Dominique Hecq #2 – Flying out – response to Jean Kent’s #1 (Fly-Away Names)

One letter dropped from your name, and already you are no more—Edmond Jabès

The clinic assigns you a false name,
records the wrong gender, as if
you have already and forever
flitted out of your skin, like talc
fallen from the wings of a lilac
moth, its body winter etheric.

A nurse, hazy blue and wordless
checks your pulse for signs of after
life, maybe dreams of sky gardens
with moons floating like halos
and stars fluttering in the air
above your body open at rest.

Lights dim. Walls close in on shadows
in this new landscape of the heart
where pop-snapped plastic bracelets
cling to skin and excoriate the scars
of time, dropped letters uncover
the trace of your unrepenting voice.

Béatrice Machet #7 DRIFTS

#7     after Kit Kelen (#9)

[...] drawing a new coastline

with just this little ink

a wash

hard not but to think Norway

come closer ear of sea

and islands -- you lie further off

I'm telling this tale, am I not?

and is it sky draws on

so shaded from green thought?

lake longing to be ocean

the river draws the sea [...]

                                           DRIFTS

In my office

dreamy mood and a word on my lips

                                      drifts

that says nothing to you 

but (maybe) some vague memory 

and a dim light

drifts away drifts into apart off 

drift net 

               ice 

                     snow

thus water       hence streams 

so with the paper littering and wavering 

on the floor around me 

there is a way of “drawing a new coastline”:

Take a piece and fold it

make a square then a conical hat or a tent

then a boat 

which reveals a seascape.

And now can you hold your tongue?

What word is on your lips?    Which tale are you telling?

Peter Boyle #3 'Translating the floor' Response to Jean Kent 'Who is Margaret?'

Peter Boyle #3 'Translating the floor' Response to Jean Kent 'Who is Margaret?' 

Translating the floor

A slight gash to the skull,

the earth up close,

sharp pain in the wrists and hands,

dull pain in the lower right leg,

I am translating the floor.

Lying on my back --

the stars have penetrated my skin.

Mould and specks from the skeletons of ants

have begun to colonize my dislocated elbow.

I am translating the floor into the sky

and the sky into the floor.

My body is in one moment

the shared terrain of meaning.

There are dints and scratch marks,

rigid lines and balls of fluff

like the floor, vast mottled

surfaces and moon-like craters

that dot the sky. Through me

floor and sky are devising

a brief moment of shared dialogue --

a snatch of universal history, the final

language that perhaps forever now

will (as the wise have often said)

go over my head.

Kerri Shying # 2 Stitching on the Kang quilt "After Jean Kent's 'Fly-Away Names'"

Stitching on the Kang quilt

All the stitching gathers   

first

along the mattress needle    

I stitch in memories   think grey points

stood with my sister by the Chinese boats

where shark fins dry  at the Quay

near the Opera House

when I was just a kid

tension    loomed    yet

 is    all the same  required

bunched   pulled flat

drawing with a steel finger

one tale   all the years to make

   I tuck it in around me

   children tell

no labels  

in our dresses

you can guess

our mother’s hand   know

that we were matching

in style   but not in colour

I wish I could remember the dress

the way I feel this beneath my hand

Mum needs no scrap of fabric

sewn on anywhere

to find the effulgence

of our faces 

we

 rise up in holographic plasm

from her

 blue-lined book

 of measure

 a chart  in

 her secret garden

the scraps and envelopes

benign  intense   this

the contents

given from my father’s brown hand

and for my records

  my infants band right off my foot

  my see-through curl

  snipped and tied

  like the sample card for silk

 the wrinkle   which isn’t string

 my cord 

 the snipping from our final fitting

 snuggled in a bindle

 this corner of forever

 is my own

Magdalena Ball #7 Only Breath after Jean Kent #2 Who is Margaret?

Only Breath 

(after Jean Kent #2 Who is Margaret?)

Would you carry this breath, a secret twin

to spill out sound bypassing audible waves

pressure the sternum at the point of change

invisible gasp

all that can be seen is surface ripples

a twitching mouth to say the words you don’t

write what won’t be read a trickle of blood not ink

these names become labels become memory

in absence, your departure, the silence

always a pause, and then the outside world

fills the vacuum, sunlight knocking against the roof

the washing machine, cicadas, a currawong’s long

song someone shouting in the field

there are ways to spy on the inner life

sneaking in through respiration at night

when the guard is down

it’s not such so pretty, the falling skin, clawing

at morning a harsh light of responsibility

slowly moving down the face, like an ocean wave

coming in, a crest over our plans, the sanctity of this

shared space, the bodies that submerge