Title: Sport 40: 2012

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2014, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 40: 2012

Kate Camp

page 144

Kate Camp

Snow White’s Coffin

Tom Waits records the sound of frying chicken
that’s how he achieves his pops and crackles.
Our old unit had a hooked grey arm,
it was a trunk of wood with woven speakers.

As a child I worried about forgetting:
the hexagonal handle, a creamy honey cell,
that flaw in the lino resembling Donald Duck
while the others of its kind looked like grey bells.

Sometimes life would seem too big, even then
an empty Sunday where you drifted as a ghost.
I saw Bonnie and Clyde on such a day,
as I recall, in black and white

when the bullets came
they died like oceans
full of slow turbulence
as if brought by death to life.

Why preserve one’s childhood memories?
So, like Egyptians, they might be packed into the grave?
That I would sit up nights, eating from the Haworth mug
spoonfuls of plain sugar mixed with cinnamon.

Is there room in the sarcophagus for that,
for the feeling of the covers of paperbacks,
in which girls survive, among great trees, girls who make mistakes in forests.

page 145

One thing I loved was to pick the scabs on my knees
while sitting on the toilet.
Do I need to say, I ate them?
Who is taking this down?

*

The Dutch, I believe, have built a car one molecule long.
I’ve seen its silly form, its atom wheels.
It looks nothing like a car, it looks to be a pupa
some kind of baby bee surprised by disaster in its cell.

The problems of this world will not be solved by tiny cars.
Everything is small enough already
and there is too much, too much of everyone.
To understand your life you need another whole life.

I think we are sitting here on the axis my friend
that is why we feel a bit unwell.
Buried in us are minutes, days, mornings slept late
nights of no rest, turning to one side

turning again like a tide
sweating into the bodies of hot beds
those bucketfuls of moisture.
I think that futures might be in us too

driving in tiny cars, they are opening their minute glove
boxes and with infinitesimal hands
draw out maps too small to imagine
but they imagine them, they look at the lists of streets

all arranged according to the alphabet.
And then I think they throw the book away.
And they get out from the car
and they throw the keys into the ocean
page 146 howling. They do not want to go to places in books.
They will not drive
in their molecule cars
those ridiculous cartoons.

*

Snow White’s Coffin
is an integrated radio and record player
that introduced Plexiglas to the domestic interior.
Relieve yourself of the excruciating clutter of the world

is what it says to you
everything you thought was being alive
is revealed as a problem
which can be solved by good design.

page 147

Self-adhesive horror stickers

Grey sickles, speckled with blood
for your convenience. Some eggs will be patterned
this way, the eggs of middle European songbirds.

Day appears upon its stage
a Bakelite green gently usurping the dark.

To wake in a landscape made of people
appearing from the earth as bulbs
as signposts will, pointing their fingers at crossroads.

The body made in particular order
may be unmade in a treasury of ways
as when you sweep into your paw
the grey nubby hands of a jigsaw.

You can buy a three-dimensional wound
to stick on your arm like a little bloody cunt

though the one boy I know
went to Halloween as a doctor
with a heart inside a jar.