eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580904 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 72 |
| File size: | 158 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Husk
By Chris Price
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2002 Chris PriceAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-090-4
CHAPTER 1
The mirror vendor
The mirror vendor carries the day
beneath his arm, bringing hills and horses with him
and on his head at night a moving tray
of stars to be served at the party
of Doña Juanita, packed in their dark ice.
The mirror with the red and gold frame
contains chickens and a small boy
leaning against a dusty blue wall,
disdains the khaki soldiers
trying to blend in with their guns.
Some take him for a thief
but his pale brown palms are clean
as the glass he polishes every day.
Windows regard him jealously
as he passes, giving the Friday girls
a spray of lights from the barber's shop
under a backward arch of red
and white letters as they leave work
in search of lovers and husbands, their
heels unpicking sequins on the puddled
pavement, a shining path
that leads them safely for this one
enchanted evening into dense
equatorial air, swimming in the mirror vendor's river.
A drop of mercury
Great-aunt Helen
orbits Emily Way
twenty years of houses, friends
suddenly unfamiliar
she keeps the vertigo
to herself (a drop
of mercury)
walks the shopping trolley
remembers flying
her first Piper Cub
at 35
and a canoe
on the Amazon
(still a secret
from her grand-daughters)
looks at her life
star cooling at the
wrong end
of the telescope
long nights in a room
only gravity listening.
Mexican couple
She loves the milky gaze
the way he looks through her sometimes
from where he's been.
And he? Also loves, but lacks
concentration.
They try to break
and for a while 'the hours
were broken' but
history sticks them back
together, a rough match
until one burns out
in a halo of fire.
Sometimes unhappiness
— his affairs, her operations —
makes a pair perfect
this too is written
in the bestiary of marriage
the elephant, the bleeding hind
the shape of things
the heart, the arrow
unknown to Vogue
but covered, yes
and coveted. The art
to struggle into
what you've got
catch the photographer
off guard
and there!
two pre-Columbian idols
outstare Time.
Archaic torsos
(Istanbul, 1998)
It's a fine market day
for browsing. Across the street
a library of second-
hand trousers hangs
round a pillar. Flies
open like intimate
biographies telling
of nights flung over chairs
days on boats, fish slapping
wet silver in the bilges
and bony promontories
knees pressed down
polishing religious stone.
On the street before them
stands the trouser-man's
advertisement:
two sawn-off Apollos
their torsoless legs
tightly filling worn jeans
from waist to plastic feet,
hips on a sauntery tilt,
crooked leer at the groin.
They're sizing up
the virtues of the girl
with black hair and bare arms
striding by on a contemporary
errand while behind the pillar
as the trouser-man
discreetly looks elsewhere
his customers are changing.
Their phantom limbs walk
former lives away
as the creased grins
of his plastic demi-gods
fade and their jibes
fall gradually silent.
Serbitsky Institution for Psychiatric Expertise
Trees on your wall
a sunlit wood somewhere
in Europe. You have peeled
them away to uncover the old
green paint below. And beneath
the trees you start
on the plaster, chipping clouds
into grey stone. Outside
statues are on the move
but you are digging in. Tomatoes,
marigolds and bluebells on your plastic
tablecloth, companion
plants. For now you have given up
tending the sky, your garden
to watch the world on screen.
Attentive blankness turns you
from us, two crop-headed boys
in blue. On the table, empty plastic
bags and a small brown pile
that might be bricks, or fruit cake.
Illuminated window
Empty of shadows and making a shadow
— Bill Manhire
Sitting in with
this family, sprawled
on its furniture
you are made to ask
the simplest questions.
Is it their sun
or ours? Which way do shadows
run here, what hemisphere
is this, that grants observer status
at a patient barnyard colloquium
on the globe and all its bright
ideas, where the delegates tell
by showing what you think
you know but are not
slow enough to understand.
Imagining you don't belong
here, a sulky teenage visitor
sentenced to a long stretch
in the country without television,
detained among elderly aunts
and longing for razzle dazzle, not reflection
you hang out below the washing line
or at the window with its missing
pane and overlook the way
the world drops in
'for your entertainment
and edification' —
travelling showman,
suitcase filled
with properties of light.
Husk
They live
in a little house.
They eat oysters
and other molluscs
reputed to enhance
love.
* * *
Outside
gleaming shells
of cicadas
their amber crackling
grass fire
underfoot.
* * *
His soft voice
nursing lust
raw with emotion.
Passion
and twilight
in the dark
shadows
beneath his eyes.
She lights
the paper lantern
a cape gooseberry
dangles
from her fingers
* * *
or perhaps the shell
of a man
delicate skin
a silk purse
for the mulberry
stem
the hungry life
within.
* * *
But she is tired.
Little
hollow
pod —
nut with
the sweet
meat
gone.
* * *
A father's kiss
goodnight —
hairy wooden cheek
coconut
lightly sanding
smelling of the sea.
* * *
Drawn up
on a shelly beach
the hull of a small
craft, a coracle
sun sinking gloomily
in the bay
the monks returning
to their island hermitage.
* * *
But look —
an arrival!
A fruit boat
has been bobbing
for days across the ocean
its green message
come to rest on this dumb
hospitable shore.
* * *
They have known each other
for some time.
Months
have passed
in the little house
where she stands
at the window
hearing the cough
of a young bullock
turned out to forage
in stubble
its tongue
protruding suddenly
in the winter dusk.
Dry honk
of a saxophone.
The smoky air.
She runs her hands
through silky
corngold hair
* * *
as a dog barks way
beyond the timberline
a rough-coated dog,
in language
of the northern tundra.
In saltier times
the skin of the dog-fish
was used
for smoothing arrows
* * *
and now
the shark beneath the skin
wants out.
It wants to shuck her
and swim free
heedless
in its sharp teeth
and sandpaper
capsule.
She bites down.
She holds his hand.
She opens up
* * *
and up
and here
the new one comes
sharp no more
their little shellfish
now without a shell.
She lies back —
scooped out
cocooned.
My love
he says
my sweet
husk.
Dog's body
If this were child's play
and I could choose
I'd be the dog —
body a soft black curve
on the stone flags
of the square outside the gallery —
patient in my red collar
and tongue
all my love
in waiting.
Tutu
Not one of those short, swan's arse affairs
that give it all away
from mincing pink toes to the drumsticks
of the corps
de ballet beating time — no. At fifteen I
was a Chekhov heroine:
my fervent desire, to swan about
in tossed foam,
the long gauze that conceals, as a lake's
reflection hides the webbed
and furiously paddling feet. I could dream my way
into it — cheekbones,
a good turnout, severe bun
and stately glide —
but never was a realist: a swan by any
other name, launching forth
on my flat feet. A lake
and a shore:
what is one without the other?
So I became a follower
until I was sure what kind of elegance
I was looking for.
* * *
Sometimes in the afternoons, when
the heat pools indoors
I still go and sit by water's edge and sink
into chorus lines
of spindrift and feathers.
The house laps
round me till you come home
in your dun
plumage; net curtains belly
from open windows
and a heavy sun descends as we step
outside to adopt
a comfortable position — flat
on our backs
in the long grass, watching all
the cloudy girls go by.
Modern education
The nightly stroll up Homebush Rd
highlights our lack. Stratocumulus,
cirrus, they're not for us.
'Good clouds,' we say. 'Good sky.'
On flora and fauna little better —
we know the chaffinch, the kingfisher,
waxeye and tui. Starlings in their telephone
choirs. But we're not up to much on trees.
We study the letterboxes of the street,
constructions and additions.
The stuff they built the neoclassical
house with, that looked like polystyrene,
the concrete pad for a new garage, they are
mysterious as the biology of the weta
that clicks in the tree by the deck
at night, or the goat that showed up
one morning in the neighbour's garden.
It's dusk. A blackbird is jumping
at the dirt. Sometimes it's hard to tell
exactly where we are. 'Speak! Speak!'
says the bird, but we remain
unaccountably silent.
The death words
Starting with
rictus, the grin of the stuffed
museum cat
then rigor mortis, an equally
stringent aesthetic —
all the good latin words
of dr death, o my string bean
— and memento mori
(alas the stone skull I saw
in the shop window that morning
was gone by afternoon)
and me with no more recall
than some spring thing
some frothy adjective
like kittenish — which ark
freighted that one in,
o my sugar snap?
The lighthouse morses on
about unyielding rigours
of rocks as we catch the slow drift in
and out. A miracle the whole thing
floats at all, small wonder
that it sinks, widdershins,
countersensical down
the gaping plughole.
The menu blinks, recommends you save
as all unlabelled do the limbo
filed half way
to Hades, irretrievable
as Orpheus only proved —
the singing heads down-
stream, never to be seen
again, but for print's
angry snarl.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Husk by Chris Price. Copyright © 2002 Chris Price. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Epigraph,
I,
The mirror vendor,
A drop of mercury,
Mexican couple,
Archaic torsos,
Serbitsky Institution for Psychiatric Expertise,
Illuminated window,
Husk,
Dog's body,
Tutu,
Modern education,
The death words,
Font,
Rose and fell,
Jouissance,
Ghastlily,
Night life,
Six thinkers,
Mix,
Taking heart,
What I know about Curnow,
On the road,
II,
Trapezing,
The Origins of Science,
Evenings at the microscope,
Electroshock,
Polygraphy: a user's guide,
A brief history of automata,
Keeping ravens,
Acknowledgements,
Copyright,