Famous Reporter # 11 - poetry, Anne Kellas: 'Ice-Silent'

ANNE KELLAS

Ice-Silent

The night is ice-silent.

Over in the corner a very tired man lies curled up under heaps of blankets.

He is dreaming intently, or sleeping intently.

Just here in the foreground in front of the monitor is a writer

trying to make sense of things through a glass darkly.

Everywhere there are traces,

left-overs.

Everywhere they are slicing away at history.

The image breakers are active, telling me not to bother,

that there are too many stories and poems

and yet they say nothing of song.

The live in glass mountains, ice-silent.

I watch my family. I am the timekeeper and referee.

I worry about the vocative case,

how to escape my role as alarm clock.

I can't her anything now. Everyone must be asleep.

The last car has scratched its way into gear

and roared off from my neighbour's house.

The silence is calling me to uncoil

the covered man

and tuck in the sleeping children.

I must be on guard, off guard.

I want to lunge into life with love and with gusto

but I don't know how.

Love Christ and do as you like, said St. Augustine.

I do not know my neighbours' names.

Someone moves in the passage.

Or is it the wind. Or a mouse. Or just

the old weather boards creaking in winter.

The alarm clock is ringing.

It is ten past eleven to red alert.

One evening we will be called out into the streets.

It will be night and silent,

but the skies will be open.

Something will happen and shadows

will be left on the pavement.

Everyone will vanish.

There will be no more street poets or music,

they tell us.

Science fiction and heaven, and all ideas, will coalesce.

Heaven will come down to earth.

Christ will return.

He will judge the living and the dead.

And His kingdom will have no end.

People will think how they thought of the future

with the careless ease of somnambulates,

and in that second will wish it all otherwise,

and will find themselves thinking of the eyes of the needles,

camels,

and the parable of the talents.

The words of man will fly about lost,

unhinged from the music to sing them.

Under the cover in the corner of the street

a very tired man lies curled up under heaps of papers.

He is dreaming intently, or sleeping intently.

Oblivious of alarm clocks.

The night is ice-silent.

Anne Kellas is a Tasmanian writer, and co-editor of the electronic literary journal, The Write Stuff. Her second collection of poetry, Isolated States is waiting for a publisher.