Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Dessèrts Nouvelle-Zélande

 

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Lucia Sylvia and I

 

blue moonlight plays through curtains

with a breeze

my crystal spins

pages of open books riffle setting

Lucia and Sylvia free

 

sister winged creatures

snared by the dark father they tangle together

dance unaware in wonder wild

 

'dance with us!' they call

 

looply they leap

stage of light and rainbow child

moon prisms on my sleepy wall

 

Lucia scintillated

before she became a fish

teenager locked in a squalid room

with her brother beyond innocence

sleeping on stretchers in the corner

near the marriage bed

 

aware aware experimenting with flesh

alive only in her father’s eyes

expressing with her body what he translated into words

all slithereyscales and riverbandbanked

 

what he needed was all she knew

when the Wake was finished he withdrew

as if she’d never really existed

gone from her as finally as Otto left Sylvia

 

in London Paris Dublin Lucia and Sylvia

walked the same streets separated by time

they sat in the same cafes with the same friends

the Merwins Sam Beckett all joined

by words and the darkness behind them

 

what came before the Word?

first furtive fingers of incest or just

growing up with an elder brother

innocent touch that burned forever?

is it about love, our dance?

 

Lucia serious sinuous always in motion

or frozen on a Grecian urn one moment

the next a dybbuk an undulation

her body spoke for her

even louche DaDa youths feared her

insistence on bare flesh encounters her avid

selfish play the basilisk of syphilis

 

brittle sister Sylvia

had no father to flaunt before so she

married one and the yew outside their window

caught the moon

Sylvia thought celestial

what Lucia knew as guttural

 

Oedipus for Sylvia his swollen foot

his amputated leg

hatred shaking her as she hid behind

the mask of a dutiful daughter

 

and Lucia, Myrrha, graceful seductress

turned into a tree

imprisoned for

her rage against her mother

kept jailed by her brother’s fear

 

Sylvia incandescent with anger

scorned gates and fences

with no way left to set things right

she turned on the gas

 

Lucia kept docile remained a prisoner

 

and shall we all three dance together sisters

daughters of the same mad feary father

sacrificial offerings

playthings of some chthonic force?

 

the moon snagged in the pohutukawa

waits for an answer

 

The circle game

 

Connecting rooms without a corridor

that lead one to the other, in the same

succession always, where I can no more

retrace my steps than step out of the game.

 

Then speeding up, the seasons spin me round;

from room to room I stagger; winter, spring,

the tempting promise of repletion found

to hold as little truth as any thing.

 

I have not learned to simply look away

but leave myself reminders of the trip;

that every growth is followed by decay

while custom stales the fire on every lip

 

and like a rat grown happy in its cage

I turn my squeaky wheel towards old age.

 

Sonnet 43

 

How do I love you? As Ulysses lists

over and over his beach-heaped treasure,

missing his chance to know Athena

directly, hidden in the mist.

 

I love you as the grindstone and the grist

define ripe grain. Process becomes pleasure,

from crowned to pierced, heart-weight feather-measured

by one exquisite goddess, patient bitch.

 

I’ve jettisoned my riches, passed the guards

and reached her doorway. There with halted breath

I knuckle-tap a door; it opens hard

on gaping pit; from that abysmal depth

 

exultant flies the queen of heart’s last card;

the ace of love still triumphs over death.

 

Organic GPS

 

Ralph and Menaker discovered

suprachiasmatic nucleii

while experimenting with

foetal tau mutant hamsters

following Hastings and Sweeney’s

work with bio-luminescent

dino-flagellate algae

 

we all have them

from the site of our third eye

circadian oscillations

locked on local time

keep track of place

 

every living organism

on our planet has this ability;

to register intersections in

time and space

and always know just how far

they are

from home

 

My mother has moved

 

I

 

My mother laughs like a madwoman.

Through open windows, down corridors,

sparrows flit; old men with walking frames

scatter them faster than thoughts.

Sad crumbs of words dot the carpets.

No code will open these doors, no pill

will make her bigger now; she holds fast

to a stuffed giraffe with its insufferable

expression of knowledge.

 

II

 

My mother has moved beyond language.

She laughs as carers come and go

speaking reassurance, medicine

and food, measuring out her life

in large disposable knickers, green

for each day and blue at night.

They eat her chocolates for her, water

the flowers she no longer notices,

kiss off the days on her calendar.

 

III

 

She was the eye of my father’s needle

stitching the hollow pocket of family.

In the kitchen she saved brown paper,

baked biscuits with blood and bone flour,

disguised inequalities in the chickens

in every pot, chose the parson’s nose,

reset tender buttons, mended socks.

Knitting, always knitting

needles in firelight flashing

to her muttered plain and purl.

 

IV

 

My mother laughs like a madwoman.

Time’s all eroded, salt

crystals sit in the brittle

twigs and twitches of her limbs.

Once I cranked an old hand telephone

wired to a dead frog; it danced

as she does now, not pain, not

memory, some simulation of both

that shivers as altar flames do.

 

V

 

My mother has moved beyond language,

past the speech of stones on the floor

of a cave, taking no note of shadows.

A spider burns cakes, char and ash.

She’s all husk, a charmless voodoo

has sucked away her fat, her shins

poke through blotchy skin like blades

and blind bats rummage for wool

from birthdays lost in her purse.

 

VI

 

She hesitates at the barrier.

All she was is being undone, her hours

fold down like a fan; pinned to a board

her ankles are knots in a tangle

of embroidery thread, her knees as worn

as any penitents’, beggar in a wordless land

where winter loosens apples – her teeth

grin from a bedside glass, hungry still,

as useless as slippers for the lame.

 

VII

 

My mother sleeps with her eyes half open

as if she fears being taken by surprise.

Sunlight lies like prison bars

along the carpet. She’s travelling economy

into a country where speech has no currency,

helpless, given up to the stream, packed

like cattle. Her God who counts sparrows

designed this drift, slow dark sediment

instead of a single bolt.

 

VIII

 

My mother is gone, beyond language.

Left behind like luggage, with tags attached

in her almost-copperplate hand, all the things

she’ll never use again, all the ways

to live, not needed on the journey. She’s fed,

it comes out the other end. Carers chase

sparrows through the door, with brooms

and laughter. The cat stretches, belly up

kneading air, purring to the sun.

 

IX

 

My mother finally stopped laughing,

stayed in her room, lost in her bed

like a child afraid of the dark.

She used to check the doors

were locked, last thing before

she went to bed. Now doors bang

in the wind, there’s no latch.

There’s nothing left to do now

but this.

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Mercedes Webb-Pullman was Danse Macabre's 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence. She graduated from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand with her MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of Tasseography (2014) Track Tales (Truth Serum Press, 2017) and The Jean Genie (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2018). Her poems, and the odd short story, have appeared online (Bone Orchard Poetry, Caesura, Connotations, Danse Macabre, The Electronic Bridge, 4th Floor, Main Street Rag, Otoliths, Reconfigurations, Scum, Swamp, Pure Slush, Turbine, among others) and in print (Mana magazine, Poets to the People; Poetry from Lembas Cafe 2009, The 2010 Readstrange Collection, PoetryNZ Yearbook, many anthologies from Kind of a Hurricane Press, and the Danse Macabre anthologies Amour Sombre,  Belles-Lettres, Hauptfriedhof, and Weihnachtsmarkt (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2017 & 2018). She has also won the Wellington Cafe Poetry contest in 2010, and wrote a foreword for their collection of 2012 contest entrants, which included another of her poems. Since then she has been awarded 3rd prize in United Poets Laureate International Poetry Contest 2015, and is particularly proud of having a haiku (the only one from New Zealand) in 100 Haiku for Peace, an international publication in five languages. Her lucky number is 8. Blue. She lives in Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand.

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