Indigo Perry
Indigo Perry's book Midnight Water: A Memoir was shortlisted for Australia's National Biography Award. She is a senior lecturer in Writing & Literature at Deakin University. Most of Indigo's current writing is poetry, often written in public spaces, and improvised live in performance art as part of the collaborative duo Illuminous. www.indigoperry.com.
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Calligraphy ghost calligrapher I have seen you carving from out of a clear sky calm day wind soothed solitary Wild whippings of scarification so quiet you could be painting. How do you know the parings of crescent moon to fall as scythes in leaves. Figuration of memory over the veins, the vast swathes of arterial oceans, silhouette of yourself crying and falling, always the falling, over skin, making forms of the ligatures in fractals caught up, the blue-white flash, shock, the unseen dive from warmth and the soft childhood of yellow, faint trace of a summer you believed you'd remember. When, I wonder, did you forget to remember and when must you remember forgetting. And then, the taste of regret. But the sorrow drains and washes with the storm and you look in the morning at the lines of trees and see how they echo the jagged cuts of lightning, and as they already grow soft and pale, luminescent, on the quiet parts of your arms, the under- sides away from the burn of the sun, already you feel brighter. And ready to set well- constructed new fires to warm your house and dry the clothes bathed in rain and blue light. It rings and razes you in cloud forms. Fault Lines nights strange tracings along crumbling clifftops resisting the ecstasy of falling. Extremities curled to soft landings. The comforts of love affairs played out in the psyche Eyes closed to the agony of the outside. Temporal travel. Where calling up the sound of you sorting through the cases of your music soothes and warms. Not to sleep. Walking, still, under the bright eyes of moonlight. Not quite alone. You and the happiness you place inside me linger nearby spectres lightning-haunted tree figures. There is joy to this accompaniment And the weight of sadness Like the company of a brother long ago lost to depths. He appears if I call to him but mostly he is still He's the brother caught in photographs and memory. He crosses rooms in loops. And you arrive from your own night wandering Waking me softly with fingertips when I thought sleep had eluded me and I was sentenced to the hard lines of the waking. Holding you it's an echo The heat seeps in a deep bath that never cools Geothermally loved. You're not like the phosphorous threads of my brother. Your night visitations are deep in warm colours and I am held while rain describes a distant roof. Doors left ajar Remembered intruders Mornings when what was lost rises again and again. You're still here until I must open my eyes. When will I start to live instead of feeling for a fault line to fall through. Bitter Tastes here in time and out this revelling not acutely rebellious for once but still I hold her the one who rages dances from the under-growth old and youthful Fresh minds Over-grown already Timeless threading through bones and branches tied up hard nubs of cold Wind rhythms in the wilting of morning But the rebel, she stills, she rests barely discernible from these fern bodies, furred, softly frantic inner darkness The scores of families I hear you, singing child Calling the mother to stop pounding keys and enjoy the light walking through sunshine. Notice shadows on closed eyelids not as spectres of danger but as symbols and spaces As cloud forms hold secrets And there is the murmured melody of insects crossing thresholds to lace workings To rise, my happiness, from sleep. Not all poems are sad, although all the ones I read are of the sea, whether deep and layered with rooms and apertures doors and windows ajar, or else skimming shallow tones of warmth the gold that I drink to the inside.
Indigo Perry's book Midnight Water: A Memoir was shortlisted for Australia's National Biography Award. She is a senior lecturer in Writing & Literature at Deakin University. Most of Indigo's current writing is poetry, often written in public spaces, and improvised live in performance art as part of the collaborative duo Illuminous. www.indigoperry.com.
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