Kevin Brophy’s book Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion came with me in my bag everywhere I went for about eight months, including three months of backpacking through South-East Asia and Queensland. Consequently it is a very well-travelled book, and I am better travelled for having read it. His work is always full of tensile strength – it uses plain sensible language to brilliant effect, and no-one is better able to sum up the strangeness of the everyday in a simple image. And there is always humour to be found in Kevin’s work, especially when he reads it aloud, delighting in the correct pauses and intonation to convey the satire. This is poetry which even people who hate poetry can enjoy, kicking back and listening to the man read you a few thoughts. Kevin has had ten books published, including fiction, poetry and essays. Wittgenstein was his latest of poems, published in 2008, while a book of essays, Patterns of Creativity, followed in 2009. He is associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Melbourne.
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Difficult
It is difficult to choose the reader for this poem.
I have left its windows open
so you might as well climb inside
where you can be safe for now from weather,
and though your sudden presence feels intrusive
think of yourself as a museum visitor
to a reconstruction of a life now silenced.
The bed, I know, has not been made
but the silver cutlery on the formal dining table is meticulous.
You will not be roped out of any room
and you can be confident
the writer left before you and your party arrived.
The place is left as realistic as anything you might write yourself.
Dirty clothes (for instance) are piled into a predictable straw basket,
their odour not quite human,
though the stiffening socks were plainly meant for feet.
It is difficult to choose a visitor
who must arrive by chance.
Parents too are difficult to choose
though they’re chosen all the same.
The plain truth is the bricks outside are wet with rain
and now you find yourself inside
the couch is sprinkled with the drops that just blew in with you
through the curtains of the open window.
Sounds of possums in the poem’s ceiling must distract you,
a blackbird in the yard outside is startlingly alive,
the cat in here will stay asleep despite your tread,
and a green bin steaming with the evidence of wasteful life
in a corner of the kitchen is what you’ve come to expect from art.
The lived-in emptiness of every room
makes it difficult to choose a reader for this poem.
No meal has been prepared and no money has been left
in an envelope with your name on it.
The vases are all empty.
A man has written this you must suspect.
Blue sky outside presses down on us its single thought.
A green and oily ocean’s creeping closer every century
and an ochre desert lies less than three thousand kilometres away.
It is difficult to know what is the greatest threat to this poem:
reader, silence, landscape, weather or its absent occupant.
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Fifty years on
Photo captions from a science textbook, 1951
These people are testing a new drug to learn if it is safe. The drug usually does not hurt the rabbits.
The chief means of controlling the body is the nervous system. It consists of the brain, the spinal cord and the many nerves.
This man is wearing an asbestos suit. Such suits are worn in fighting oil-well and other dangerous fires.
In a safe ashtray the cigarette cannot fall out. How many of your home ash trays are safe?
This farmer is preparing to do one of the most foolish things in the world—smoke in a hayloft. Smokers are the greatest single cause of fires.
Man constantly explores his surroundings, and right now men are seeking minerals to provide atomic energy.
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A week in Jamieson
After five days away we’re drying clothes on all the chairs,
running out of fruit, bread, breakfast cereal, alcohol;
sleeping later, lying in our beds until our sleep-suspended limbs
match the trees that stand around outside all day
seemingly with nothing much to do.
We get up in the middle of the night to watch European soccer.
A dozen packs of cards and no tin to bake a cake in.
Taps and eaves drip. Wombats own the land.
Their tunnels curl down under the roots of these river trees.
We find ourselves on a map.
From this valley the thing to do is walk
until old injuries in hips and ankles tip us back to bed;
we shower under reluctant water;
wear thick socks, scarves and gloves to buy milk and
the shop is out of everything by the time we get there.
At night we toast each other. History is here in magazines
where everyone we know looks younger.
We spend hours translating into French and back into English
To Kill A Mockingbird until we realise it was not written
in English in the first place.
Somehow there are leaves across the carpet.
The house eats wood by the barrowful;
at the end of our stay we will spread ashes outside
under the trees, their lesson for the week;
we take more lemons, thick-skinned, juice-packed,
from the brittle dripping tree at the back.
The kookaburras watch like cops on a stakeout.
The wombats move so slowly we do not see them.
The stars are too close, too many, spilled everywhere.
The river runs like a perfect machine past us.
Mount Terrible waits for us, idly moving leaves about,
keeping its damp head in the clouds.
After a week away we cannot imagine a place
where the trees do not outnumber us.
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Sailing
1.   When I took an interest in the theory of the short story everything became a short story. Every film I watched, every apple I ate, every newspaper article, science textbook, poem I read— they all had beginnings, middles and ends; everything existed in a curiously reduced universe; even the longest of novels was in truth a short story. I found that all my short-story experiences had inspirational openings, strategic ellipses and moments of poetic elegance. Each one cohered round an enigmatic core image just as any short story must. When you become an expert in short stories your whole life takes on the modest proportions and outlandish ambition of the short story. You are a brief work of art too often crowded into small spaces with too many other equally short existences.
2.   When I became a car owner the world was at once divided into those who do and those who don’t drive. The car owners gathered , heady, at the hoses in the servos. You will always have a fat set of keys in your pocket if you’re a car owner and a glove box for anything but gloves. Success will adhere to you like the best quality duco.
3.   When I began to wear glasses the world became circles of brightness and my lover clinked against me. In the morning the world is there on my bedside table within those two tiny rings as though God’s angels had taken two glasses of water from my table last night and left these reminders. When you wear glasses you are fish and the world is undersea. Your weakness is a kind of magic.
4.   When you die you will know without doubt that you are mortal and this will make a significant difference to everything from then on. You could not have imagined what a difference it was going to make before it happened, but now that it has, now that mortality is really here for you, you will know how short time is, even infinite time. It’s a lesson worth learning though it cannot be taught before it is too late. Your allegiances will shift and you will love without involving your heart and though every thought will lead to inaudible mental sighs you will be sailing.
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Shots of Bo Derek
In a five-year-old magazine, photographs of Bo Derek
all nipples, cheekbones and skin-coloured skin.
All this the text tells me, at forty-three.
It is a wonder, a miracle, a marvel.
Does it mean Bo Derek will never grow old?
That beauty can age gracefully?
That Bo Derek is more beautiful now
than she was in the cornfields with Dudley Moore?
Or that this, five years ago, was the last season of her beauty?
The see-through garment over her curves, her skin,
is expensive, tasselled, almost a distraction from the body
the photographer is compelled to focus on but not too sharply.
The text asks me to remember her
as well as to look at her now (then).
The nakedness was the photographer’s idea
while the reclining pose came naturally to her,
and the beach was its own perfect setting.
Nearly fifty now, she can look at those last beach shots,
her beauty defying what defeats the rest of us.
Next I read a scientist’s report that women imagine themselves
to be less beautiful than they are.
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Stutter
If you were blind, I say to myself,
you would be on the telephone all the time.
Where are you? could be a question
directed to someone in the same room.
Mention of yellow light might remind you
of the suddenness of air against your body
as a door swings open
blue might be the feel of ironed cotton
and always you would be accompanied by words
that point in the dark.
You might turn to music
as someone in the night might turn to a sound
or as water turns to cloud.
Words would be dark stones packed hard in the earth
and you would notice
that national leaders stutter when caught out in lies
how silent a book is
and that a hand can approximate any shape
it finds itself against.
If you were blind, I tell myself, you would learn
the primitive language of asking for help.
You would gain the attentiveness of a body falling.
Distance would be a layering of sounds across the suburb,
time would cover you like a skin;
you would know what the rain keeps stitching back together,
and that vision is our one essential distraction.
If you tried to explain all this
your childhood stutter would return
and the words like terrible hooks in your mouth
would not tear themselves from you.
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Beautiful accidentally
We walk into the world as if it is, and it is,
but being in this beautiful accident,
unable to find the brakes, reverse the engine,
with everything crumpling in front of us
we want to see the plans that designed love
at least—the irresistible accident of it.
But intelligent design is a foolish idea,
we’ve been told.
It’s like trying to say accurate accurately.
The accident unrolls itself as if it loves itself.
There is no surprise, only surprises
as we career into the miraculous disaster of it.
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Negotiations
My eleven year old son asked for a pay rise today.
What does this mean?
Secretly, is he working for me?
Unknown to me, have I employed him?
Casually, permanently or on a short term contract?
He speaks to me as if I could be his employer:
everything’s all right as long as the expected payments arrive.
Then there’s little need for contact until the next instalment.
Is that right?
Meanings shift as quickly as the possible uses of parents.
Am I now to negotiate payment to my son to take the love I give
and ignore the cruelties I administer?
Is that the work he does?
When he asked for a pay rise I had to ask him
what he was being paid at present
and five dollars a fortnight did seem a pittance.
But then he was taking a good deal in benefits
I pointed out
and with an increase in wages he might be given responsibilities
beyond his ambitions.
I notice he keeps in his bedroom drawer a collection of wallets
and his pig grows fat with coins
telephone booths give up loose change to him
and gutters wash treasures up at his feet.
What is the silver flash I see in his blue eyes?
He talks to the bundled cat now, convincing it of something.
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Painters
It is as if each one has been sent to colour in the world,
and to do it between the showers of rain
so that colours will have time to fix themselves
on walls and pipes and window ledges.
When it rains the painters in their speckled overalls and spotty shoes
sit quietly in vans
with ladders like folded wings above them.
They drink white coffee with two sugars
and treat themselves to doughnuts from the local bakery,
sugared cinnamon.
At night they dream of edges of immaculate neatness.
They admire leaves and what autumn does to them.
Their lives are short, for each painted colour releases
a poisonous fume like a sigh
as it spreads and dries and makes our lives feel
deeply real.
The painters speak less and less
as the fumes take hold.
Their wives and children watch the painters going
like elves to another kind of existence.
You ask them what to do with left over cans of paint
and they tell you it’s not easy,
for paint would stain the sea and kill the fish if you let it go.
There are places, deep and foul, where paint must go
when its colour is no longer favoured, they will say,
and you will feel they are the enemies
of the paint they love. Their elf hearts move inside them
at each slap of colour on a wall or fence or seedy chair.
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Box
The universe is box-shaped
and death will be box-shaped too.
Everything I own
I put into boxes
and send to a warehouse
constructed according to
the principles of the box:
six sides, rectangular
more often than square,
a series of clever folds
and a little glue.
In the glue
of cardboard boxes
there are traces
of melted-down horse,
a box shaped creature.
Beneath the feathers of birds
you will find they are box-shaped too
and the egg is a misshapen box
hopelessly inadequate for stacking.
Your head is a box.
Every idea is a box
as is every philosophy
and any computer
you can think of.
A tree is a box or will be a box.
A box is the shape of a fact.
Every musical instrument is a box.
Like the wheel, we cannot survive without it.
It keeps for us what must be pressed down
in darkness
locked away and hidden from children.
On the sides of my boxes
prepared for the final boxing-up
are messages, as there should be:
‘fresh produce packed by
Gayndah Packing Co-op’
Says one.
‘Gaiety’ says another
on all its sides
and another, ‘Horizon’.
I have rented this box-shaped storage shed
and gathered these masterful boxes
for filling with my boxed-up life.
There will be a darkness
within darkness as night
(like a box)
comes over the warehouse.
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The dead
After Susan Mitchell’s poem, ‘The Dead’
At night they come down the middle of the road
to the railway station at the end
and there they flick their hands at shadows;
flies drift through them.
Shoulder to shoulder on the platform
of the unmanned station
all in overcoats and slippers, hair damp (dozens of them)
their hearts slamming like distant car doors,
they hum until the wires overhead vibrate
almost waking us;
their voices enter our dreams
like books being read aloud in other languages.
Some hold hands as couples do at spectacles.
Sometimes fingers tangle in someone’s hair
and tug like small questions.
They leave before the first train comes,
all marching back along the road
a mist of coats and arms and noses
in no hurry now, their numbers always larger.
When I know the last one’s passed
and as their last sounds drift through us
I press myself against you
as if the tangle of our legs will keep us here.
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All poems from Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion, published by Five Islands Press, 2008