Jeffrey Harpeng: A KNIFE IN THE HEAD
.
From K Road to the wind-eddied Post Office square, Queen Street is
strung like a flying fox cable. In Post Office square a mime is Falcon
Scott advancing against a catabatic wind. Amundsen has already reached
the pole and returned and caught the ferry home, across the Waitemata
to a bungalow in Devonport.
The mime in Post Office square straightens with pneumatic smoothness,
shifts gear and bows, elegant as a Musketeer. Children in the front
row are tickled by the great feather in his hat. That exaggerated
feather duster sweep is the on your mark to me, up on Karangahape
Road. There I am reaching for the crossbar of the flying fox wheel
that glides the cable's sagging arc.
Before you get to glide you could get fronted outside a late night
caf�. `Would you like to make a threesome?'
Just as the wheel gets up whirr on the theoretical rope, I pass the
Theosophical Society and drop ballast from my diving belt. How easily
I forgot I was wearing that. From then on I continue passing the
Theosophical Society Hall, and don't quite get past that Edwardian
edifice. Did I just see Krishnamurti closing the door? If I let go I
will not float, for I did not get past the first joke in the levity
handbook. My heart is low on helium.
Theosophical Hall
lights out... its silences
locked in
Just recovered from a dizzy fall, the Fee Fi Fo Fum giant stands,
groggily looking south. His feet are in the harbour behind the Custom
House Ferry Terminus, across the road from Post Office square. His
gaze is toward the crest of K Rd and beyond. Half a sprawling city
south the ashes of the travel stop caf� crest the distant Bombay
Hills. The view beyond is foreshortened in a squint. All the sleepy
suburbs between have been switched off tonight and Manukau Harbour's
mudflatness is dark as an iris.
the moon clouds over
itself wrinkled
in the harbour
Gazing south, latitudes at a time, one blink to the mesmerised flow of
the Waikato: a film of luminous clouds poured over a dark mirror.
Huntley power plant, smoking black cigars, puts on a front of cubist
indifference. A flutter further, the giant's remote gazing views a
great lake, then winks past a line of snow capped volcanoes pretending
to be liner funnels steaming south through an ocean of fog. They
struggle through geological time to reach a harbour city where the
wind struggles to remember some ancient melody as it rushes tunelessly
over hills and across the harbour. Whetukairangi*, wakeful at the
harbour mouth, feels the giant's gaze, and almost turns from the light
tattoo of stars on the black skin of night. Then there is water and
more hills and clouds.
The giant, back behind the Custom House, gazes and listens for a
squawking goose. There are flickers of gold in the far off rivers, as
far south as the Shotover where the goose pecked gravel for nuggets.
There is not a sound from prospectors buried in rough graves or from
all the Chinamen dug up and shipped home for a reburial where the
immortals might whisper into their bony earhole and their dry bones be
stirred by those sweet nothings. They soak sea water. They were lost
at sea, shipwrecked off the Hokianga, far to the north.
mouths full of earth
the ancients
opinions
The giant is titanically pensive, attentive for the squawk of his
golden goose. He hears only the useless honk of a lone moa among the
primeval sprawl of beech forests. Somewhere in Arthurs Pass it seems
to be, but his hearing isn't what it used to be! Other than extinct
moa he hears sweet nothing.
A couple of gargantuan paces out under the giant's gaze the flying fox
whirrs through ghostly traffic. Raise your eyes and you can see storm
clouds gathering under the giants kilt, which hangs more awesome than
any cinema curtain. P T Barnum would turn in his grave and raise
himself to draw the curtain for that show.
Behind some door, along some off-street corridor, in a downstairs
space, my left ear hears a projector's clatter. Cinema buffs flicker,
watching foreign flicks with characters that run into each other while
out shopping, then merge with the shoppers outside on Friday night.
Some wander down past Aotea Square where a band is playing anthems for
the shaky isles. All the sheet glass around here is nervous, haunted
by the ghost of riots past. Farmers enlisted for the occasion and
police on horseback advance on watersiders. Tenuous as a few lines of
history they get lost in the traffic.
Wind is whistling round my heart, coming down the chimney, between the
timbers of this old house. I am not a house. There is a house, there
are houses in me, large as life and small as memory. What does it
mean, that there are untrue ways of saying true things. Somebody is
knocking at the door.
I glide the flying fox cable, past the chemist shop built into the
back of a palatial cinema constructed in an Art Nouveau cum Arcadian
blend. Indian gods nap in alcoves in the foyer, Baghdad balconies are
halfway to the starry ceiling above the stalls. When Bruno Ganz, on
the silver screen, enters the building where he gets a knife in the
head, he is entering the back room of the chemist shop to get his
script filled: a knife in the head for the irritating memories, and a
powder for the headache. For the rest of the film he's trying to piece
together what happened, and where his life was when he went. The
chemist slipped a tincture of drama in Bruno's script, a tincture of
unknown danger, and a deep amnesia at the facts we've passed and
haven't arrived at yet.
after the movie
coffee steam drifts
to nirvana
Tributaries of streets and lanes feed down to Queen Street, a witching
hour dry gulch prone, by day, to flash floods of traffic that wash
memories and dreams away. Dipped headlights ride the gleaming tarmac.
Up Vulcan Lane a bluesman slide fingers a gleaming Dobro and chugs
through `Jezuz is on thee main lion, tell him watch you want. My Jezuz
is on the main lion, tell him watch you want. You can call him up and
tell him watch you want.'
summer afternoon
in the pubs long shadow
we listen to the blues
drink shandies
drink coke on ice
There's an archaeology, comatose below the bitumen and concrete
floors, the wreck of a sunken shop, pylons of old wharves under a tide
of landfill. An unsprung bell from over a haberdashery door is mute
with mud. Unglazed bricks are leached by time's runoff seeping down
into the forgotten. Even with your feet firmly on the ground, the
memory of that does not seep up into you.
Finally I glide to an exclamation mark in front of the Custom House.
After that long glide, that migratory flight, my thoughts have lost
their equilibrium. Nothing new there, but worse than that, now I want
to squawk, to honk, to lay golden eggs. I need a word with Freud about
all this.
Two great hands descend. One plucks me up, and places me in a pouch in
the other hand. At that handy altitude I spy a glance of beanstalk at
the giants back, then scan all the vertigo around.
post office
clock face and the moon
yellow with time
Swaying in the soft leather pouch I constantly pinch my nose, purse my
lips and blow to depressurise, and struggle against the drug of
memory, that other knife in the head.
a street mime
climbs a rope of air finds
there is no more
by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Queensland, Australia
first published in Quarter Past Sometime (PostPressed), 2007
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