There was a lifetime of school dinners curry once a week the colour
of jaundiced skin and the strawberry jam as a stigmata on the rice pudding:
From Aberfan by Peter Kenneally
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CAUGHT IN THE NET - POETRY BY PETER KENNEALLY
Series Editor - Jim Bennett
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Introduction by Jim Bennett
Hello. Welcome to a new series of CITN. We will be looking at the work of individual poets in each edition and I hope it will help our readers to discover some new and exciting writing. This series is open to all to submit and I am now keen to read new work for this series.
CITN 45. This edition features the poetry of PETER KENNEALLY.
You can join the CITN mailing list at
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http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/index.htm
and following the links for Caught in the Net.
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There was a lifetime of school dinners curry once a week the colour of jaundiced skin and the strawberry jam as a stigmata on the rice pudding:
From Aberfan by Peter Kenneally
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
IMPROVERS
MEMENTO MORI (sequence)
Service
Melancholy Flower
If there's anything we can do…
Daughter
Last rites
A cup of tea and a little pill
Aberfan
3 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: PETER KENNEALLY.
Peter was born in England in 1957. He has lived in Melbourne since 1985.He has
only been back once. He has had work published in various entities including
The Australian, Island, Ambit, Southerly, Siglo, Tinfish, Southern Review
,Antithesis, Redoubt, Scarp, Salt, Going Down Swinging and the Newcastle poetry
prize anthology 2005. He was commended in the New Media Section of the Newcastle
Poetry prize in 2007. He can be found at:
http://bettyslocombe.wordpress.com or
http://www.impactisnotaverb.com/
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IMPROVERS
we are forever sweeping / and
the things we sweep out of the
front door / blow in again at
the back / directly. We know
but always forget the way we
have enclosed improved and
drained / everything / so that
everything is chaff / around
our ears. We were great
winnowers / and always
looking forward but / not far
enough forward to see this and
we / are abandoning the fields
or they are abandoning us
because / when we saw the sea
flow over the fields / we had
spades and faith and clever
Dutchmen / but seeing the
fields blow over the sea / we
believe only our eyes / and they
see dust everywhere so / for us
there is only sanding and
polishing / we are forever
sweeping / and we have
stripped back and sanded
and stained every parish. We
are forever sweeping / the
floorboards / we can see our
reflections in them / safe and
sound beneath eight layers of
varnish
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MEMENTO MORI (sequence)
Service
The last time I stood
in this amphitheatre / with
the people ranged around us
the sun beating down,
you stood before me.
To each word I recited
you responded in kind / and I
in my turn and we / kissed
at some length and
joined together then / in the general
conversation as it
walked along the riverbank.
Your smile is still there
in the video.
The last time I stood
in that amphitheatre / with
the people ranged around me
the sun limply through the trees;
alone.
My words rang out / there was
no reply / the carefully chosen music
was faint and tinny / you were
behind me in a frame / smiling still.
I walked along the riverbank / clutching
a cornflower /I’ve been told there is a video:
you aren't in it.
Blue cornflowers float
mindlessly, congregating
like the mourners / the ducks
swim among them / at a loss
like the mourners.
A hand falls on my shoulder
another another there are
too many hands and as
I walk away the general conversation
starts up again without us / it is
in full swing when I return.
I walk through not catching its eye it has
a lot to say about you / that it only met you
a few times / or once / but you were this
or you seemed that what are you doing on the weekend
do you need a lift it just isn't fair so young I'm going overseas in May
and my job is giving me the shits
oh Pete we're so sorry.
Melancholy Flower (Life is but a)
A man lost his mother in the middle
of the Depression and his wife
in the middle
of the swinging sixties:
a boy lost his mother in the middle
of the swinging sixties
and his wife in the middle
of a depression.
The fearful symmetry is
all out of kilter / there is nothing
to admire / nothing to fear / nothing
in the forests of the night
except: a fading ember / a striped
carcass / a hand cold and stiff
and an eye fixed and staring.
A man finds his wife still and restless on the floor
at lunchtime: in 1967:
the lunch goes cold in the oven.
A man finds his wife (who was born
in 1967) just as cold on the floor
at breakfast time: in 1999.
The breakfast goes unmade / the son
and the daughter are all
unawares / one at school / one in her cot.
Is this man's father / is this man's son? /is
this a riddle? / or my life?
father husband wife
The sphinx is eating my heart first
as an appetiser
If there's anything we can do to help or if you need to talk about anything
don't hesitate to call: (we have social workers available),
the nurse from the coroner's office says.
She is all soft English estuarine
understanding she tells me that
she has the “results”: having insulted your memory at their leisure
they have discovered after eight weeks that
your heart was too big and may
have killed you : thankyou Nicole for ringing
but I could have told you that eight weeks ago why didn't
you just ask me?
Nicole says apologetically that
they have discovered having covered every angle
that there were amphetamines
in your system, and that you had also taken
legally prescribed drug a and legally prescribed drugs c d and e
but within the therapeutic range / she has no idea
what you were doing taking speed and has the good grace not to ask me
being all soft English estuarine understanding
she tactfully skirts around the idea
because of course she doesn't really have a clue
that you were in a hurry to get away from us or
from somebody or something or that you ran
your spirit to a standstill or that if I were to wax
then you had to wane / and I respecting her position
just say say mmm and thankyou and even
because I am English too
I understand
Daughter
what does she know?
how is she doing?
what did she do?
She looked at you
with that smile / she has
a new smile now / an older
wiser smile / she reached
for your breast where your mother
smile lay / at her command
you and she swam at bathtime softly
while I stood usefully / patient
at your behest cradling a white towel
warm from the radiator / in my hand
what does she know now?
how is she doing now?
what shall we do now?
she looks at me
unquestioningly / she
does not expect an answer.
Last rites
No one is in black / everyone
drifts around slightly bowed beneath
the weight of their everyday clothes
all cheek by jowl in each cluttered room.
The porch is cluttered with flowers
the bedroom is cluttered with your clothes
the kitchen is cluttered with
the food they keep bringing
the garden is cluttered with
fag ends from the wake
the parlour is cluttered with photographs
of you with me / with our daughter / with
your brother / alone
the mantelpiece is cluttered with incense
Frida Kahlo / candles / Andy Warhol /
Madonnas and christ childs / and a book
of improving quotations propped open at
the last scene from 'The Tempest' / that
fucking Auden poem / more flowers / cards
rosaries / beads / tarot cards
and we are choosing your grave goods
It is not cluttered here / everything
is fluorescently simple at Tobin Brothers.
You lie in a stark comfortless room
in a stark cardboard coffin on a trestle
draped with your grave goods draining the colour
from them all / you offer me a cold
kiss and a cold embrace you
do not need these grave goods you
have gone on ahead taking their
colour with you / you are not
here so why am I?
I turn around and look at
the door / it is
a thousand miles away
and I haven’t got to it yet
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A cup of tea and a little pill
every morning before school
always and always grateful
white plastic wired to pink plastic
in a glass by the cup
school holidays
overcast and threatening
the tea too strong or the wrong pill
a sudden apparition
shining faced stick doll
grinning and groaning
wet-faced clenched juddering
the howl of five around the house
the gravity of ten demanding silence
this happened in our presence
this happened in our absence
white plastic wired to pink plastic
the wet face of fifteen
dripping on the dry face of ten
afterwards no cup of tea and no little pill
the floor not fit to have a fit on
and never any breakfast
and sticking to the bed perhaps
(a bit of cheap self-analysis)
unwilling to face the day
without a cup of tea
and a little pill
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Aberfan
There was the dawn we never saw and the dusk we were born into:
there was the egg marketing board a little lion a glass of Mackeson
Trebor mints the icons of the age the dull sliding of the QEII down
the slipway the sudden sliding of coal over children the same age as us
in their classroom and then over me.
There was the strip of whalebone a throbbing palm a compass
in the back the raw pagan knuckles on the head the chinese
burn the dead leg the cross country run the snowball down
the shirt all barely visible under inches of dust in which
we wrote our initials and various insults.
There was a dirty river with wreaths of fishing line swirling past a sign
Thames Conservancy Board no fishing no swimming or us slipping down the
weir coated in green slime or fumbling with a bra strap on the bank
while the water police shone their light on us: you can't do that there they said
like every other jobsworth.
There was the bus stop the rubber johnny frozen in a puddle and along came
the bus it was the 131 the conductors were all characters and on it we sat in
our blazers the sacred heart upon the breast gingerly on a yellow cross there
were the hordes of Holy Cross girls green and shrieking
and sometimes divinely
there was brown skin dark eyes short black skirt long black socks.
Tarted up wog slag said a blazer / slag was the stuff that slid down on those
children we are older than them now and we always will be
I said as the bus inched along the bus took forever because the dirty
river had burst its banks.
There was a parting of ways a parting of waters rushing waters
everywhere the famous flood of '68 the paper thin Dunkirk spirit the army
handing out vast platefuls of school dinners from field kitchens the tv crews
we jumped up and down in front of them and then watched the news
we were on it we existed.
There was the coal hole out there in the dark but by and by
the gas heater was like a miracle to fall asleep in front of it was like Christmas
day every night with the telly snowing across our silent field, the Captain
Bird's Eye Findus haddock cod in batter faggots Mr Kipling landscape and
shining on the boxes and the tinfoil piled in drifts.
There was the plate on the knee radio to ear softly softly there was
the news an hysterical eighteen year old Czech screaming at a stony faced
eighteen year old Russian in a tank Arthur Scargill's sideburns or a cat up a
tree there was study and its thin rewards.
The bus was the only private place.
There was a lifetime of school dinners curry once a week the colour
of jaundiced skin and the strawberry jam as a stigmata on the rice pudding:
there was the guitar at the back of the chapel / he was the lord of the dance
said he while at the front of the chapel his heart still burned / we put our left
legs in and out, and shook them all about.
There was the dull sliding of Anne and Mark down the slipway
we huddled in the dark outside the chip shop all the streetlights were out
our underage drinking was done by candlelight we had no power
the three day week was more than long enough and nowadays
in the warmly flickering candlelight.
at dinner the conversation turns in a faltering moment from television
to schooldays, and I find I am saying more about it and more bitterly
and at greater length than the conversation requires
still the same age as those other children
and still under the mountain.
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4 - Afterword
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