Poems

Kunapipi Volume 27 Issue 1 Article 6 2005 Poems Lou Smith John Haynes Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Lou and Haynes, John, Poems, Kunapipi, 27(1), 2005. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol27/iss1/6 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Poems Abstract AS SEEDS BETWEEN TEETH SPLIT FROM YOU This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol27/iss1/6 42 LOU SMITH AS SEEDS BETWEEN TEETH SPLIT ‘The Witness’, ‘The Naming’, ‘Memories and Talismans’ and ‘This Silent Place’ trace the life story of my maternal Grandmother, Doris (formerly Dorris) Eloise Butcher nee Benjamin. Her story begins in Jamaica, where she was born in 1900, and lived until the age of thirty. After meeting and marrying my English Grandfather, Charles Horace Butcher, she migrated to London, and then in 1971, following my mother’s marriage, migrated once again, to Australia. The poems explore notions of belonging, dislocation, migration, and familial and Colonial silences. From my perspective, in the sub-tropical, suburban Newcastle landscape where I grew up, and where she lived until she died in 1989, I re-imagine my Grandmother, re-trace her footsteps. My Grandmother was born ‘illegitimate’ and ‘The Witness’ looks at the silences that exist surrounding her birth. However, there is difficulty witnessing a silent story, one that, like the Australian landscape, has many layers of erasure including the dual lack of the witness to the birth and my witnessing of the account, or lack of testimony. Whilst it is essential to remain sensitive to these personal silences, so many women’s stories remain untold. ‘The Naming’, as its title suggests, further investigates the issue of ‘naming’, focusing on the signing of the name Benjamin on my Grandmother’s marriage certificate. Whilst ‘Memories and Talismans’ and ‘This Silent Place’ seek connections, unearthing my Grandmother’s thoughts and desires for ‘home’. As Seeds between Teeth Split Doris Eloise Butcher, Kingston, Jamaica. (Photographer and date unknown.) 43 44 THE WITNESS in metastasis the cells divide as seeds between teeth split it spreads ‘as the disease progresses they become increasingly abnormal in behaviour and appearance’1 next to your Christian names was a line_____________ leading nowhere a line bereft of ... in the box marked Witness was the name you can tell a lot about a person by their name with his eyes glued upon you from the start, your Father, You who were cast (like those before) cast half and half between this and that when Mother sent you away with your grandmother you stayed the salty harbour breeze calming the Jamaican heat and underneath tight-lipped, your tongue curled back not a word was uttered not a word spoken Lou Smith As Seeds between Teeth Split 45 of the facts: Augustus Miller Benjamin watched you slip from your watery sack memory stored to fight off attack from that line that leads nowhere between this and that from what you said and what we know in case it all came leaching out in a whisper 1 Furtado, Peter (ed.) 1989, Medical Science: The World of Science, Equinox , Oxford. 46 Lou Smith THE NAMING Although the term metastasis may describe such disparate processes as the shifting of symptoms or local manifestations in mumps or the transportation of bacteria from one part of the body to another, it is used particularly to indicate the spread of malignant tumours to distant sites.1 Silence salted the air thick when with the cursive curl of wrist you signed nee Benjamin on the dotted line. And there it sat a seed lodged in tooth a thought caught at the back of the mind never to be spoken of again your name was Butcher now. Mechanisms of transfer include direct extension or seeding of body cavities and surfaces… Years later, sunk in your chair your stockings rolled below the knee, the view a canopy of trees and ‘the bank’ of blackberry vines we played in had the mid-morning sun bleached the memory of your in-laws’ fears, a whitened spot where thought once existed of arriving in England, you from the Colonies, your baby heavy in your belly What would the neighbours think of the colour of her skin? As Seeds between Teeth Split 47 On the mantelpiece in floral porcelain frames sat the photos of your half-brothers fading to shades. 1 ‘Metastasis’, http://www.amershamhealth.com/medcyclopaedia/Volume%20III%201/ METASTASIS.asp. (April 2004) 48 MEMORIES AND TALISMANS Did here remind you of the smell of heat the sweat moist and pungent under arms forming yellow patches on your blouse? Like on the one from Panama you wore as a child and I’ve worn (to comments of isn’t that exotic!) after you. Did it remind you of those days eating breakfast of grapefruit sweet with sugar, of frying saltfish or rice with peas? Jasmine hedge suburban fences here, their smell thickening the hot air sweet in this place so far from your home, but all I know. When you walked the quiet cul-de-sac breathing in their intoxication did you conjure the noisy streets of Kingston, cart sellers’ calls, strange creaks and dockland horns? When you felt the bush track beneath your feet, the crunch of bark and smell of gum, did the sky overgrow with rainforest vines from the mountains you left behind? What talisman did you hold to keep those memories close? I hold your photo between forefingers, I keep your wedding ring wrapped in velvet, and I wear your blouse from Panama embroidered thick with flowers. Lou Smith As Seeds between Teeth Split 49 Doris Eloise Butcher, Karina Smith, Louise Smith, Westcourt Road, New Lambton, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Mid-1970s. 50 THIS SILENT PLACE So many paths you have walked, shantytown streets hovering in mirage London lanes wet with sleet. And then here, this place this silent place where Awabakal stories are hidden under California bungalows on suburban streets. In the stillness of late summer days, when Jacaranda petals carpeted the bitumen road mauve you strolled, the smell of soaked lawn seeping clay soil wetting your parched tongue with the thirst for home and your petticoat was static on stocking. As a detective I’ve traced your journey my thoughts recording events, qualitative data of heres and theres, but there is so much space, so many blanks filled with poetic licence. If I run too fast, ask too many questions will my ankle buckle on the slippery edge of uneven bluestone? The leg disjoint, the periosteum peel away from the bone like paperbark? Fact: Dorris Eloise Benjamin Born: Kingston, Jamaica 1900. Stratified white. Poor, uneducated. Lou Smith As Seeds between Teeth Split She was able to embrace an internal milieu of Colonial rule. 1930 you married an Englishman, Charles Horace Butcher, my grandfather. 1931 headed for the ‘mother country’. 1971 arrived in Australia. As a tree I stand upright, my bones holding me in place, my neural sensory branches reaching. As a detective, I trace the sole of your foot with my fingertip. Doris Eloise Butcher. (Photographer and date unknown.) 51 88 JOHN HAYNES from YOU for Afinki Kyari When we consider a case like Dante’s we are powerfully reminded of the reasons which have supported a view of love quite contrary to that advocated by evolutionary psychology. Love, it is suggested, is a cultural construct; and the way it is constructed depends upon various features of a given society. For example, in a society such as ours in which adults very often live alone until they fall in love, love is closely connected to overcoming loneliness. But this could hardly be a major feature of the experience of life in a society in which — until marriage — the individual would normally live in the closest proximity to an extended family. John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy XXV I’m reading about certainty, the odd mad sense the word ‘know’ takes on if I say ‘I know you’re on the sofa, now’. It’s not how hard I’ve gazed at you, how carefully I’ve checked the room, but the insanity of doubting it. And then I thought of tales of Africk, eyes set in men’s pectorals. And this to do with stern Miss Browne, and West chalked on the blackboard with a compass arrow pointing at the Shrewsbury Arms, and East towards the conker tree, to do with Andrew when she hustles him with, ‘Come on now, Andrew, a noun of place?’ — then with her anger when he stubbornly repeats: ‘That corner!’ Nothing more certain than my shoes down there, or that the bell would go, Mum be at home, the fields, the garden fence, sun on the car — although we left and all that proof is gone, as that of prepschool has, now Number Ten. What’s certain’s certain just in retrospect? Which tick-boxes, when I’m dead, will you check? from You XXVI But you’re not certain, are you? Things I’ve said, when hurt, when slightly drunk, words years ago, that lodged — no time, no past — inside your head. And no use now to show how then, how you, how I, swirlings of air you didn’t know out of a fear, and still have not quite heard. I say I love you but it’s only words. They’re not the same as love, of course not, words, and still less English words, still less Bature tunes and pulses that you never learned at school, and don’t quite fit reality, not even now, not even here, where they, like yours, contain a different kind of earth. I say I love you but it’s only words. As if the rocks and loam create a tongue, as though the meaning were geography, another kind of rain, another sun. But that’s only a metaphor, the way that love alas prompts us so readily to plant the desert full of magic herbs. I say I love you but it’s only words. Bature: European (masc.), White Man. 89 90 XXVII Home as the setting, as the narrative, the starting point, the past? The soul, maybe, before the longing came? The tale you live as it comes back to you or as somebody tells it, re-tells it, as you tell me? A dawa fence? A swaying scarlet bird? I say I love you, but it’s only words. The frog hangs downward by its eyes from surface tension on a pond, the sun, as red as a tomato, drawing lines of shade along the furrows — and so on, so I imagine, as I’ve always done, exploring as the White Man always would. I say I love you but it’s only words. The Reith Lectures are on the theme of trust, without which, as I read, I realise, nothing coheres at all, and that’s not just Have I spoken with truth to you? Did I mean what I said? Or what I meant to try to say or what you thought I had inferred? I say I love you but it’s only words. dawa: maize, i.e. the stalks used for fences. John Haynes from You 91 XXVIII I touch you. I imagine you. I change you into words, my cells, my chemicals, my sparks, my dancing spine. I make you strange. I conjure you from common syllables, from Kano market, Billingsgate, Arrivals. I wait holding your biro name on cardboard. I say I love you but it’s only words. The orphan you still are must justify, must justify, must not (the phrase is just) be found wanting, can’t help it, nor can I, the daughter’s loss that drives out every trust, my trust in doubt as well, the way of love that you should understand, since you’re a nurse. I say I love you but it’s only words. I’ll be your malam and bring magani. I’ll mix up something that’ll staunch your fear of needing me, some mai bakin gashi. I’ll squeeze the droplets gently in your ears until your eyes are bright, and onion tears will seem to stand in them, but nothing worse. I say I love you but it’s only words. Magani: medicine in the sense of traditional remedy. Mai gashin baki: literally, the one with the moustache, name of patent medicine for all ailments. The label has a picture of a White Man with a moustache like Lugard’s. 92 XXIX Your glossy pages slosh over and come to it, the human heart, the ventricles, a section of the pericardium or outer wall, and then the visceral, the veins, the valves, the systole diastole of human metre with a sound like lub and dub inside the stethoscope. Like love. Safe on the page with little arrows, captions, insets, it’s not like the Holby City shots of that thing jumping in the surgeon’s reddened plastic gloves, so carefully squared off with cloth, or electronically monitored, suspended still as death on by-pass where no pain or feeling’s left. Look down then, nurse, and set your ECG, place the electrodes, switch on. All your hard homework will come in now. Examine me. Note what you see there, or what you’ve inferred from that pen with no hand filling my card with peaks and troughs of helpless lub and dub that I can’t hide, or alter, or make up. Holby City: hospital soap on UK television. John Haynes