 

through memoir

which was your course

 

I shared. Different

and the same. How

 

we make stories.

And where. And when.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

In Memory of Poet Lyn Hejinian

 

Granular

            in memory of Lyn Hejinian

 

Granular as people

            to people, arraying

with modicums

            and substantials,

setting implication

            of dead places

brought alive

            where a quote

becomes the ‘my’

            of an anecdote;

brief as interruption

            of decades, broadcast

resumed and reception

            a tool of wonder

as northern lights

            freak southern lights

and vice versa.

            Teaching-tool

of the time,

            all in thrall

but liberated;

            the clouds

were somewhere

            lost

but reform over lines

            too long

to condense.

 

 

            John Kinsella

A farewell memory for poet Andrew Burke

 By Tracy Ryan

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.

Remembering Mhairi

 

We met as Sparks — Diverging Flints

Sent various — scattered ways —

We parted as the Central Flint

Were cloven with an Adze —

Subsisting on the Light We bore

Before We felt the Dark —

A Flint unto this Day — perhaps —

But for that single Spark.

                                                        (Emily Dickinson, from Wikisource, public domain)

That's a poem for her, my long-ago friend. And now, bells for her...

Long ago, Mhairi gave me Tori Amos's To Venus and Back, and today, a year on from her passing, I listen to "Bells for Her", the live version from that album. There's also a beautiful original studio version of this song on Under the Pink.

As I've mentioned before, Mhairi played the piano (beautifully), and often played Tori's music on it, as well as more classical and experimental work.

One year today she has been gone.

Poem (in memoriam Sean, d. 1981)

Forty

I have to imagine your grave today

since there's no visiting —

& there is fire, as well as distance

& decades between.

It might be dulled or overgrown,

inscription chipped off or greying —

every sibling's name & He is Risen

no longer legible, meaningful, like those

you & I would try to decipher as children

walking around churchyards, certain

such mute & sunken slabs had nothing

to do with us, just sweetly sad,

fearsome if stepped on. Your vases dry,

there won't be flowers now, though early

on I'd arrive to find someone else had

tended you, & spend the day wondering:

places you marked in other lives.

On the long road for years there was

a van that sold bouquets, opportune

as mushroom after death-rain,

servicing that end of things. Gone, gone.

After these forty years I scarcely know

what to say to you — my living on

has said everything for me.

                                  Tracy Ryan

Poem (in memoriam Jo)

 

Remembering Jo

By Tracy

 

Jo with some of her children in the late 1960s...

My mother passed away last night at age 84, so we are all feeling very sad just now, & John has written the poem below in memory of her, because she loved birds (something we all share!) and early this morning a huge flock of galahs and a flock of '28s' (ring-necked parrots) came into Jam Tree Gully -- in fact, the largest flocks we have seen here. The poem below draws on that.

First poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

These poems were not written "in memoriam" but during the course of the friendship, and were published in Hothouse (2002/2006). I never thought to be posting them so long after, and in such circumstances. I just learnt that Mhairi passed away in the UK last month. She was a gifted poet as well as pianist, a film buff, and a savvy winner at all board games.

She was also a fluent speaker and avid reader of French, and a half-dozen of the best French novels I have on my shelf here at Jam Tree Gully were gifts from her, because she loved to give presents.

The first poem takes a line from a beautiful DH Lawrence poem, which ends "in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past".

Piano

Small walls and the furniture

too large, as in a dolls’ house,

or a Dutch interior

the swollen disproportions

of a dream;

a baby grand and you playing

Bach and Satie

as my grandmother played the Polonaises

and my mother the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata

suddenly the hunger

to pick it up again, dropped stitch,

to let fingers go as they know because

it was trained into me

every morning

or because I was born to it

and let it go, wasted and taken for granted

like water; this our idiom

I’ve abstained from

out of some foolish notion

of imperfection, forgetting the pure pleasure

the insidious mastery of song

that makes the child’s heart beat faster

as I stand there

wordless but listening

with my arms around her

in the chill spring.

                                                   —Tracy Ryan

Elegy: Kalgoorlie 2016

Elegy: Kalgoorlie 2016

  

The distance between a Facebook page

and a mineshaft, where vigilantes threaten

to drop the murdered, is so very small.

Behind screens is only part of the damage,

it’s when bigots emerge from self-

illumination, self-images in their eyes,

that it all comes together: the running down,

the killing, the justifications. In a mining town

the burrowing down to what might be at the core

of belief is also an attempt at erasure: to mine

away souls. But desecrators unearth

their own demons, digging deep to find

the white goods they desire: as Dr Plot

conjectured in 1667: ‘lapides sui generis,

naturally produced by some extraordinary

plastic virtue, latent in the earth...’ this fossil

record we turn ourselves inside out for,

reaching too low. And so, frontiers

are made on the field of the screen,

and Kalgoorlie — out there — epicentre

of the goldfields, cutting edge of race riots,

Superpit-proud of the venal seams in the Aussie flag,

flexes its Midas touch on God’s Own Country

while a dead boy’s family grieve and grieve and grieve.

            John Kinsella

Afterthought: a poem

Afterthought

A whole half-life has happened since you went.

Thirty-five years. Whose life was that? Mozart

had so much – it was more time than you got.

You stayed just long enough to reach “grown-up”

and that was it. It’s not about talent

wasted, or what you might have been: who gives

a shit about accomplishments? Not us,

not now. On the far side of the planet

from anything you saw or could have guessed,

looking up weather, I noticed the date

and thought of you. This is the way you ghost,

through numbers, intimations, other lives.

No Google search will ever turn you up

your relics are in hard copy, or lost.

Or in my poem. Thirty-five times round,

and I am sure I’m not alone to note

this, where you rise for an instant to cross

a scattered consciousness, then fall to rest.

Tracy Ryan