Andrea Brady Working Note The opening epigraph is from Skelton’s poem “Speke Parot,” about a multilingual import who goes to school with ladies. The reflection of language as mimicry, a physical activity divorced from semantics, refers me back to considerations of prosody as a kind of physical cognition — though Skelton’s imputations about women’s speech are obviously a keen instance for critique. I’m hoping next to work towards fulfilling the promise of occasional poetry, to extend beyond occasion into the perception and celebration of shared, communal time, through form and prosody, not just through simultaneous recognition of events, news quotes; but don’t yet know how. Parrots To learn all language, and it to speak aptly. Now pandez mory, wax frantic, some men say 1. Ramy delivers at last. A golden calf looped and branded tilts its jughead toward fence, pile of decadent matter includes bones and field work. Her form is finished. Mined from the interstate bridewell and bloodwell, with emeralds and silica, shellfish and landbridges mined breaking into a hand and breaking off all cont. act, seen, abridgement. Acacia leaves bound together with carrot: we worship a finished form, his neck weeping in the thorn and sun loam. On them thorn, tying Afghan lips to the outback and the lips to pleasure they suck up another blow from the fascists; that new low is nothing new. With the burnt end they can scratch grammar or anatomy in harvested animal form, seal up surplus to the harvest by striking punishing bargain or compact. Uniform project for a history of civilization, that barrel end smoking against appropriate dawn targets and smaller game: what have we here unearthed, the shabby form and the blank looks as film wraps up in celluloid opaque and brimming that girl target. 2. Yet I brought the calf here because her blank eye triggers our milk to come in, venus blood frothing over as dairy goodness, back and white. Ramy delivered the news into my private drawing room enclosed in bitemarks. His tenderness was another trademark of the stoa, the meat market where we sheltered from the onslaught of Israeli bullets and dumb propaganda. I held my breath in the bus shelter, and drew in more asphyxiating beliefs for want of forward-thinking about fresh air. Now, maybe the levels are better: iron droplets in saturation, gold in the Czech drinks and blood in the French letters alerting another woman at last. 3. Between the sheets I dawdled in wishfulness that came to smell me, regranulated sugar from toxins I allow myself crusting my lips and my cunt. The plane, flight’s unbearable fervor pooled in hollow bones made an act of musculature, I see it bounce off the water strip and I set us free by recognizing fantasy. Ramy part of the clear sapphire that blinds and comforts this clouded eye, comes out of heaven and sits on my desktop. Our exchange is morbid, a free state and social being loaned out for patterned conversation, the law traded for an idol precarious as a standard yet saved from slaughtering by a finished form of calf and binding, that simile informant who smiles as he ascends stairs to the second landing. Who will write a new formula for addressing these locations earth just material dispersing with wave motion, petty freedoms of living bodies, when all is lost in the reflex. Bio: Andrea Brady was born in Philadelphia in 1974. She now teaches Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Writing at Brunel University, and is a co-publisher of Barque Press (www.barquepress.com). Her first book, Vacation of a Lifetime, was published by Salt in 2001: details available from www.saltpublishing.com, or PO Box 937, Great Wilbraham Cambridge PDO, CB1 5JX, UK. |