that I might            read      What I do not know 
in that      viscosity      of being 
before        word and          language
a working        question                     to float 
in the    dark                water
where desire makes                  light 
and      need is a        beacon
 

Not your answer 

Not your answer

O funny bone 
the hurt that laughs
I want rooves to blast
and walls to fall

Hansel and Gretel 
my brother and I
miserable leftovers 
of a large family 
are abandoned after tea

 
 

Like Atlas 

mother put the bad 
world on her shoulders
to make us feel secure 
it was make-believe
a tissue-thin 
illusion she preserved 
to make the world which was 
not right seem right.

We learned it by heart 
the kitchen table 
was an unhappy  place 

We know 
magnified reality 
stripped to the facts 
isolation, poverty
her sore heart served 
on a plate pretending 
to be peas and chips
the clink of a knife 
cutting truth
from placatory domestic rituals
I have sat with my own child
in the same silence 
a silence that put 
a clamp on my heart.

Oh busy day!
It is a formality. 
I enact a brittle distance
to preserve autonomy 

I MUST SOUND NORMAL

I must sound normal
In the amplified void

But tea towels 
hang limp
on a rack 
 

 

And on opening a book
the pressure of inner life 
forces words into hieroglyphics

Mother has no taste for fiction 
things already too animate

Silence has teeth!
 

In the amplified void ...
what is heard 
no one speaks ...

In the amplified void ...
I step from the wings 
at The Civic Centre
in the school production
I did a straight copy 
of Fagan in 'Oliver' 
It was in the paper 
'Best Actress in a Musical'.
It is literal
Derek Nimmo 
handed me twenty dollars
in an ANZ Bank account
It is literal

This is a theatre
SILENCE
(360 degree turn on rock)
 

These are the lights 
that turn night to day

SILENCE

This is the door
 that swallows space

This is
the room with no walls

It rains!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

RAIN continues until end

Rock is planet earth

 
 

.

Who will lead us, we who are turning? Where are the gypsies who sing for us into the other black sea the night sky? Where are the gypsies whose voices reach gathering all in beauteous howls?  Who will wake us from our grave cities, beat the blood from our waiting, drag us into the light for grace grows threadbare without forgiveness and all the world is crumbling, all the past is blasted scenery wrecked and smoking to the sound of armies marching.
 
 

I return the stone 
to its image
my father is hosed 
inside the house
beneath an electric bulb 
on a threadbare floor 
his drunk wet gibberish
is twisting lids
off all the jam jars 
in the cupboard shelves
of mother's heart 
leaving her a wrench
and going  into me 

The room rains 
The room rains
down the twirling 
twirling vortex of my ear,
through the wide iris eyes
a stone sinks

It waits
beneath surfaces

FOR AUDIENCE

 

Paper boats travel erasing fish
against the tide in my mind
the ocean floor
saline place, heart of oblivion
land without liquid 
grave of dead gulls
and helpless  sunken boats
and did I go to sleep and 
having fallen  did I follow 
across a speckled floor 
an inverted sky, 
an inland space?
 

Did I follow 
these fossils 
into sleep and 
there remain?

One thousand years ago 
there was an ocean 
that once again draws outlines
that remember their bodies 
As the shell 
remembers its sea

 
 

This my secret
my treasured significant

And so
beneath the fig tree 
on beds of moss 
in the pubic beds 
of fantasy and intellect
searching in the slumbering 
mansion of Psyche
where the wound
my evedom, lives

In these lonely hours 
I loved playing 
with berries and seeds
I brooded up vertiginous drama 
laboured at scabs for sweet pathos 

So I might step out of in-substance
So I might substantiate ambiguity

So I might prowl 
the nights of childhood 
loud with thought 
prowl  the house full of worry 
walk the cold dry garden 
pick up smells I left 
in hollows that still remain
so I might shipwreck my heart
in sleepless nights of witness 
when I mistook the swell of love 
believing it was the ocean 
not the cliff face 

And limp to my mother 
as the doomsayer
tolling the dull bell
the damage now  manifest 
It is literal 

I prise the lid 
Aaah (throat makes long creaking sound)
hear the cracking rooms 

the ravaging winds
the jumbo jet crashing
through the ceiling
of the unhappy marriage 
through the red tiled roof 
of the weatherboard

How I welcome 
the unholy light
with a chorus of angels 
with songs of praise 
for the damage now manifest 

You must see mother
a need for form
I am not invisible at this door
It is literal

I have only 
a small window 
opportunity glimpsed 
it the critical spindle that pricks
the way out intelligent air !
the door Alice!
tiny space in which I hear meaning 

Oh vertical descent cracking my eyes
rinsing me of knowledge
laying bare a bare child of imaginings 
prancing barefoot with a stone 

See - girl in a playground. 
a bright  stage

Everyone of course
has a childhood
something literal 
inscribed with fidelity
stepping in tides of giving sand 
unknowing from an origin 
to some specific future
enacting form 
to show itself
in a proscenium somewhere 

here...where 
a practice of milliseconds 
apprehends
thought to substance
substance to thought 
in an exact undoing 
 

Voice over:

 

A priori 
embedded within 
the ancient erotic curve
of the imaginary 
of the symbolic 
of that which forms us 
deep beneath the covers
 

our work enunciates thought
becoming shape 
following air
 
 
 

Photographs: Geoff Busby, Margaret Cameron and Hellen Sky. 
Drawings: Craig Rawlings and Margaret Cameron.