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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 60 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
From the Word Go
By Murray Edmond
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1992 Murray EdmondAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-656-1
CHAPTER 1
The Word Go
Go.
You begin
by imagining yourself
that theatrical act
at a window
the flat sea
stretching from the Corniche
and hungry penniless barefoot
prostitute boys
going about like yachts
all that wartime glam
and a short bespectacled man
in khakis and lemon-squeezer
beside his YMCA truck.
Febrile heat makes
ghosts —
towards him
across the Mediterranean
comes a small blond boy
walking on water
clutching a typewriter.
Go.
And you go.
Now.
And it's now.
Dead Lines
shoot that tui off its tree
in the bay where the dead sheep lay one day
separating the boys from the buoys
signs taken for tokens wonders sold as toxins
tinniness tinnitus tocsins tininess
words bottled in books
history debrided of stories hisses alone
prey prey prey on your mind for a prayer
knowing only the knowing of no no no no no no
25/1/91
The Life Frieze
When I placed them together they acquired all at once a ring they never possessed individually — just as if they could not be exhibited with others. And so I put them together in friezes. — Edvard Munch
Faviola
In the stories we tell about the stories we told
her eyes used to follow you round the room
but only if you didn't look at her directly.
She would listen in a way which was faint, romantic,
forward-leaning, mobile beneath her red cowl,
attentive to the micro-gradations of emotion
in the confessional sotto voce of the small boy.
How sick he always looked to her. But this was a very public
room, coming and going with lower case life in its
proliferating nullity, its small, tepid, intense handshake,
its grasp of the lunchtime musical, I'm just a girl
who cain't say no, poor Judd is dead, I almost
forgot the blue-eyed kid — all these she bent towards
giving me the velvet of her ear as a comfort.
How could one have sucked succour from what one
poured oneself into, the whorl of the skull's cave, the instantly
clanging cochlea of instantly being heard —
all the fights she saw, the naked children whipping
each other with towels, the fire leaping up to greet
their sadism, evening inundating them with its
sodium passion, nuclear splendour, poisonous, religious
cloud chamber, postwar elegance, the best of everything
in a nutshell. She was always there. Of course.
She was mother at rest among the curling apple peelings.
Her hand held his wet brow as he coughed into the basin.
She was several stories high.
He began suspecting things.
Mother of all nurses, matrix of the house.
Her presence amongst uncles was so taken for granted
it was unnoticed.
Bradman
(for Rod Edmond)
Even as the one great umpire was
writing against your name on a scale of one to ten, you were
rolling round on the bed beating the wall
doubled with the laughter of fiction while
he looked down on you, the paternal image, nothing
catholic, but a grand, protestant cricketer.
In your small room
green and brown without a hair out of place
nothing against your name but the sin of loneliness
locked in your cell from birth
and refusing to come out when released
for fear of losing the approbation of the great cricketer,
the gently raised and censoring finger —
it was a tale told of another age by boys
who were men at which you laughed with such fractious delight.
I'd like to re-run several instalments like
a radio serial, a hamper full of jokes, a summer full
of evenings listening for the last ball to be bowled.
Scorer, whittler, scrimshaver,
crouched with your spoon in the corner of your stone cell
(even as the commentary ran on year by year)
you scratched and scraped grain by grain
to grind an escape from the fearsome chateau.
Even your own spit was a corrosive on the stone.
Then, one midnight, breakthrough at last —
a gleam of water twinkles two hundred feet below
up through the breach you've dug in the granite flags,
your own innings over.
But where to go in this nowhere world of sea and endless wind
and spume drift spun in air?
A boy's own agony was what was writ in water against your name.
But then you spotted it —
a piece of rusted pipe to clamber down,
a clammy hank of salt-shredded rope to swing the gap,
a ledge on the sheer rock to inch along
with meagre foothold
and a tiny niche where you might eke out the night
with waiting while your doom crept closer.
And the wind howled.
But look!
Could that beetling shadow on the cliff presage rescue,
could there lurk a secret opening there? And, yes,
in fact the fabled passage to the lost treasure
has just fallen to your luck.
Remember the umpire's gaze is fixed, as in a picture.
There was always a blind spot in the room where his looking
could not reach.
As the stories told it, there was always a way out,
always, at five minutes to six, another day to play.
The 1895 Kiss
Was he dreaming of buying a hay paddock
in Okura for $1.1 million as he kissed her?
How did something so rigid with desire
get on the wall? Is it possible to compose
a narrative only of questions? Were the curtains
left open so that the neighbours across
the street in the apartment block and the men
in the warehouse and the uniformed women
at the industrial machines could watch them,
their warm, naked bodies buttoned together
at the lips? Did the neighbours whisper
to each other: 'Her blood-red hair has enveloped
him.'? Did the warehousemen murmur as their
afternoon shoulders brushed, exchanging
waybills, 'He has wound himself round her
like a blood-red snake.'? Did the women, coughing
towards the evening of the nineteenth century,
exclaim: 'She has sent a chilling lust through
his body, she has pressed her body violently
against his.'? Even if the sole intent of the two,
the woman and the man, had been to misdirect
the street, to stir the whole town up
with wave on wave of inexhaustible words pulsing
through its wires, did they themselves perhaps
feel themselves perhaps both moisten like soap
or eyes as the soft smell of each other's hair
as rich as fresh ink choked their nostrils, throats,
tongues, as her hand found his shoulder, blundered
into it like a moth in the dark and noted
its precocious life fluttering at her touch?
Did they not once walk together as light departed
over the hay paddock and feel the blank moths
implode like soft bullets on their separate skins?
The discovery she made about nature was that
everything in it has a name, every part and parcel
of it is distinguished from every other part
and parcel; and each parcel contains some means,
sexual or otherwise, of reproducing itself.
In the hay paddock, was she confronted by the huge fact
of her own ignorance and tempted to rename everything
in her own image once and just once
so each name should be forgotten as soon as
it was born?
As the child is the child of the child
of the child, the kiss is remembered for ever.
He set it in ink like a sentence in 1895.
Snake
Grey linoleum, grey formica, grey paint,
silver taps and cupboard handles, coupe louvres,
stainless steel bench, grey-blue table top,
white fridge, lemon walls, and swimming there,
my snake, how I wanted him there, on the wall,
my golden snake (the gold are venomous)
who came curling lazily out of a child's
reptilian grief of love withheld, mismanaged,
timed-to-perfection, and bent his head
(they must be killed) round the water pitcher
and lazily lifted his head and looked lazily
round him, while the mongoose danced and danced,
all the while lazily all the while with
enormous strength subduing his desire
to eat his own tail, to tangle with the alchemy
of the kitchen. He was mine. I painted him
myself, thick damp paint padded on wallpaper,
an ochre splodge unwinding formlessly through
poisonous Sicilian weeds and an overworked lattice
of broken bricks, the well itself, the place
to draw from. And I was waiting, as he waited
for the snake to drink, as I waited for the present
to go up on the wall and propitiate, initiate,
shamanise, the way certain words like leukaemia
or megaton, Reader's Digest or Gershwin's Rhapsody
in Blue could transpose a room.
In the nineteen fifties everything was made of gold —
the snakes were made of gold, the love was made of
gold, the kitchen taps ran gold from the burning bowels
of the earth and far-off Etna smoked gold smoke.
This was my painting of my snake, an archaeology
before the paint had even dried or cracked. Which
it did. An antique alive and well in its own time.
That Prince, another who missed his chance,
who wondered to our face if fardels should be borne
at all, had no hesitation heaping his well-to-do
emotional blackmail on Ophelia. What we saw,
as he spoke to us, was his self-hate, his self-scorn,
the snake of his hand reaching out to her
to withhold love.
The Blue Boy
What manner of child was this
who turned the heads in Milne and Choyce
at the quality of cloth he wore,
the fine bone china of his hand,
the way a cricket ball would roll
with linseed touch across his palm
and devilishly elude the batsman's
prod? The mothers all swooned
when he drew his dirk and foil
and danced at Christmas time
in the forecourt of the petrol station.
Fathers were not so taken
with his jou issance.
For one thing, growing up
wasn't on his purposeful agenda.
His body language told them something
they pretended not to want to hear.
And in space he hybridised
the Victorian and the Continental:
chasms vast of cliff and crag
floating in sublimity of storm and sea
were melded with the café corner,
enclave with absinthe and a dream.
He was the boy you were born to fall
in love with, the child every mother
ached to hang upon her wall.
He drove that kind of 1930s sportscar,
had a library of erotica,
smelt as other men then did not smell
and got away with it
because his Dickensian offsider, the Red Boy,
took the rap.
That such a spiv as that Blue Boy
was living in the lounge, a room
parlous with dignity where you were taken
when the doctor came, a ripe needle
in a whack of buttock, standing on a chair
so the doctor didn't have to bend,
this was his enchantment.
From his rock settle he looked across
a tuneless piano to a glass flamingo.
Dutch Interior
When you came into the room there she was
plumb in a corner with her broad back
comfortably wedged into the panelling
and watched by a small, interior clutch of children.
It was quite quiet.
There was no sense of horror
as it is registered in a scream
or speechlessness.
Her suckling of the baby was bountiful,
loving even,
and the looks on the children's faces
(they were turned away but you could read them
from behind)
indicated incomprehension and curiosity
but also acceptance.
The pattern of the floor, green-black and grey-white squares
of marble, large and peacefully laid out,
and the calm light which streamed down through a high side window,
and all the restful, warm stillness
were totally reassuring.
You knew simply this couldn't be a place
where something inhuman would happen.
Not this light-filled corner of the bedroom
where the armless chair sat
jalousied by shadow cast by the Venetian blinds
and the safe things like hand-mirrors and combs and brushes
and bibles and barometers were evenly spaced
on crocheted doilies on the polished rimu.
It was the kind of place you came and quietly sat between
the heavily skirted knees of your mother
while she sang an old French song
and sorted the headlice eggs from the strands of your hair.
You asked her to tell you about what she had done as a girl
before you were born
and before she met your father
and she cut and peeled you a piece of apple
and you took it
marvelling something could be so clean and crystalline,
so light and fleshy at the same time,
so sweet and yet make your eyes water when you bit it,
and when you glanced up for an instant
through the happy tears
your mother's face
was the face of a woman you had never seen before,
the lustre on the high dome of her forehead
was completely unfamiliar
and yet how could you not recognise her?
after all she was your mother.
Crows over a Cornfield
It spoke disaster on a grand scale.
The kids knew it was Freudian.
The folks did not.
Impasto crows aching with depth
and with excess
who made no attempt to scumble
the murder in their minds.
The way the joke was not got meant
a moral sampler may as well have hung:
An Englishman
Never Raises His Foot or If
You Can Keep Your
Head When All Around You someone or
other Is Losing Theirs
above the fireplace. But the kids chose
this, Who Suffers Wins or Misery Is
Truth. Oh artists,
radiant with defeat, the victim's ears
can be taken out
on loan. No other picture could have
quite so well subsumed
the family iconography. Since it was
the last thing you saluted,
car keys clutched
for dear dear life, before
you left the house.
From woe unto expunging woe like
Ishmael, afloat the coffin in the Classic
Comic wearing long pink combinations,
gazing out beyond the creamy pool
where the Pequod
sank, to sight the Rachel,
devious-cruising.
No other final frame ever caught so well
the sense of something coming up
when everything was coming to an end.
As if rounding a nothing-special bend
on the way to
the Ohaupo pub after hours
you caught a crow
in the foggy beams and thought,
'Now that reminds me of something or other.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From the Word Go by Murray Edmond. Copyright © 1992 Murray Edmond. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
The Word Go,Dead Lines,
The Life Frieze:,
Faviola,
Bradman,
The 1895 Kiss,
Snake,
The Blue Boy,
Dutch Interior,
Crows over a Cornfield,
Reunion,
Rerun,
Ode to Virgil Exner,
Hamilton,
S O S,
Cookbook,
Home Movies:,
Travelogue 1958-59,
Horror Movie,
Cult Classic,
Road Movie Canto,
Melodrama,
The Space of Time,
Hirsute Canine Narrative,
Holiday,
Pnigos,
Cool in versions,
Go to Woe,
How to Write Laments,
Dérive à la Frank,
Script,
Treating of Why Ten Eyes Weep,
The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations,
Notes,