Impermanance.com

 Adam Aitken

2006

Acknowledgements

My thanks to their editors.

To my Double

Even my beautiful other half

reminds me of you

We are growing old

at a simultaneous pace

We both take

exactly half of the first

bottle of wine

After that the wisdom-ratio

is pure astronomy

We watch the same programs

and laugh together

You used to pick the murderer

first

now I do

We cry together too

when once it was only

one half that cried

the other stony faced

Now our teeth

engage perfectly

We kiss much more

and for longer

On retirement

we know exactly

what we want to see

Love is a kind of

intense plot awareness

I look at myself

I see you

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At Kingsford Smith

A touch hungover, drugfucked

after the office party

Asiaward I go,

exchanging bleached looks

with Lolitas

in baubled Dredlocks

coming home.

Hi Mum and Dad!

I stride they float

I do business in summer weight

pure new wool.

They go home

in sporting tans

pushing past the other way,

Sydneybound via Bali

Sage returnees

exit bottlenecks with trolley loads

of souvenirs newsprint wrapped

in foreign text

unreadable to them

meaningless to me.

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The Anti-travel Travel Poem

The anti-travel travel poem suggests the road

romance & regrets

the endless paperwork we left behind

I dreamed of walking boots that wouldn't lace

anti-travellers can never get lost

in a swamp of Choice we must take

the American grid pattern endless

military runways, the borders

of Empire, take-off zone & rabbit fence

keeping peace at the ruined city gate

where crows consider life in a decommissioned bomber

the line I have lain too long on the beach

staring at the awesome winter surf

is prelude to destruction & creation

the anti-travel travel poem does not

ask for directions on a road no one's taken

it is arrested time at six-ways crossroad

where cremation crews put shoulder to the Prince’s corpse

malicious hangers-on decide its time to quit 

and humans go on burning quietly

find shelf space in a Singapore of metaphysics

food halls where no one's lost,

no one's found, no one needs directions

each well meant instruction (go straight

through the cemetery, turn left - or was it right)

leads to the wilderness of whole new forests

wholly dedicated to paper (Show us your ID, Mr Death!).

Sure not everyone’s perfectly matched.

Even the President preferred golf,

the curve & arrow of ball and club, the flagged

plantation we thought would abolish

inter-island piracy forever, & snakes

that hide in elephant grass all know

how dangerous the sedentary life

being cute & poisonous at the same time

exiles mistaken for natives

non-travellers who decide to stay

feral & primitive, go loose, develop the local accent

camp on the edge of what they know best:

abandoned village with Pepsi sign

a dog dozing in a broken down truck

in the mountain's two thousand metre air

the sign on a frog statue:

SORRY, NO ROOM SERVICE

hasn't changed since Eisenhower's visit,

a red stop sign marks disused

industrial estate no one but a film crew stops at

checkpoints for the apprentice guide

and even the ICBM stalls

on a one way track to Krakatoa

with human maps it cannot read.

Rivers stop, flow back, released

from the burden of their own

meanderings, the drunk boatmen, Ophelias

overgrown bloated with silt, good for growing moss

from that moment a bird dropped seed

of grass & trees on no-where-in-particular's

shady undergrowth & the poem's farms & gardens

revert to shaggy Edens where no-one is a stranger

in a Kingdom of minute-by-minute ritual

where we know belonging, we know how.

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Nyepi

Grope around for matches.

Annual ritual black-out, island-wide,

ghosts get bored, start their engines & go

back to Java, Darwin or another island.

inflationary demand for séance

& exorcism.

Part time Barong & Leyak in cat-like form

roam the fishing village of no fish.

Unplug neon, blow out candles

in damp ten dollar rooms,

tell the tourists what’s Royal or divine.

Books by torchlight? Forget it.

Everywhere PCs put to sleep.

When someone cleans the pool

someone collects the sheets, another

clips the hotel garden into topiary.

When it’s Nyepi

they say magicians disguise

themselves as pigs or glamourous

women who kidnap street kids

& give them jobs.

They tell us: all this fuss ensures

the great darkness

is a darkness, the great abyss

exists & why ghosts

are fooled by this. The party

lights go out.

The locals sigh immense relief

when the world is released

for when morning comes

Someone cleans the pool,

someone collects the sheets, another

Clips the garden into topiary.

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At Batu Caves, Kuala Lumpur

Cathedral or limestone factory of blunt stalagmites

in blast range of 2020 Visionaries

crunching dried bat cave guano. Graffiti.

Lost sandals. Landslip of a hundred-gross foldable chairs.

A cleaner’s abandoned bucket.

A ladder climbs towards a forest skylight:

messages from the love-lost scroll down through ferns.

Scratched ventricles in a stucco Hindu heart

modeled in corrosive rain.

I’m glad it’s not Jenolan.

Today’s cave is moist with neon and dripping calcium.

Gifted with calm echoes, gods thrive 

even on a working day, the worker’s god that is.

The Brits then Japs stockpiled bombs

where gargoyle simians now fight

for today’s hierarchy.

The Don with double-barrel fangs

slurps a 7-Up, squatting on a turquoise pergola.

Canines invest in peanut filled hand bags,

entrepreneurs mine human largesse.

On this day’s mindblasting heat

dogs in shrink wrapped ribs asking for nothing

like miscast Buddhists.

A souvenir bullwhip sir, and a BMW might absolve sin

but for you sir a mandala of skewers

three through each cheek, one through the lying tongue.

Virtue is not bleeding or wilting from the pain.

I too was excavated

by a different anti-faith, nearly knifed to death

in Chinatown, my eyes fake sapphires spit-polished in the dust.

What terrors we see, the miraculous

black peacock with tiger's head

guarding the mystic portal

to my open-cut heart. Her eagle wings

folded for repose and authority.

What terror she sees.

From there two hundred steps

back to a carpet of pigeons

past the god of commerce dozing on an off day.

Baby-faced Ganesh, and the Winged Female Goat

swings her multiple udder, cosmic signage.

She’d be Going Places right now, my god,

though she’d never need to hurry, just browsing thanks

through a Bombay test pattern,

totaled by belief in a shop where Sue buys postcards

of Malaysian beaches

and Trengganu coconuts, and considers

a statuette of Kali

that might make sense

perched on the frost-free, guardian

of gourmet takeaways

two thousand miles away.

U-turn and we brood in traffic

detour through modern consciousness.

Not to include chaos must have been

a planning error.

For this view of modern curves and vistas

won’t hide our scoured treeless hierarchies.

Everything’s open too and precisely engineered

concrete city extracting its fee.

We don’t ask to be meaningless, just driving home

or going to work, even

the hire car has its patron saint.

Make no mistake my friend:

the real temple, sir, is a god in love,

and a few to choose.

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Federation, Mark 2

One hundred years, and I am not as I was

things are better now, you will agree

motto on an old school badge:

the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness

or our folksy versions:

"i am and i want" in Australian Latin of course -

i want what I am...or words like that

and I can't think of a nation

 so anxious to be happy

singing ourselves this structured refrain

each year a motto

each year

a tango competition

that charges double

for the Portaloo amenities in Olympic park I guess.

At least

the nomads like walking

the rabbit fence again,

but mostly they drive like anyone

from meeting to meeting,

trading messages and recordings

like boomerangs coming back

as petrol, as a promise

to meet and talk

dreaming and telling

that story we all agreed was true.

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The Bargain

They bargain & agree: the child & elderly

scour the marketplace

for tart fruit that’s hard to peel

but irresistable three days after picking.

Grannie turned the pawn shop inside-out

trading rubies for rations: some bluegrey duck eggs,

a wad of betelnut, or half a dried fish.

Gambler since the 20s, outlived rubber boom

three military coups, three Kings,

two Marshals driven to modernise.

She never could cover her breasts

for propaganda reasons, or wear a hat.

She peeled fruit, basketfuls

for both of them. The baby combine-harvested

the never-empty tray. His graduate mother

her blue-eyed husband

were tall mythic gods printing cash.

So fashionable, what do they get up to? she mused.

Time-ravished, leathery and dentureless

she crooned for the heat-rashed brat,

Tiger Balmed his temples, fanned

the velvet of his skin

banker to her greedy client

mouth an avid conduit.

Asthma, nine children and her

faithless spouse prayed too much, Grandma's

bargain allowed for bribe and chiding

so the plate shone clean -

and childishness could know

experience, or sense the limit of her body

as he climbed into her lap, exhausted

(a little bloated animal).

His pleasure pulled her limb from limb,

but what dissolved her jaw and gums

were pink alkaloids

of a crushed nut wrapped in a bittergreen leaf.

Craving’s law no one broke

like a thunderstorm brewing up air

too thick to breathe

storm clouds thick as cataracts.

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The Fire Watchers: A Memoir (in the Sydney Style)

Too blind to be a fireman, too flat footed

my brother sought out fires, big ones, coming home

late from school - and became a heavy smoker of imported Virginia.

But me who biked the Harbour Bridge

and saw that shoddy playground burn,

Luna Park, it’s joyful fretwork temple to fun, the ghost train

razed, parents and children, fairy floss and chewing gum

gone to ash and blackout.

Mum said, I hope you didn't look...

In the only city he ever loved Dad slowed down

on passing accident scenes, and I asked

a lot of questions then, a kid stuck on ‘Why’?

Obsessive, thirteen, and forensic I memorised

the number injured, type of vehicle, angles

of incidence. Years before crumple

zones crash dummies or digital instruments.

My brother, the surfing shaman, mimicked

sirens and I noted with skilled

Conservatorium training

how they differed - in pitch and rhythm -

from foreign ones on TV.

His every gesture, mum's nerve wracked silence,

Dad's use of the lighter, the way he steered

knees on the wheel as he lit up -

the habit he learned from America.

Reaching forty now I ask: Why did Mum

never sew the hems of my jeans, even if Death on the TV

reminded her of her children?

Who buys the albums,

the biscuit tins stacked and smiling, flipped through

so often the narratives refine themselves

with every passing year?

On the day Mum burned Dad's books I thought

how modern she’d become

hard as a fallen city’s final hour.

The pyramid of books glowed orange

then the pages curled - biographies, murder mysteries -

winged histories made permanent in print:

‘50s crime classics, adulterous romance

well plotted paperbacks Dad would have hoarded

if only to browse, somewhere between accounts,

reading his life away

on a balmy Sydney autumn.

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