5 Poems for E·ratio
by Louis Armand
Light Gradually Descends on the Obsolescence Curve
(for John Kinsella)
Light gradually descends on the obsolescence curve, picturesque
as a statistical report slated for a whitewash. our camera
has captured for you a few aspects: night-time tracking shots
in a dockside container yard. the shipping lanes, hemmed-in.
old trans-Pacific news. Seduced by the progress achieved
in the domination of nature, the mass-acculturated cockstand,
the sweating surveillance eye… Same times found us in the same
places, living and acting otherwise. Somewhere a lost decade is
talking through a telephone. Now we are dark tunnels and
stairways underground, spent icons of roadless outcountry,
quondong fluctuations – pre-recorded Arnhem dawns above
stratospheres of cyclical downturn. What’s known. What isn’t.
A Darlinghurst Gauguin sketching portraits for a hit, the hungry
spoon, the Buddha face-down on a floor of broken eggshells
and Petri-dish insomnias. Give your vote to evolution.
Cruising through endless TV vistas looking for the big clue
to what’s going down. Northbound: the great convict ziggurats,
orbital night-signals lighting up and sometimes obscuring a sky
empty of response. Indian smoke-signals on Mars. Stun-guns
and UFO chorus-girl routines. Climbed to the top of the Bridge
to throw a spanner in the works, arguing with gravity.
It’s all happening out there on Retrovision. Yesterday only.
Zenga zenga, space junk, the absolute finito – next time pull up
your knees and try to be a door. testing the inhibitory reflex,
a grey verbal sludge of language smeared as upon a windscreen.
Warhol squeegee gangs hustling the intersections –Dogs in Space
mapping the escape route via welfare cheque deposit slip.
Time to get serious, the life of the body you’ve failed to cultivate,
the body you were born in and not some strap-on placebo.
Another monument to the lowest common dollar. Did you get
your free measure and quote? A portrait “in absentia” –
things that want life and may be kept… Like dental floss. Rain,
impinging upon sleeplessness and windows one after another.
Someone closes the door and re-arranges the furniture –
smells of cooking fat, ash, a stomach-like enclosure you belong
like an ulcer in. The future never looked rosier. Select replay.
In just fifteen minutes, you too can be all you were cracked-up to be.
Sotades the Obscene of Maroneia
Nine o’clock and all the worst yet to come –
May Day parades, Saturday morning horrors.
Been living in mirrors as long as you have,
dear. What’s life but a stumbling palindrome
in a lead-suit aqualung? And you call that a man?
Awake to another day’s ego-dissolving bliss,
I’ve condensed myself into a fraction
between matter and no matter. Hours pass
like rotten plumbing – the untolled village bell,
the ass in its stable braying – a pair
of all-night drunks earnestly at attention
before the crux of their patriotic God, whistling
while they urinate. How do you cross a line
drawn in water? Jacques Cousteau
of the depthless blank page – I am the whole
of my own autism: the world on its axis,
the poetaster’s wife, the perturbed length of a
human pratfall as it drowns and breathes again
and still drowns.
Tête de Femme
(for Ali Alizadeh)
An open window and morning out of doors
is a Bartók sonata with delivery vans and
dogs and pigeons in trees, the inevitable
end-of-the-world making background noise
arranged in arches, domes, minarets.
A city’s alter-ego is crying into its drink
like the woman you observe in a hotel window –
anxious hands create their own occasion.
But candour is a foreigner in time of war.
Chance encounters without witness –
midday, a deserted terrace along the strand,
the sea’s elaborate mosaic – her face
watching out of it in half-profile like a Roman
concubine’s. And would you bleed for your
own country? One word for any other word –
ships pass north into a scenery that begins
where the sky ends. There are worlds, supposedly,
much vaster. A one-thousand year ad-break.
Why seek what can’t be found? Behind
every clock, under every stone – the noise
of traffic coming closer, the sounded
note, the hectoring voice. The restored relation.
After Donald Friend’s The Outrigger (1974)
Windjamming between the reefs – a boy in a canoe
you lie beside in your mind, knotted blue hair,
loincloth undone as he turns about and rides you,
white shemale posed on all-fours, a four-posted
thatch hut and postcard figures cut out to form
a watching backdrop, static as Balinese theatre.
The ribbed canoe flexes against the breakers’
coercive uniformity; a snapshot makes the outfall
aesthetic. His mother, he says, was an orphan
of Dutch colonists. Brownskinned. For another
five bucks he’ll let you suck him off afterwards.
Through a chink in the wall you see the dogs
stalking the periphery – remedial demons, rust-
pelted, scavenging for morsels of proof that things
are indeed as they seem. The ceaseless grovel
of the waves. On the wall, a gaudily illustrated map
shows the route to paradise – but who can say
if what lies there isn’t cursed? The outrigger
turning back to shore, sun low in its arc, flash
of an oar. Each stroke, down-thrust, a purification.
But to stand in the light and not in the shadow
is no guarantee against the infinite evasions of glib
post-coital sentimentality. Was anything stolen?
Can you provide a description? The outrigger,
dragged up onto the beach among crab burrowings,
seaweed, brine – all the surrounding amorous
real estate pegged with for sale signs. Or you alone
are the island on which you walk, compass-eyed,
seeing only the X that marks the lost co-ordinate.
Object Lessons
They’ve taken down the statues, the portraits,
the posters with children: what’s left
is the quicksand simplicity of words turned
backwards, becoming the stuff of TV,
signal adjustments, talking heads. Their malady
exists solely for the sake of curing itself,
like penicillin on stale bread. Tobruk,
the dancing feathers of the ceremonial bird
exiled from its habitat. We set out for want
of territory, stakes driven into sand to pitch
a cenotaph. Nomads of the kasbah hunch
backwards into the storm, melancholy
figures shouldering TV sets – as unwatched
diatribes waft in and out of the frame, like scenery.
Louis Armand is a Sydney-born writer who has lived in Prague since 1994 and currently directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. He is the editor of Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern UP, 2007) and of The Return of Král Majales: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance, 1990-2010. His work has been included in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Best Australian Poems. His most recent collections of poetry are Letters from Ausland (Vagabond, 2011) and Synopticon (with John Kinsella; LPB, 2012). He is an editor of the magazine VLAK: Contemporary Poetics and the Arts.
