Hermit He carried no phoneand sent no text. He took holidaysbut no photos,downloaded no jpegs,burned no CDs,got no snapshots printed. He maintained no blog. He had no email address,deleted no spam,subscribed to no mailing lists,unsubscribed from no mailing lists. He downloaded no songs,and ripped no music to mp3s.He created no playlists. He carried no camera or iPod.He recharged no devices.He never backed up. Optics Before Dawn Trees their own shadows,lone cars test the streets.colour seeps in like arousal,or useless knowledgefilling the brain’s catchment. Trees stand in their own shapes and fidget;dark stationary cars imperceptibly rust.Colour like pain kicks inat a certain intensity.Shadows in photographs are wrong:the world comes out too bright. Flowers wait for water,stagnant traffic dispersed in driveways.Wet spots on road or fabric are darker.The eye works tirelessly.There are always thresholds. Dawn’s barrageignites the trees with detail.Small birds chirp their barcodes.We use yellow crayon for the sunbecause shadows are illuminedby the clear sky’s scattered blue. Cosmè Tura: St Dominic, c.1475 The theme is those dry wrinkled hands,The stark high-contrast folds of whiteAnd dark cloth, how the knuckles glint,An emaciating holy blightUpon the spirit, one lean faceThat pities all the world, he standsJointed in diamonds, in iron hurled,To intercede between God's wrathFor Man, and iconise belief,Minted in an abstract space.The metallic backdrop of gold leafMakes it plain this is no sceneOf earth, or what earth can ordain. The marks he made In Florence a spirit had said clichés must go,so he’d broken a toe off the left footof the David by Michelangelo. And then there was that time in Prato:in the darkened duomo he had addedwith a marker to a Lippo Lippi fresco. In Rome’s Gallery of Modern Arthe used a marker again to attackJackson Pollock’s ‘Watery Paths’. One man’s war on abstraction: he’d plannedto wreck a Manzoni, but had foundone ‘equally ugly’ to damage. Moved from prison to a psychiatric ward,he’s now on day release and has a jobworking as an art museum guide.
David Lumsden lives in Melbourne and works with the design of large computer systems. He used to edit a now defunct literary magazine, and spent several years living in Poland. His poems have appeared in journals in Australia and overseas.
Hermit image by Shutterstock.