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Sport 8: Autumn 1992
♣ Allen Curnow
♣ Allen Curnow
An Unclosed Door
Freshened by any wind, sanitised
with pine and cypress, the slaughterhouse
is cool as a church inside. High rafters
too. A gallery. The hooks hang ready.
Nothing else intercepts the day's late
blaze across the Seven Sleepers' chins
and Cooper's Knobs, on this point between
adjacent bays, only blotched light
can get past, as the wind in the trees,
fidgeting to the doorway. The door
on its iron track having been wheeled back
wide enough, the small boys, me and Bob
Crawford, can see in. One of the men
turns our way, in the act of closing his
left hand on the lamb's throat, at the bass
viol the right, the bowing hand slashes
deep! in blood stepped in so far will up
to the eyes or the ears be enough?
They're all busy now, the hosing down
will have started. Add water and sweep
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shit pellets puddled blood, the outfall
gulps, discharges over the rock-face
misting all the way to the green bay
water, with a noise of waters, where
the round stain dilates. An enrichment.
I think the children had been silent, all
this time. I will have pulled my bike, off
his, on the tree. Nothing alters this.
Investigations at the Public Baths
At nine fifteen a.m.
on the first day of his eighty-
first year. Why don't I
first-person myself?
I was hoping nobody would ask
me that question
yet. The strong smell of
chlorine for one thing, one thing
at a time, please.
For instance, there's always
this file of exercyclists
riding the gallery
over the pool. Bums
on saddles, pommelled crotches.
The feet rotate, the
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hands grip, or hang
free, or hold open a book,
demonstrating how
the mind is improved
without progression, if not without
rumbling noises and
lascivious absences.
How free-standing engines enjoy
their moving parts.
privately mounted
overhead. There's also the deep
and the shallow end
between which the body
swims and the mind, totally
immersed, counts
and keeps count. I think
sixteen, touch tiles, turn again,
with underwater eyes
follow the black line.
Touch, thinking seventeen, turn
thinking eighteen
and enough. Whatever's
thinkable next or only the peg
where I last hang
my clothes. A destination.
The gallery rumble-trembles, the riders
always up there were
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an abstraction blooded, a
frieze the wrong side of the urn.
One grins, catching
me looking, lifts
a tattooed hand. I wave back. So.
You know how it is.
A Facing Page
Behind the eyelids the giant in the sky
is probably sightless, but that can't be known.
Cruciform from full-stretched arms his black robe drops
the whole way to the city. His fingers point
down at our rooftops. We don't know about him.
He knows all about us. By the fire the child's
nightgown is warmed for bed. It's a book entitled
Under the Sunset by Brain Stoker M.A.
my mother's copy in green cloth board 8vo
has nearly lost the spine but a few threads hold,
her childhood and mine. Tucked and kissed for the dark,
I shut my eyes too tight on a picture-book
for waking to loosen. Locked on to where people
believe in themselves, engraved fingers point down.