Issue 4: November 2003

David L Briggs | Carrie Etter | Roddy Lumsden | Liane Strauss | Frances Williams

LIANE STRAUSS

Read Michael Donaghy's introduction.

Self-Portrait as Myself

Oh, I've done Socrates and Jesus Christ
off the cuff and, not above a touch of theatre,
Lady Macbeth, with a nod to Ellen Terry.
I confess to smoke and mirrors, stand-ins
like those palindromic Annas,
Emmas, Pips and Ottos, innocent and flawed
but sometimes so convincing even I have fallen for them.
As for these and every other as
I've ever stuffed and suffered myself into,
like all those mutilated feet and that glass slipper,
I make no excuses.
If I've been a one-woman step-right-up-and entertainment,
anyway I've given money's worth.
(The shows were great, the days off excruciating.)

And I've pulled off my beard.
Laid my hat on the table.
Put down my smock and palette
and put up that sign that reads: NO SIGNS,
appending the unequivocal rider:
NO PIPES NO PAULS NO PIGMENT
NO SEMAPHORES ALLOWED NO
SUBTLE OR UNSUBTLE GESTURES
NO FANCY PARED DOWN BACK-FORMED
GRECO-LATIN NOMENCLATURE,
and like the allegory of myself
played Truth upon a simple canvas,
blood-smeared, nerve-strung, gut-impastoed.
And, blimey, if it wasn't honest as the morning.
(I had to suck my lips to keep from yawning.)
It beggared blunt, it was revealing,
it thundered like the cavalry with feeling.
(I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing.)
Oh, it was fraught and full of meaning.
But it wasn't me.

And since you've come for me
I offer you myself instead
today in a portrait of my dead grandmother.
Among my better efforts.
She's in one of her beloved caffs,
Vienna, between the wars.
A back room. Gilt and mirrors,
a proscenium of smoke. A fox
dangling from a chair-back
like a provocative suggestion.
Dark and small she wears that
classic clingy Vionnet, back and shoulders
bare, in quarter profile, turning,
already laughing, already demurring.
Rosewood scrolls of hair
that could have been carved by Gibbons.
A woman of absolutely no convictions
but one or two political connections.
Eventually they saved her.
Who never reserved judgment.
Who loved cards.
Was, in fact, a gifted player.
But whose real genius was for flirting.
She did it consciously, instinctively,
all the time, with everyone.
She does it here in my self-portrait.
Come close, you might catch her even now
regarding her reflection like a man.

Boy

Years before, the infant Salome
had a favourite she called Boy.
He was always there.
Wrist-first, heel-first, he weathered
girlhood's rough terrain and nights
spent dangling over the sides of beds,
his mouth around her hair,
and, knowing he was hers, belonged
exclusively to her, she loved him.

Love was not enough or she would never have lost
Boy, naked, nameless, stupid, alone,
in a dingy, ill-lit Waldbaums, ceilings
coffered in coffee-stained acoustic tile
like human skin under the microscope
of teenage lust. She'd gone astray
among the slopes of pomegranates,
split and paired, fresh from the East
and glistening under cellophane
exactly like the sometime necks
of smallish animals or great big birds.
Around that time he disappeared.

That night she turned merciless.
She snapped the head off every doll she possessed
and heaped the headless bodies in her bed.
She wept longer than anyone ever wept.
And every night she dreamed of Boy,
only of him, his moulded-plastic head
mouldering in the dust of crates and cabbage leaves.

This, to satisfy those for whom cause and explanation,
and not the simple disposition of parts, is paramount.

The Speed of the World

There are gears in the air
and under the ground.
Discs without dimension.
Wheels with spikes and wheels with cleats
like teeth, alternating and inverting,
night and day, like crenellations —
a veritable Caernarfon of fearsome rings.
They interlock as gears ought to.
They're always turning, like the man
who hears a voice from the past over his shoulder.
And they govern the speed of the world.

The speed is constant.
It never varies, never slows, it never changes.
That should make it easy to fix, like the north star,
and like the summer sky easy to master.
I can't tell you why it isn't.
I take its measure, judge my entrance, I leap in —
but I don't land true. Impact
always stops me cold or sends me spinning,
too in love with my own velocity
or sunk in leaden legged labours.
It's sometimes days before I come to my senses.

And everywhere I turn I meet a hundred blithe and busy creatures
credo the pace is theirs to set and keep.
And ten among them who daily drink the frothing cup
convinced they taste the tang of nectar.
And here's me pounding the thick glass walls shouting Fish!

Just think about a Bach cantata,
the inscribed anatomy of Leonardo.
Can't you see why it goes so hard with me?
Once in a dream I believed I was the thing of art itself.
When I woke up I wasn't even the dreamer.

How To Do Things with Words

Darling, would you mind terribly?
Scrambled eggs appeared before him,
the then-boyfriend,
and without uncoupling his eyes
from the morning whore text
(Knicks in Seattle? THE ZEN OF INVESTING?)
he thanked me.
That was the first time I noticed
how you could do things with words.

As with pianists, pets, and ribald humour,
tone is everything.
The request sweetened with possibility
is command from woman to man.
With conspiracy, from woman to woman.
With admiration, man to woman.
Necessity, man to man.
It takes a little patience
but it pays to get them sorted.
You can have pretty much anything
so long as you know who you're dealing with.

Words do the rest.
They really do have a life of their own.
I take up any old words at hand,
piece a thought together —
it's what I'm thinking.
If I stop to pick and choose them,
words become Ideas — even better.
A good one's like a German engine:
it can take me anywhere
and I can go years without retooling.

But the stars and crescent moons of feeling,
now that's magic.
Like the sorcerer's apprentice,
I simply utter a spell, "I love him," say,
under my breath or out loud in my head,
and my colour rises, my palms go sweaty.
Try it sometime, or substitute another feeling
you never suspected, and watch the buckets overfill,
the brooms sprout arms and legs and march and multiply.

The truth is, everybody does things with words,
whether or not they know it.
Consciousness is like an apple.
If it happens to land and you're Newton,
or even if like William Tell it's forced on you,
it changes everything.
Never again will you toss off a casual remark,
hazard an innocent question.
Things you've been saying for years suddenly sound stilted,
nonsense profound, meaning ridiculous.
You have to give up what's true along with what isn't
and just be grateful for fiction.
Nothing's real until you say it, and even then —

Knowing how to do things with words can be terrible.

As for the speaker who doesn't know he's an actor,
it's an old story. Boy says, "Eggcup, I'm dying —"
and pauses for effect. Too slow! Too careless!
A kiss, a brandy, that's all he was after.
Instead, with the unshakeable conviction of a Stanislavski graduate —

Schweinehund

These sour old men would swiftly trade ten years
for what we have in mind to do.
It's too hot in this corner,
and we've been here for hours,
but you somehow haven't noticed
that our promiscuous parley,
how far do I go, which way should I take it,
is starting bodily to try my patience.

You've brought me to The Dog and Duck,
surrounding me with hunting pictures,
and I appreciate the gesture.
But all those men with guns behave,
their dogs are too well-trained.
I can't stop staring at that bird
hanging in rapture like a saint of Mannerism,
the S of her neck so lately rampant
all uncoiled, slaked, wrung,
eminent of every longing.

It's hard to breathe and hard to think
and I'm too coy and you're too charming
and then again my eyes keep straying
to where those wild old men taking their rouse
keep braying and drinking the long week's end,
and how, unblinkered and unblinking,
they would trade a swift ten years,
and maybe more, maybe much more,
while you keep talking and my free hand in desperation
goes to hold the hair up off my neck but nothing helps.

This pub smells of dog.
The doggy air is baying.
You're not shy but you're
too literary, in this heat,
which comes at me
and comes at me and comes at me,
and at my back those keen old men
who'd scoff to hear our niceties
and pity us our theories.

Hang form.
I'm done with feint and parry.
I'm crushing out my cigarette,
I'm finishing my drink.
I'm licking my unliterary lips.
So now, my duck, tell me,
how is it with you?
And what, exactly,
are you going to do
when I let slip this
low-cut
high-heeled
fishnet
whore-hound
kiss?