.S. 9{attf J. S. Harry was born in 1939 and lives in Sydney. Many of her poems have appeared in journals and magazines, and she has had five collections of poetry published. Harry was awarded the PEN International (Sydney Centre) Lynne Phillips Poetry Prize in 1987. Her most recent publication is Selected Poems (1995). The works referred to in the essay following this selection of poems (with abbreviations used given in brackets after the full tide) include: the deer under die shin (D), 1971; Hold,Jor a little while, and turn gently (II), 1979; A Dandelionfor Van Gogh (VG), 1986; The Life on Water and the Life Beneath (W), 1995. A full list of J. S. Harry's published works appears in the Select Bibliography. 83 ^BS^a-^a^^;..-.^^^-.1.^5». t^pt •"'■*'- THE POEM FILMS ITSELE Down the slimy rope into the impossible! The insides heave somehow they got the camera down inside die alimentary tract The poem as a historical drama or epic by shakespeare or a drunken lamington by somebody french whose names our memories'd glided over (elision marked by ampersand: digestion omitted) will be filmed in prose our new technique (perfect for moribund structuralism) The costumes will appear to be modern, say crudely early modern ashbery or o'hara (we will not know either of them well enough to differentiate) with a few loops of pointles sly-pi eked-over intestine (It would be 'hard' to establish a particular crow was here) Though our techniques are the shirts we are betting our horses' lives on, their bloodlines (techniques', shirts', horses') like diose of the abused, & Active, 'crow', 'derive' from the ancients & cannot be said to be audientically 'ours' yet still the. pace carries us, into the future with a marvellous momentum We are like the elan about to drive a gothic cathedral upward into havens of print /sky-high!/ happy? heavenly? (exit arsehole as might be expected) the mixed naturalism, & the absurd, trade-marking the content local, a few flashes of unparrotlike environmental realism, yet to be added, for the risk . . . Notwithstanding dead animals rising on our tongues (soap, soup, the leather we've been chewing, round die holes in our spirits' feet where the thaw, as a melting joke leaves gangrene green as agony) what sincerely gets to us is : a kind of food-poisoning : that we are still here as if saving cents for a 3rd row seat where we don't want lo sit & are already . . . too close up . . . from a 3rd row seat, the soundtrack-roar 's quite deafening . . . (& peering) : the screen immense in front of us (Mute Nausea saving up to pay to be itself & dead?) while from the backrow stalls we do not have die bread for, they say you can almost see, & hear, from dicrc , . . it could be little boy blue or hamlet who was the one. . . bv the needs of the drama managed . . , to get die shiv dug in himself: right place & job well-done . . . the real, irrelevant bagpipes wailing frail but true, outside, (us liking them—but better:) next role will play us into death FRAME soft as chamois paperbarks* white torsos rise out of water like sleepers caught in a dream by degas there is no wind music and they do not. dance on their white arms black streaks arc cormorants the brown soft splotches ducks ears paint what they cannot see in the varied shapes of frogs rain crickets and cicadas play die movement on a wet cormorant stretching to dry is a dancer's old black sock briefly hung on the air above a bough paint blurs line as the. sock wrinkles down the ripples of die carp throw rings that glide on a water-stage slow silent at a particular stand of paperharks there is no approbation the willows trail their green hair into the blackened stage and do not talk though they arc inside the carp's language the moon is in its first third low olf centre lighting the way mute misty of face to fade stand and move out STANDING IN FRONT OF A WOMAN ARTIST'S PORTRAIT OF A PLLICAN on the lake the pelican stands on a black sodden log half of which is anchored on the bottom half of which is balanced on the top die pelican stands like a balance on your mind halfway between art and life lost legs apart faintly luminous like the subject of a Drysdale painting of a heaw lady: Drover's Wife: it is a very solid pelican and its squat body and wide apart legs give it ballast balancing on the log its beak is working hard bringing something down or up you can imagine die. drover's wife working on a colicky baby with just the same even effective strokes most of what happens to it is beyond its control in the. black water beneath its legs food ebbing and flowing die lake of its life drying bencadi it like a great salt expanse that time is wasting into death ULTIMATELY ultimately you come to be found in the holes you have made where before diere was only emptiness ultimately a crow flics low over the people walking the gravel summer-track between the lichen and the snow tussocks in cast* those people might be :-dif ultimately your bones are older uhan you ever expected diem to be with you still on them ultimately in die summer gale in perisher valley a boy climbs a big old white branch of the dead snow gui when the wind gust strikes the branch breaks the boy falls into the creek and a rock tears his underarm hair out flesh widi it BRIDGINGS. for sympathy his father whips him—for falling— all the way alive back up out of the creek ultimately a dust bfcard roars down tire valley at noon tire high thin air is pink trout rise and tile wattlcbird is feeding its babies ultimately big significance, is a load of shit THb IMAGINARY SHE ; Somes spirits prefer tire reality of imaginary demons—one demonsce.n e— to the realities—many sites— of imaginary nits. She has had, in a medical sense, nits but the demons itch her mind harder. Is it ridiculous sometimes to prefer to choose to imagine something like a mind which can onlv be observed as a gerund writing its crawly tracks in words/deeds, rather than to be chosen to imagine a body twitched over by an imagination charged bv the tensions—& twitchings— its body? Imaginary demons' demons crawl over her skin She scratches incessantly. 2 /does not need to apologise to Grace Cossington Smith's The Sock /initter (Socks?) (Sox?) They to this point had not seemed to be related —The Imaginary She— otherwise known as The Nit Picker— Socks . . . Knitting . . . a land of nitpicking widi the hands set on automatic pilot She/ is talking of die hands of The Suck Knitter—not of the hands of the Grace who painted them WIND PAINTING lake birds in wind ride a bucking saddle of water afghan dogs float in the wind their tresses laid back like the hair of the willow they are dancing under the. wind's water 90 BRIDGINGS like a film of thorns elves-in-slow-motion the wind buckets the lake's surface slops Lilt over the brim the coots ride it out on the slant sliding & riding in the sunblack light which pinks the skin of the pelican's beak membrane round the lump of the frog he. is swallowing —there—m the lee by the willow— hawk makes the hijdi hill over the tossing pine, trees spire of his hunting site & die redbrowed finches & little birds evanesce in the short grass blown on screams of panic thin as grass seeds entering die invisible there is one fat gold dandelion for van gogh tethered by its own sap in the black damp shade by the clump of horseshit Tell Me What You See Vanishing Tell me what you sec vanishing and I will tell you who you are ... ' W S. Merwin 1 i went to die place of two years back: that shell was under the sea. Only a mailbox stood above the tidcswirl. 1 choked on its singular cry like a gull, |.S. H A R ft Y but swallowed its angular pour of die letters written by fish. Now we have come to gut & scales, & turned with a killing-intent, to die shoals, to prey perhaps we will find our letters , . . Those people from whom die letters do not come must he somewhere within our reach . . . unless they are behind, fishing us, on the last tide in the place towards which we can never swim or fishing die ocean, outside the reeij or in some hole we have forgotten, which formerly, we used to dive, for them . . . If it is true we never wrote to them or diey to us without sign we have exchanged ourselves endlessly. Somewhere on an unvarnished hull with die paint peeling from our eyes like skin, we are waiting for them to grow tails, to rise . . . for ourselves, to sink . . . for continents to begin . . . The lost continents continue. Whales like dead armies sing Between the Sand Dunes and the Cattle Going in the direction uf the bending grass-stalks between the whitesand patches—windblown, driftspread wide and smooth across the bones of thirstless cattle old and soft as ancient wood, you may walk across the padi of die one-inch long red ant where it forages translucent amber-red as if the light had climbed behind the bodyjuices inside die skin— 92 BRIDGINGS I. S. HARRY two hundred million years of insect behind its travelling—It is going in the direction of the wind that bends away from the ocean spray tossed upward, over dunes. Five hundred yards inland small green blowflies fire themselves like buckshot from the body of the cow we stumble on. The legless maggots have no distinct head. Vertebrates in the live stage being somewhat less than useful they do not notice us at all, A sound or a scent starts the dull sudden diudding: the tAvo kangaroos that startle into noon. I.ate a golden whistler moves across the stillness putting sound-pegs on his holding. There are wildflowers on the hills. Coffee velvet wildflowers come one hundred times each century Roots pin the dustdry twiggy shrubs to the boneholds between these dunes. After the sun has dropped its compass point— how far there'll be no telling north south east or west of here or there's the dark we'll walk as now stumbling, over roots and into branches. In the spaces of die sky, five hundred years or now our eyes hunt stars. LETTING THINGS WORK VARIOUSLY TOWARDS DEFINITION loud dirough blackness the feet of the roaches crackling the empty biscuit papers at the bottoms of boxes at die backs of cupboards lust dry as taffeta wrinkling crumbed greaseproof-wrappings of the mind's old layered bread- know them by touching if you can without writhing the skins ot old loft-apples where they move like silent hairs glimpse them at midday scrambling darkly round the boiler hidden heated haling daygrey winter-air clearly diemselves yet fiercely evasive, blinded by techniques of electric.glare— independent (defined-at-night by a torch-eye focused obliquely) curiosity quiver-legged whiskered intensities, burnished quecrly- shiny like greed glistening over dark surfaces feeling everything with the feet— hard-backed scattering; scuttling cracking loudly: dangerously loud for Illusion's feet— sometimes tilings at the backs of cupboards rustle louder with the lights off sometimes roaches can be caught by the, intellect pulling a switch THE LITTLE GRENADE The little grenade wanted poems that explodexplorcd or pushed candles inside the pumpkin people to make flames sputter and drip where their darkness bulged. The he that was a friend of the little grenade liked poems that sat fatly in die middle of stillness waving their feelers. Hie poems the he wrote were lumpy mattresses stuffed with kapok. Or flock. (The little grenade woiddn't lie down and think in them—didn't lie down and feel one—ever.) They had the kind of stillness that goes to museums on sunflerked Saturdays to be glazed by the marbly stares behind glass.