Views from Oyster Mountain – Jalal El-Kadali
April 11, 2020
Another Order of Being
The water sloshed out of a plastic cup
Became a horse jumping as over a jump
But not completing the manoeuvre
Posed suffering in air
And the work of many hours was to coax it down
Which tragically could not be done
My horse a young girl with very long legs and hair
Had already completed the course
Acting it out as a character in a play
Consisting of yoga asanas
Then it was time for her as my proxy
To go and confess
At the Spiritual-Temporal Authority Hub
Known as the ‘STAH’, where behind a desk
Sat her little brother, alone
On work experience, in uniform
But she brought him a drink instead
Pathos
We seek the plangency
Of a child’s tears, or better yet
Those of the parents of one
Stillborn for the best
To find an aluminium lunchbox
To save them in, preserved
Like dew in a spider’s web one day
Salvaged from the rubble
Of a nuclear holocaust, whereupon
They scatter forth miraculously
Like a hoard of spiders
That don’t need lungs or tear ducts
And have eaten first their mother and then
Their weaker siblings
Two Trees (Three Days)
I.
Bursting out of a trepanned head
Of ground: there the hands
All grasping umpteen
Of them of this several-times
Life-sized homunculus
Would-be gracile cancer
Neural effigy or child, reaching
For liquorice rope powerlines
To have its thieving hands cut off
Are not
Ah this shod earth
Performing a many-tailed scorpion pose
With us its accomplices
II.
A pair of lungs and a brain
As though withered by addiction
Down to the little green
Incredible shoots and nuts
On a hillside superimposed
They whisper, Listen, we
Like a travelling salesman
In an unlikely location have something
To show and tell you
We grin through the flyscreen
Uncannily, in dirty clothes
The wrong face on our lanyard
No car visible. Then
As our lips move at last, a truck mangles
Your attention beneath its wheels
But perhaps it is more to each other
And the rest of them there that they speak
At any rate you can tell the rest
Of the body parts will soon get involved
Moving as designed, wind
Acting between them as glue
III.
A semi-purposeful activity that
Sloshes over even into
Work, where you notice
Things like bird-like ornaments
Among the branches
Of a tree at whose apex sits
Eugenics and psycho-
Somatically text yourself
Yantra
Atop a meso pyramid, mesoforms
An open book—as she described herself
Meaning she liked to try new things
A wind turbine, an oil diffuser
Erotic figurines crafted in marzipan
All on a megalithic scale
Full head of soft hair, from out of which appear
These items menaced by a wrecking ball
Depending from the sky itself
By some holdfast: moles by the mallet
Attached to the machine
The door to the arcade lies open
Grace of the Number-One Figurine
Her almond eyes permanently upon you
Reclining on her chaise longue beside an ancient phone
Terra cotta tiles extending
From the kitchen all the way out to the stars
Then the gravid chrysali
Of your eyelids open
On the proper light of that loveliest bibelot
Like a great keyhole, Self-Tokeness
The weather balmy, the merest
Twenty years passing as you sleep off
The intoxication of your first night together
Harassed by nightmares of her absence
In this way you will outlast the world
But remember when she stood like that
Before, one wall only of her sanctuary
Left standing, the structure having been built
Along a socio-political fault-line
It seemed quite another pair of lips
That divided that continent in miniature
A map 3D and actual size
Beneath a striated sky so high
The birds flew upside-down
Afflicted surface of a desert
Amidst the open sea, the reason why
Today the outlines of the continents
And words spoken or written
Seem each a sign of signlessness
To those inclined thus to misread them
Braille inscriptions of absolute contingency
Merely the grossest stratum of cloud
The solid, inwardly inhabited earth
Finds space for all: coins and tesserae, up to
Vast cities of cities, country towns and estates
And those cities of trees
Who has their freedom
A traveller, you materialise outside
A mountain shaped like a manor house, in the gloom
Your shoulder brushed on the way in by
A skeletal figure carrying a baby
And at the foot of the cutting, by the danger light
Another tries to warn you
But you have set out to learn the meaning of fear
Thence a sequence of rooms and passages
The contents of each more horrific than the last
In tableau with stage lighting
Starting with life-sized Sylvanian Families
And working up to a dungeon wherein
You confront a dismembered plastic skeleton
Marked “yours” (as if to disambiguate
From the one before encountered ambulant)
Lights flashing, an alarm going off
But the noise at length gives way
To the choral finale
Of Mahler’s Second Symphony
Strands of yarn brush your face on the way out
Big Breakfast
It was a boarding pass flecked with rain
Now, sucking a tooth like a key
Tied to a kite in a thunderstorm
You remember the coffee stain
Associated with the memory
Of words in a book
Marked with its ten-year-old receipt
In which you were wont to express
The idea of every creature
Turned to stone preparatory to being
Carved into something else
This happened over and over
All of them getting smaller and smaller
Making the world in turn thereby
Larger and larger
So that the tiny island on account
Of its central location
Became a commercial centre
Despite a lack of natural resources
The Woman Next Door Keeps Her Little Dog Tied to a Tree
And forgets to feed and water him
I hear, or pretend to hear, him counting
The moments between his last succour and his next
There are infinitely many, more than he
Or I can represent to ourselves
As mallee gums sucking their ration from the dust
Though reason demand we do so
But then his owner shows up mumbling how
Her unit has been broken into again
By ASIO and/or the CIA
Or a neighbour shows up in her stead
Though one day the dog be dead, poisoned by spies
And here is a temporary proof
Like a top secret note that combusts when read
Adding yet more smoke to this already laden
Horizon of universal salvation
Pinocchio
Came up gasping
Nascent self-awareness
The pure abstraction of sails
Someone in green like a gymnast left holding
A bunch of balloon strings: the cordage
Against the outcome of a background check
Acrobat performing as a spider
And like all true art this had a serious purpose
Catching flying creatures to show when landfall was imminent
Yes, you will soon be digging seaweed roots and gathering coral fruits
Whereas now all you like your father before you seem to catch
Are inedible puppet fish
To mock and punish you
The spider gradually replaced by its web
A vector flow chart set before
A player violin
The luthier no blood relative