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

Graphology Chronotype 34: Parking Refugees -- a poem by John Kinsella

by John

Graphology Chronotype 34: Parking Refugees

Wilson’s parking — ‘Expensive,

don’t you think?’ Yes, close kin

of Wilson’s of Nauru. Security.

You know, where victims

are guilty and sex crimes

are as the case may be

and the Minister says

what’s what about self-

immolation. Security. Private.

And privacy of a sort.

They have many locations

in the city. Each lot

a kingdom. Your cars

in their care. Security.

Underwriting the Island

where no man, woman

or child can be entire of itself.

Impoverished, bought off

by the Australian

Government, sub-let

to Wilson’s. Fire sale.

Big island little island

what begins with I?

Disconcerting?

But don’t worry,

Wilson’s is watching out

for the silent majority

right here where cars

need somewhere to park.

Security. Your cars

in their care. And anyway,

how many cars could they

fit on Nauru? Diversify.

Security. Living space.

            John Kinsella

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers — a poem

By John

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers

The new colonialism

eliminates or integrates

the water’s edge. The Avon River

is replete and despite the chemical

run-off it can’t quite process,

birdlife is rife along its banks.

Perched in dying paperbarks

spoonbills eke out nesting plans,

and sacred ibises preen

themselves with optimism?

A problem with me using this term?

Really? Try the trampling-under

of birds and riparian vegetation

as the eye of the telephone

mediates the real world

into digestible auguries: and where

a rare white swan swings

its neck, a Pokemon perches,

scowling and grimacing.

Trodden under, this nature

of encounter, this exercise

routine to coax emergence

from the caves of gaming,

this tracking of each and every

cybernetic soul, this savvy

that marginalises non-participants

and swallows tales of capitalist

liberty with addicted gulps,

is a travesty of seeing. Too blunt?

Each step into privacy,

each sucking of another’s skin,

each moment of worship interrupted

and over-ridden, each threshold

crossed to gather location

to conquest, is the theft

of reality from non-participants,

all sucked into a vortex of deadlife.

The sacred ibises preen with optimism,

believing, along with spoonbills,

that they will nest and raise their young,

and see what they see with their own eyes.

Violation of geography, absorption of ‘outdoors’.

            John Kinsella

Sweeney Encounters a Russian Adventurer in the Avon Valley: a poem by John Kinsella

By John

Sweeney Encounters a Russian Adventurer in the Avon Valley

Sweeney had to do his shopping at Northam Coles.

There was a lot of kerfuffle in the town and more

than a few foreign voices. He was surprised

to find the foreigners were not being attacked

by locals. On his asking why, a teenager stacking shelves

told him, It’s because they’ll only be here for a while.

What was going on? Sweeney took to the airwaves.

Birds of a feather, we might interpolate. Just outside town

he came across a vast balloon being spread out and filled with night.

He swooped down and found a man who looked like

a heavily bearded Dennis Hopper. He caught the name

of this wild man whom he recognised as a holy obsessive.

Almost like me, he said. A Russian. There were many voices

speaking Russian. I know Russian, said Sweeney — I get pictures

wired to my headspace from a poet in his country dacha

every winter, every summer. It’s cold here in winter,

but not as cold as it gets in Russia. That’s the definition of cold

in overheated times. The balloon was filling and the zeal

of the adventurer was palpable. All of this just for him.

His name was Fedor Konyukhov. He was aiming to loop

the earth from sunrise. To smash a record. The media, cloying and clinging,

were saying he sees the world as a place to conquer: mountains,

oceans, everything. Sweeney could see vast swathes of mangroves

dying in the far side of the country but in his gondola Fedor Konyukhov

would fly nowhere near them. Sweeney watched the balloon rise

with the sun, hung around and did a couple of interviews, then flew back

to Coles to finish his shopping. I feel like the stork delivering my own birth,

            he said, adding a few more cans to his stash.

            John Kinsella

Windows

By Tracy

Windows everywhere. Here is a little poem about windows, specifically Drehkippfenster or tilt-and-turn windows, though the photos show many other kinds. Tilt-and-turn are apparently the most common type of window in Germany. 

Tilt-and-turn

The windows are uncountable

yet plural. On every outdoor

town-view, they dominate – also

singly, from inside, loom over us.

Hold threads under tension, a frame.

Edgy magic, they might unhinge,

fall inward. We tilt them back to air

the room for want of fan or vent,

releasing vapours, our humours.

Out there, commingled.

They gauge the day, admit

street-sound, anonymous.

No veil, this pane, no projection

of hymen, fantastic intactness;

it was always already open.

Not for turning your back on.

Nor for dreaming you live in

another’s life. Rather for keeping

charge like custodia fenestrārum,

alone in a crowd, turning this blind

eye as I hoist or lower the sail.

                                      (Tracy Ryan)

The poem is also engaging indirectly with aspects of the window-ideas in poems by Mallarmé and Baudelaire, as well as the (I think) misguided use of the hymen in de Man and Derrida.

I've also developed an interest (or further developed a very old, long-held interest) in the various kinds of dormer windows, some of which you can see in these photos.

"Custodia fenestrārum" in the poem is making a kind of play on custodia oculorum or custody of the eyes, which is enjoined in monastic (and general religious) life — I use it not because of any empathy with the prudery of those who tout this term nowadays, but because of the sense that when living in a densely populated place (unfamiliar to a rurally-based Australian!), windows are more acutely potential sites of failure to respect privacy — in all directions.

The Bells (poem)

By Tracy

The Bells

... the silence, wanly prinkt 
with forms of lingering notes            
– Christopher Brennan

In Germany, there appear to have been few
instances of overt resistance to the [Nazi]
confiscation of church bells. – Kirrily Freeman

I tilt the window
and they pour in here
cascading, swallowing
till I can’t separate
sacred from secular –
how could it matter?
More than a marker
of time or collection
sanctus or death-knell
barely an interval
they take possession
with body and tongue.
Once they were named as
metallic resources.
Churches flew swastikas.
You can see photos
of the bell-graveyards
thousands awaiting
recasting for service
from all over Europe.
Now in Tübingen
they ring out in order:
some are survivors,
missed requisition
by virtue of heritage –
others too recent
to carry that weight.

Tracy Ryan