Island: No. 102: Poetry

Heart to heart

Today they stop my sister’s heart
then, counting off milliseconds,
shock start it again, her pace halved.
She had slipped down the bell curve of normal
without warning, her blood in a hurry to get home.

ICU’s quick and dead are with her briefly –
a car-struck boy, a man with petrol burns,
the boy dead quiet, the man screaming.
She wonders about life for the first time,
what it is exactly. Even her nurses don’t know,
deferring to doctors who fuss over charts
and fiddle with stethoscopes when asked.
Something to do with electricity.

We are always preparing for death:
hair dead from the scalp out;
skin flakes falling away with each blow or caress;
parts of our hearts already comatose
from long-ago mishaps in love.

Yet we are never prepared;
in this, it is like birth.

Our father brushed with death –
foot dragged by a tag-end of baling twine
beneath a rear tyre,
the tractor mounting his chest,
breaking three ribs,
trying for his lightly-caged heart.
Much later, the pain in his chest
he’d always feared through heredity,

but still he was spared. Waiting
for something with his name.

Our mother, whose heart recoiled in horror
from the surgeon’s knife in her back.

An uncle’s cardiac arrest at forty-five,
when he replaced cigarettes with mint-flavoured lollies.
Now he uses both.

In our family talk of the heart
is never metaphorical, or metaphysical,
but spoken of in terms precise as scalpels,
with the hushed tones of hospital wards.

At one time, the heart of an important person
was buried separate from the body,
spirit safe from mere flesh.
Who had the task of lifting out that organ?
And did they marvel at its structure,
how such a small, soft, reddish thing
could be the seat of affection and conscience?

In death, we could fall into place in the food chain,
have sky burials like the Nepalese,
perhaps order coffins in the shape of marine mammals
to float out to sea.

Mostly, we dig our loved ones into the earth
like bulbs, then place flowers
cut down in their prime.

What of the man who wakes
after nineteen years of death in life,
or life in death, and can’t stop talking,
as if his share of words must be used up?
He is shocked that life’s gone on without him.

Yesterday I saw a gleaming hearse run a red light,
its wreath-strewn casket shifting in the roomy wagon,
late for its own funeral.

I think of Compay Segundo’s funeral in Cuba
after ninety-five years of life fully lived,
his secret, cigars and just enough sex,
but not too much,
music not even mentioned, like air.

I’d like to know if I will go out raging,
or simply take a breath never to be exhaled,
if I will gurgle and spit and swear.
I expect I will sigh, Ah, my love.

KATHRYN LOMER has published two novels, The God in the Ink (UQP) and The Spare Room (UQP), and a book of poetry, Extraction of Arrows (UQP), which won the FAW Anne Elder Award for a first collection. She also publishes short fiction.

Diane Fahey

April Dusk

There, beyond the road’s end: a hundred or so
black stones forming an archipelago
on the wide bowl of the estuary –
some with looped necks; all of them still – unfazed by
the arc of greenish scales the wind slides, as though
an afterthought, over jewelled grey.

Trapped in the heart’s tunnelled cliffs, or thirst-struck
as it turns to a dry well, remember this:
swans floating with pristine calm on dark
waters lit by satin cloud; their bodies –
wing-clasped mounds of cindery leaves – ballasting
the search; and, blind to the riddles of dusk
and autumn, their red unhuman eyes reading
the flow’s intimate text; their red beaks feeding.

DIANE FAHEY’s latest poetry collection, The Sixth Swan, was published by Five Islands Press in 2001. Her other poetry books are: Voices from the Honeycomb, Metamorphoses, Turning the Hourglass, Mayflies in Amber, The Body in Time and Listening to a Far Sea.

Karen Knight

Wellington Range

(i)
On Black Tuesday,
when the air was filled with ash
and sheets of smoke smothered the stars,
fire rearranged the mountain,
caused it to break out in blisters
and the wind howled like a human.

It took a while for the treacle roads
to reset themselves and for the redness
to clear from the currawongs’ opium eyes.

Children missed being close to the sky,
scooping their hands across the sea
to pick up ships.

Women needed to feel their skin
fizz like fruit saline.

When the stubble of snow gums
trafficked green in the rain,
the mountain unlocked itself to visitors.
South Hobart residents left the stale geography
of their kitchen windows and walked up
to the summit again.

(ii)
Council workers are building
pinnacle decking of macrocarpa pine.
One track is so close to the ground
you can hear tiny hearts beating
among the scrub.
It’s an air walk for insects,

a new sun lounge for alpine lizards,
a safe crossing for tiny marsupials.

Today, the workers have given up
on someone to mend the weather.
They’re running back to their truck,
rain acting the broody plover
over their heads.

Tonight, an ancient spider will tripwire
a work-glove with its silk.

KAREN KNIGHT’s book Under the One Granite Roof: Poems for Walt Whitman was published by Pardalote in 2004. She is co-editor with Sue Moss of Interior Despots: Running the Border, an anthology of women poets (Pardalote, 2001). Karen has also published two chapbooks.

No.102, Spring 2005 Contents page | Editorial

POETRY

Kathryn Lomer

Diane Fahey

Karen Knight