![]() |
Home
| Databases
| WorldLII
| Search
| Feedback
Alternative Law Journal |
![]() |
POETRY
No one knows what the laws are. That there are laws we know, by the daily burnings, if nothing else.
Anne Carson;
TV Men: Sappho
In-our fireplace we are burning wood -
300 years old and embedded with square-headed
nails
and its own splitting, the gentle and slow rub of
flames
along its straight back rising orange and upright
as if drawn toward some higher place that awaits
all courage.
And when she speaks her lips curve upwards.
This fire is brave to love this wood
because other fire has preceded it, the planks
collected from a house round the comer which burned but not
to the ground.
And he looks away.
I will call it the second burning
and this burning, evidence,
that intellectual conquest
of time.
And ash? he says, and misses her smile, what is to ·
Be born.
And ash, she says, evidence of evidence,
of what came before,
no more-
Daughter is derived from the verbal root, duh, to
milk.
Is this burnt stick, wood or bone?
He claimed on the one hand to be the dead girl's
father
yet while she lived he denied paternity.
Do we have an expert to tell us
at what temperature bone turns to ash?
She is the dead girl's mother, that one sitting
there,
not smiling.
Duh?
What is being described here bears no
resemblance
to what really happened.
The moment of love?
The conflagration?
The house stood for three hundred years.
Her eyes were a colour none could agree on.
Does anyone here know
what these questions are trying to elicit?
The term, father, is rarely applied to animals.
...and she said, my belly.
And he said, could have been anyone.
Her eyes are like the man's
her mother smiled at
before she was born.
Is green just a species
of blue?
What is meant
by animal?
The fire in her eyes is like that
in the man's who looked away from her mother's smile.
Daughter means derived
from another, could have been anyone.
AustLII:
Copyright Policy
|
Disclaimers
|
Privacy Policy
|
Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AltLawJl/2004/36.html