ADAM AITKEN
Sydney-based writer Adam Aitken is the author of four books of
poetry, a Ph.D thesis, and a few short stories. His work has appeared
in Poetry, HEAT, Meanjin, QLRS, and the online US journals Tinfish,
Trout, and Qarrtsiluni. He has been living in Cambodia, where is has
completed a new poetry collection, Eighth Habitation, due out with
Australian press Giramondo Publishing.
Aubade 4
And what of waking
in the afternoon, after a dream of
dark nights when jackals stalk the oasis?
In the absence of a revolution
where does the mind go in siesta?
How odd that feeling
of having missed a whole century
in a blink of an eye,
as you wake with the sun going down.
It was like this
for the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
And before they could ask meaningful questions,
bang! It was all over!
It's the same dozing off in the waiting room
as the train disappears for good
into the hills of white elephants.
It's too easy, this drifting off
like Martin Sheen on R and R.
He saw the horror, then
smashed up the hotel.
You go AWOL on any excuse:
to rest your eyes
or ease a minor back ache.
Was it the cow you photographed
that morning, the queues
at the dengue hospital?
Does this count as a metaphor for love,
or a kind of neglect by design, the body's
failing to sleep and wake
at the proper time?
It can't be jetlag or the ghost
of Confucius haunting
the Chinese Garden in Qufu.
The day's sounds too busy, like child's play
or finches roosting in the eaves,
the neighbours gossiping as you wake,
counting money and dressing children.
The heat you didn't reason with
or calculate, the fan on full blast.
There are poets you know
who hardly sleep.
Your method is different.
You wake with a guilt hangover and
a mangrove for a face
after three coffees made in Vietnam.
No doubt the maid had drugged you.
All this money and nothing to do
in a world where capital never sleeps.
To be expected from an old dog, not you.
Tonight you'll pay, sleepless in Seattle
or Singapore, too alert, too aware
as the silence closes in.
The Scream
A child wailing in the river naked,
as if planted, all torso
and nothing else
in a canal of litter.
One eye covered with a thong,
an insane frozen salute.
Two kids stand watch,
though it seems they aren't the final terror.
Such wailing
demands a theory or a cause.
Had he lost something? His mind,
or his parents?
Did he have legs to scale
back up the bank?
Nobody knows and I can't know
if they care;
it's lunchtime
then siesta.
I have a bridge to cross.
Though we hesitate,
in recognition,
as if he's caught in a trap
and has my eye.
The child that's
fixed on the apparition;
and he wails again,
rooted to the riverbed,
as if his only pet
had drowned,
and its voice down there
was speaking, a puppy in the underworld,
or barking
much louder than the passing traffic
or the taunts of two bullies.
Maybe he had seen himself:
a watery exposure
slowly drowning.
As if the vision of two eyes
was too much, the mud
taking him down, sucking
at his limbs, the red river
draining his lungs of blood.
Dear Henri
Dear Henri
When you died your last fevered words
were incomprehensible to the servants.
These days it is not so easy
to discover anything,
or to re-discover anything,
let alone die looking.
I would like to begin my book,
To the Learned Societies of... etc.
I would like to be buried in Luang Phrabang
where the chanting is atrocious.
I would travel, trusting to Providence,
with a case of Bordeaux, cognac, sardines,
and a King Charles cocker spaniel.
I would like to be writing in my jungle tent,
only to be interrupted
by the unexpected visit of a governor
offering a Rhinoceros hunt
in my honour.
The dream never came to pass:
that great cotton plantation
on the shores of the Tonle Sap
(priced in francs)
surpassing the Americas
then in Civil War –
a nation eating itself
like this place has done for centuries.
You gained nothing by the excursion
but the pleasure of having been
a chronicler of the habits of a curious people,
intended to gratify a public
with a taste for amazons
and ruins built by giants,
for savage but kindly people.
One could civilise them,
though you knew one wouldn't.
"All sensibilities seem deadened among them,
proud and great cheats" said the Abbe
of the Annamites.
Your subjects were lively but obstinate,
generous but vindictive,
intelligent but dissembling,
slow to get into a passion,
but terrible when they did so.
Their food stank
but diversity of taste
was laudable.
How they weakened with dysentery
but still looked cheerful.
Depressed by the monotony and driven mad
by the torment of insects, there are
always choices: what to admire most
in an elephant flicking sandflies
off its back with a branch –
the sensitivity of its skin,
its patience
or its intelligence?
A town could be stifling
unable to waken your sympathies
with its "too great a number of humans".
Our aim? To counsel, soften, enlighten
and convert,
like a gift of mobiles phones
or an SUV can do today.
I appreciate you telling me
how you were cured of Athletes Foot
due to your scrupulous cleanliness
and that the inhabitants of the jungles
learned the range of your rifle
and the calibre of your balls.
I would like to be travelling
with gifts,
a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles,
a bottle of scent, a sedative mixture
for a chief with rheumatism,
a button or a cigarette
for the still suckling child.
I would like to be surrounded
by superstition, ghosts, spirits and demons,
and not believe in any of it.
Now we will know how the hunter
was once truly beautiful,
how, on hearing a creature
gliding through the canopy,
you reached for your gun.
We will know
how to shoot a leopard
through the heart,
how it prowls thick undergrowth,
before it hears the report of your gun,
as it leaps, wounded mortally
then drops, the creature extended
lifeless.
At your feet.
description, for
whatever is profound
is indescribable
and writing is an exercise
with invisible ink, like
a patchwork of moonlight in the foliage;
"Phrai stood with a sabre in one hand
and a torch in the other, pursuing
the fishes in the stream."
Let's be modest, your notes were
hasty, rough, with no claim to any merit
but to record the truth.
Destined as good books are
to see the light.
I would like it if
someone regretted
I had been French.
I would be grateful
if someone named a beetle
even a minor one,
after me.
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