Tuesday Poem - 'Simple' by Aileen Kelly

Simple

It used to be simple, large

self-supporting God with worldfinger on

all the pulses, lifting dozey new Adam

out of the clay under the surprised light. Then

proposition and inquisition untuned

the pulses, squirted back the mud,

crosseyed the saints, racked

sweet fanatic poets between lambchrist

and tigerchrist, candle and stake.

Accounts are rearranged,

the winners win. St Paul’s is sideswiped

by the parade of the tallest and tech-best towers.

A few church mice unaccountably strong of stomach

come with soup and patience to the dark arcades

where losers piss themselves

off the edge of memory.

This morning the fingerless mist lay

over asphalt and brick, over grass and gravel

spreading yourself thin but everywhere here.

Fetching the paper I thought I heard you sigh

or laugh in the mintbush by my gate

and who was it flipped the petals, hiding under a single

petal, little god? But when I turned a wet leaf

there was only a websoft texture,

an intimate scent

that troubled my fingers till someone ground the coffee.

from: the Passion paintings, (Poems 1983 - 2006),  Aileen Kelly, John Leonard Press, 2006.

Reprinted with permission from Aileen Kelly.

I can't remember now who recommended Aileen Kelly to me as a poet I should feature at La Mama Poetica back in the years when I ran this longstanding Melbourne poetry venue. What I do remember, still, from that night is Aileen's poem, 'My Brother's Piano' which gave voice to Sigmund Freud's sister, a promising concert pianist who was forced to practise on a silenced piano so as not to disturb Freud at his work. It says something about a poem that you can remember it some fifteen years after you first heard it. That poem contains the elements that I've come to expect from Aileen's poetry - an acerbic intelligence and wit, fierce compassion and deft wordplay and lyricism. 

Aileen taught poetry for years in various places - although taught is possibly the wrong word. She unlocked poetry for many people who returned again and again to her classes. I attended some of these - both formal classes at the Victorian Writer's Centre - and informal sessions held at her home. I was also involved in a peer workshop group with Aileen and other prominent Melbourne women poets. Aileen was a profound influence on my own teaching practice and remains an equally important influence, both in her work and her friendship, on how I think about conducting my own life and the challenges the world throws at me. 

I'm going to be featuring poems over the next few months that have taught me both something about poetry and about living. This is an incomplete and idiosyncratic selection and I hope to say something about the poems that explains, at least elliptically, what it is in them that resonates with me.

'Simple' begins with a bit of a rollercoaster history of western religion, that resolves into that elusive moment where the patriarchal and hierarchical capital 'g' God becomes the 'little god', 'thin but everywhere here' and yet still unknowable. 

The subject of this poem speaks to me. For some years I attended Meeting for Worship at the Religious Society of Friends, too ambivalent to become a member but, nonetheless, grateful for the hour of mostly silent, communal worship and the f/Friendship of people who led their lives with an emphasis on spiritual life and social justice. The 'little god' of this poem and the intimate moment of something like worship reflect my own uneasy struggles with spiritual life. 

As a poet, I love how Aileen has condensed so much into those first two stanzas using just the odd word here or there - dozey Adam -   the unmistakeable visual reference to the Sistine Chapel, the 'racked' sweet fanatic poets, the deft juxtaposition of 'lambchrist/and tigerchrist candle and stake' and then, those church mice at the end, slightly prosaic and grounded in their humble acts. The third stanza gives me back the 'little god', not found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or anywhere, perhaps, except in my own examination of the miraculous, everyday world. 

You can read more Tuesday poems if you start here.

Tuesday Poem - Martyrdom of Friend James by Catherine Bateson

Arrested in Colchester, 1656
confined to a rat's hole in the wall
a rope between him
and the ground.

One day numbed with cold,
he slipped.
They pushed him
bleeding and broken,
into another hole, the size of a baker's oven
and this time he rose,
oh he rose like sweet bread
like blessed, obstinate bread.
They could not stop him
though they buried his warped bones
barely twenty years old
curled like an unborn baby.

Did you fly into death singing, boy,
the cramped, stinking months shucked off
as though they had belonged to another?
Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Tell me, how I can take off my anger
abandon it like an ill-fitting boot.
How I can open my fists, lay them naked
palms up, waiting for the blow, the nail.
And these tears -
will I ever learn to thirst for salt?

This poem comes from a sequence of poems which form a fictional seventeenth century dialogue between a husband and wife. The husband has converted to the Religious Society of Friends but his wife resists. The sequence chronicles their relationship to god and to each other. This poem, written in John's voice, is a documented historical event.


Catherine Bateson, Marriage for Beginners, John Leonard Press, 2009.

Next week I'll be resuming transmission with some fine examples of contemporary Australian poets! I posted this today, however, as a response to VesperSparrow's poem, 'Mad Maud at the River'. Well, not a response, exactly - rather, her poem made me think of this sequence and the sheer pleasure I'd had in writing about a different time and how the plainsong but mystic language of the early Friends had been an inspiration.

For My Daughter in Her Fifteenth Year (posted for International Women's Day)

Rewrite the old stories - why should the mermaid
swap her flash sequinned tail
for boring legs? Build her a swimming pool,
resort style, and all her daughters
(chlorine blue polish on their webbed toes)
can swim laps until their hair turns green
as glass but the boys still buy them sushi
and sit so close dizzy with daring.

Red Riding Hood? Think it over -
let's pity the wolf, colour-blind to the danger,
trapped by her pattycakes and pretty please
cursing old granny wits sharp as scissors
awake in her bed.

Cinderella dropped that shoe - oops
- like a text message
on his mobile - Call Me!
Sleeping Beauty peeked -
and so should you.

In even the best gingerbread houses
a clean kitchen is only ever
a clean kitchen.
Finish the chapter instead.
A dress - black slink or tiers of froth -
is never only a dress but
a brief benediction, a candle you light
against hard times. Oh daughter
love yourself fiercely -
the changing pigments in your eyes
the knobbled spine holding you straight
all the small bones, the lace
of capillaries under your skin each cell
patiently replacing itself
as I do.

As I do.

from: Catherine Bateson, Marriage for Beginners, John Leonard Press, 2009.

Tuesday Poem: Learning to Swim

Learning to Swim - Catherine Bateson

Every time we touched each other, we left a fingerprint of sweat,
the grass died back, the hens stopped laying,
and on the fig tree outside my bedroom the figs ripened.
That summer we read girlie magazines spilling beer
on my white sheets and over the pages of Penthouse.
His big body was as pale as parsnip, black hairs sprouted
in unlikely places but his hands were like talk and
I loved his unhappiness, his migraines.

I'd always had boys before, stumbling through their paces
lights off and everything, even their knees, strange in the dark.
This was no different, like learning to swim
after years of walking your hands in the shallows
fooling nobody.
Look, now I can backstroke and butterfly,
I can dive from the high tower.

He opened my like an oyster,
like an artichoke. I was brine and undertow when he broke
over me, his hands full of music, each finger
singing a note purer than sainthood.

I swaggered into the year wearing that song
never again so unknowing,
never again so electric.

from Marriage for Beginners, John Leonard Press, 2009.

This poem is set in Bell, Queensland where I spent some of my growing up years. My mother bought a shack in the township and five acres above the township. In time she moved the shack on to the five acres behind the Church of England. But this poem is set when the shack was in the township. We had chooks and there was a fig tree outside my room. I used to ride up to Bell - four to five hours from Brisbane - on the back of my boyfriend's 950 Kawasaki. We'd pull into Dalby which was 22 miles outside of Bell, my face stinging from the wind that had whipped my hair out of the helmet. I'd swagger into the truck stops in my suede fringed boots, dirty blonde hair. It was all new and all as old as Eden.

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