Verdon, Robert. Ed. by Alan Corkish. Before We Knew This Century. Erbacce-Press, 2010

8/14/2019 Verdon, Robert. Ed. by Alan Corkish. Before We Knew This Century. Erbacce-Press, 2010

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copyright Robert Verdon 2010

All rights reserved; no part of this chapbook may be reproduced

in any way without the written consent of the author

erbacce-press retain copyright of this chapbook

in its current format

Cover-design, editing and typesetting by Alan Corkish

erbacce-press publications Liverpool UK 2010

ISBN:

erbacce-press can be found via: http://www.erbacce-press.com

Before we Knew this Century

Robert Verdon

PROO

FCOPY


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Id like to thank the playwright and poet

Kate McNamara for encouragement.


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To Centrelink

(the Australian Dole / welfare Office)


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Soon

Early Christmas Shopping

Propositions of Wittgenstein if he had gone mad

Finding coins under grass-blades

Scintilla

dole at 51

And you...?

first contact

The Horror

Autumn in Spring

Eternal City

Nebula

Silverfish 2000

TonsureIcarus, 2001

Hundreds of Shells

Horse Linament Memory

Anoosa

Song of the Homeless

Tuross

Bethlehem, 1995Scapegoat

Haiti, 2010

School Days

To Maria Callas

Decor

About the author

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

16

17

18

19

20

2223

24

26

27

28

29

3031

32

33

34

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Contents:


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PROOF

COPY


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Soon

frail corn-cob husk

rotten as the 1900stree in grey hose

tongueless as spring

church-bell and wind-chime back-beat

all linger in some future memory palace

I live near old people

sometimes they are no longer there

sometimes I see silver on top of my hairsoon I shall go and be forgotten

then I feel fifteen again

some people use telescopes

to stare at the end of the universe

its a beginning


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Early Christmas Shopping

In time exposures of the battlefield

Only the acceptable dead appear

Cold sounds

Are all I imagine they hear

I picture the moon

Shrinking like a prune

The June sky has a perm tonight

In this bulb-in-the-mouth light

The malls a garden of deposed royalty

Hot as the earths core

Damaging brand loyaltyEconomys sunk at the shore

Empty store

Full of carbon dioxide

Cold day

Sunglasses, grey, savings still melt away

Christmas is pleasing the Christians

Once more.

Rise like lions


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Propositions of Wittgenstein if he had gone mad

1.* cats are weapons of mouse destruction: kings spring onto

their thrones in horror (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,

darber mu man schweigen)

2.* Celtic knotwork is an attempt by the artist at a self-portrait

after three bottles of Jameson

3.* entrepreneurship seems effortless because everyone else

does the work

4.* a Second International politician is like an obstetrician in anunnery, or a bright young tourist in Roma asking for a bowl of

mussolini, as the Cross blasts off like the northern lights over

St Peters basilisk

5.*the best advertising is a feeding tube down the pharynx

which buys votes for bombing babies

6.* thoughts are a traffic jam of cable-cars aloft

7. no king was saner than Ludwig of Bavaria


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Finding coins under grass-blades

Footsteps in the park, my own, still fear living here one day

looking for coins under grass-blades, finding plastic spoons and

bottletops,

know every stray stonelet and green shard, every sharp shadowof it as the sun passes over, I am a mouse or an ant,

this is my escape into miniature, safe in a warm dry nail-length

ditch, horizon of mad embroidering starshadows, unable to

grow up,

stalks bamboo forest, grass-rapiered heart, fall into footprint

crater, more pitted than Miranda or Ceres, beyond the DTs of

hard-tack, grey-gravel planettrillions of hectares of real estate, price spun below zero kelvin,

each steamed coin stamped underwater with eternity its

apotheosis as neither prison nor palace but decent

home


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Scintilla

In scintilla city

The dawn dreams which rock

The foundations gritty

Escape the committee

To unbuild each block

Their armies so tinySlip down each leaf shiny

From the trim, endless hedge

Marching over the ledge

Onto each eyelids edge

So we rise up in bed

And turn suddenly red.

There are figures outside

Flinging roses and bread

Singing

empire

The empire

The empire

is dead!

PRO

OFCOPY


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dole at 51

my city has a great postal service

unsigned letters taunting you with destitution

computer-generated death threats

from some twenty-year-old kid from a private school

hard at work in the only Government agency

to get more complaints than the Police better to sleep on the beach and dream of freedom

dole at 51

now 52 and in a house I love at last

in the insecure public system

better to sleep on a bench and dream of freedom

but itd kill me in a week

almost a relief

to nearly die last year

and get on the disability pension

50% of my liver no longer works either

better to sleep in a trench and dream of freedom

but I am afraid and lonely

as I was when Iwas five

better to live like a leach and write of freedom

better still to write back


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And you ?

Stylish steenless stale

mugs for sale, by Spooner!

In the corner-shop of my desire

Hard by the ingle

Cloudshade racing ahead

A fire-engine bell and brass bubble cars

Whisk by the school-library

Where Miss Creole Crinkle stacks book-dust

And counts the raindrops

In base three

In the glare of the skylight

Jealous of Julias reservation of the Amstrad

The law ambles corpulently, and life is marmalade sun

And sequestered white sweetshops.

The cobbler breaks wind over his knee.Lavender frills

crumple beneath golden curls

The baily berith the bell away.

Julia will not get up this morning.

This is the church andThis the steeple

Open the door

In the city

For three days

And three nights

The smart bombs fall


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first contact

blade of jagged sword

becomes edge of continent

silver lure skims sand

pilots have five ears each

make us all stand in our bikinis

and steal our earrings

ants

ants on a low concrete wall

appear, like bubbles in water about to boil

- sick of aimless life

I begin to love it again and the clouds

left by a ghost train across bluetopia

are condensing steam

(but what is steam)

these ants are not melancholyfrothing on their artificial rockface

a tidy mind is the sign of a sick desk

loving anthood or knowing no better


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not enough to wait for sunsets peacockery

or to glance at the million-whirligig tree crown

or the new-gold furnace of carbon it screens

or to care that the earth is turning into a sunstone like the

moon

(or that theres no more blood in it)

as I forget to worry

surviving death, this afternoon, by saying its just gas

passing the church again as at twolearning what no school can teach

as the ancient windchimes of my parents sing

and the clouds steam overhead ...

PROO

FCO

PY


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The Horror

my father

born in Britain

joined up at fourteen

no jobs in 1934

served in the R.A.F.

and traversed Africa

on Wellington and Lancaster bombers

and Catalinas flying from South Africa to Madagascar

and back looking for U-boats

he never knew Hitler

but he foughtfor and against

the worst form of capitalism

and I had my cat put down when she had

throat cancer

my father is deadand I am bereft

and will ever be so

if I ever kill

it will not be for oil

but justice.


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Autumn in Spring

old gold sun

on pine needles

at 5.30

feeling old as Prufrock

imagining myself as a weather vane

or Tiresias

nearly fifty and hung overand cant believe

that the ground may not be far away

old and poor

in an alien land

that loves me

as the birds do diamond turns

in the warming air


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Eternal City

There was a city when I was three and it existed beyond the edge

of the world. The world ended at the trees with the stars over them

opposite 3 Pen-y-Bryn.

No one had a car except the man with the Austin A-40 who I later

learned had the job of hovering over a button to stop the rolling

mill in case the steel flew off, and died of stomach cancer.

I never knew what crying was then. I thought it was about handsburned in snow and the toggle that came off my duffle coat.

In the city were red buses, as red as postboxes.

And my dog Prince, left behind ... and the horror of holly that

scratches your leg.

join the army, 2002

children constructed

kites

out of plastic bags

at Woomera detention camp

seen from inside and out

the kiteswere confiscated

and freedom has since been

banned

join the army

of freedom kites


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Nebula

the sun rises,round rice-cracker over my broad beans

which rarely flower

I am a flathead on a sandbar

caught between the ends and means

pale sun, pale sun

you and I have no place here

we do not belong to the harvest

even Hamaguchis

we may as well be lost

in a post office-box, unpaid for,

speeding to the dead-letter office

PROO

FCOPY


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Silverfish 2000

silverfishI rescue from the dry bath

with a square of toilet paper

in the room my father died

as I did as a child as

now in the cemetery again missing an interview

by the grave with the colour wheel spinning

not quite managing

to bring all the colours to white

while little planted wooden birds

whirl clipped wings

over the childrens skeletons

so deep in the soil

as never to smell

or cry up out of the ground

on a hard bench I write

a year nearer fifty

with

my fathers concrete headstone in the distanceits new flowers bird-tongue-red

against the couch grass he hated

twenty-four hours after Remembrance Day

and more than a minute of silence since I saw the blueness

beneath his ear

before they screwed down the coffin


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I wonder why I

am

thinking instead

of the war of terror

where the daisy-cutters

bury more than the box-cutters

and of the silverfish that will chew up this poe

how shall I go

and explain it

to the Job Network?

I remember my Manx fathertalking of a man in the R.A.F.

who

from a great height

flew his Spitfire

into the tarmac

and buried it

up to the tail.

I see no silverfish here

just the far mountain wind

screaming full throttle over vanished lives.


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Tonsure

Love is my

How can I say

Purpose is this

Small roundelay

In the fens

Of my heart

Where I live

On the tumbril

To Palestine

And the nightOf the light

Of the soul

On fire

In a whiskeyworks

Catching the bus

To a dream

In the forestsOf Hell.

PROO

FCOPY


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Icarus, 2001

america is led by a lemmingis falling

like its rate of Profit

into a sea of totalitarian humbug

as the human doodlebugs strike its own cities

unstricken, they say, by aliens since 1812

and it does not know who to shoot

who to bomb back to the stone age

guys, its been done,

stop exulting that youve won

liberalism is dead

there is no alternative

under your sun.


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Hundreds of Shells

I cant remember

Because I am growing oldIn silence

my Welsh mother worked like a black

in the Canberra Grammar School

cleaning their horrible temporary classrooms

in 1966

and the dust smelt like chalk and fleshhundreds of skin-flakes

from hundreds of bourgeois brats

and the short-wave radio

I found

promised

with its dusty string-guided dial

to reach Berlin

and Moscow

hundreds of shells lie on the shore

hundreds of stars shine in the sky

hundreds of

as they taught me to write at Duntroon Public SchoolPialligo of farm rats

and

with their help

I made it into a stapled book

at five

so bursting with love and longing

and the sense of building somethingbetter than they could ever know


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hundreds of shells lie on the shore

hundreds of stars shine in the sky

but only one Mother

and my mother was scandalised

at the patronising outrage of it

she had made shells in the Arsenalit was not a football team

and I was so small

and smaller than usual

and I have never forgotten

though now my memories

are so fullof the dust of death

and the book

I lost years ago

which is why I cannot quote it

in a scholarly fashion

with footnotes

and urbanity

my first book

written without cynicism

or alcohol

or hatred

PROOF

COPY


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Horse Linament Memory

God in a pink nightie

Clag glue under the tongues

of the faithful;

Feral spies, pork pie hatsCocooned in pimento jam

Sugar-paned portholes

Diminish at sea.

Corncobs in the microwave

Boiled string fantasies

Evaporating at midnight

Dry hot metal

Which crosses a river

Paling mountains, sharpened

and cool.

Apes dancing in the night

To the music of Galileo

Galilei comes to knock and knock again A banjo played badly

Fifth string a bicycle bell

Invites the weary sleepwalker

To emulate Toscanini

(or at least Henry Mancini)

Forks rise majestically

Across the pentagonal kitchen table

Bobbing over the Marianas Trench

The dishwasher is attacked by pirates

Buckshot ants in a glass cup scatter

Beets burgeon in the frost (caring little,

as they have white wooly anoraks)

Under the fingernail of the world.

Sukey take it off again


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Anoosa

Cloetus Anoosa

I loved

in 1960

when we were sixI saw her father

loading spuds

standing on the rail

that ran under the tabletop

of the Inter.

and then he fell like a sack of potatoes

his ankle caught and twistedand he screamed like a child

a typical cowardly Greek

I heard

(later he won the lottery and went home)

we got to school late

we blamed each other as

we were caned on the bare legs

I still love you

Anoosa


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Song of the Homeless

Published in The Murdoch Press

I love to be homelessIts ever such fun

To sleep on the pavement

In the rain, sleet or sun

To be victim of street gangs

And druggies and cops

To be bashed, raped or murdered

Or living on slops.To be knifed in a shelter

To be catching T.B.

Are part of my dream

To be happy and free!

Yes I love to be homeless

I love sleeping rough

I was cut off the dole, see

But I say, Thats tough!


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Tuross

fish dance like flat stones

across Coila lake after fish after fish after fish

Mojo the dog

is working in the shallows

I sit with Lee and

talk about her Dad

and how the house was built

Tuross Heads

never been here before

but the fish are at home

(and not in butchers paper)

or maybe leaving quietly

PROO

FCO

PY


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Bethlehem, 1995

As Bethlehems handed back

Just in time for Christmas

As the Israeli trucks crawl home

Three wise men follow a star

Which might at first be a skyrocket

Let off by revellers but it doesnt fade

Inside the manger, a poor Christian family

Hides from Hamas and Shin Bet in sheets

The wise guys kneel before the ChildOffering gifts of frankincense and myrrh

Plum pudding and smoked ham

In tins, bags of surplus wheat,

Trifle left over from last year and

Plastic Chinese decorations for the tree.

Then they get back

Into Air Force One

And head West.

PROO

FCOPY


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Scapegoat

still not keeping track of my childhood:

they either love you or want to kill you

want to strip you of your flesh

and make it into leather

you are not human

you have slits for pupils

and running away is like driving a tank

blinkered you paw at their barbed wire

and each whiplash on your armour makes you jerk

but one day the wire comes down

and you throw your armour in their faces

and gallop across the land-mined wasteland

to the river.


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Haiti, 2010

The minutemen have slowed considerablySince 1776

They began to falter around 1804

Were sluggish between 1915 and 1934

And comatose from 57 to 86

{REDACTED}

This time they seem asleep at the wheel

Must be the Caribbean air, or the rum

Or the sales of tee-shirts and baseballs

for enemy combatants to eat

But never mind

Blame the roads and the rioters

I guess theyll have the place all set upIn time for the election.


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School Days

All my friends are conservatiiive

Tory songs they siii - iiing

Each one a reactionary and

Horribly right wiii iiing.

Chorus:

Horribly right

Horribly right

Horribly right wiii iiing.

Horribly rightHorribly right

Ho-o-or ribly right wing.

Im a revolutionary

Out of place at Eton

If I were not Headmaster

Id be surely be-ea-ton

Repeat Chorus Forever


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To Maria Callas

No opera buff

I heard Maria CallasSing this afternoon

and now I know

how she lived

and died at 53

her heart finally

smashed to piecesbut still beautiful.

Singing

With all her heart

Her strong voice

Quaking

like

Surf-pounded sand.


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Dcor

I live near an old folks home, you

In the best street in A_____, your

House is an opium den, mine

A funeral parlour

Both

worthy of a well-placed undertaker

We are hemispheres of U235

Twisting each others tale

Bathed in Cerenkov radiation

Too much light

Darkening the dcor

PROO

FCOPY


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Robert Verdon (also known as Auntie Rhoberta) pens

poetry and prose and pushes 56 in Canberra. He is hoping

for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Robert is author ofThe Well-Scrubbed Desert(Canberra:

Polonius Press, 1994), Her Brilliant Career(Canberra:

Aberrant Genotype Press, 1998), My Cat Eats Spaghetti(Canberra: Ginninderra Press, 2000), and [with Caroline

Ambrus] The Artful Dole Bludger (Queanbeyan:

IrrePRESSible Press, 2000).

He has been writing and publishing in magazines since

the 1970s, but is yet to bag that elusive Nobel.

About the Author:

Documents

Verdon, Robert. Ed. by Alan Corkish. Before We Knew This Century. Erbacce-Press, 2010