Indigo Perry
Indigo Perry is a writer living in the Yarra Valley, outside Melbourne. Her book Midnight Water: A Memoir, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. She is a lecturer in Writing & Literature at Deakin University. Most of Indigo's current writing is poetry, often written in public spaces. Her website is indigoperry.com.
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Cave of Swimmers
I'm not sure I want to
swim away in the obvious directions
of sadness
And the husk of
this.
I'm waiting for the rain. To be drenched in it and have it peel me
of clothes until I am filmed in moony, transparent skins. In breakage, I will be
lovely.
And you
won't go this time, leaving me to the lonely relentlessness of the river in the
night. I’m tired of being strong like unbreakable thread, a fishing
line drawing tighter to corset me like a woman being prettily, slowly quelled
with ribbons.
I don't want to go home to the children I've made. I'd rather
skate surfaces of indelicacy and irresponsible behaviour. Lick away
the pretense of caress and
sink my fingernails into the skin, kiss with hard lips and teeth
until I make jagged blue-red lines.
Lines to be followed back to me.
I will stand here amidst my sharp-tipped flowers with my soundscape,
my score
of rushing water.
And my mouth quivers. Who am I to be the one who is sad.
I’m this one.
I led her here with marks I made like poems in your flesh. Scales
of memory pain flicker me in knife-scattered and -scraped flecks.
To cry through nights seems sweet until I stretch out to feel
the emptiness.
And wonder what mistakes were these
and am I going to stop. Breathe on me
with gentle, warm wind through this bleak desert with its
dream
of rain,
until I wake and remember how it feels to have feet and to have blood circling
inside. What it is to bleed in heat over another and he
rubs it over himself and then puts his clothes over the top
and goes out to the street with
imprints of me
all over his skin.
Rags streaming,
wrapped to bind my wrists, cutting off the circulations,
the fucking endless circles.
Touch me again
because I've forgotten to be here. Forgotten to be
born into this life, instead of caught in flight between.
A storm in the bones.
Breath held in. A hot, red-black ocean surging. Nowhere to go, empty of
swimmers.
I go searching in the waking between dreamless hours for my
cave of swimmers.
Mine.
Do I really look in blindness: in desolate directions.
Fury in the fingertips. The hurt of wanting to hurt.
To have affect.
To be the one keeping you awake.
With my seas,
lapping over your skin.
Prowler
Always the endings and the rhythms
rhymes and the rages rain all night must be thunder the thump of wounds
Around you all our children
thrumming It's you who haunts the mornings.
Who is this self, up with the washing-through the rinse
many dirty dishes to keep me from sleep. The adolescence of loss
left to
those infuriated devices Remember when you said I was present
like a hummingbird.
Here but in flight.
I've been
the bird of absence the home in dissonance promises and hurried kisses
Try to predict the detritus My tracing through Your poetic whispers of
absence and presence And
remembering again through the skin and
spectral repetitions of the voice of the mother. I am at school and
There's talk of a prowler.
Always the prowling. Every small town seems to have a
prowler. Too hot I sleep on the trampoline under the Mallee arc of stars but
before dawn I'm running in because I hear the footfalls. In the
schoolyard the taunt ends with something
half swallowed
Your father is the prowler.
What?
Nothing.
You're not meant to tell her.
What?
Your father. He's the prowler.
No. My father, he's the butcher. A gentle, loving man.
He's the prowler.
Everyone knows.
Fifteen years ago, he got
arrested. For being a prowler. In another town. He was the
butcher there. And the prowler.
At home, my mother. At the
sink. Tired eyes. Dad is at work. At the butchery. He
starts before dawn every morning and comes home long after dark. Coats
and aprons over his arm, left in the laundry out the back Where the litter of
kittens curl up in rags under the old sink. Meat-stained work clothes for
washing and pegging out on the line.
Mum, what's this I heard at school. Dad. That other
town where he worked at the meatworks. Prowler.
Arrested.
Her mouth falls open. It both terrifies and impresses
me, that way she has of showing emotion in her face. In many ways, she is very good
at hiding but shock
marks her like open wounds to her face every time
And she is a woman who has suffered many shocks in her lifetime Many
cut-open wounds Openings-up
Who said that?
They really said that to you? At school? Today?
And she tells. Tells a story it looks like she has tried
to forget but
it lives inside her like a dream that just doesn't seem to dissipate no
matter how bright the light.
The police banging at her door. She has me, an infant,
in her arms. And a toddler waking up in the back room. She's sleepy, always
hard for her to find her way out of her deep, deep sleeps.
She doesn't understand.
They keep asking for him. Saying his name. Again and
again. Asking where he is. But it's in the night she is inside this deep sleep
confusion He's not there. Of course he's not He works nights. They
slaughter by day and the butchers work in the night Making the cuts. But
she can't quite remember that Only that he's not here Not in the house
His side of the bed empty and they keep saying his name and of course
she knows the name, he's her husband Of
course he lives here. Why can't she say, he's at work.
She cries says he's not here, can't remember where he is They shout
Think she is hiding something. Is he often missing
when you wake at night, they say And of course he is.
He works
nights. He's the prowler they shout at her. You must know.
You're protecting him.
And my mother, you see, my mother
with all her shock and her open wounds, words like that scare
her They really scare her. Prowlers scare her. But not as much as the
suggestion that her husband is a prowler.
They leave at last. She's got out the words that he's at work. He's at the meatworks
she says
I'm screaming in her arms.
Her baby is screaming in her arms.
She shuts the door on them and puts me in the bassinet
and shuts the door on me too. And sits in the kitchen in her dressing gown with
her coffee. And waits for the morning light.
His name is Robert.
He's a butcher at the meatworks.
He is tall and thin.
Another butcher at the meatworks is also
named Robert. He's also tall and thin.
That butcher Robert is the prowler.
Not her husband. Not my father.
The other butcher Robert, the prowler, is
arrested that night. At some point soon afterwards he is not
only charged with offences relating to the prowling
but also with a series of rapes.
He goes to jail. The other Robert goes to jail.
My father continues to work through the nights. My mother sleeps
her deep sleeps. But,
fifteen years later,
I am at school and they are still saying my father is the prowler.
It's a new decade. A different town. I'm an
adolescent, not a baby in a cream wool blanket in a bassinet. But this
accusation sticks to my skin now.
And I go back to the schoolground and tell them the real story
but nobody is listening.
And I ask my father why that is, and he laughs. He's strong.
Unlike me, he's sure of who he is, and so I watch his face shadow over
as he continues to smile. He can try this on for a moment. He can be the
prowler. Because he's so sure that he's not.
I wish I had that as well as his dark eyes. I don't think I'm
ever sure that I'm not
the prowler
thief night stalker
We,
you and I
are
alike in this way among others
Always meaning to fall asleep earlier but intoxicated
by the wind that sounds itself after midnight.
Indigo Perry is a writer living in the Yarra Valley, outside Melbourne. Her book Midnight Water: A Memoir, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. She is a lecturer in Writing & Literature at Deakin University. Most of Indigo's current writing is poetry, often written in public spaces. Her website is indigoperry.com.