Andrea Porter & Heather Taylor
June 2009
AP
The big bag theory
When the cat is let out of the bag all teeth, claw and spit, it blinks, pupils shrink to pins. It slips down blind alleys, fur leeched to the colours of here. It yowls. Only those in the way of secrets hear its story. It tells of the beginning, how it curled in on itself in the dark listening to it until it understood silence, then sound, the roar of light slashing open the threads the white throat of something yet to become
HT
The order of things
Furore leeches to combustion, springs from sprung elbows to hurl lit bottles into blackness, an explosion of light against brick.
Knotted strings puppet lips, a chorus of echoes that bruise ears, welts blistering hearts and twisting guts.
DNA whispers tried, tired answers, blood sings with it, pumps check lists to brains, feet, fists the sword ticking each box with death.
AP
Puppet
You hung it behind the door, no movement only openings and the closings.
You never liked it, found it a dead wood thing and never named it, unusual for you when everything was named with the careful rites of a priestess.
Fierce Barbies, languid stuffed animals a bed corner gang of jumble Action Men each one could be called and summoned, all moved smooth as fish through the world, pretend was as powerful as sinew.
You said that it could not work on pretend, someone had to pull the strings and life was already full of make me, have to. You cut the strings once but it never ran no matter how you willed going into limbs, breathed leaf and wind back into its memory.
Years later on a visit home you tied the strings together again, so it could be hung back behind the door. It took hours; head bent over clenched knots, your tongue poking out in concentration as if this was a final act of some connection.
HT
The snowman
You said it couldn’t work on pretend as we push snow into sculpted men, ice cloud whistle choir boy songs until black blankets our yard.
Chins balance on fisted hands, lean noses flat to frosted windows and the moon unearths diamond fields, a solitary figure in suspension
waiting for animated picture book magic, a scarf flying in the wind as we, like the pyjamaed boy, circumvent city parks, narrow streets, our empty cupboard house.
AP
Snow beauties
Found poem from the works of Wilson ‘Snowflake’ Bentley 1865-1931, a Vermont farmer who took the first photograph of a single snowflake
Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and not one was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.
What magic is there in the rule of six that compels the snowflake to conform so rigidly to its laws? Six rays or parts, there always are yet what an amazing variety these parts exhibit among themselves.
I have been studying it all these years, it has brought things that were new and beautiful to my hand. I have never yet found a time when I could ever entertain an idea of relinquishing it.
Sixteen hundred photo-micrographs of snow crystals alone, and no two are alike. It is all most marvelous and mysterious these changing habits of growth, the perfect symmetrical way all this is accomplished.
Bits of pure beauty from the skies will soon come into their own.
HT
The six
Separated by time, stretches of salted water and changing cultures, the days we meet we solidify, crystallize into cascading sextets and move in tandem,
our beat technofying existence. We dance around strangers steps varying six-fold, incomplete without prismed partners, mirrors of chromosomes trading places, linking us completely to the end.