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Snapshots
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Liberty
Desk: Not in Attendance The door opens quietly as we slip into a realm of ghosts, a hotel honouring its Moores of the past and their Irish best. In the solitude of an upstairs lounge we find photos of Joyce, a picturegraph of Moore, Shaw, Beckett, Yeats, cold eyes staring at King William Street. And in the heart of their collection, verse. Life, it seems, at the Brecknock is short on cash. It’s like a poet on a migrant ship still looking to the shores of Innisfree, on a downhill trail, desiring nothing more than bee-loud paddies drinking with their mates droning on about St. Pat’s day. To me it’s not a graveyard, just centuries old, in the wrong part of town, now designed for hitchhikers sensitive to fumes. Still, there’s cornflakes, ironing-board toast, a cavernous trickle, Adelaide calls water. In the hallway we laugh and joke, crouch under blinkered eyes, waiting for uplift. (This is a just a note to others, we didn’t leave a tip). The festival of writers is why we came, Coetzee in the East tent, Attwood, grey and proud, Keret’s magic piggybank, or Grenville’s perfect gaffe. Not the heat though. That’s not why we came, nor the marquis queue, waiting for god knows. Oh that’s right! all those authors’ books. Helen Hagemann, Perth - Wednesday 24/3/04 News of the blind man He left his country before the army could pen his number and life. I knew him, half blind, well aware of his aggressiveness. In Adelaide, he left behind winter suits, vests, ski boots, blood drying in the pockets of his winter overcoat. When I met him he had the voice of a bell, growl of life, a hunger to walk inside leather shoes. Days grew to battles he fell into, an inheritance of family lies. He spread the distance between us with a bottle or two of beer and wine. No one knew him or was informed. He gave away his existence, destroying walls and doors. At times, he was a husband, a father, absent from home. In my sleep he’s the lion that can’t be caught smiling from the lettuces, mortar and brick. I’ve had this dream before of paint sheds, lilac tins, studio of wooden toys his children will never see, or a face without drink. Helen Hagemann, Perth, Wed 31/3/04 Salt-filled memories For Edith and John Sydenham Grandfather got sick of hiring Bullions' boats. From a photograph gone to rust, he says, "all summer, the crowd took them at dawn"' I can picture him standing around bailing his own, that fine piece of hardwood he rowed and baited in, exploding estuary and bay with a waist logic of anchor and chain. My grandmother stashed Sunday leftovers on the best plank, away from the sun and mop of wave. I reflect on her life, know nothing of his, only they grew closer in '32, fishing for hours until the moon paled over Saratoga, or the whiting skittered past the lighthouse to Box Head. He died there in the boat as the light twirled silver, as the rip deepened, as the bream paced his line, as the briny sea opened its mouth. I remember the lawn hanky at my Grandmother's nose, wondering how she faced the agony of oars. In khaki shorts, Wellington boots dressed for bagging worms, the snapper run, the point's salt-filled memory, she unravels the lines of her mouth. I turned with the food, with a hot cup of tea, I saw him slumped, asleep.' In the burning bay, slightly sweating hair, my grandmother placed a consideration of sunstroke in her hands, moistened his curling lip, as if he was not yet gone. Helen Hagemann, Perth Wednesday, 14/4/04 heritage for Robert James, 1826 in chains and ruddy eyes he claimed a sea of imperfection like a curse of his days he remembered bitten dogs, sewage streets piled high on population, the squeak of a loft's rope, fifteen minutes starboard side, stomach overboard swamped by a sea's roll, wanting death by waves, anything other than this salt cake of unfamiliar glare, the memory of Scottish wigs, hammer coming down, the amplified clap of iron, then a harbour dredge of flesh wounds, the long quiet highway of bird fodder, sandstone shards sending his boot heels into a mountain quarry landslide, his Hunter Valley life, the monumental family tree growing healthy in the sun Helen Hagemann *** May begins an August Memory We sit silently in a room where the past whispers undignified moments, our August garden, lake, sedge and log. You with your wayward lunch, me with a woman's smile. Contaminating the air, my laughter, too, floats among the clouds, is distained only by the traveller who hides behind our life. We return again and again to our comic muse, always the moist birth of our love. Each year a molding of poems, words defining self, a cityscape, country breakfast in a generous shed, new borders. Every day we play with leaves and sticks to set the fires trembling. Helen Hagemann, Perth Wed 12th May. *** Broken Bay In the bay, where shells suck and wheeze in the spillage of tide, where jetties hollow a thump on boards, and loud boys plunge off ferry pylons, where line and metal slip into weed and silver bream, where from the point, in an absence of jewfish and whiting, fishermen continue to race the southerly-buster home – And on the headland, where Lion Island welcomed strangers to its sphinx-like shore and Blackwall Mountain shaded summer tents, its autumn seep dripping forest finch, and when carnival floated over children raking for soldier crabs, my home was called holiday. Back then, my parents, still in love, raised me to take it in – left me to my wild wandering. Helen Hagemann, Perth Wed 26/05/04 *** Discovering Winter I have winter stuffed in my pockets a tissue, paperclip, a silver seal, nothing of the artic kind. It's partly from a clever flip of juice I had at lunch. I am hilarious when it comes to junk, the little scraps of detail one collects when writing poems in stuffy gas-fired rooms. Sneezes stunningly simple to my coughing boom. Two hairs have fallen from my headache. I flick them off like dust. My eyes and nose are melting into ugg-boots on my toes. I know I'm not unique. Helen Hagemann, Marangaroo. 2 June Poetryetc is a listserv relating to poetry and poetics which provides a forum for poets to debate their critical and creative work. The list has over the years run a number of projects for its members, of which Snapshots has been the most enduring. Every Wednesday, Poetryetc members were invited to post short poems on any subject or in any form they chose. The idea was to make a poetic collage of instamatic “snaps” of that day that reflected the international membership of the list. The project has generated an astounding number of poems. The first two runs, of six weeks each, and the first ten weeks of the third run, are archived at Wild Honey Press www.wildhoneypress.com under Poetryetc Project. The rest - amounting in all to a run of a year - are archived here. Poetryetc, like its affiliate Salt Publishing (http://www.saltpublishing.com), was founded by Australian poet John Kinsella. Salt is managed by Christopher Hamilton-Emery (cemery@saltpublishing.com), while Poetryetc is owned by Alison Croggon (ajcroggon@bigpond.com). Poetryetc is now archived at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/poetryetc.html. and anyone interested can join from that url. To contact the listowner: Alison Croggon These pages are designed, maintained, and hosted by Rebecca Seiferle, the Editor of The Drunken Boat. To email. 
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