St. Gulf Days (and burned house horizons) — a 20 poem narrative
2020 · Mingji Liu
Unhappy returns
The moment the wheels slammed earth, I knew it was done.
My planned resuscitation, my yearning to cross continents.
To experience a starry-headed life of travel. All gone.
I was dragged back into the crust. Into heaviness.
The mistiming. The waste. The years of treading water.
And then a mad rush to heave myself out, to wake up.
To escape stagnation, self-shame, the singleton vision.
Only to slip back into muck. Like a relapse.
Tucked into a friend’s house for fourteen days,
Jobless, time-shunted, and dazed in my lazaretto corner,
Coming off and coming down on mandatory reality,
Like a crushing spell that couldn’t snap anything.
***
Their house was never the plan. That cold sixties thing,
With yellowing frills and Californian squatness,
Edging onto parkland, a damp rambling green,
Fenced up against it like breakwaters against the trees.
I fell into it, not thinking through my design or theirs,
The melody of the house, or the prosody of its bodies.
I fell into it, thinking straight past the heaviness I bore,
And so I stumbled, believing I carried better than I did.
And how happy I was at first. How we ate the days away,
Like lotus-eating sailors on a warm, sheltered isle.
For two months, I grinned boyishly even though,
Deep down, I knew I had seeded a foundational sin.
***
One night, sitting on a hill, reading poetry by phone light,
Watching the moon drift on clouds like a catboat,
A white blindness fell upon us as we spoke stanzas
And threatened to hide the tilting, trembling dirt.
While the world sickened, I forgot the disease inside me.
Multiplying. Festering. Fooling me into wholeness.
The stars shifted and another plane droned overhead.
The ground opened beneath our hill. And engulfed us.
Some old garden tankas
There’s a sundew by our veggie scraps,
caressing sunlight into pinkness.
I punch thumb-sized keyholes into sticky earth,
the bulbs are under house arrest.
In a tarped up cot, heavy with rain,
larvae squirm in happy neglect.
Comet-pale streaks across the lino.
You tugged a chair too quickly from under me.
Is anything more intimate than mashing fungi into compost?
Yellow, fleshy, hopeful.
We move through styrofoam, undressing ourselves
like unwanted grass roots.
Redbacks in the shed and scoria barricading our driveway.
Everything in its right fucking place.
Hacking at a bed with a borrowed hoe.
Heart management, hormonal relief.
I run my eyes across the black tabletop.
Craters, pocks, a dead cup in the corner.
Weeks after the fact, we find rainbow-foiled eggs on the fence
like stolen, rabbinical jewels.
Trees shimmy in the wind, peeling their fingers.
Exiled to parkland. Goddamn.
My heart could burst from happiness,
you once whispered.
Captain
You made an early hour wonder of yourself,
perched on the rails with your head over the fence,
captivated like a lover with a frost covered hill.
The first ice, dawn polished, a perfect white crest.
And you were still in pink bathrobes, kettle breathed
and trembling, as you savoured this delight.
With your hands on the pickets, I imagined a captain
steering our house through the long winter months.
Our morning captain, our pink fuzzed skipper,
charting a course for that crystal dusted rise.
We’ll round the knoll, catch the last of the good leaf fall,
before dropping anchor in a dog park by August.
So forget about papers or cycling in the dark,
forget string recitals or reaching the speed of life.
Your compass is daybreak, your wheel change itself,
on waters beyond vapour or sumps in our lawn,
to where it’s mirror and miracle spun from frozen air,
where it’s purest observation as long as you’re there.
Five cats down
It’s just a numbers game, I told the voice against my ear,
we’ve been friends for maybe two,
no, three and a half years.
Then came her reply: another died last week,
three years down,
and with it five cats deceased.
Five cats down. That’s nearly one every seven months,
pushing up rhubarbs
around the farmyard stumps.
Counting my pieces, the figures rattle on:
I’m twenty-eight today and our house has just begun.
Beth I’ve known ten years. The other one none.
I’m twenty-eight today and it’s like I’ve never left,
like I’m back at college, squared to my tests,
too dumb to occupy love, fumbling every text.
I count holidays and houses, pregnancies and pets.
I count years without women, the months I took rest.
Five years in Melbourne. None of it my best.
Wandering Jew, you did this to yourself.
The digits haunt like animals
because you botched your own accounts.
Girls with flower names, girls with bird names
She rushes home in a red riding coat, slinging lilac cuttings over her shoulder,
I want to lift her up and make her cheeks redder still,
But that cannot do,
No, that cannot do, at all.
We’re dancing in our kitchen, drinking deep on midnight songs,
I want to look into her moon-pool eyes and swim into its silver,
And push these gentle boundaries,
And break these sacred lines.
The plum on the branch, the lark in the sky,
The deer in the woods, the heat of her eyes.
I remember this one under a bridge of roses…
I remember that one as the swans in the open…
Oh, girls with flower names and girls with bird names!
Know this limerent trembling, this shadow play of fancy,
This false spring fever, this rabbit sharp obsession!
Ah, delirium of sweet infection!
Her parakeet-red windbreaker hangs by the gate,
Fly away, little bird, fly away,
Before it’s too late.
with two happy women, how could it have lasted?
St. Gulf Blues
A prayer to St. Gulf:
I devoutly bother thee.
Blood of the martyrs, I beseech you dial me.
Save me, O Gulf,
patron of plate lickers and half-arsed finishers,
of late night wankers and cask wine drinkers.
Guide me, O Gulf,
shepherd to the semi-happy, to those who microwave tea,
to hard rubbish vultures and gut health devotees.
Constant St. Gulf of some third-rate English shire,
saint to those who can’t shift gears on the freeway,
to those who yell cunt more than is admired,
you touch and you comfort our mizzling days.
Gulf-of-blunt-knives. Gulf-of-chipped-mugs.
Gulf-of-painful-taps. Gulf of my soul!
Of toe-on-corner-jammers and escitaloprammers.
We lean and you topple for us to cry foul.
A sign from St. Gulf:
an ex’s Christmas card, a bag of travel trinkets,
a bewildered dog in our yard.
Give me, O Gulf,
a slow sourdough mix, bad anime talks,
and a knob that closes but still needs to be fixed.
Bless me, O Gulf,
with holy dishwater, with homebrand crackers,
with a thurible swung like a limp flyswatter.
Knees on the carpet I call unto thee, Lo.
Unto your host I shout from my chest, Low.
I sink and I think and I can’t stand being a – NO!
saint Gulf street Gulf stream Gulf round the bend,
and for our fathers, a hale and merry end,
and the vainglory be, I finish. Amen.
Amy Mulvaney composes her end
(“But who remembers a cloud?”)
Circular Quay, on that day we glimpsed,
I knew it was you who had survived, not me.
I wanted to seize you, Dory.
For years I dreamt of reaching out.
But in my dream we never spoke,
So like a teetering heart, I never fell.
Amy, amie, amour. Doubt you remember.
Sure, I had friends, my little pleasures,
But I felt you under the carnival lights,
In the cool pearls on my neck at night.
I wish it had been you, Dorrigo.
Why did it have to be you.
The wind, the waves, the wind, the waves,
The green in the clock, the green of our graves.
Are we still there on that empty beach?
Or are we Keith in his burnt hotel,
Condemned to a tearful, impossible hell,
Running on a time we’ve run out of.
You might have Ovid, Lucretius,
Your soldiering jungle verses,
But I know my Hutchinson
So I will hum what he sang:
“Oh, how the ghost of you clings!
These foolish things remind me of you…”
But these foolish things are nothing,
And somehow they mean everything.
The world of clouds
is only a world of clouds —
and yet
And yet.
Burned house horizons
‘Domicide’. House-murder.
Or sometimes ‘Domithanasia’.
Putting the home to sleep.
Academic words, coined to describe
a pattern of charred rubble haunting the
earth under Europe’s eastern reach.
It’s a strange layer in the sediment,
a black horizon of Neolithic destruction.
Huts, halls, entire settlements torched,
slaughtered by fire, sacrificed to the heat.
But was it by raiders? By priests?
By the builders themselves?
Some speculate they did it to release
an old house’s soul, set alight
to be remade in the ashes,
pheonix-faced and shamanic,
efficacious and systematic.
A most primordial reset button.
I remember our final dinner together.
I read to you from Birthday Letters,
about how Plath painted their marriage chamber crimson,
scorched it with her psyche, bloodied it with her passions.
And Hughes, his love and infidelity,
that saddened you the most.
What a terrible thing to remind you of.
You were still reeling in it. Reality’s brothel.
Hurting and hurting in your own sacred redness,
while yours truly was withering away
in the whorehouse of his skull.
(All artists are lechers; poets worst of all.)
What he did to you. Jesus. Three years
of that would’ve crushed anyone’s soul
let alone your parrot-breasted heart,
rose veined, pulsing cardinal, crucified on a flame.
I know you want no self-pitying bullshit,
but you deserve better men.
(Men, I note, in the plural.) We sat in the living room,
soaked in winelight, wondering whether
fire could ever be cleansing or forgivable.
My girl. My fragile, ruby girl.
You deserve better men,
and I deserve some peace of mind.
Stuff breaks down
Textbook physics breaks down the further north you go. Out in Preston time trots backwards, and in Reservoir things that aren’t nailed down dissolve into the flow. And here the Wi-Fi tanks when it rains: a dim drizzle is enough to kill the dot-and-three-curves or, worse, make it pulse and scan aimlessly like a search party that secretly knows it won’t find the hiker.
But Beth is an optimist in spite of omens and forecasts. After a lunchtime downpour, the clouds still bruised with sky junk, she hangs her only linens out. They’re snow-white, faultlessly white, like flags of surrender waved at the heavens. She’s confident the sun will outlast its disposal. I wonder how people can remain so hopeful.
——’s bedroom has a photograph which bothers me. V-J Day in Times Square, that famous one of the sailor kissing a nurse. Consent wasn’t necessary back in black-and-white days. Her hand is at her thigh, trying to press down her skirt. They’re clearly strangers and he’s too strong to resist. In other shots of the scene, she’s making a fist.
Tonight, though, I sit by her bed and read a preschool book aloud. Something-something-magic and something-something-child. My words hush her anxieties and woos out a smile. As I close her door behind me, I feel good for once. I feel content, almost complete. Like I’m the good chink. The healthy one. A man that’s not just liked, but sufferable.
I’ll cradle these outlines until my next mistake. As I said, stuff breaks down the further north you go.
without fear of infamy I answer thee
I try to tell her
that this flame would stand forever still
if not for the confidence we share
under one roof the line
is from Dante I explain
but all she worries about
is not being as cultured as me
or Beth as though we are
waving at her from a distant field
but I need her to understand
how much it moves me to hear her sing
in the driveway with a guitar
it moves me to tears
but instead of telling her that
I tell her I’m always here to listen
and she replies in kind
and we both know that just means we won’t
we’ll confess nothing because
this world is hell and I’m past
infecting those I care about
with my heirloom virus
and now she’s holding a puppy on her bicycle
and now we’re catching rainbows in the bathroom
and now I’m brooding under
a brackish sky as she says it’s okay
to feel the full spectrum of human emotions
and I don’t need to apologise for anything
yet I do need to apologise
for this because the truth is
I want misery to linger and I
like being unhappy thank you
very much and
what does it even mean to be sick
anymore
if nothing I do or say could ever
shake this flame out
how to belong, how to make right. when no one ever does
incident.
ah fuck i can’t do this any longer
these blurry borders
this festering limerence
circles and circles lapping and stupefied
/ i have to snap out / have to break out of it
friday night as she’s strumming her guitar
i march into the yard and burn every page i possess
i cast them into a fire pan of my brilliant loathing
/ boundaries blurring / circles fraying up
i sit the morning in drizzle
smelling her hair cuttings on the grass
(she leaves me cups of tea poor girl)
mourning my relapse greeting old shit again
madness and madness filling my loins
/ kindly girl / poor girl / just had to inflict myself
high on despair i catch a black labrador atop a hill
drooling and black as sin
a nameless lost dog
talk.
The embers were alive from last night
She didn’t sleep a wink and looked it
‘What did I do? Why are you evading me?’
Like a fool, I told her everything
She darkened, she cried
‘I’m baffled, I truly am’
‘Is that what you see me as? A piece of meat?’
‘I just want to have sex and find myself’
nights.
Atlas, watchmen’s patron,
would come into my mind,
the only other one
up at all hours, ox-bowed
under his yoke of cloud
out there at the world’s end
— The Nights
Slug-footed, I hobbled across parkland
As rust-fingered dusk weaved shadows in the trees,
Trying to evade the taunts, the slings,
The arrow of suffering over fear of suffering.
I clenched, I roared, I slammed myself
From bone to bone and stooped like a puck.
Maybe it is true. Maybe an easy slice of flesh
Is what I seek. Ignorant muses, who am I to say?
‘…have sex and find myself…’
What ill-breeding possesses me, what years of bad,
Simmering, torquing, whipping the echo chambers
Of my heart. Speak, not as a lion,
But as a goat-faced man. A man of few turnings.
Those nights, they poured sour sleep in me.
Her phone trilled and I viewed a kitchen scene:
A juice-bright bottle, underwear on a table,
The Great Australian Fucking.
‘…how old do you think I am…’
I could sense the purple skyline heavy with skin,
And beyond that, there, on the edge of want,
Bowed Heaney’s never-sleeping Atlas,
Great witness to the world’s disgrace.
I imagined him buckling, sweating with cataracts,
Trembling from the weight of deathless Gods
Riding one another above the bird-filled skies,
In a place, on a peak, where desire still happens.
crash.
roiling, bed bobbing wine sweats! the addict came
out of the soul bottle, ejaculating from that irish cream
you loved so much, plus that bubbly shiraz shit, mixed
with sedation tabs, quickening in the candy coloured light
of another sore throated morning.
never been good at keeping wires grounded, honest.
got too sad, all lightning triggered, thought circuited,
rubber gloved sobriety worn out and jerked up.
given any excuse, it’s the same old lexeme again:
yo bebo, tú bebes, él bebe.
revisiting music at the grub end of a drink,
(Slow Show was mine, you songbird stealer)
electrified, frying down, and then once the interviews,
the hot job jabbers, were nailed and dusted,
it was back to couch sprawling, listless, dry crying.
developing the forlorn look of a vegetarian didn’t help.
gut strung by that white mazda purring at seven,
(a real lemon clunker)
dreaded in by garden swimwear, by worm motions
in sleeping bags, and sticky foundational sin.
the semen foamy roar of lake reserve falls, the moronic
cacophonics at a drive in show, and the kicked pup yelps
for flicking, hinged exits.
IT’S TOO LOUD! IT’S THE PITS!
thinking you’ve lived too much, yet knowing you haven’t lived at all.
Barrenjoey Peninsula
Q. What was the naughtiest thing you ever did as a kid?
A. Crawl into the sun and risk my hide.
| Drowsy on spring grass and holy committed to an early coda | you’ll find me on the banks of burley griffin gazing at yarralumla’s pale lakefront with reeds as musky as oyster mushrooms and the willows and midges my only friends | you’ll watch me cutting deep into the hedge roots of memory, deep into my fear of men’s sheds and pensions | appointing myself head gardener, self-surgeon general, the shoemaker of jerusalem | screaming bon voyage to gratitude diaries, to cbt, to dass twenty ones |
| you’ll hear my endling demand: wretched reader! show me a garden! o overgrowth, o cheap denouement, o rude spangle of leaves | and feel me ascend to the empyrean and clock God in the face before resigning off with an incurable, rose petalled full stop. |
what were you hoping for, what did you accept,
“Poem 16”
1
Everyone keeps asking
How goes my writing
Anointed in travel
What words will I give
2
A fort made of sunbeams
Above a deep city blue . .
The birds at dawn
Over the brown holy Ganges . .
3
Train rides through jungle
Towards palaces of rock . .
The god-light of humanity
Many-jewelled and shivering . .
4
I want to regale these
Instead of low domestic matters
If only my mind would drop
Slow suburban regrets
5
Then I could paint freely
On mosques and market rows
On the steps of pyramids
And in the rainy Bosporus
6
And relive those easy
Marijuana nights
Along the thin Sinai coast
7
Instead of confessing some
Prosaic heartache
Again and again
8
But I am too entrenched
In my present
Too lost in engulfment
To share something richer
In the Year of the Soluble Postergan Pill
I had a dream, which was more like a video:
You and I, conscripted into the final war.
The bombs shaved mountaintops while the choppers
flew low, their c-beams carving up the ocean floor.
We huddled deep in our corpo-bunkers, You and I,
bathed in a chemical glow while Sydney went dark
and scores of innocents finally learnt how to die.
Then came the cargo cults, gliding on a storm.
Iconoclast and wrapped in dark starry blankets,
chanting asura-delivered reveries as the Daintree
was gassed. We joined them, Mister and Miss,
we danced arm-in-arm like secular demons,
casting masks, hypo-sprays, and menstrual
treatments down a numbing, annular abyss.
And when we returned, faces happily tattooed,
it was election day for a community counsellor.
Who to build a new morale in the After Feud?
Will it be the Psychic Boy who talks to pobblebonks?
Or Empress Jane and her chain slaying sword?
Either head will roll us into another swamp,
into a mire of blood, silica gel, and discord.
I had a dream, which was more like a replay:
You and I, deserting all survival duties.
The court was split by megatons, the moon was KIA.
Birds were extinct now, as were most beauties.
So we stole an ornithopter. We just had to get away.
We gunned it, Me and You, into the depopulated wilds,
ditching child-like hopes as we broke free and flew.
If my feelings for you are sovereign
then my brain should be classified as a failed state.
The opposition leader is calling for a coup
and several prominent neurons are under house arrest.
There’s rioting along the corridors of my skull and
reports of looting in my memory banks.
Martial law is expected to be declared this afternoon,
except the army hasn’t been paid, a sleep cycle is missing, and
all my hypothalamus dockworkers are on strike.
I’m head deep, trying to work out if it’s a foreign influence operation and,
to make matters worse, rebels are upping the ante in nervy border regions.
Someone needs to draft a general ceasefire.
Where’s Westphalian naivety when you need it most?
Every chunk of grey matter, from brain stem to frontal lobe, is trapped
in a web of treaties, conspiracies, backstabs, and triple-crosses
that would make even the steeliest Bismarckian shudder.
I can’t compartmentalise. I’m no longer a clean product.
My therapist tells me I use thoughts to obfuscate emotion
because feelings make me anxious, so I cope by burrowing
into metaphor rather than experiencing to the nub.
It’s true, I think; whenever someone tells me my feelings ‘are what they are’
I’d prefer to imagine them as infiltrators on speedboats,
wearing catsuits, wielding Kalashnikovs,
arriving in the graveyard hour to blow up parliament house.
St. Gulf Blues Pt. 2
I don’t understand how
you can think it’s okay
to write these poems about me, Mingji.
Yes, I understand that
you’re upset, that things have been tough
for you. But this isn’t fair; this isn’t respectful.
Art is no excuse. Reshaping details is not enough.
A change of names does not give you license and no amount
of cleverness can twist that away.
You barely know me.
You’ve never met my parents or my sister.
You don’t know who I am or what I want from life.
How can you shove words inside me like that?
Like this?
Honestly, that’s what baffles me the most.
These verses.
This entire series.
What did you hope to accomplish?
The funny thing is, it was a spurt under the bridge for me,
a minor episode in the scheme of things.
I’d moved on. And you couldn’t let go.
I could run through your writings,
line by line, image by image,
and explain how you got it wrong.
But you know what? I’m not sure I care anymore.
Mingji – you have your life and I have mine.
I’m sorry it ended like this, but I think it’s best you stop.
You’re not well. Please finish up and leave.
Nearby is a country called life
No feeling is final and their limits are fleeting
What happens in the heart simply happens
You looked so tired, you seemed so sad
When I finally said I was leaving
For there was amity in confinement
Between our familiar, lilting walls
- I left one last poem, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
- Among the photos on your desk
-
You do not have to be good You do not have to repent
In truth, I had left it for my own sake
Something to turn endlessly in the dark
- Like a worry stone rubbed to an oily sheen
-
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
For even at the intervals, soothing is possible
Language is fragile and no gesture can bring closure
I had to force the door on my own
Because no feeling is final and nor should any ever be
at the end of these months, what was left behind?
Mingji Liu, Melbourne, August 2020.