Indigo Perry
CORRUGATIONS
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. These poems are written during improvisational sessions as part of a collaborative performance art project called Illuminous, with trumpet player Andrew Darling. Indigo's writing is digitally projected onto a wall or screen as she writes. indigoperry.com/illuminous.
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CORRUGATIONS
1 Corrugated Roads
Corrugations on old bridges
crossed in dreams. A small child, a girl.
.
Only shops. No houses.
No homes.
She gathers courage to ask busy
women
packing
shelves
if they've seen
her mother and they
say no, she left.
And the street grows quiet,
for it's a street in the country
and as the afternoon falls
birds and the wind call along
the footpath and human voices
scatter and blow away. She
walks to the middle of the
bridge and rests
her fingertips
on a sheep's
fleece left
behind there,
hung over the
wooden railing.
It's moist and warm to touch
but she's already getting
cold and over
the bridge
the street
becomes a road
of dirt and yellow
rocks. Trees
bend over it and she
sees how their shadows
crawl over the road
Soon it will be dark. She
knows the heads of trees
turn to ghosts at night.
The child’s view
shifts. She's
further away now.
We leave her behind on the
bridge and the women in
the shops have gone home.
She grows smaller, but still she is
there, alone. A child in a memory,
never retrieved.
Waking, cold,
I must have sleepwalked
to get here. It's night
and has the quiet and
stillness of four am.
Dark, but the
moon is full and shows
the deep green of the
edges of a road lined
with sleeping houses.
Shows, too, the
pale blue-white of
my skin. Cold.
Almost naked, breasts exposed,
a soft-waisted skirt oddly pulled
on, and I try to pull it up
to cover myself but it's
not long enough and
whatever way I arrange it,
it's exposing my body. Now
I'm shivering. I don't
recognise this place.
From my bed, my somnolent
self has wandered here
and I don't know the way
home. I have the night,
the sky, the moon, to
myself in that glorious
secrecy of night-wandering.
But, then
there's a car. It
arrives
noiselessly, almost
an animal slunk
from out of
the bushes,
and I freeze,
I too am an
animal, trying
to merge with
the moonlight,
making myself
mirage.
For a beat, it seems
it's worked and I've
become the night.
The car swerves,
headlights on now,
and its turning is
hard violent.
It's a predator.
I'm pulling at the fabric
but it's no cover.
And I run. But
limbs move as
though under
viscous,
deep water.
As though I am
the night. And
have no limbs but
only planes of
milky light
and a musky
scent of night-blooming
jasmine and the
sorrow of loss
and regrets not
yet lain to rest.
Another awakening. This
time in my bed.
Heart
too fast. Body still
flailing in slow
motions of subdued,
flight.
Sorrow and
regrets still
binding.
The room is dark and
the walls intact and door
closed. Covers warm.
Heart unquiet.
I miss the wet-painted
appearance of the
verges of the
unfamiliar.
The interest of the moon.
The self that felt to walk the
night with
breasts bare.
Still, I can't return to sleep
with my body sharply
attuned to the
presence of the
animal.
A circling inwards to
solace. Warm holding
spiralled.
2 To Float Before Sinking
Timelessly
timorous Picking a
way from pale,
moon-washed stone
to the thinly voiced
rhythm marked on the
currents. The
cure.
Membranes taught
strung-taut memories
run
like water.
Upon
reflection. What could have been
different.
The dreamed.
Immersion.
Running the cascade
through streets
bloodlines.
Gutters and stuttered utterance of all
you meant to do.
Achieved.
Acquiesced. Bled-
dry
and replenished
with the
flamboyance of
tree ferns
in resurrection.
The reservoir
of the heart.
Depths created
to sink into like
beds you made
without meaning to
yet here
you
lie And
with slowly fading
incandescence
perhaps floating
spread out
the patterns of petals
flung out
Softness in akimbo until the deeper seas
Furled-up documentation of the earth
begin the
seepage Faint
capillaries of
transparence in
the skin of your
flower growing
to patches with
the perfection
of asymmetry the
shapes of bruises
in reverse.
Missing pieces of you
stolen by the
damming of the earth
Your
petalled skin falls
to pieces It's
a boat that not only
sinks
but transforms
to threads and then
translucence.
To a momentary sense
of absence at the
surface. Deja vu
shaken off as
the wind shifts and
you turn away.
This resilience of breathing
through fire
and walking lost amidst
echoes. To be still
inside this
can be
impossible.
To be
quiet and sense
smallness may amplify
all that's louder
and larger.
Inevitably
human.
Deceptively
transitive
living beyond
Walking fast with a strong
stride
the tide laps at your heels
Hear the tapping of feet
the knocking on the
surface.
Forming curves
Arches attuned to
this fitting together with
the forever. Body
curled foetal to the
heat of the circle. The
white water of bones
instrumental to this
score.
All voices under
translation Archives
of the
elemental
The rain on the roof
the music fossilised
A season a chamber
in which your heart
is the percussive
mnemonic of the
air you breathed
into being.
Resting, touching
what is closest
and recognising
familial vibration
The resonance of hope.
The arms
of my sky open
to the new
hour
the invention of
cells in houses
for living in houses
made from the shell
of poesis. In sleep
within the
hypnosis of
night I lie
beside you,
face to face,
wake
still
aware of the warmth
of you You were
there.
I traced the line
of your breastbone
with the tips of my
fingernails just
before I opened my
eyes the cartilage
portal breaking
softly between the
worlds
And still,
the heat
lingers.
In the subdued light
of morning, following
the blazing away, the
setting on fire of the
evidence of the night,
we rise
start again
3 Guildford Lane
Draining silences sinking deep
between minutes and
rivers that
wring
the psyche. I've
devoured the chatter
until all light
matter shows itself
in silhouette
And
feeling the warm
night
call
of
her
you
embrace
shadow
blood running
murmur
lantern rises storey
by
storey
telling all your
layers To
forget
to feel the
shame
Alluring to hide
from it all and
play the
innocent.
But a sweet flow
beckons
the earth up
through the cracks
sounds the
bright melody
even from
underground.
What's stuck fast
shifted by the
age of river
Stones pressed to
implode
mnemonics.
It's a sky that says
it dies to
weep.
Not the complex rain of mortality
but the rain of
childhood.
Deceptive.
Distorted specula of
mirrors turned about
to talk over the
tarnish
Wandering,
then,
through your
dawn broken,
through insomnia.
Tiredness held under
the wraps of the day
Night, though, some
time after one
hours loom
as spectres of
themselves through
the past.
It lingers. Wearing
the same old clothes
Not the immersive
reflection of sleeping.
What comes in the
wakeful hours is
a running
after
away
towards
The attempt to
fix the unfixed.
In the wakeful dream
it does not occur to
you that some things
are not to be fixed.
Requiem to
acquiescence.
Dark stream
spoken for
to be a city pathway
but who can regret
paths taken and
structures built from
dream body skeletal
architecture. You
dance the foundations
and make a language.
Once enunciated, it's
a breath taken
Alive transmuted
still itself
lines
gestures describing
dance
eternal.
Moments of
spontaneous
flippant choices
remaining
the spirit figure of
memory in
flight. Storm cells
flickering
themselves alight
in ideas in this
identity pinning is this
a forever idea or already
incensed with itself
and leaving the room.
Remembering
that very first
winter.
We could see our breath.
We saw the wings of
fog over the
creek And the way
fine breakages
showed up
even as we kept a polite
distance. Languages
laced in the snuck-up cry of the creek
and how in the
dense layering moss
lichen
the rocks
the aloneness
we sound a
rhythm of
connectedness.
The creek that feeds
the river
that satiates
the thirst
of the city becomes the body
of all
the bodies of water we've known. The swimming pools,
acid-blue.
Baths taken.
All manner of cleansings,
baptisms, love affairs
in seas under moonlight
And of course the
drownings.
Ships
passed and boats
spinning fast without
direction leaking boats
too I see
you
bailing and
smell the
depth of the
exhaustion and
the power in
the
vessel.
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. These poems are written during improvisational sessions as part of a collaborative performance art project called Illuminous, with trumpet player Andrew Darling. Indigo's writing is digitally projected onto a wall or screen as she writes. indigoperry.com/illuminous.