by Tracy Farr
From a book of poems
THE CURVES OF HER BOD
For Rosa
I trace the curves of her body,
its terraces and
faults,
the lay of the land,
its beautiful
folds.
I measure the depth of her,
the width of her,
the height
of her; the steep
dips of her, the uplift of her.
I pace her out in yard-long steps.
60. Forty-four years ago
I have renamed the business, hung my own shingle over the shop. Golden Photographic Studio is no more. Fortune Photography it is.
Two years on and people still ask for Frank.
Is Mr Golden here? He did such a lovely job with my wedding/mother/baby.
Could I talk to your husband?
It’s time to start fresh, though I call myself Golden still. I’m Mrs Rosa Golden, now that I am widowed, gaining back my first name at least, no longer Mrs Frank Golden as I was when Frank was alive. Dear old Frank. Solid as a rock.
Iris, next year, will start high school. She remains as quiet and solitary as ever. She is still sad for Frank, misses him greatly.
I have not yet shown her Zigi’s letters. Maybe she already knows that he writes to me; but I think not. She never speaks of our time in New Zealand, those few months. It is as if they never happened. Perhaps it is all connected, in her mind, with Frank’s death, and with the guilt of not being here when he died.
59. Forty-six years ago
It is strange to be here, without Frank.
Though we both grieve, Iris grieves most for Frank, while I nurse a newer grief: the baby that had caught has slipped away. It’s probably for the best; a menopause baby, so much can go wrong. This little thing had kept itself lodged through the trip across sea and land, all the way to here. A tiny thing, the size of a marble, or a pebble, maybe grown to a clenched fist or a stone you might pick up from the beach, to use as a paperweight, or keep in a bowl to remind you of place.
58. Forty-six years ago
It ended as unpredictably as it had started, with the telegram from home, the sad fact of death. I booked us on the next boat back to Australia. We packed our things, caught the overnight train north to Auckland. I sent a telegram to Zigi at his field camp: Frank dead. Going home. Sorry love. What else could I do?
From Auckland the boat crossed the Tasman Sea, berthing in Melbourne, then around and up to Adelaide, where Iris and I disembarked. We caught the bus across the desert to the West. Frank drew us back in death as he could not in life.
So it was. We returned home after the Meckering quake, following the fold in the landscape and the road that mapped it. I spent the whole trip west looking through windows, sideways. The tripped land made me think of Frank, dying alone.
I felt guilt, at fault.
57. Forty-six years ago
From the notebooks of Zigmund Silbermann
UNCERTAIN/CERTAIN
No Fault? the map asks.
Elsewhere, No Fault’s a statement,
on its side, sliding.
56. Forty-six years ago
The voice on the radio stutters on the name of the place, Meckering, juddering at the unexpectedness of it. An earthquake! Over there in Australia!
The knock on the door comes the day after (juddering, unexpected; shifting everything). I sign for the telegram, read its non-sense.
REGRET TO ADVISE FRANK GOLDEN DIED TODAY. SUDDEN MASSIVE HEART ATTACK. ADVISE ARRANGEMENTS.
I equate the two events, imagine the earthquake shifting apart the plates of Frank’s broken heart.
Iris’s face, when I tell her, crumbles my resolve to stay.
Of course we’ll go back, my love, is what I tell her.
And we will. We do.
55. Forty-six years ago
From the notebooks of Zigmund Silbermann
THE ASYMMETRY OF DEPRESSIONS
They plunge gently from
the east to their deepest part,
west of their middles.
54. Forty-six years ago
Letter from field camp
July, 1968
Dearest Rosa,
Another letter from me, from the field. Are you bored with them yet? I pour out my thoughts to you, as if I’m speaking to myself, love. I tell you my story in these letters. Each letter is just a fragment. You can piece them together, add in my poems – make me, like a puzzle.
You ask me, over and over, where I come from, where home is for me, and each time I give you a different answer. Here is my answer today. My imagination was formed first in Germany, then in my beloved Israel, my Dead Sea rift, and I see analogies and synergies with this landscape, a world away, an arc, half a circumference away. As far away as you can get, and still be on this earth. This ball of clay (and graphite), its carbon-based life forms; this ball of clay that seems so still, that hurtles through space – it is unfixed! In space! Held in its orbit by bits of nothing! By forces. By electricity, in essence. By tiny squillions of nothing, and also by the biggest bodies. The sun. The sun.
Sol, o Solomon,
o Sol. Bind me,
bind me, hold me – spinning
– at armslength. I’m
the third of your daughters, warm
in your distant embrace, cold
at shoulder’s turn.
I wrote these words – this poem – today in my notebook. I inscribed a hard-edged box around these words, marking them off from my work: an aside.
As a geologist, I can read the movements of the earth. For me, the earth is not stable, not still. The earth truly moves, for me. The earth is my text. I underline it with marker pegs. I run my hundred-foot tape along its lines, as an eye runs along the lines of a page. It is a language that makes sense to me, a language that I learned young. They say that learning a language young forms pathways in the brain that enable the learning of still other languages. My languages – my human languages – are German, and Hebrew, and English, and Latin. My earthly language is the language of the land, the solid, moving, transformative language. Doctor Freud wrote of the skips and slips in human language. I write my science in English, and so it has become for me also the language of my poetry, of the slippage of language that is what lets a poem become a poem. Language that is fixed cannot make a poem. That’s why I write my poems in English: for the words that slip through, unfixed from their meaning, after I’ve written the science. For the science, I need to get the words right, fix their meaning. I can do that. But the meaning that slips through, that is left, that meaning makes up the poem.
The poem is the meaning underneath the words. It’s the backdoor, the underbelly. It’s the vivid colour that has not been paled by constant sun. A book, left on a bedspread – if it is left for long enough – will leave a book-shaped rectangle of pale, when it is removed. Or: in a pile of books, one book on top of a larger book – if the pile is there for long enough, the rectangle of the smaller book will remain, imprinted, once taken away. Its negative self.
When one day I bind my poems in a book, Rosa, I’ll bind them for you, I’ll write them for you, they’ll bind me to you.
As my thoughts do, each day, with love,
Your Zigi
53. Forty-six years ago
From the notebooks of Zigmund Silbermann
A SUGGESTED MODEL
A fault is straightened
by means of folds; a good match.
A narrow gap’s left.
52. Forty-six years ago
Note from field camp
May, 1968
Rosa, this brief note to let you know that though the quake was near here, and gave us a good jolt, I am fine, and all our small party hale and undamaged.
Two poor souls lost, the radio tells us. One in our party knew the helicopter pilot. A good bloke, he said (as all who are lost remain, forever, good blokes).
Rest easy, love. This shake puts
us a little behind in our work, but I’ll be with you again in two weeks, I hope.
Shaken, not stirred,
Your Zigi
51. Forty-six years ago
From the notebooks of Zigmund Silbermann
TECTONIC COMPRESSION
Under compression
small gaps will not develop
but the blocks will tilt.
50. Forty-six years ago
Letter from field camp
May, 1968
Dear Rosa,
As promised, I write to you from the field, to show you my days, the shape of them. Can I share with you the everydayness of it? The sharp edges of it, and the blunt quiddity of it?
I use quadrillé notebooks to record my field notes. I bought them at home – hard-bound, stacked and wrapped in brown paper and tied four-square with string – and shipped them ahead to my colleague in Wellington, in case I couldn’t get them here.
Like all field geologists, I write in pencil, which writes in the rain and never smears, smudges, runs or fades, but which I can erase, if I need to. I sharpen my pencils using a knife – snick snick snick – the way my father sharpened his pencils. I like to snick a flat plane at the blunt end, the top end, to expose the raw wood – but not through to the lead – and use a pen to write my name. I like the feel of the pen biting into the soft wood.
In my notebooks, maps share the pages with columns of figures, with tables, with words on the page that might be poems, or might be observations. Or they might just be words on a page. I draw diagrams and figures, box them in with a border, doubled, crisscrossed with lines. I speak with my pencil, you could say, as I am alone much of the day. I make marks on the page, all manner of marks. There’s no colour in the marks, though. They’re all the silver-grey of my HB pencil, not too hard, not too soft, but just right. Like Mama Bear’s bed.
When I have a question for myself, or an odd observation that doesn’t flow with what else is on the page, I box it in, wherever on the page it sits. I draw a hard box around it, three sides out to the page edge’s fourth. Questions sit next to, but separate from, the certainty of observations; measurements line up in parallel, away from the reach of my hundred-foot tape, my prismatic compass, my hand level, the tools of my rocky trade.
I work figures using a pencil sharpened to a fine point, hard enough for control, but soft enough to give depth and blackness. I favour HB in general, with B for the softer, blacker lines. H for Hard, B for Black. Soft black, lamp black; the more clay, the harder the pencil. Graphite softens, allows the pencil to slip across the page, as I draw the slips and faults. I letter words on the page, on maps: Fault and No Fault, questioned and unquestioning. I delimit the fault, sketch the land as it lies, and as it moves and has moved. Forever and ever amen. If another man should map this land, in fifty years time, or a hundred, then shifting land will make it strange, will shift it from this shape I have mapped. That is the way of it.
Where one man might see solidity in a landscape, and never-changing, I see only change, movement, transformation. I see where the land has changed and moved, and I see where it will, one day, move and change; and move and change again. Its past and future are there to read in its present. I can read the land. I can move my eyes (my prismatic compass, my hand level, my hundred-foot tape) across the land and, each day, I read it, and I write it, marking its edges and ridges with my HB pencil in the ivoire clair pages of my quadrillé notebook. The ruling aligns my thoughts; and yet I can disregard the rules, make them a grid for my most abstract thoughts and ideas.
There I leave you for today, my love.
Yours forever,
Zigi
49. Forty-six years ago
From the notebooks of Zigmund Silbermann
THE SHAPE OF THE FAULT
The most common shape
of the fault trace is an arc
concave to the north.
48. Forty-six years ago
Letter from Wellington
May, 1968
Zigi love,
Here we are in Wellington, and you’re there in the field. You know our life here, the shape of our days. Tell me about yours. Who are you?
I have taken on some work, a little typing for a local business, on the typewriter in the house here. That scrappy story I sent you last month, our shared shalefire song, typed in ghosts of letters, squeezing ink from the old ribbon like blood from a stone? Now that I’ve inked the ribbon, it’s good as new – don’t you think?
(I know you could read my pale and sorry shalefire story, though, as you sent it back to me as cunning verse!)
We can stay a little longer in the house. It’s all arranged. I’ve cashed in our tickets home. It was easier than changing the date.
And you will be with us again soon, in this little house that keeps getting colder as the light gets lower, the days shorter. Hurry back to warm me.
Your love,
Rosa
47. Forty-six years ago
Postcard from Wellington
May, 1968
Dear Frank,
We may stay a little longer, dear. The photography is going so well. Iris continues to enjoy her lessons. Can you spare us, Frank? You could get help for the studio if you need it. I’ve taken the house here for another two months.
Your wife and daughter,
Rosa and Iris
46. Forty-six years ago
Letter from field camp, with poem enclosed
May, 1968
Dearest Rosa,
Your letter reached me! Thank Iris for her drawings. Tell her I have tucked them in my notebook, as I tucked my trousers into my socks when I cycled.
Ah, but you needn’t have put away your red cellophane fish! You took my teasing too much to heart. Recall this: when I held it in my hand to ask it my fortune, it curled to the shape of lucky in love (according to the legend on its packet). I know it was only the warmth and humidity of my hand, my skin, that caused it to curl, yet I cannot fault its accuracy.
And your strange story of shalefire – what am I to make of that bawdy? It is so good to see you writing tales again! And this, from our talk of colour, and dyeing wool.
I continue our conversation: I have taken your words and versified them. I have tucked the paper in here, next to this short note. I could not help myself. It is just a doodle – I think this is a word to use? – repuzzling your words from prose into verse. Forgive me. I love your words as they are. This is play. This is me sounding your words back to you from here, an echo from the land, your words made strange.
Listen: that is love, echoing to you from
Your Zigi
SHALEFIRE SONG
After Rosa
It’s time for celebration-o,
for singing, songing music-o!
For dancing drinking merry-o! When
shale bonfires are lighted.
Fires are lit at summersease,
(when summer’s tailing, summersease)
and bracken’s dry as ever be. Then
the shalefires shall be lighted.
Then the bracken is collected-o,
and shale is piled in bunkers-o,
then they all come together, and
the shale bonfires are lighted.
They burn til head of summer-o,
through dark’ning time of winter-o,
the shalewatch shall watch over-o,
while the shalefires smoulder.
Smoulder eyes of ember in ’em,
o you see ‘em when they poke ’em,
o they burn with red eye gleaming, steaming
smoking smoulderfires.
In the summer time of wetting,
when the gleaming steaming’s retting
there’s the smell of woollen netting hanging
over all the town.
And the shalewatch’s no more needed,
once the ash is raked and graded,
and the pots are where it’s made up now, with
pants-off pints
of brew.
And we all go pissing freely
in the buckets and the brewery,
and the smell of it is flowery if you
’magine well enough.
Mix the shale ash, mix the wettings,
mix them good and make them retting,
let it stew another season then
the paste is fit to dry.
45. Forty-six years ago
Letter from Wellington
May, 1968
Oh, Zigi, love, now you’ve gone again and I can barely believe you were here.
To see you standing at the gate of this funny little cold little house was to see a ghost made solid. I remembered every inch of you, every moment of you, every smell of you, every sound of you. How could I not, with Iris your echo? I hold this in my heart: you, taking her hand in both of yours, shaking it softly, solemnly. The two of you, like a trick with a mirror.
The eggshells and stones remain on the windowsill, where you left them. They alternate there: the shells letting light through, the stones catching it, holding it. I see you now in my mind’s eye, juggling those two stones (plucked from your pocket) with that egg (about to break for pancakes). ‘The earth’s like this egg,’ you told Iris, ‘just this thin mantle covering its molten centre.’ Then you cracked it, for the pancakes, and she cried, for the broken earth! Perhaps you need to hone your teaching skills, my love.
You (rational scientist) laughed so much at my silly little cellophane fortune-telling fish that I (chastened) have tucked it away in the back of a drawer. Perhaps if you do not come back to us soon I will haul it out again, and ask it when I should expect you?