Béatrice Machet # 8 "SILENCEWEB"

# 8  “Answering” Magdalena Ball’s poem (in response to Angela Gardner) …  and thinking both of Louise Bourgeois and the Native American myth of Spider Woman

(see https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/magdalena-ball-8-high-wire-step-in.html)

                   SILENCEWEB

In full view its conspicuous legs

plus an obvious fact at its core

as if logocentric dualist dichotomy was all swallowed

by a gynocentric commitment to stillness…

In the shape of a body     what truth to draw

and what do we aim at    what do we  want to see before telling

is it a body or is it  truth

the truth of a body

a body of truth

in the shape of a chest in the shape of breast a reconstructed  constellation

made of potential sounds

a score to read on the lines of breath a chant to be pressed by the lips

they know that singing is no saying

that silence is made for Spider to weave while

spinning without defining polarities

without avoiding emptiness

without seeking words

but four syllables she said

then something lopsided:

silenceweb

could be enough

Cui Yuwei #5 Notes in Melbourne responding to Ali Jane Smith's 'Star-riddled in the dustcart'

Cui Yuwei #5 Notes in Melbourne 
responding to Ali Jane Smith's 'Star-riddled in the dustcart'

Notes in Melbourne
Written in English and Self-translated into Chinese by Cui Yuwei

walk every road
in Melbourne
like you walk every line
of Joyce
make a bird that occasionally alights
a comma

《墨爾本雜記》

在墨爾本
把每一條路
走成喬伊斯的句子
只讓偶爾飛落的鳥
做它的標點

Judy Johnson #1 'Between a Moth and a Butterfly' responding to Jean Kent #1 'Fly-Away Names'

Between a Moth and a Butterfly

A butterfly, more often than not
has antennae with a knob or hook at its end.

While a moth has a taper or frayed probe...
think of a hastily rolled wick, that must be quickly

applied to the lamp before it burns the hand
that feeds it...

Mostly a butterfly is active through the day, cold

blood in the veins of its wings
basking in the adulation of sun.

A moth's flight is often a bright
floater across the dark iris of night.

Its wings are often pale, otherworldly.
A ghost then.  A negative.  Moths are less often seen

for themselves, and more for the braille they punch
through a cabbage leaf or rose petal.

If a butterfly is Narcissus then a moth is Echo
hidden in a cave, the dull twin who repeats

the call and response of wing and wind
a little fainter each time.

Is it any wonder moths are so often drawn
to the light of doorways, lanterns, the false gods

of fireflies?  Like 19th Century women
required to sit at the feet of men

sipping small, decorous drafts
of reflected glory.  Moths must play dumb

to the painful burn of the flame
In order to get closer to what their birthright denies them.

Ali Jane Smith 'Star-riddled in the dustcart'

From a misreading of Toby Fitch and other stuff https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/toby-fitch-4-memememememememememe-in.html

it was a grape but not a chicken

a tawny frogmouth

also feathered

but not so obvious — geddit?

want it? Joyce?

The dunnycart’s funny

no matter what.

The dustcart

like the dirt tin

long gone.

Welcome to the 'Museum of Things my Grandfather Used to Say’

Free Entry if you correctly mispronounce ‘ambulance’.

Dominique Hecq #4 – Unline – in response to Melinda Smith's 'accumulate'


The wind is weathering the skin
in lines that tell of life lived
in braille as though it knows
how to unhood the eyes,
unwrite the lies, sand off
the varnish on the heart.


I tried repairwear, laser
focus with its promises
to smooth, restore, correct.
Now I exfoliate as you would
sand hardwood, imagining
the tree, not the floorboards.


Plank, trunk, stump, bark, phloem,
cambum, xylum, annual rings
heartwood, limbs, branches, twigs,
buds, leaves, clenticels, scars.
Crown. Taproot. Primary root,
radicle caps and hairs. Seeds.


As my skin and eyes peel
I see adventitious roots
originate from other
organs: I'm up for flaying
down to the crisscrossed chambers
of my scoria compacted heart.

Dominique Hecq #3 – Day breath – in response to Anne Kellas' The Pond, Moonlight, itself responding to Nathan Curnow's 'Versing' 

The pond, the moon, midnight. 

In exact order. 

The moon waxing blue, blood, black. 

BreathIng daybreak like poetry 

summoning itself 

Through the gneiss in schist 

asy ou walk through the valley 

unaware of the vertical immensity 

of rock walls, sheen of granite, play 

of water in the silently streaming fall. 

And underneath it all, the deep  

resonance, the massive inwardness. 

The pond, the moon, midnight, breath. 

In exact order. 

Kit Kelen #10 - the house or checking for signs of afterllife (after Dominique Hecq, after Jean Kent)

(first draft of) the house

or

checking for signs of afterlife

after Dominique Hecq

following the thread Jean Kent started with 'Fly Away Names'

https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/dominique-hecq-2-flying-out-response-to.html

I'm in the fifty years of it

they're everywhere with me

is there nous in the tank of heaven?

or on the to-do list?

souls are

everything was touched

purusha
daemons running all around

there is a consciousness in things

as if it were finished once

the risers shone with tread, edge scuffed

complete – cruel tiger under sticky tape

and the Rah Fizelle, reflections wrong

a wedding gift, things told... and told

till the whole house knows

that Japan is long gone, and the islands carved

reeled tape with no machine to play

there's lots of loot I left as well...

collecting is a habit passed on

we need to let air in

among trinkets of the way

at home in their afterlife

tight as a drum

(window keys hidden)

the unscreened door ajar

thinks blowflies

but much more pets

who might escape

some I buried myself

it's we're the ghosts of it

they're not here

but are

ear to the chest

where we've gone

everything is touched

Magdalena Ball #8 High Wire Step in response to Angela Gardner #1 three fragments

High Wire Step

In response to Angela Gardner #1 three fragments

This is where we sit

in the cold room, white walls

daylight can’t leak in

I’m alone here

but imagine a partner

broken conversations into the quiet

confessions, absolutions

the things I’ll never do

people I won’t see again

attachments hold me on this high wire step

like levitation, giddy

out of time

stillness is a slow slide

moving up the body

remembered as breath as a single sound

silence, the fourth syllable

I can’t form it, my lips pressed 

fighting for sound

a name forms in my breast

soft like spittle, cracks the interior

numinous, mathematically structured

maybe I won’t ever say this

maybe the emptiness
is enough.

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.