Shikibu Shuffle
Andrew
Burke / Phil Hall
Murasaki Shikibu (973—1014)
Ornette Coleman (double quartet
experiments, 1960)
Editor: One of those happy turns of fate brought Phil Hall, Canadian poet, and myself together in a Perth backyard about three years ago. He also hails from Perth - but his one's in Canada. We struck up a conversation, swapped poetry anecdotes and a couple of books, and kept in touch by email. Then I had a heart attack and was queued up for life-saving surgery. I just had to wait, unable to do much at all, kept alive by sprays and medical potions. To distract myself and to learn something of Phil's absolutely different poetics, we agreed to collaborate on a text. I wrote, he wrote, then we shuffled lines together to make a final text - actually, although I wrote 50% of this, Phil did most of the shuffling because he was so good at it!
1.
Whistling without charts
I praise all swoops and
calls
old red-throat has come
back
the gentle violin-maker to
the countryside
a left-footer’s choir
all language metaphor
I air my tongue
and dream of placid jaws
bawdy songs once belted
grace
2.
Don’t
play what’s there
play
what’s not there
a
Chinese dragon of smoke
wearing
my dead friend’s clothes
above
the marina
I
stall on the floating bridge
and
turn Schubert or Mingus
down
low upright in
the
long paddock
gathers
rain
3.
I
watch my chest
rise and fall in the mirror
nature in the raw
nothing I see or think
means
anything to me
then
I plan to tell you about it
and
into each dull thunk
like lemon on fish
comes
flugelhorn
a
faint zing
4.
About
playing
harmonica
means
nothing
down
the laneways
is
tuba backwards
sorrow
of the jarrahs
and
an open spit-valve
lining
the suburbs
windrush
through reeds
to rain
5.
The local gun range
swears black rapid-fire
but our sugar maples insist
circus the only place
and yellow-jackets concur
(in mosques of spit)
3 into 1 goes fine
our
brains inter
connected in their
dome sweet dome
6.
Delighted
by
homage
to
the
trap
of
the outhouse
door
open
twinkling
lights in a grey sky
here
to there
a wing and a prayer
a section of flight
the Flight Bros
7.
Praise each new word
any word will do
on the child's lips
in the windrows
in the windrows
sacred proximity
moon moon
moon moon
be our replacement
in the daylight sky
pale cuticle
hope
8.
Thinking wetlands
I say swamp
I say lake
as a trophy big-mouth
startled out of what I
was
leaps and smacks
(Thoreau says pond)
ibis peck
the unlettered eye
in dry reeds
9.
Silver
wakes
biting
into an apple
hanging
off a tree
in
weather Newton
read
it right
fence
dotted
like
manuscript
with
white snails
written
juices on skin
small
autumn regatta
10.
As boustrophedon
vines
whisper Ashbery
to
my Basho
I’m
light on
the
distortion pedal
before
pulling out all the stops
and
switching to rock’n’roll organ
telling
it
like
it TI is
11.
Talking
to the air
I
break cobwebs
on
the line
cello kite
fishing
making
lurid
the
net result
while
hammock hook shines
sun
holds motes float
12.
Company
gone I’m talked out
our
opened lake-door takes wing
kingbirds
nesting above the light
fat
chicks gaping pleading
the
oriole Jesus in drag in Tasmania
our
woods-door opened leaps in chorus
peepers gaping
pleading
an
evasive poppy-seed furnace answer
come
back silence I’ll try to listen
once
more a single organism
13.
Body
rags
slouch
toward
the
poem
about
the door
dark
piano
rolls at play
the
o in poem
in
memory’s chapel
not
a knob
or
halo
14.
Worldly
opinion
runs
in the backdoor
God must be a Boogie Man
and
out the front door
then
walks in
through
the wall
and
sits on the floor
scant
help to me
playing
in my sandpit
looking for myself
15.
To braid
plumbago blooms
with tuppenny turn-ups
to weave submerged antlers
breathing blue at their
tips
with centaurs
in wheelchairs
our hymn
to abundance
and sense
Stunning work, Andrew and Phil. Beautiful sequence. Thank you.
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