JOHN MATEER has published chapbooks in South Africa, Indonesia and Australia, as well as three book-length collections in Australia, the most recent of which is Barefoot Speech (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). THREE POEMS for Martin Harrison 1. Glass Words Desire's flesh, like glass words, alludes to memories that may not be our own. Lost among streets named after heroes, perplexed like temporality between twilit minarets, a stranger proclaims, denying history. Like glass words, desire's flesh is present in a monsoonal shower, in the interrogative guffaw of lightning that exhumes the city's bones from under the cocked ears and pointing fingers of satellite dishes, tv antennae. Glass flesh, in the parallax error of desiring words, envisages houses shivering against lovers' fingertips, and reflects on demonstrations that depart from religious places to amass on grassy squares, dissolving tyres into smoke. 2. Graphic Images Disarmed, the poet is speech to the powers. Only loanwords arrive in his mouth, like placebos or wisdom teeth. The fangs of a night are lightning, though the thunder could be a Javanese dissident or a cloud disguised as joy. In speaking to the powers, disarmed, he's wonder, and the silence nobody hears is just one order of the only philosophy. Disarmed, the powers having spoken, whether through an animistic door or the microbes of a kiss, have conversed beyond all found images, never having revealed their guilty selves except as that. 3. Ancient Noise He used to talk to God, praying (the speech that enters the void unguaranteed). Every prayer, though, became a test of reality, and the world in which the body dissolves was an ear like the Milky Way. He used to curse God, talking, as though he were the author of the Ramayana originating a poetic of anger, having witnessed that hunter's slaughter of the beloved bird. (Righteous anger, then, was fierce extinction.) Talking to God, he used to sing, mouthing the absence of a jungle, mute, and internalizing those spaces of industrial cities in which everyone is recognized only in mirrors. To those ghosts, as now so often to him, all voice is failure, an ancient noise. CONVERSATION: A TRUNCATED FAX Often I say so much that I don't understand what I wanted to say, hear or remember. I wonder how what you are seeing ( ) is changing your sense of 'an ending' The curtain descending between us is like the gradual submerging of an inner ear. I often say so much that I don't hear what I wanted to say, hear or remember. Of course things are seen in the sensory 'packet' in which we can see them - one sample - and things go on otherwise than how they are seen. That my voice is a metaphor, a 'poem' if you like, noticed in a heard memory, a tonality, and that THAT grainy voice is the Buddha's Silence - That I don't say, hear, remember or understand what I often wanted to say so much - Yet for all that I am of the opinion (I think I am) that late Western industrial and post-industrial life is an outcome completely congruent with a specific oddity in the biological positioning of the species Where do you go from the top of a hundred foot pole? THE MONSTER IS THE NIGHTMARE of realizing the meaning of everything you have said, of witnessing exactly who you have been, each micrometre, each nanosecond. Dust - the ash that you shake from yourself when you burn with light - may be called 'fragments of space for the Western eye'. Who am I? asks the mouth. The ear does not respond, except in the negative, with oceans of sound. The eye asks, Is that real? And the skull, like all deserts, answers with a chilling breeze. You, as non-believer, are a sentence left incomplete due to its grammar, the whisper that evokes the subliminal noise and light that is pure. As the tsunami of every instant, I am collapses into you were while the clouds and the mountains identify. Who is that? asks the mouth. The ear responds, listening, with the attention of a blackhole luring everything elsewhere. The eye asks, Is it seen? And the skull, like all conclusions, is collapsed into a Moebus strip. THIS PATH 1. Anyone can walk this path where the eyes have no moon. Who is to say theres ground under your feet? except the odd brick crawling like a knocked over animal. Theres no light here only a dim sky hovering over the roofs. Of the mouth that opens allowing the blackness in (or the blackness out) your mind can only conjure a vague angel. 2. Step carefully - there is a watery scattering of glass before you. 3. Have you never seen a mother sell an ulos for nothing? Don't you understand that without a moon you too are ghostly? 4. Now, in the blackout, free of your silence, you have turned onto a main street and are starting to understand that there have been other ways... (No, there is no music, few sounds.) Though the sudakos prowl like illuminated cages, all the people are hushed, calm. Candles and lanterns are glowing in the warungs. In the alcoves of restaurants and stark doorless shops every shadow is as precious as Coke crates or the shrines of ancestors. 5. In a moment of pure blackness, as this city narrows to an alley, all around you, in gutters, ditches, potholes, the rainwater is now been struck like a huge bell and you are waking: |