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Joel Magarey’s poetry has been published in Australian journals such as Meanjin, Quadrant, Redoubt and Hermes. He co-edited the online literary journal Overland Express. Holy Rite I am kneeling at the tabernacle I am being blessed, her palms upon my ears and she is saying this is my body and she is offering me the chalice and she is saying this, the cup of my blood and I’m putting my lips to the cup and I’m drinking deep, deep, deep and she’s breathing amen, amen, amen Bedroom at four a.m. Thickening darkness returns you to an equilibrium: one body at rest. For love, too – like light and motion – ends when the energy’s spent. Until three, say, you kept a nostalgic candle alight; but as it burned lower, a sigh put it out of its misery. Now the darkness is pure – you cannot see your own hand, and that also seems right: for you entered this blindness by letting go of hers, which guided you so long, which taught you the Braille of bodies, which stayed you when you would fall. Balance is again the responsibility of your legs. So use them. Get up. Turn, and walk, through the dense air, to the window: through that chink will soon be leaking impure, thin, colours. Questions for Narcissus (after Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus) Look away and what you love is nowhere. – Ovid Humans can’t be meant to have always suffered in this position: he facing himself, she facing him – a visual echo, forever fading from the background. The foreground, like all of the grounds, is taken: this owner has exercised his option to occupy his inner lands exclusively. He’s walled the boundaries, too, and though he doesn’t realise it this means he wants to die alone. Child of rivers, his own are drying fast. Narcissus – can’t you see her at all? She holds out her beating heart toward you like a struggling dove – her hands bloodied in the suicide of love. But you really cannot see; for as you leant over the bank that image picked the pool’s lock and floated up, free, attaching to your pupils like a cataract. Now your sight is dimmed: wholly unable to punch through the shadow you cast on yourself. Yet still she waits, bleeding hope, somewhere at the back of you – repeating your words, the only part she gets of you to keep. She looks toward you but your head is bowed as if the reflection has you lassoed around the neck and is slowly beginning to pull you down. Son of Cephissus: could you break that bond? Do you think you could surprise us? Could you struggle against the weight of expectation? Against the stocks history puts us in and the racks to which we chain ourselves? Say you had another chance – could you turn, Narcissus, turn and face her? |
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