Albinoni: Adagio in G Minor

Sometimes, life is unbearably sweet,

when the shadows of a Moorish lamp are spilt upwards

and blotted into bedroom walls;

when morpho butterflies nestle bluely on a canvas,

and brandy burns like petrol in your gut.

 

Sometimes, the death-keening of a violin

makes me sick to the stomach

with melancholy.

Once, when I was just a child in patent leather shoes,

a madwoman raving in a red train carriage

 

made me feel the same, and almost holy.

Even now, I’m confused by my own secret Maria Goretti;

by my own secret murderer lurking nearby.

I suppose it shouldn’t have fascinated me:

the story of the fourteen-year-old peasant girl…

 

(or was it fourteen stab wounds?)

and the father’s long cart ride over a rutted road,

with Maria jolting like a sack of spilt meal

on boards strewn with straw.

I had hoped to be a much-desired saint.

 

I had hoped that Our Lady might appear to me,

like Serena Couchi, who fell into the flames of a bonfire

when she was only small, wearing a Blessed Scapula

around her neck.

But she was just a potato-farmer’s daughter, and Maltese,

 

with dirty cracks around her fingernails,

whose sister sold pink lemonade in wax cups at Woolworths.

I always liked the story of how Jesus would not be tempted

by the devil, and shouted: Get behind me,

Satan!

 

I always liked Jesus when he shouted.

Once, I did get behind you,

though it was no less sinful than in front.

My hair hung between your buttocks

and down your left thigh.

 

I felt like the Magdalene,

and my hair seemed to fill the room.

My combustion seemed to fill the afternoon,

and you can’t deny,

it was a miracle, of sorts.

 

Albinoni adagio in g minor

A Savage Orthodoxy

Mercedes Sosa and Misa Criolla;

the wind outside frigid, blustery.

Pan-pipes bring the Andes into my

high-ceilinged bedroom.

The front door rattles.

Good Friday is roaming outside

my house.

 

Once, when young, the poultry farm shriekings

on Good Friday morning

were the howling ghosts rising up from their graves.

 

At my First Communion breakfast,

I vomited saveloy and raspberry fizz-

why wasn’t it the body and blood

of little Baby Jesus?

The hymn they sang made me sick inside,

it was  so beautiful,

and life so transitory,

the light on our mothers’ faces

supernatural- a chrism.

Though, now I understand,

it was ordinary motherlove,

not the Transubstantiation.

 

Misa Criolla fills me with the same fearful beauty-

reminds me of the six-inch spikes on the grille

that we saw my sister’s best friend behind

when she became a Carmelite.

 

Beauty and cruelty,

compassion and ugliness,

mixed together to create una mescla,

a misa criolla!

A savage orthodoxy.

 

 

 

Mercedes Sosa "Kyrie"

 

Saint Joseph of Cupertino

My coloured tumblers are fading on the window-ledge;

my aspidistra has grown too leggy for its plastic pot;

the leaves on the cherry tree have turned yellow

and they hang like yesterday’s dirty socks;

the birds are not really singing,

they are mumbling about moving on.

 

One of my curtains is missing a ring-

it hangs drunkenly from the window’s bony shoulder blade,

and it is probably too late too late for love;

it is probably too late too late:

my wicker hamper overflows with matted cardigans,

my red sheets hide the stubborn stains of poems,

my nights and mornings are filled with delusions.

 

My mother, at this age, fell in love with dark-eyed priests

with French names like Fillipe;

her favourite saint was the one who laughed so much

he floated to the ceiling;

his levity a kind of grace.

My mother once slept, crumpled,  in the front doorway in her nightie-

she lay behind the screen door while the mosquitoes

batted their blunt heads against the mesh.

 

She also climbed into a backyard pool

fully dressed and heady with chlorine

on New Year’s Eve 1974,

besotted with a young monk with an eye for little girls.

When it is like that-

when they say things such as mutton dressed up as lamb,

there is no sense in the analogy,

since a woman is not meat.

 

The Reluctant Saint

 

Review of Bread of the Lost in "The Compulsive Reader"

Review of Bread of the Lost by Maggie Ball

Hexagons

NON OMNIS MORIAR: On Love, Brutality, and Death. A bloodshot review of Philomena van Rijswijk's Bread of the Lost

Purely Phenomenal. Purely Philomena.

... Reading this book institutionalized my eyes. Bemused by van Rijswijk's poems, I imagined a series of photogravures of the corpses, black birds, dying swan, spoiled bread, and wounded wombs against the polaroids of the flowers, lazy mornings, lips, fingertips, the sailor, a mother, and a coffee cup.
The surprisingly dark qualities of van Rijswijk's poetic expression and her brutal take on the theme of suffering and death are not stagnant and breathless. Rather, she is a poet who deconstructs the imagery of death:
that even death has to die;
that death, after all, is not death in itself;
that death cannot hang around the kitchen
or else it will be cooked.
Through a highly texturized composition, van Rijswijk's poetry has no traces of lexical loitering and aesthetic voyeurism. Each poem incarnates a raw-meat vision that is not poised yet focused; a magnified memory that is not tangible yet solid.
Without a doubt, Philomena van Rijswijk is a poet, an artist who has a profound understanding of language. Language as a human being-complete and completing. Language as a woman, a mother who doesn't stop being a mother after giving birth. Language, not merely as a tool or means, but also a fruition, an actuality yet imprisoned by the contrasting realities of life.
The emancipation of language is greatly achieved, if not painstakingly, by the gradual moulting of the penumbra of human experience. And it is every artist's vocation to translate human experience into a transfigured humanity. In experiencing art, when a person forgets the images, words, forms, and sounds (how they breathe, and how they move), one comes closely to that which is divine. In truth, Bread of the Lost reveals the poet's truest self and her arrival to the purest creation and we partake of that one bread.


Geri GedaSee more

...and on the third day...

A BRAVE AND LOVEABLE MIRACLE

 

Returned to that hut by the rust-painted rocks

where, once, I saw the sun set, veiled in her

contrived modesty and blushes, and later,

where I saw the sun rise erect

in his fantastic oriental pride.

O, lovely show off!

 

I saw you lift up from underneath the night,

from underneath the tousled bird-blue bedding

of a crumpled sea…

Such a rising up of the day, it was,

appearing, engorged, from under the gently rippling

raw silk of the sea…

 

The conceited peacock,

standing to attention outside my window,

guardian of the liquid light,

wearing his ludicrous little crown,

craned with admiration at the regal uprising

of the day…

 

The sweet applish leaves of the cider gums,

busy in their soft chatter,

were suddenly hushed and suspended,

alert to his salt-stung breath…

and the rowdy authority of the rooster,

watcher of the long grey hours,

was held at bay by the morning’s inflamed glory-

the miraculous resurrection of the day.

 

And O!  my lovely! what heavenwards delights

ascended with the pulsing incarnation,

the blissful optimism,

of that day!