fr. Sweetheart, over____ (2006)
lines from the script for stage, Sweetheart, over____
two rivers
There are two rivers
One flows over the top of the other.
They run in opposite directions.
The first is measured by extent
Although it has depth
And although the second
Is measured by depth
It also has extent.
The effect of both is violence
But violence on a different order:
The first is the war
The second is art.
A pane of glass separates the two.
Don’t be misled into thinking
That either of them goes over our heads,
No.
The deeper stream shuffles stones
In its bed and
Is sometimes lost from view
In the dark,
So to see it
At all,
Lit behind the glass
Briefly,
Like a scene,
An apartment window
From a train passing,
We are already standing in the first river.
The singular occupants
Reading papers,
A girl’s face pressed to the glass
Sitting on her mother’s lap
In a passing carriage.
You say
Underground,
No.
Below the surface of the war,
Separated by glass,
Running in the opposite direction.
You think
I could slip back in
Quite easily,
Yes?
But for this
Paralysing
Sense of sadness
Attendant on the fugitive thoughts
That all captive images possess,
This glass…
The river above, the war,
Moves ever more slowly on.
It spreads
Exactly like a river
On a flood plain,
Dazzling, out-dazzling…
The people in the cars
In traffic are indistinguishable
From those waiting to join them.
And any sensible element
We might call individual freedom
Is lost in a vast
Mechanised waiting room.
Where oddly enough,
We are also operated upon.
On the wall a sign reads
In Case of Emergency
Break Glass.
To make you wonder,
Will the glass burst inwards
Or outwards?
While you wait.
It’s simple hydraulics to know
The glass will burst out,
Because of the greater pressure
Of the river under glass, and
Leave only splinters and shards,
Which will be caught
In the contrary flow of the first river,
On the plain,
Out-dazzled…
Because
Art can only increase the technical means
Of the long war,
The second river will be lost
Its greater pressure dissipated.
Finally, it is the ongoing emergency
Of civilization, brought down
To a single copulating couple,
Where the West may remind itself
Of the irony
Of this loss.
And in the familiar gesture
Clean its hands
And wash away the
Splinters and the shards of glass
Still clinging in the now,
Practically, motionless
Expanse of water.
(June, 2006)
the second room, Maria
I wrote to you
Maria, about the studio
Next door
I said that this will be
Our cage
Outside
Of the world
No one will know
When we are in there
Together
I will never write such letters again
For the length of time it takes
For paint to fade and peel
I go to the door
I peer in through a hole
And see
What I haven’t been allowed to see
All these years
What I’ve accepted –
You are in the second room
You’re there, _________
Filling it
This is the sort of art
I’m talking about –
Beautiful but of course
Impossible to achieve
the third room, sleep
I can hear your voice in the third room
Do you know the third room?
Where it echoes
The first is the room I share with you
The second is the one you cannot enter
Now both those doors have shut
Your voice floats through
As if from far away
Softly and yet not any softer
You’re saying this world
That is all appearances
Is no truer than when it points
To another world beyond it
And it’s really a simple thing to show
That it’s false
Although it may seem real
Especially to a community
Who have lost faith and direction
And who feel betrayed
Because of how the people
Will treat one another
When each in his or her own time
Has arrived at disbelief
I’m about to drift away
I’m on the edge
Of the precipice
My eyes are closed
And I can’t open them again
the transport
A little girl.
She hears her parents
Arguing in the hallway.
She can tell by the tone.
They come and say
To pack her little suitcase.
It’s not yet light.
It’s like a funny game.
But she does as they ask,
To make them feel better,
Because she knows that it’s not.
She knows by the tone.
So she goes along with it,
With her parents,
With them,
And it’s cold out of bed.
She pulls her clothes on
Over her pyjamas.
Some shells she collected
Rattle in the pocket of her coat.
She wonders for a moment
If it’s something she’s done.
Every girl her age has heard about children
Who are sent away.
She packs her little suitcase,
With her doll,
A book
And her best green dress.
And when she gets outside,
When she gets to the gate,
She notices the others.
Other shadows are coming
Out of all the other houses,
Each with a little suitcase.
…
Afterwards she can’t say,
Which of her parents woke her up,
Who it was who helped her pack
Her best things,
Who got her dressed, or,
Whether, at last,
It was her mother or father
Who carried her outside,
Past the front gate.
Because in her mind
They’ve become one.
…
Later they’ll insist
That they didn’t tell her,
Because she wouldn’t have understood
And didn’t want to go.
But this isn’t true.
She understood,
At the time,
The important thing.
It was a game,
And her parents were acting.
She could tell by the tone.
…
Even later, if they ask her
What she remembers
She’ll face them,
The ranks of all
The mothers and fathers,
Standing as one,
In sunlight,
And say,
That at the time she was real,
They weren’t, and
When she was serious
They were just play-acting.
(June, 2006)
verse 5
However the body is described
And however the body is inscribed
I go down deeper
I go down below the road
Where the body takes its root
I take hold of the path
That is indivisible
And it’s time
Below the road
Deeper than the traffic
Below the peace
In the country I’m composed of
The poverty of the sea
The columns of broken hills
And the shattered escarpments
The mound of pillaged hills
And the chopped land
The excess of the sky
Whose grasping light
Reaches out
Far out beyond
The weeping land
And brings back
Handfuls of smoke
Mouthfuls of salt air
Dressing and stripping
With cloud and salt
The mourning field
However it is that I’m composed
Ugly and beautiful-ugly
Sad and dutifully alive
The same as you
According to a metaphor
Whose structure will never be found
In poetry
Eyes in the skin
With resentment in their eye-holes
Searching
For the words
For the tongue
In your tattooed faces
Your skins of lead
Your leaves of organs
Layering thickly
The dark bush
The skins of your cells
Your chemistry
Looking for your microscopic difference
But chiefly for the stories of belonging
To a path
Below the skin
Whose outside order is overcome
Who is both female and male
Human and subhuman
the country I’m composed of (embedded sonnet)
The poverty of the sea
The columns of broken hills
And the shattered escarpments
The mound of pillaged hills
And the chopped land
The excess of the sky
Whose grasping light
Reaches out
Far out beyond
The weeping land
And brings back
Handfuls of smoke
Mouthfuls of salt air
Dressing and stripping
(With cloud and salt)
The mourning field
