John A. Scott
A selection of poems
This electronic edition of a selection of poems from John A. Scott’s Selected Poems, first published by the University of Queensland Press in 1995, is copyright © John A. Scott 1995, 2005. This edition was prepared by John Tranter in November 2005.
Flooded City
1
How long these perfect words
Have called the time by evening. The City
Blackens & already Your eyes recoil
From objects not yet threaded with darkness.
These perfect words, like
A blood-rush, reel You to streets
& hallways, long frames running down to
Their lives, these strangers.
These rains. The sadness slows the days
From You, perfectly.
2
Moistened ground from a window where
You see it. She asks You to share the pain.
Talk to me now, she says, and I will listen.
The other City would have killed her for less.
The cold awakens You before dawn.
Your eyes, accustomed to darkness, have
Drawn her close as if for love.
Light gathers about her breath, her face,
Like a seeding flower. She says,
Each time this pain is irreversible, each time
Wanting to give in, to keep up the habits.
The rain-heavy wind shudders
Momentarily.
It taunts You & then
Even this becomes easy.
3
It is complete. You
Have hacked passage through another day
& the struggle has elated You:
It is a child’s guile pretending sleep.
Maimed with exhaustion, she is dying now,
Mouthing Your hatred. You remember
Those words for their perfection.
Doors You knew still open onto strangers:
This other place, other City. Outside,
You see the children bend & bathe
Their wrists in the floodwater. Evening
Unclasps them from the skyline & abandons them.
They are adrift again, with the white gulls
Throbbing gently in their
throats.
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‘Changing Room’
The breath’s slow
drum-brush marks the end of Gillian’s time.
Her hair’s haphazard marathon, swaying
with the slowest jazz of afternoon. Detectives
wandering at her breast; the nipple’s darker trilby.
A black thief hair, returning to its crime.
*
Now, amongst the sheets, there is
a trace of blacker hair, curled and blunt
as shorthand. I watch her move, the blankets
fanned across the mattress like a deal of cards.
Her foot beside an ashtray shell, its butted
cigarettes settled into parquetry. She dresses
as a child might in a changing room, all
half-under things. And what she’ll do tonight
comes out of silence like a talking in her sleep.
She’s leaving; and the similes are gone.
A borrowed room, and everything quite suddenly
and only like itself: this coat, this coat.
This floor, this floor.
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Man in Petersham
He’s dropped his heart!
His heart has fallen to the footpath
But no-one seems surprised and least of all
the office girl whose stockings violin
across this empty road. He’s dropped his heart!
It surely must be this and not his cigarettes
The way he stares so long and makes no effort
to redeem it. And his suit is an immaculate grey
and his shoes a duco white. And his feet are
frozen in the tiny refrigerators of his shoes.
With all the colours running out he stares
upon his fallen heart. His mild-blue heart
shattered in its twenty filtered pieces.
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Breath
(A Collaboration with Laurie Duggan)
1
In windows he sees
women comb their hair: light failing
in distance, horizon light.
Women combing hair against the light.
And ‘against’ might mean
‘they fight the darkness’ or ‘provide
a counter motion to the darkness’
or ‘their bodies lean out from
darkness’; there is no way to be sure.
Only that he sees their hair spiral
from the clouds; the faces of visitors
caught in light, vague as lost sailors,
and the light trailing like
women’s hair.
2
and now rain.
And now rain ceasing.
He sits in a room. He feels that gentleness
has been lost from the circumstances
of his life. He wonders at its ‘peculiar lack’.
He wonders how it is that things change
unaccountably. ‘Change’ meaning
‘to grow different’ or ‘to take another
instead of’. What he feels
compressed to this word. What
he sees compressed to the contents
of this room. What he hears.
Outside, a road already half-dry
with traffic.
3
(Breath)
He hears her breath.
This trace of presence: air rustling
distance, horizon air,
the faintest assertion of being.
Once he heard
her fight for that same air
against the rush of former lives
and saw her come to life.
Now he lies awake,
the closest he will ever be to her.
And from the sounds that might
name this place, or give it shape
and sense when all is dark, there is
only her, breathing.
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From After the Dance
4 Pride of Erin
The public telephone is a cage for the exhibition
of Chrissie.
She comes from Science to the shop.
Saunters with her friends through a suburb of dogs,
keeping ahead of evening, just beating it inside.
Smoke from the slow-combustion heaters.
A sun, low in the sky, giving lamplight and no warmth.
A dying star and the domino theory of barking, when
light starts to fail.
She has trouble with the door; with instructions.
Is afraid of losing her coin; doesn’t have another one
on her right now.
Is afraid of not at home. Might be round at Greg’s.
And outside, Sharon and Cheryl and Debbie are wearing
duffel coats, in range.
She is a carrier of nomadic truth.
Wishes commitment.
Knows of energies deep within her, under pressure, that
she squanders on choir or keeping things clean.
No-one guesses them.
They are efforts of will.
Soldiers win medals with them.
She watches the duffel coats picking at dusk.
Watches the way teenage girls jostle and shift; are
non-committal, like baboons.
Can’t stop herself being like this most times.
Finds herself doing it.
Wonders if noticing things is the essence of growing
old; and that as we pass some mid-point it falls
away again, eventually back to nothing.
With difficulty, she comes from the booth into what
is left of today.
Makes her turn.
Watches her friends move on.
In the darkness they seem to float, like objects
displacing their own weight in water.
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The Dog Becomes a Waterfall
We have read clouds
in the textbooks of a dull
Lit. seminar, or.
Because she
turns
her head, the dog becomes a waterfall.
That dangerous gestalt.
Because
she moves, becoming frozen mid-turn
and puts her swimmer’s touch
upon the boy.
Because ...
I’ll whistle Niagara. Hell!
Open the doors! A so-shall-we-reap
of dog water shaking down
the hall, and honeymooners dewy
with the stuff at daylight.
From the splintering water
comes a bark, restoring figure
to its ground: the waterfall
completes its turn, flexing
on the lawn.
We have.
Because she pushes her hair aside
unlikely things swap.
Believe me, Sue,
of what you are most capable.
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Velocity
He waits with the near-silence of night.
He makes out the dog moving slowly through middle
distance, a notation now barely visible, burrowing on
the stave of fine wire.
His clothes, which are loose and open at the neck, give
evidence of the day’s heat, now passed. He imagines he
can see this heat miles above him and moving towards
the stars.
He has no idea that the woman with whom he is living and
in whose parents’ backyard he now stands, who only
five minutes before has used the words I Love You, will
in almost exactly a year’s time ask him to leave because
she no longer loves him.
If he were aware of this fact, the stillness of the evening,
the abundant sense of calm given him by her reassur-
ance, even the image of the heat jettisoned starwards,
would strike him as being possessed of great irony. He
would perhaps ask why she no longer loved him and she
would be unable to understand.
He looks towards the light of the house, contrasting its
sense of life with the absence he momentarily feels in
the yard.
He recalls approaching a lighted house: at first his parents’;
then the house of the woman who became his wife; the
house he shared with his wife; and the house he shared
after the failure of his marriage; finally, the house he
shares with the woman who now sits inside the lighted
house before him. He is unaware of any other houses in
this series of which there will no doubt be many.
Now he turns from the light and, as a consequence, can no
longer differentiate objects within the yard. He recalls a
comment that to be ‘in love’ is exclusive of all doubt.
He finds in this statement the most positive evidence of
doubting. In ‘real’ terms — what we talk of as ‘practice’ —
he has no doubt. He has the fear of abandonment, or the
fear of inadequacy. These he decides are about himself,
and are exclusive of doubting. She has, after all, only
minutes before told him I Love You; consequently he
has no idea of the impermanence of this relationship
with or without the notion of ‘doubt’.
He imagines her, inside the house still heavy with summer,
listening to the crack of timbers abandoning warmth.
He imagines her ‘in love’. And she, having conceived of
life without him and on at least one occasion having
acted on this conception, is still ‘in love’. She has no
idea who the person is with whom she will also be ‘in
love’, or, to clarify matters, that there should even be
such a person. Consequently, when she speaks of
‘love’, she does so with openness.
These last notions do not fall within his imagining. He
cannot, for instance, construct the idea of her speaking
‘with openness’. He believes she simply ‘speaks’; and
in every fiction this would reasonably be the case.
As for his notion of the day’s heat — given that such
dispersion were possible — at the speed at which he
imagined its progress, and given the destination he had
picked from the night sky, the only physical trace of the
day almost ended would fail to reach its destination
before the time of his death, so much so that one could
be excused for doubting such a journey had commenced
at all. Indeed at such velocity and at such a distance the
very first heat from this place, unknown, unnamed,
would still be ambling through the universe and, but for
the lack of light, shimmering — the lack of air,
humming.
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‘A’
1
My friends be with me still
on this playing face of the street, lacquered
and hissing after the downpour.
In the lane, someone called Gene’s
screaming ‘Moll, you fucking Moll’, and then
the back panel of highrise explodes
like a windscreen about his fist.
This afternoon I took a taxi across town.
I saw that same building, its glass flaring
twenty storeys of red cellophane, lit up
as if by skill and she in some other place.
For him, tonight’s already over.
Duped in front of all that glare and
all that gloss: survival in nova,
with something waking on one side of
a dream, and the tense of A-
or even the gender.
*
Out
from the pier: nightfall, flare,
regatta. Out from the shore
a nativity of sorts.
In the bar they moan.
They ache to be milked. Each player on
the ledge, so circumscribed by impossibility
and the sorrows they have chosen to retain,
they remind me of this search for A———,
her language, her location in history.
Tonight she drinks with me, indifferent to
the purpose of search. This time her hair is black.
This time her parentage Macedonian.
*
In the back room, two Filipina girls
go down on Gus. They alternate the slow
stroke of their mouths. He is remembering details.
He is making bets. Navigating somehow,
staring down at the rules for each
of our behaviours, more or less known.
But he drinks, you know, and there are
too many stars, too many cigarettes
to follow. Too much siren on the playing
face of the water.
*
Each day separation constructed and
the dismantling of separation.
Each day the past constructed and
the dismantling of memory.
Each day absence of the familiar constructed and
the dismantling of familiarity, now absent.
In others, the eloquence of attachment.
In ourselves, the growth of ruins: a directory
of remaining streets and the way rainfall gives
substance to things unseen.
Each day under the writing, traces
of an older writing.
Litanies constructed and
the dismantling of litanies.
*
Tonight she was here,
her head tilted against a lover’s word.
I watched her feel the borderlines
as if she were on wire. One told her
she was ‘disco’, another she was ‘jaguar’;
absolute, conspicuous,
playing percentage Macedonian.
Tonight she was here, giving asylum
to smoke and the handsome, hoarding
the thousand lines beyond her control:
one opening doors, another driving her home.
Someone to be there when the windscreen
explodes into rain about dawn.
*
I am leaving this city.
Search in that ‘distant country’ from
which one ‘writes’.
But there is no leaving.
Gus leans in the doorway. He is telling
a woman his foreskin conceals angels.
The machine of angels. He says, ‘You try?’
By three, the heat’s all lined up on
their own machines. Somewhere it sounds
like they’ve just won something big.
And we are still cocooned inside these
halls and arcades. We are armed with
an anthem called fortuna. We sing
‘Moll, suck on eighty; on eighty,
you fucking moll!’
2
A second, third and fourth occurrence may be familiar
stages leading to what was known of a first. As within this
love there are many loves which we bring together. Against
which we collapse.
*
‘I remember Peter saying
that once you’d had a woman she wasn’t
the same. From then on you knew you
could always have her.’ So Carl talks.
In his hand a volume of Rilke, and
Rilke’s face like the Christ of
the Protestant Bible.
‘He was making a film
about the martial arts at the time.
On his humble way to stardom. Jealousy’s
a dreadful curse, you know. You don’t suppose,
I mean, they’re not back together?’
The bar tonight is a colony of defence:
mirrors filled with the idea of women,
smeared on the loose florid wounds
of our faces.
*
‘I once bought her
a pendant. Her initial in silver.
I remember her saying I’d have to call her
Hester from now on. She said it was
a licence to continue in her life
without deception, and without guilt.
Do you see her?’
I shake my head.
You know Yeats once said that rhetoric
comes from the quarrel with others,
and poetry from the quarrel with ourselves...’
He responds to some change of expression
I am unaware of having made.
‘I haven’t
memorised it or anything. It’s quoted in
the Introduction.’
He drops the book.
Our Lord of the spilling. Our Lord
of drunkenness.
*
True home lost to us,
I write these letters like poems from
the fourth day of intermittent rain.
Bleak September, I despise this audience
of weather. I despise these faces that
embody my likely future, as those
who acquire the past with such ease.
*
I remember Peter’d get angry.
“Anyway,” he’d say, “I’m sick to death
of all this talk about women.
What about people? What’s wrong with people
for Godssake!” I think she was genuinely
beguiled by the inarticulate. Gave us
bugger-all of a chance.’ I watch the words
he once controlled become lost in
conversation and grow savage. I see them
make their home in fear and failing;
become feral words. I leave Carl,
and come from the bar with his ex-lover.
*
A second, third and a fourth journey
may be the same journey, abandoned
at a different place.
*
‘He talks about Peter
so he can mention her name and not feel
horribly guilty.’ I sit with Julia
at Julia’s: the restaurant whose joke
we share. ‘One day I found a collection
of pornography: photographs of his.
One of the women had her mouth. One her hair.
Another I suppose his idea of her cunt.
He drinks too much. Less than then,
but too much; like the others. I lived
seven years with Carl. In the last two years,
how often do you think we made love?’
She looks up, then stares at me with a shock
of recognition. She pushes back the chair:
a gross rasping on the wooden floor. Now another
table is magnified by her loss as she leaves;
half-running through the palms, out into
rain like hatching in the neon light.
She hails a taxi; the hair matted to her face
in a heavy veil. ‘And if you ever
found her, who’d be left to celebrate?’
She spits the name of a club to the driver.
The tyres cut a momentary arc in the wet road.
Love is a similar currency.
3
How the poem is a reincarnation. An emergence within a
fixed scale at a point previously unconsidered, for an
unconsidered time; partaking in familiarities placed so
uniquely against our bodies’ capacities to utilise them, they
appear as unknown.
The surfaces of our eyes become engrossed in recollection.
We remember her face as an abnormality of splendour. Her
skin as barlight on formica. The black gleaming dogs of her
palms.
How the poem fills with blood and will not rest unless it be
with her, even now.
*
When Gus talks of blood, he talks of the blood of fighting
men, their arms flexed and monstrous. ‘Her brother used to
box,’ he says.
‘She’d sit at the makeshift rings, crying for
him. But only if there was blood. Not because of the blood
... I mean, she’d only be there on the nights of
blood.’
*
L’esperance humaine.
This pornography of hope.
This absence from an expectation
of presence.
This distance from an expectation
of proximity.
This darkness from an expectation
of light.
*
My friends be with me still
into the new voyage.
Hold me,
against this ruin in my heart.
Blind me to the light of this hope.
Deafen me to the music of this hope.
Scatter these ashes,
so that at the time of her rising
there will be no recognisable form.
Only dull haze upon the earth
and spectral voices.
A sufficient warning.
An explanation of the scar.
*
O metaphors for this city
incapable of love!
Or men, incapable of love
in a city of luxury.
Hall and arcade sustained
by the phantoms of hope.
*
I am a watchman of pain.
Of noise and failure.
The torchlight makes theatre from emptiness.
The torchlight is a bruise
and the bruise the seasons
of a dying planet.
*
A———, star retreating.
A———, my splendid one, lost
in red-shifted light.
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He Mailed the Letters Himself
A few years after his return to Italy, suddenly old and silent, he went into the garden one day and sat down at his typewriter. He wrote letters. He had not written anybody in years. Were the old fires flaring up again? The despondency and fatigue ‘deep as the grave’ rolling away? He mailed the letters himself. Within a week they began to return. They were addressed to James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, William B. Yeats...
Guy Davenport ‘Ezra Pound, 1885-1972’
The Geography of the Imagination
Dear Jim:
31 I finally got your letter, encloseing your letter, enclocusing your
letter which was so omportant fo me thank quack ob verymuch.
In
time this fainful business will will soonful, will soon be onered.
Thankanany goodness if ess lossie ely wy oner we sine signature,
I hope I hope I make it
signed,
Bill
William Carlos Williams
letter to James Laughlin