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ARTS AND CULTURE

The business of unbirth

  • 12 February 2008

Six Elegies For My Father 1. entrails on the day my father died the morning headline blared a scandal: medical students had abused donated corpses, mother's voice was stronger than it had been for years I read nature was more anarchic self-organisation than central state and even men who experienced the Great Industrial War of wired trenches did not become pacifists, helped Helmut butcher the two sheep I'd killed the week before a brief gust of weak nocturnal rain did nothing but wash a little dust off the iron that night I dreamed I was giving a man instructions on how to train his unruly dog 2. janus descending down into a cellar cool room garage smells like the storeroom at Coca Cola my father worked in where I waited after school for the long drive home from Naremburn now his body a marble sculpture white blotched skin in white silk soft cold hands crossed to touch lightly as the bird he nursed and released from the opened window when I was five the face in deep sleep the mouth opened on the chipped false tooth the eagle nose the strong skull reasserting itself through the temporary skin a bad shave but beloved eyebrow spikes to stroke earlobe I once sucked over fifty years ago in a morning bed familiar as father from the left from the right a frozen sleeping stranger 3. over, through and under extended turbulence over India jumbled voices in the head snatches of old tunes perforating the engine hum waking over the Ukraine where his childhood was Vinnitsa, Zhitomir, Lvov where horses still pulled grandfather Arkady's artillery through the thawing mud on the screen a little plane tracks its caterpillar pilgrimage over another 1500 kilometres of green and virtual land towards a farewell to my dead father at the bottom of the plastic tray under the Malaysian rice breakfast a real palm leaf 4. liminal

not at the funeral parlour (burst water pipe) not at the garage cool room (was no punk) not at the chapel (no coffins allowed) rather: 17 kilometres through the jungle of autobahn clover leafs and agribiz wastelands to the invisible Father Rhine, centre of the centre Bingen, mystic Hildegard's place between the grey concrete apartment buildings a grime-red Lutheran church 1904 eternalising the Swedish king who in the 30 Years War helped lay waste the land this coffin is not my father yesterday's embedded marble king there/not there during it all where liminal father liminal son non-embedded still flying not home here old friends dead just cold air in which candles and Russian liturgical chant on CD fight to warm weave now a shroud of memory music words solo tears come and go come and go in the car going back mother's voice: 'such is life's end are we in Bingen?'

5. chrysalis the ceremony closes with a Russian Easter Song the black urn he chose against his wife's wishes is embossed with the icon