deeply evocative
of visceral eroticism
[being] queerly naive
[emphasis on the queer]
moved by beauty
as if in some kind of love
with a dimension
of desire and taste:
an itinerant preacher
made by numerous persons’
widespread observations
to risk declaring myself
the guardian of secrets
Materiality and death
Are inextricably linked
Are they not?
Something profoundly irreconcilable
Between the thing that dies
And that goes on:
One imaginable
The other not.
Fictions. Figures. Myths.
Fascination with death
And the flesh that will carry us to it.
John Frow argues
There is no non-fictional
Modality of personhood.
What question is the body
The answer to?
Can we seize on the body
In time and space
To give us full bodied
Meaning?
Erruption. Ongoing.
Material invention.
What a slippery question!
The account of the body
Insists I pay attention.
the ego
ergo
echo
sounds
my voice is tenuous
and I have no powerpoints
because this is
an entirely theoretical paper
Knox boys neat in blue:
Pimply faced with snivelly noses
March through the art gallery.
Children, they are.
I don’t remember
Being little like that, so
Alien, small, unfathomable.
Pumped up with childish ambition.
They will go down together.
Once inherent desirability:
Entry to a world. I can only laugh
When confronted with the smell
Of mother’s hand soap,
The thing no longer touchable,
Long gone
Into my own history:
The boys I longed for
To hold hands
Under wide brimmed hats
I felt proud to wear
As an emblem of belonging
Marching beside railway tracks
Alongside the highway in neat steps
In time with a world
I can push my hands into.
the great calm
naive beauty
waiting
to be discovered
You are backyards yesterday
Always all the things I
Have seen, going somewhere,
Nowhere. The pulling obscene
Fly catching window noise.
I wish you were you and I
Were me in my shoes wet
With river mud slicked,
Running next door to squeal
With the little boy some
Senseless sensible wishing
We were here and now.
She stands knee deep
In the dam water,
Hands leaning behind her
On the rock. Her skin is
Toned the same colours
As the crumbling sandstone:
Streaked buttermilk and brown.
Back from the water her clothes
Are strung up scarecrow on a tree :
Blue denim shirt, pink singlet
And a straw hat with a yellow bow.
She’s naked on top, wearing only undies
Like she did as a child.
Body soft, open, bare
And squishy like mud -
Like only a woman’s can be.
Dance is the only language we both speak:
Bodies together like sugar and wine
Moving through the blood,
Moving in a jungle.
We come together without knowing
The semiotics of pre-formed options.
Elbows and knees share the space
Governed by the beat under our feet.
I am still in love with you
And you and you and you
On and on forever
In endless variations.
Are you writing poems
Or shopping lists?
Is there any real difference?
I’m eating an apple now
That’s all I can say.
On the train
The rugby boy
Rubs his hand
On his groin
Trying to be
Innocuous,
Flicking his thumb
Gently.
Large hairy thighs
Extend out,
Asserting themselves
With inherent solidity.
He has been well fed.
With his headphones
And his pretty-boy face
He screams
Of a life well bet on.
