Interruptions to Reading Poetry
1.
In the Middle of David Malouf's Wild
Lemons
I put down the poetry book and walk out
the front door. On the brick path, like a visitor
hesitating before broaching the house steps:
a small, slate-black rat.
It is shivering, poisoned, not-quite
dead. Its pointed ears
pick up my footsteps, but
barely. Its coat rises round it like a fur
around the neck of an opera-goer stepping out
into silence, each glittering dark fibre
still electric, still charged,
deep to every nerve. It is in the middle
of
my path to anywhere —
as
precisely final
as
a print from Dürer, perfect in
every tiny
detail
of ear point, bony paw, fishing line-fine
whiskers
hooked
in an
elegant, still nose. It is in the middle
of
what I am carrying out of the house from my book —
wild
lemons, a place in Tuscany, the body receiving
transfigured
text …
Under a sky of singing blue
it is
in the middle of its death
and
will not
be
transfigured. The flat world of a shovel
is what
I bring it. Banged head. Final act.
When it
rolls on the bricks it has the profile,
soft
torso and premature paws
of an
ultrasound embryo.
At this moment when it should be
hard as
stone, flung out of the world, instead it is so limp
and the
day is stiffening around it.
I
balance it on my spade
towards
a last rest, a quick
sharp grave
under
hydrangeas' already bowed
lapis-lazuli heads
and the
noisy miner birds
which
all day have been rehearsing
unholy
choruses
hold
their breath.
Under the hot rattle
of
loquat leaves, their silence follows me
like
the weight
of a
just-closed book.
2.
Somewhere in Charles Wright's A
Short History of the Shadow
That
petulant bird, the phone, warbles in another room.
Where
I am sitting, sun has just sparked —
even though the sky outside is sulking.
Dark ranges at the edge of my view
are lugubrious dinosaurs, waiting to gobble what's left
of last night's moon —
and now here's this chain of song, its couplings tossed
towards me.
I go like a dog to be collared.
Some dark man with his thumb on my name
wants to offer me pest control, as if he knows there are
rats
slinking along the branches of my trees at night,
sly shadows whose teeth gnaw holes in everything at 3
a.m.
He hangs up even before I do …
My
voice in its glove of politeness
must hold a bait of slowed time, some dangerous
sweetness
I caught in my last moments alone in the poem —
but
which
poem?
and where in the book can I find it now? The black matt
cover,
its edges scuffed, its sleek centre streaked,
has collapsed. Like an unpolished shoe
it
shows no sign of the white foot
which
lived in it two minutes ago.
The downward sloping leaves
of
pittosporums and loquats shiver
like the ears of sleeping dogs an arm's length from my
chair —
sun ruffles the morning's dreaming fur …
and the book,
no
matter where I open it —
the
book
slides out of its fretful slipper —
it
walks out into the dawn again
its ankles and its insteps so painfully white, its black
lines like veins
rising
knobbled and tender toward
'the
music of things'
while a gnawed moon
slides into grey mountains to grow again.
I couldn't help but
agree with the blurb by Paul Summers on the inside
front cover of the
hour of silvered mullet – that
Jean Kent's poetry was
like
'an argument with the air'. It is a slippery, silvery sort of book. I
was
at a loss, as I read, as to how to put my finger on its qualities.
But
then,
as its qualities invaded me, I minded less about pinning things
down,
and began to let my mind float about here and there, in a most
particular
intimacy with the drift and lift of its musicality.
http://pittstreetpoetry.com/emporium/jean-kent/
The detail of the black rat in the first part is beautiful as is the observation through both 1. and 2. The content crosses elusive barriers as if there are a number of parallel worlds sided by side. Impressive work.
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