Aphasia, exile, outlawry
I
One of those nights. You and sleep playingtag, though only one of you thinks it's a game.I will rest, you say, I will go home:Just let me find the words from the water garden.
So you haul them up from the well, but they smear like ink.They belong to your real life that you abandoned —there where the wattles bloom and corn and 'taters grow.Eucalypsis, apocalypsis ...Every night you make a run for home.
In exile language fades away, unused,till the whole tree languishes.Words are comfortless as bare boards;you pace about forgetting what you came for,unless some ancient knot or syllabletrips you up and thrills you to the quick.
You have to hope the long-sought words will comelike Bo-peep's proverbials safely grazinga suburban garden full of virtual magpies:
plumbago frangipani Hargenbergia
II
All photos lie. But something's caughtin this one: faster than a speeding bullet,a flying blur in tabard and trousers.If you're caught, it's waiting and preparing and serving;left alone you climb trees and run fast and sing, pledge fealty to the forest and the life of an outlaw.
Peep peep peep cry all the little girlsfrom the West Indies, Americay and Spain.We're nearly three and a whizz at wordson which we know the universe depends.We repeat: we hear you loud and clear.We're pretty sure you can't hear us at all.
Maid Marian's maids are we.If you call, we are not at home.We're dining very publiclywith the Sherriff of Nottingham.
The Sherriff has a fulsome set,his words line up without a gap,He'd sentence us without a second thought:we hold our gaze and smile a mirror shield.
Peep peep peep, all the women cryIn Ireland and Australia and France.It's just as well he cannot read our hearts:Our voices are inviolate and clear.
III
This table's had hard use. The grainis coming through in tiny elevations.I run my fingers lightly up and down,learning the long contours. And I knowsomething about how my life has gone.
This evening I've been marking paperson the colonised and their oppressors,their strategies my strategies,fully theorised — and on my shelf,lest I forget.
You know what happens to outlaws. Such is life.So don that pencil skirt, sharpen your nose,powder the