Hushed
Light pours down
the unrelenting sky
to earth ribbed and ridged
with the tough stroke
of Drysdale’s brush
I track down words
for hues and shades in books
envy the skill of artist-explorers
who forged new ways of seeing
The cries of crows fall
Through blues onto rusty ochres
pulsing with raven dust
This place stills my tongue
Pulse
1
Somewhere in this night lives
a light
that turns in the open
throat of time.
2
When the sky waits for rain
birds squat in silence
and longing is but
one great sweeping movement that makes the earth quake.
3
The clock stands still in the heat, and I
fear the mimicry of clichés—
like a comma usurping all
punctuation.
4
No, I don’t believe
in the silence
drying up
on your lips.
5
I dream the wish that inhabits
you is a space
opening up a gap
into the night.
6
What I write gleams
like the moon
pulsing in a sea
of clouds.
7
Your lips are grey—a hyphen
between dis and ease
and the ultimate sinking
into silence.
8
Rain pours.
In my throat words come up for air
like a promise
to skin death alive.
2017 ‘Pulse’ at Double Dialogues
Catch
Smell the rain on the breeze
down at the river mouth
where fishermen stand
in the swirl of incoming waters
Feel the first drops on your skin
where the mystery of the ocean
draws away from salt spray
and the chill of the west wind
Ribbons of kelp sway in the deep
Refracted light dapples your face
as the child comes up for air
Your hands, useless
against the sky
Arms, broken wings
skeleton dust
Osprey kestrel tern skua shearwater sandpiper swift
Fire relies on the leaves of gum trees
No sound fits this spectacle No sound
but the hiss of fire bark grass
searing your world into sheer whorls
of alliterations Hallucinations
of words resounding with nothing
Following faultlines a gorge aflame
furrows erased in granite and sandstone
lines of scribble gums forever
receding The gorge
barring you
Now how could I speak again
when syllables shatter on my page
turning words inside out
when letters hover in the air
like the smell of your burning skin?
We were discussing poetics
on our mobiles How we didn’t need
manuals for wordsmiths
preferred to work words as an end
in itself make a poem fulfilled
in its enaction look inwards
to the materiality of language
on the page and in the mouth
stress the event not the effect
You said good bye
And now I dream that you flit
out of my skin your voice
lettering me Poetic enjoyment
perhaps as if to resist
the etiolation of language
Don’t put individual utterances on show
you say Perform their moves
of repetition re-use reiteration
show your reader the absurd
desire to contain ( )
For here is the gum and its inferno remains
the grave among blistered roots
the mouthless earth lulling one to leave
If it could speak it would say
here is the silence here is the question
The Hanged Man
At the time of writing to you
The sun sinks in Sydney Harbour
Full moon swells above the bridge
Bizet’s Carmen bursts on the water
Valentines clink glasses and part
clink glasses and part
In Melbourne a southerly blows across the bay
Spectral waves ripple, curl, frizz, fizzle
Madame Sosostris sets The Lovers alight
Fireworks explode in the sky
Rainbows cover the face of the moon
and rub out the stars
Ropes of rain drop on Esperance
Pods of pilot whales shore up to die on Farewell Spit
Cascading waters rip into America’s tallest dam
Everywhere on earth lakes fill with fish doped on antidepressants
Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood II (non-fiction) is released
In Paris refugees huddle outside the Sacré Coeur where cleaners
slip them Halal baguettes
In London a Tory student films himself torching a twenty pound note
next to a homeless man
In Grahamstown one thousand and seven hundred people catch AIDS
In Manhattan the Statue of Liberty squirms
At the time of writing
Maryam Mizakhani dons no Jihab but wins the Nobel for mathematics
At the time of writing
George Orwell’s Twenty Seventeen (non-fiction) crackles off the press
At the time of writing
China stacks its artillery and extends its air strips
North Korea fires missiles into the Sea of Japan
Syria leaks chemical weapons
Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, India bury fresh bodies
At the time of writing
The planet tilts off its axis
Foaming clouds ignite
Coal-fired power plants belch
Robotic bees are born
At the time of writing
I’m out to kill time
Forget all possible endings to the world
Remember the boy who’d launch himself off into the river like Tarzan,
rope dangling
from the tree of immortality
At the time of writing
Death has achieved her majority
Madame Sosostris grants you eternity
I tuck away the Hanged Man’s card
Archive Fever Making Tracks
the arkhē appears in the nude—Jacques Derrida
You are I am a tracker bent crouched close to the page ground looking
for traces and signs that sense you has have passed this way
You sniff sniffing for the scent of absence you
but above all feeling
for the gap in your my life
that wants to fill this page
alone
The air is incandescent
The white page track glows
Emptiness talks back talks back talks back
to the heat that cracks open the world ground
This is a land of surfeit and lack
of hardness and clarity of image
of absence that opens out
or closes up the world
and sometimes the heart
Derrida, J 1998 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trans Eric Prenowitz, p. 92.
Pulse and other poems are © Dominique Hecq
The above poems have been published as follows,2015 ‘Archive Fever’. Axon. 2016 ‘Archive Fever’. Best Australian Poems. Melbourne: Blac Ink. 2017 ‘Archive Fever’. Recours au poème : 182 2017 ‘Fire relies on the leaves of gum trees’. Recours au poème : 182 2017 Pulse. Double Dialogues 2017 The Hanged Man. Meniscus 5 :1 |
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Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. Her works include a novel, three collections of short stories and six books of poetry. Her stories and poems have been published internationally. These appear in English and other languages in anthologies, journals and on websites. Over the years, her work has been awarded a variety of prizes. Hush: A Fugue (2017) is her latest book.
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