Poems of the Interstitium

7/28/2019 Poems of the Interstitium

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Poems of the

Interstitium

by Ian Irvine (Hobson)

Poems of the Interstitium(Digital chapbook) copyright Ian Irvine, 1991-2013, all rights

reserved. Image: Among the Ancestors (Lake Toba, Sumatra 1997) by Sue King-Smith,

all rights reserved.

[A Digital Chapbook by Mercurius Publishing (Bendigo Australia)]

AcknowledgementsMany of these poems have been published in journals and anthologies. The author wishes to thank

the editors of the following journals and anthologies.

Best Australian Poems 2005 (Edited by Les Murray) (poem 1);Agenda (Special Edition: Contemporary Australian

Poets) (UK, 2005) (poem 1); Ozlitonline (poems 1 & 2);Poetry New Zealand[poem 16],Envoi 150th Gala Issue

(Wales, UK) [poems 3 & 4], Scintillae 2012: Anthology of Central Victorian Poets and Writers [poems 3 & 14], Tears

in the Fence (UK) [poem 5] ;Pennine Platform (UK) [poems 15 & 21]; Takahe (NZ) (poem 17), Conspire (Online,

US) (poem 11); Woorilla (poem 18); Works on Paper(poem 6); The Seventh Quarry (Wales, UK) (poem 8); Vernacula

(South Australia) (poem 8); The Mozzie (Poetic Preface); The New England Review (poem 2);Bluff(US online) (poem7);Rose and the Thorn (US - online) (poem 10); Poem 22 appeared online at a petition site protesting the deletion of

Poetry Writing from a Victorian TAFE Level (Diploma) writing course in 2011.

Poems 1,2, 3,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 and 13 also appeared inFacing the Demon of Noontide 1999, Booksurge Publishing,

USA.


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Contents

Poetic Preface:

To The Reader

1. The Giant (1)

2. The Giant (II)3. Europe After the Rain

4. But Our Ocean Was Dark That Night

5. The Pale Moon Left us Here6. Triangles and the Avant Garde

7. The Circular House

8. The True Colonial9. Antipodean Landscape10. Passion is a Dying Bird

11. The Cemetery by the Coast

12. Undeveloped Film13. I Have Rediscovered Darkness

14. Hiroshima Dance15. McKenzie Falls, December 2007

16. The Fifth Eye of Dharma

17. The Neo-Liberal Book of Fairy Stories

18. The First Hint of a Realist Sun19. The End of the World

20. Black-Rock Spirit of the Waterfall21. Vivid Turquoise Leaves

22. Where Have You Buried the Poets?


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Poetic Preface


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The Giant (I)

The giant beneath the chestnut treesmells of mushroom and lichen.

In the autumn when the leaves fall

he makes a blanket that lasts through the

long damp winter.He says little, and slowly -

his eyes are not of this world

his words come as if from afar distance.

He has settled here

and receives his visitors and their questions

with slow consideration.In the waning light of dusk

he murmurs them an answer,

and those who hear such words

- all hoary, dark and sweet -wonder if it is rather the deep

hypnosis of the wind

or the strangeness of the houror the rustle of the leaves

that brings to them their

remedy.

And thus they begin to doubt.


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Women Who Smell of Dead Flowers

(The Giant II)

The war is over - for now

the medals all are handed out

and shine with an evil gleam -the device of all killing is this strange respectfor ceremony -

and what pacts, what nations, what causes

have meaning to the heroes now?

He kneels before the chestnut tree

comic, too loud, his chest puffed out

and the giant will not answer,there is only the biting wind

and the soldiers mirrored solitude.

There are only memories andflat futures ...

futures in the arms of women

who smell of dead flowers.


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Europe After the Rain

Things have settled in the melting,

man is fossil now,impersonal textures on fissured walls.

The sun rises (as always),

to a still organic beauty,

where all things are constitutedsomewhere between rock and tissue.

Only the soul is absentits debris has no name,

no presence

to the assembled organica.

The mannequin is all but human now,

tall beneath iridescent gallows

olive green, beside an ornate stele.

Mythopoeic sentries stand guard,observe in the waiting,

the decalcomania of banished gods.

Together, messenger and doppelgangertrudge upon the brittle reef of

history,

they survey distant patches of colour

fossil soilsand the same old sun.


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But Our Ocean Was Dark That Night

Were we really like that?

Recall descent through Albert Park,autumn trees in slanting sunlight,

a pathway slippery with leaves.

We paused, overlooking the city- cross-hatched streets, the easy humof early evening traffic.

Suddenly, a shared impulse for the sea.

Love craves warm bodies of water

We turned right onto Queen Street,our lovers' commune blessed in turn

by hamburger joints, Chinese restaurants

- the drift-smell of exotic cooking.

We were heading for the ocean.

we paused, in a place between elements

and watched, as from the northrain clouds swept in across the water

and swirled, about the structure of the bridge

Love craves warm bodies of water

But our ocean was dark that night,

jagged with tide-thrust masts,bridge struts and lurking outcrops

of rock, concrete and steel.

I see it clearly now, young lovers,

locked, insecure, under dock lights

stained blurry with salt

and yellowed our love.


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The Pale Moon Left Us Here

The pale moon lost us here. Here

among the tall-block shadows of city, hereclose to the spot of Persephones last singing.

We come across a barbed wire square, unlit,

but heavy with the night-chopped moanof earth-bound spirits, wind-tossed andloose-cut, through vortices of gust-cold air.

And when the gate succumbs to key and push

we see the ghost of a world pan out, this way and that,

all-proclaiming a kind of meltdowngrisaille and pure

And the soilmuddied from early evening rain

seems raw and trauma-shocked, as though

lightening struck and fuming cloud

We walk slowly past burnt-out cars,

fire trucks, and insect cranes chained

like surly beasts, among the skeletonsof all our mad belief in structure.

Here a winter came into the world, and ever

since, all souls perish, slight of slight, untiltonight, when even the birds refuse to sing.

And of course there is an entrance hereUnder This, under all of This,

This failure, This unfathomable wrath

of man.

And of course there will be Spring

And the hum of Summer bees

And the whish whish whish of drifting

Autumn leaves

But kneeling in this place, hereamong Persephones brown and fading flowerswe bear witness, as all souls must,

to the worlds soft rot, and know

that the pale moon left us here.


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Triangles and the Avant Garde

Young man, the two poles do not satisfy,high and low, golden boy or villain, either way

incarceration is the whole-domed picture.

The geography of assent or dissenthides a shared fault line,and contrary to rhetoric

the Centre is not suburbia.

The goal posts of revolution

are mirrored on the right of the social turf

just as the orgies of the damnedare sacred to the monk.

Architecture in the new utopia

/dystopiaevokes a tension intrinsic to the plague.

Light and dark, socialist or tory,

each defines the other's faith in substance.

The puritan lusts after the exhausted bacchante,

the whore admires the penance stick,

the freeman craves the simplicity of chains

Young woman, the orbit is extreme,

activity flourishes where stagnation settles,and where liberation is the fantasy of bureaucrats

the ideal is intrinsic to the plague.

The angel is defined by

the character of devils

'Exploiter' and 'Exploited'together keep the meta-system versatile,

'Work' and 'Leisure' conspire to feed the

void,and the sought for variations of fleshdo not deliver sentience.

At midnight the witch succumbs to Mary,the flaneur is anxious

as the bourgeois solidicom dissolve,

at every turn, the pluralist constructs a universal law


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Young man, young woman

this ceaseless pushing of boundariesswings the orbit into chaos

itself defined by extremes of order.

The new rebellion is triangular,a drawing in of pathogenic either/ors

to a healthy third

mindful of instability.


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The Circular House

He grew tomatoes in the desert

Miraculous the locals said,and they all had a look

at his plump, firm, January tomatoes.

Its a jungle of red and green, I said

You just need a Missus now.

He rode a mountain bike

and wore a huge Mexican hat.The locals got used to him,

he was going to build a circular house.

We spent days on the foundations- the mixer spat the dummy,

the measurements had to be precise

the house was fifteen feet across.

Some local writer came to assess the venture,

and the greater venture,

examined the sheltered spotsmiled at the symbolism.

My daughter loved the concrete,

the grey wetness of it all.Shed mumble like a tradesman after each load:

Settin' smooth dad, yup, settin' smooth.

She wanted to swim in the concrete.Id answer her, Yup settin' smooth, settin' smooth ...'

James would just smile anxiously and

scurry for the tape measure.

(For James Gaghan)


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The True Colonial

Over the hill, down a long dirt roadhiding in the bush - thats where he lives.

He lives with his wife and children

among tropical vines, fruit trees,eucalypts, cockies and quartz.He has sheds full of useful and useless tools,of wood, steel, irrigation equipment, colonial artifacts.

He is a true colonial - Mongrel country,he says, What you wanna live here for?

We related in a strange sort of waytil I turned what he called Bohemian,

he didnt like hippiesor bohemiansor schoolteachers

or government officialsand I didnt like his colonial ideology.

He wanted to build a paddlesteamer one day ...

a circular house,

an unfillable daman unmakeable paddlesteamera failed commune

He loved being undergroundbunkered in against

the governmentjust like me, except

on a much larger scale ... corruption in shippingpublic service accountabilitythere was always a court casesomething to prove.I told him

Youre a bloody stirrer,a radical ...that got him.


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Antipodean Landscape

In hunger of the eye's fresh vision,

we re-construct the outer parts of Empire.We see a yellow-streaked sky

Antipodean mountains rising sweet and fissured

above a blue-svelte plain, gently undulating.

The buildings here are fewand merge organic with ridge and valley.

The fruit, of course, is otherworldly,likewise, the strongly scented foliage,

of tree or bush, phantastic

And always the imposing gateway -or rather the ornament of 'Entrance' or 'Exit'.

Elaborate prohibitions,shield the eye and heart

here at the outpost of known and knowing

You cannot own the longing,

the brim-swell of heart and mind,

the giddy purpose onwards,that drives oblivious.

For always

Southward, off the maplurk mauling beasts

with nightmare eyes, and

blue dogs with claws of fabulous birds,and chattering demons, black-eyed

and time-reversed.

Who would eat of the fruit of this land?

Who would drink of its healing waters?

few, for courage drains

like blood from a dying mans cheeks.


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Passion is a Dying Bird

Lost all the colours of

my imagination,cant visualise an epic scene,

Sheets of grey, instead of

fields of green

the Underworld is only seismicrock -

instead of Kingdoms of the

Dead, andweeping souls enlocked;

instead of necromantic shrines

and huge man eating dogs;

only seismic rock.

And sometimes

you are not quite in my arms

and our passion is a dying birda vanishing paradise

and I rub my blood-shot eyes

and dream of turbulenceand big-eyed witches

and incense, and dancing

maenads, and madness

And then I make to go,

and straightway seized

straightway, torn asunderthumped between the temples

cracked upon the spine

Youhave left already.


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The Cemetery by the Coast

(Robe South Australia, 1995)

There is a cemetery

a place of dead thingsof bones

of things extinct

things that livedbut now have given up the ghost.

There is a cemetery

a place of memoriesof bones

of regrets

of words unspoken

buried in the worm-black soil.

I come to the graveyard

armed with a silver spade,I come like pilgrim or a penitent

weary of heart

broken ...I come

to the cemetery by the coast.


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Undeveloped Film

The photograph will turn out well Persephone

It will capture grey concrete and harsh linesIt will colour and make poignant your sadness

It will preserve your smile, unveil your soul

Dont we both believe in worms and magicand the sacred heat of idle pleasure?Dont we both hear music only after the band

has ceased its imperfect tune?

I want to show you landscapes green and glistening

sliding beneath the wings of travel

I want to tell you fantastic storiesthen watch you laugh, wanting to believe.

The photograph will turn out well Persephone.


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I Have Rediscovered Darkness

I have rediscovered darkness

and star-omensand breezes through dark and

shrouded

gardens of memory.

I come once againto the early morning

mist,to moonlight and the birds

of midnight

winging

under silver,winging

over shadowed plains.

I have rediscovered clarity,the reverie of

re-emerging sadness

beneath a canopy of stars -Orion

The Southern Cross

eyes of the South.

I have rediscovered storm-

clouds

and driftwood,lone fires in

fog-heavy valleys,

the midnight splashof fish or bird.

I have rediscovered darkness.

Here in the dead hours, ghostschatter amongst the gum trees.

Can you hear them?

They disturb great gulfs ofsilence

and their voices

map out the aeons

of man and beast.


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I have rediscovered darkness

and citadels of stone

and wizard bones,which I cast as the sun

dies

and readat the turningof the heavenly axle.


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Hiroshima Dance

The dance of the holocaust century

is will-lessacted uponthey impact upon the shoulder

(missile trajectory), she braces.

They direct again, at the smallof her back

and

she hurtles sideways, bracesuntil they bullet

her knees

and she buckles, staggers

marionette awaiting the nextshrapnel animation

perhaps

the back of her neck?

She slumps forward

still upright, braces

statuteimmobile.

Injury of mind wars

(embed their words)

Her arms like branches, her

hands like autumn leaves

lifeless hanging, cravingthe oblivion of earth.

Then it comesstrange wind

of the holocaust century

uncanny flash

and were blindedher body in the sunlight.


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McKenzie Falls, December 2007

I have the photograph: chance

time of dayplay of late

morning

lightand

a certain turbulenceof waternot too

rush of distant deluge, but

not toodry and arid the valley

high abovejust enough

clear and tumbling

watersto sacred black-

fish

far

be-low

At just thisexact

angle of looking

youll

see, theSpirit of the Falls

like a

quinkin dreamtimebeinghes

rock-art in

foam of motion,spray and surge,

ghost-white on

dark rock

fluid as themuch-reduced rains

that brought him

out of hiding.


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The Fifth Eye of Dharma

If I see you in the drunken boat

I see a figure like the Goddessof Mercy, Guna Yin, in the temple by the

cemetery. The drift of incense and flower scent,

thousands of years of statutes, ascent/descent

and nourishment.

The Feng Shui is not good, he

explains: special precautions were taken,the paintings, all those manifestations, brighter

than Tibet, as if to distract us from

the bonfires, in among the crumbling

buildingssterile spaces catch and flare againstvividness, and the witches incinerate, and

even the roofing and wall-work more

rounded and confusing the demons and

ghoststheir straight line efficienciesall muddled, yes, even here were talking

extremes, in the temple of the Goddess

of Mercy, Kuan Yum, such are the times.

Outside the proprietor, a fifth generation

Chinese Australian, hoses down

the vomit of passing racists, theyvebeen baiting round here since 1856

but their fun is paltry compared to

infinity.

Did they see the laughing Buddha,

his huge bellytoxins indeterminateas the fifth eye of dharma

did they see him grin and gulp?


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The Neoliberal Book of Fairy Stories

no one

ever grew old.To enter: your child should be

permitted to consume on demand.

cinderellawashed, ironed and scrubbed floors.

pocket money should generally

be earned; remember, however,piagets cognitive stages.

pinocchio somehow made the whale sneeze

though private schooling isrecommended, if at all affordable.

cruella saw only commodities: processed puppies

a sea of spotted fur coats.deviant behaviour,

research demonstrates, occurs when

teenagers are not prepared tomarket their skills and abilities.

she kissed the prince

and ever afterhappiness.

your teenager will crave

popular brands. its connected to hisor her need to secure a mate. remember:

rejection by the pack will have

profound psychologicalconsequences.


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The First Hint of a Realist Sun

Lets suppose a Dada morning,

we can eat by the river and watch the misfits

swooping by. Later,as the Surrealists paint the afternoon,

well watch the phallic processions

and vaginal excavations of summer,

deep in the valleyof smoldering fires.

Yesterday was Expressionistic

you wrote the landscapevivid, your feelings of

exclusion. A fever pitch of bold emotion

splashed across a Symbolist conclusiontwo spirits

speaking transcendence, and yournew dress (soul) so

vulnerable and fitting.

Tomorrow the garden will be Abstract;

leaves collapse to triangles and ovals,

geometric forms, green or yellow, red or purple

across the canvas of ourstrange journey (slowly).

You say: This Dada fog

is difficult enough, but I fear

a Futurist utopia of sharp, masculine linesmachines the size of God,

fast and stark and brutal.

As you speak, the first hint

of a Realist suna stray beam, and

all those colours in your hair. Enough eternityfor any Platonist.

Mostly, though

I wish for change, Impressionistic movement,

the grace of your necka Pointalist smile,

never frozen or contained.

All these patterns ours for exploring,

and more besides: pre-Raphaelite evenings

Cubist memories, Baroque winters,and the years unfold behind us.


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The End of the World(for Philip Irvine)

A dozen jet streamsin the still sky above Cwmbranand parallel to

vanishing point horizon

I imagine severalto the west

Ireland, the Atlantic, North Americato the east

Heathrow, Gatwick, Europe

The Americans are comingevery morning, just like this.

After the Oxford turn offand straight ahead to London,

we watch the sun risea vastscribbled sky, a sliced up,

butchered sky.

The geometry isVorticista funnel of sorts

but chopped (like NudeDescending Staircase)

and all the heavens wideat 20,000 feet, though

narrowing to a wing-spanat ground zero.

A single hour of

industrious aviationfrozen like an oil paintinga welter of smoke-grey cuts, scarredacross the reds and yellowsof this mid-winter morning.

And

a dullnessdispersing all across

southernEngland.

The topic

justhanging there -

the weatherdoesn't move

it.


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Black-Rock Spirit of the Waterfall

The aether-animated beingof the waterfall is

male, protective, fluid, opposed

to lifelessnessarchaic large,lives out in the bushland,contained not

but slipping through

even the hardest, mostsolid rock stuff.

A being of midnight positives

arrived allpalaeolithic dusky, not

six months before

in safe havendreams

and waking visions.

But yesterday photographedand filmed as though

speaking in showers,

shimmer and roar,luminescent half-beast

invisible at the timepoised

between the dimensions.

I stare at the imagesinoracle speak: awaiting

significant communications.

This omen, sharp

as the late-morning shadows

that angle his soothing spumage.Giant of inspiration

creature

of this

precisemoment in time.


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Vivid Turquoise Leaves

Today on the street, death like an abyss

hanging at the traffic lights. A masked bikie,maybe suffering an anxiety disordereven

his beard was hidden. Just his

grinning canyon reaper gaze

as the dusk lumbered in.

But it does not feel like thatdeath

though your mood is curtand wounded and hibernate

the winter.

If not the literals of deaththen what ends, what

closes out the summer?

I suspect this plague of impediments

not hard to wish their R.I.P.in the drizzle among

the moist debris of monolithic gums.

They dropped their summer limbsand now, glutted with water,

grieve a littlethough

vivid turquoise leaves

sprout every-which-wayin the charmed angles

of sunset.

The wheels turn slowly, like

a river boat leaving bank and anchor

in search of driftagein the sunshine, untilstirred from sun-baking bliss, until

blind dizziness sits him up, until

hands cup eyes against the glare.

The port, a long way

East.


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Where Have You Buried the Poets?

Where have you buried the poets?

their fine, slim cadaversstacked neatly in the moonlight.

I saw them as we entered

but now theyve vanished

and with them the riskof rebel words

of revelry, and serious hauntings


Was it deep in the gold mine,

in coffins made of lead

or other deadly metals?Did you bury them in concrete

flooded by waters, pumped there to drown

their posthumous words

that tendency to sing like Orpheuslong after the fact

of each bureaucratic execution.


Homer and Sappho, Chaucer and Shakespeare,,

Blake and Goethe, Eliot and Riding -

so many bodies in the mine shaft rotting -H.D., Neruda, Zukofsky - silenced now

by men and women with

cardboard for brainsand hearts that never miss a beat.

Where did you bury them?those

wizards, those

witches of the bleeding heart,

made momentarily visible(in all its aching dignity)

against the stark backdrop universe

where ?


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Author Bio (as at April 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist,writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured inpublications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The AntigonishReview (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia)and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also

appeared in a number of Australian national poetryanthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books)and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author ofthree books and co-editor of three journals. Ian currentlyteaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at

BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans,Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia)and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation andmorbid ennui.

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