1653 c/o Laura Kochman

   

Infant / Infanta

   

   

1653      it begins         the slow bloom

of portraits, of a swollen cheek

heavy and soft in oils, baby skin

blushing           little roller

little thing.           A match struck

will burn hotter every year. The first of many

corsets, stiff skirts       hands hovering

on other surfaces       as if to say

I am here, Uncle, and I can set the table.

As if to say      I am full

like this round rose        petals like skirts

can open in layers, the years

your anxious friends.       1653     a proposal

the first of many promises      a small thing

harmless as a lost tooth      we are skipping

many pleasantries        Uncle, we

direct our gazes downward,

we       see each other only. This painter

loves me       with every pearl     white

highlight on lace        every exposed wrist.

As if to say      why don’t you stroke

my face       call me cosset      a brush

did it once.

1652 c/o Joshua Smeltzer

 

Haiku

 

Island of the free

surrounded by the enslaved

Waiting for the day

1651 c/o Susie Anderson

1651

there is an ice cream container on my piano. in the container there are little pieces of paper that say things like 'diminished seventh beginning on b flat', 'dominant seventh of f sharp', 'a flat major' and 'e flat melodic minor'. most mornings i get up half an hour early, do stuff to get ready for school, then sit at the piano from 7.30-8am. i take a piece of paper out and play the scale written on it. i play it in different rhythms and at slow speeds. right hand, left hand, then both hands. doing this makes it easier to play evenly when you play them at the right speed for your exam.

my piano teacher is mrs adler. she has some sort of bad disease like cancer i think. it is not appropriate for me to ask anybody about it now because she has been my teacher for two years and i think people just assume that i know why she is so sick. mrs adler is the fourth piano teacher that i have had. she is not my favourite but all of the other students that she has are the best in town so i am glad that she is my teacher. my last piano teacher was more like a friend to me and sometimes i would cry in front of her. mrs adler likes flowers and usually has a new bunch of flowers every couple of weeks. she often talks about 'dancing with the stars'.

as well as my scales i am learning four pieces for my grade six exam. they are the hardest pieces i have ever had to play. sometimes i genuinely think i will not be able to play them properly. there is always a lot to think about when playing piano, so many theoretical things that get in the way of just trying to make a piece of music sound so good that it might move somebody.

i have to play in the eisteddfod as practice for my exam. it is probably the sixth year in a row that i have been in an eisteddfod but being backstage with everybody else who is competing is the same type of nervewracking, year after year. everybody is familiar. a young girl who is a piano prodigy, people from my high school, other people who learn piano at the same place i do. i try to ignore them and remind myself to enjoy playing, enjoy what will probably be the last time i get to play on the fancy schimmel. the schimmel is a big grand piano, the keys are spongy and the pedals are heavy.


this eisteddfod goes better than any of the ones i have ever been in before. i win a jazz section. i come second in a few sections. i play oboe in it as well. i come first in 'fourth year woodwind solo'. i win some sort of award for being promising, and the adjudicator tells me to keep doing music, he says something like 'the time is now' and i feel excited by how he is talking to me.


the exam is a few months after the eisteddfod and i am feeling more nervous than i ever have before. i want to continue being impressive. i want my last piano exam to be the best one i ever do. i don't know how to calm down and i try to listen to sigur ros to settle myself before i have to leave to go to the exam but i feel like somebody has pressed fast forward on me and walked far away with the remote.

my hands retaliate after all these months of early morning ice cream container practice. they run away from me when i am sitting at the piano in my exam and i play the scales too fast. i fumble through the sight reading, can sing the intervals, can answer general knowledge questions about my pieces. 'the baroque era was from 1600-1750...'


a year or so later i am home from university, at my mum's house. i have not played oboe in months, piano much longer than that. the ice cream container is on the piano still, but empty and dusty. my sister has sheet music strewn around the piano. all i can remember how to play is regina spektor songs.

i sit at the piano again. i am not sure if anything ever happened here before. one of those 'who am i? the sum of all the things i have done previously, or who i exist as, right now in this moment?' moments. are these things still valid, even if i haven't looked at a piece of music in months and months? the piano stool is lower for some reason.

looking at all the music on the floor... this is a piece from 1651 - baroque. this is a piece from 1870 - classical. this is a piece from 1974 - contemporary. i used to hide in those eras, protected by black and white keys and guarded by pedals.

on the table in the kitchen there is a 2008 eisteddfod entry form. there is a list of prizes and donations on the back. there is the award that i won. there is also an award that has never been on there before. it is 'the ann adler memorial award'. music is leaving me, quietly slipping out the back door, disappearing nicely.

1650 c/o Jackson Nieuwland

Cafés begin to become popular in New Zealand

What’s up with all these fucking cafés?
They’re everywhere nowadays.
Everywhere I turn I’m confronted by them.
With their little tables and their hipster ass baristas in their skinny ass jeans.
Seriously.
I don’t get why people love them so much.
Whenever I try to make plans with anyone they’re all like,
“Yeah I know this great café. Lets meet for coffee.”
And I always respond like,
“Oh actually, I forgot, I can’t do that day.”
And they’re like,
“Oh that’s a shame. I’ll be there anyway so just stop by if your plans change.”
Like I would change my plans to hang out in a café with someone who hangs out in cafés.
I don’t even drink coffee.
It’s disgusting.
It smells horrible.
I remember once we had to make it at school and I drank some and threw up.
After that none of the girls at school looked at me again.
The stain on the carpet never came out.
People made so much fun of me.
Never again.
That shit is poisonous.
Caffeine.
Who needs it?
I’m straight edge and proud of it.
And I’m legit unlike these other posers, taking antidepressants and cough drops and shit.
A drug is a drug is a drug guys.
Don’t forget it.
I mean depression?
You need to stop being such a fucking pussy.
Do you think I got all weepy when my parents died in a car crash?
Hell no.
I didn’t shed a tear.
I just went on living my lief.
Without coffee.
Even if I did drink that shit I wouldn’t spend my cash on fancy ass drinks and expensive ass pastries.
I don’t want no soy.
I don’t want no chai.
What the fuck is chai?
I mean it’s not like we live in Europe or Paris or some shit guys.
This is New Zealand.
What ever happened to a Coke and a steak and cheese pie?*
That’s the only sort of pastry I can get down with.
And I know you’re the same.
Quit trying to be someone you’re not.
Don’t you remember all the fun we used to have?
Can’t you just come over to my house.
I’ll microwave some popcorn.
We can watch School Of Rock.
It’ll be fun.
I promise.



*And yes I realise Coke has caffeine in it but none of us are fucking perfect are we? We all have our vices. Every now and then I just feel like splurging. I mean, I don’t have anyone anymore. My family’s dead and all my friends are hanging out in cafés. What choice do I have but to turn to Coke? There are plenty of worse things I could be doing. I’m only human. Don’t judge me.**



**And I didn’t use footnotes because of David Foster Wallace I used them because of Terry Pratchett!!

1649 c/o James Chapman

The laws of nature are discoverable by means of reason

As I combed her long dark hair she spoke of death as a glory. I would have to forget my body to feel this glory. Death was truth, culture, an engraving in copper greening on the wet ground. Underground, everything you can name melts into time, gets resolved by truth into truth. Like, the face of the beautiful woman becomes jelly. The tongue of the gourmet becomes soup. Truth tends toward glop, muck. As I combed her hair, she sang a hymn to muck, to the combining of all in all. As I combed, as I chased confused tangled clumps of hair back up to their source and negotiated their rhetoric and became lost in the problems of earthly insoluble hair, she took the crayons and put them in the cooking pot one by one. If she found a red crayon, she next put green. If orange, immediately purple. The wax attacked itself as it melted. Yet it was me who built this cooking fire for her, I even willingly stirred the pot, though gazing in my mind at the individual crayons as they’d been before they became ruined by truth. I best loved mocha, saffron, gold, uterine, royal purple, permanent crimson. Colors are ephemeral. Laughter is untrue. The list of untrue things is the infinite list of moments in the life of the world. That engraved copper plate has Sanskrit words mingled with Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Sumerian. To one who knows all these languages, it’s clear that the meaning here is hopelessly fucked. But for all of us who can’t read these words, the engraving is mystery, it seems to sing monody about what is permanent. The pot of all colors, when combined by melting, when viewed with ultimate perspective, that brew is muckbrown. As I combed the dark hair of my permanent, life-long, never-to-be-parted-from, souls-joined-forever-in-truth wife, my body was directly behind hers, but in this world our bodies are ephemeral. When a guy crossing the street suddenly laughs at a memory that hits him from twenty years ago, and you’re watching on the corner, you see his face change, you witness blossoming brightening. Next instant his laugh is gone. It’ll never reappear that same way. You saw it, yes. But you don’t know this guy, and he’s not important, you don’t have to care about his life or the hilarity he’s suddenly understood, the light that flickered in him. You should forget the whole thing and fix your mind instead on a particular text of a dead poet. That poet once witnessed the face of a woman crumple with desire. Another time in his now-ceased life, he saw sheet lightning illuminate a ravine and make it a revelation of beauty. Those two incidents gave him emotions, which he combined in a stanza, using them up so he couldn’t use them again elsewhere, thus approaching his death a stanza nearer. The poem became famous, was published again and again for centuries, now you know it. You recite it as you cross the street, you watch the traffic carefully, you want your body to live. The poem is true. The woman’s desire, the sheet lightning, those were not true, they were junk, and the man’s laughter you’re ignoring right now is stupid. Try to pay attention to what I’m saying, I know it’s hard. You can’t love both your wife’s hair and her soul. Or if you must, consider her hair a direct expression of her soul. That’d be unscientific though. Many women have tremendous hair and no souls whatever. Souls only exist in those people who love death, hence live for truth. Am I being clear? I combed her hair, irrationally since she could have done it herself, that was my love for her soul operating. A scientific approach to her tangles would be to shave her head and separate all the strands with a machine. Aristotle once cut open a fish to see how it worked. Nobody had ever thought of doing that before! The inner workings of the fish are not the same as eternal truth, since fish are ephemeral and pleasurable and practical and pointless, but at least the workings of fish are generically true. There was a cat in the room with Aristotle while he dissected. This cat didn’t believe in eternal truth at all, he just wanted to eat the fish. Aristotle would have said this is merely how the cat-machine works. That was how the Aristotle-machine worked. There was also a fish in the room with Aristotle and the cat, but because the fish was dead nobody mentions it as having the right to an opinion. Its desire was to exist, swimming, being silver. Stupid impermanent fish. Personally I’d’ve liked to see the fish in the water, flashing light, carrying life away within it. But Aristotle won’t let me, because I’m wrong, I’m just wrong. I combed my wife’s hair and she talked constantly. She said things you young people wouldn’t be able to appreciate, because you’ve failed to clamp your joy to the awareness of death. She talked about Descartes’ remark that the soul has nothing, nothing to do with the body. This was typical of the beauty of her soul, bleak beauty. Her hair expressed this, in my opinion, though not according to Aristotle. I was not allowed to hack the tangled clump of hair out with a knife, but must coax it, make it cooperate with ephemeral reality. Every day this coaxing. I was a crayon that would not melt. Palepink, almost white. In the world of light, all colors combine to create white, not mucky brown. I was not living, at that time, in the world of light. Light, soul-stuff, bounced off me like my skin was a mirror, floods of light, I felt none of it. So painfully pale. The sun had never touched me, and I’d never touched the sun. The sun is permanent, but my pleasure in the heat of the sun, that’s ephemeral. Have I got that right? No. Even the sun is ephemeral. There’s a ten-billion-year limit to its desperate desire to burn and burn and burn.