Andrea
Brady
Working Note
The opening epigraph is from Skelton’s poem “Speke Parot,” about a multilingual import who goes to school with ladies. The reflection of language as mimicry, a physical activity divorced from semantics, refers me back to considerations of prosody as a kind of physical cognition — though Skelton’s imputations about women’s speech are obviously a keen instance for critique. I’m hoping next to work towards fulfilling the promise of occasional poetry, to extend beyond occasion into the perception and celebration of shared, communal time, through form and prosody, not just through simultaneous recognition of events, news quotes; but don’t yet know how.
Parrots
To
learn all language, and it to speak aptly.
Now
pandez mory, wax frantic, some men say
1.
Ramy
delivers at last. A golden calf looped and branded
tilts
its jughead toward fence, pile of decadent matter
includes
bones and field work. Her form is finished.
Mined from the interstate
bridewell and bloodwell, with emeralds
and silica, shellfish and landbridges
mined breaking into a hand
and breaking off all cont.
act, seen, abridgement.
Acacia
leaves bound together with carrot:
we
worship a finished form, his neck weeping
in
the thorn and sun loam. On them thorn, tying
Afghan lips to the outback
and the lips to pleasure they suck
up another blow from the fascists;
that new low is nothing new.
With
the burnt end they can scratch grammar
or
anatomy in harvested animal form,
seal
up surplus to the harvest by striking
punishing bargain or compact.
Uniform
project for a history of civilization,
that
barrel end smoking against appropriate
dawn
targets and smaller game: what have we
here unearthed, the shabby form
and the blank looks as film
wraps up in celluloid opaque
and
brimming that girl target.
2.
Yet
I brought the calf here because her blank
eye
triggers our milk to come in, venus blood
frothing
over as dairy goodness, back and white.
Ramy delivered the news into
my private drawing
room enclosed in bitemarks.
His tenderness was another trademark
of the stoa, the meat market
where we sheltered from the onslaught
of Israeli bullets and dumb propaganda.
I held my breath in the bus shelter, and drew
in more asphyxiating beliefs for want
forward-thinking about fresh air.
Now,
maybe the levels are better: iron droplets
in
saturation, gold in the Czech drinks and blood
in
the French letters alerting
another
woman at last.
3.
Between
the sheets I dawdled in wishfulness
that
came to smell me, regranulated sugar
from
toxins I allow myself crusting
my lips and my cunt.
The plane, flight’s unbearable
fervor pooled in hollow bones
made an act of musculature,
I see it bounce off the water strip
and
I set us free by recognizing fantasy.
Ramy
part of the clear sapphire that blinds
and
comforts this clouded eye, comes out of heaven
and
sits on my desktop.
Our exchange is morbid, a free state
and social being loaned out
for patterned conversation,
the law traded for an idol
precarious as a standard yet
saved from slaughtering by
a finished form of calf and binding,
that simile informant who smiles as he ascends
stairs
to the second landing. Who will write a new
formula
for addressing these locations earth
just
material dispersing with wave motion,
petty freedoms of living bodies,
when
all is lost in the reflex.
Bio: Andrea Brady was born in Philadelphia in 1974. She now teaches Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Writing at Brunel University, and is a co-publisher of Barque Press (www.barquepress.com). Her first book, Vacation of a Lifetime, was published by Salt in 2001: details available from www.saltpublishing.com, or PO Box 937, Great Wilbraham Cambridge PDO, CB1 5JX, UK.