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.