whispered lineage

Poem written July 2011 in China; published November 29, 2013 in PERIL Magazine #16: Binaries: http://peril.com.au/featured/in-the-anthropocene/

Read Full Post »

Published June 1, 2013 in CORDITE Poetry Review #42: No Theme II, guest-edited by Gig Ryan: http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme2/some-kind-of-simulacrum/

Read Full Post »

Originally written 2001 (Australia – India – U.S.A.). Recast in 2013, published in CORDITE Poetry Review: Transpacific (Feb. 1, 2013) at:

http://cordite.org.au/author/martinkovan/

Read Full Post »

published in CORDITE Poetry Review: Transpacific (Feb. 1, 2013) :

http://cordite.org.au/author/martinkovan/

Read Full Post »

Work-torn clothes, the ache in his eyes:

how the knee that steadies paper or bowl is still

the same, slight uncertain crutch it has always seemed to him to be.

He can see only its hollow persisting, the way

his whole life is forever marked Anonymous.

           Via negativa – the great, uncomprehending way.

Deer in an American night, coyote moan: is their

dark path in the cold something that also vanishes

their bare, forked animal footprints as they move away?

Do I move with them in a solidarity of erasure?

My ears, at least, are almost as fine-tuned, and

what they hear is not always pure invention. Night-miracles:

insects lost in their haze of white-noise, airplanes

lowing to impermanence in a blackest sky, a father and

a mother crying, not far, in a shadow trailer-home.

And this dream of a lady-saint peering into brambles and thickets

because she can hear her own voice in there,

telling her the way.

To hear it she loses it somewhere, first.

Goes for days and years mislaying the clues

she has already given away – diamonds of a deaf-mute

scattered in the weeds. Left for dharma-lions

and wild men to stumble on,

long past midnight.

(II.2004, CA.)

Read Full Post »

The image without an image
pinned up in the air
advertises
the Ten Thousand Things

but where was your heart when it
fell down
here?

never thinking it would fall for the nameless
unwanted, undesired         ‘things’
lost by the wayside.

city-skips full of refuse
obscure songs    expired train-stations their
tickets       un-used
books not yet read           a
child yelling
in the street            crone in the bar
who read your palm –
correctly.

Aged monuments      pigeon-strewn
standing-in              for something
other than themselves
lives that have stood up

to time & waste

one after another
surely         self-
shedding.

July, 2010

(published May 1, 2012, CORDITE POETRY REVIEW #38: http://cordite.org.au/poetry/sydney/shedding/)

Read Full Post »

I

In the early hours we took to the road

fully-prepared    maps    compass   all-weather gear

& civilized guitars.

By midday worn down

we had to leave           half of it behind.

late afternoon        the maps had

lost their use

destinations     less pressing

songs unaccompanied

the journey its own reward.

nightfall there was only the single tent

to shelter those of us

waiting up        for the dawn.

Others     staying out

keeping company

with the stars.

II

High vast tilleul trees

hollow canopy domes of summer

thundering bee-droves         at fierce blossom suck

each tree a jet-plane

readying for lift-off.

walking underneath

in green translucid light

the mind stops –

unable to move     in mid-air

take a single thought

further

slipt inside          the bloom of the World

forever.

III

Some wanted to say

the eclipse could be explained

just as freedom

could be learned.

others refused to hear

hands cuppt over ears and eyes

private screenings         projected on

their own cavewalls.

Darkness descending       the obscured sun

in these days of hidden Buddhas

I sit outside my hut

wait for the clamour to die down

watch for the double

dissolution.

Georges St Labastide, France, June 2010

Read Full Post »

Another’s face looking out a window

Brimming with an inchoate music.

The house charismatic but spare, flat to bare ground

& whitewashed. (He lives alone.) A stable for

Attila’s horses come from the Hungarian plain.

(Hysterical car-alarms, magazine weddings of the suburbs.)

His letters to Stefi Geyer curl edge-wise with suicide.

Like a painter who sees through cobwebs

he closes the blind to everything

begins                     again

drags up sense from organic form

justifies the unwilling lover (is she really his muse?)

a Bluebeard who would play acid electric guitar

so they’ll all come flocking

hovers over injured manuscript in the time

it takes to brew black, bitter tea & strychnine.

The composer waits, in a foreign summer

for nothing in particular.

Then the Gordian noose of sound unravels

sends in fibre-optic substitutions

epilepsy stilettos defying obsessive

circuitries of reconfigured pain.

Allegro barbaro. Moto perpetuo. Demonic ostinati.

Abused violins (she’s a violinist) – the Bartok snap!

inner-ear that hears what’s coming soon after 1909.

Like Schoenberg what he knew was

everything lies in the sequence

the withdrawal when she calls

his absurd shouting in the night

(Wozzeck is there, Joseph K., even Stanley)

that make her close her peasant shutters.

What was needed was a trapdoor

or a trance-house Totentanz.

Into another unseen place

Not a home, nor loveless exile

(not these irreal portents of another TV-war):

a first quartet, a poem, barest grace.

Summer 2002

Read Full Post »

Not to have found, or lost

Anything. The hours in burlap

improvised tents we sit in through darkness

games & joke & out-of-tune guitar to

draw the breath closer in the same

close skin we all crave.              Sunil

never gives sign of seeing himself

from a distance all night serving big brown

Germans dhal, rice & tea, his third thumb

corkscrewing out of his wrist          birth-wonder

we abort in the West.

Orion flexing above      dogs fighting in mud

madness is real and I’m not sure

what’s worse getting drunk on Indian whiskey

or waiting for the earthquake already long due.

Only raving Irish Baba tries to make it for real

comes down to town to recruit fools like me

help him drag supplies up high for the winter

another five-thousand feet, at snowline

immured in a cave, sunset, stark mad in his

dead-ordinary stark sane mind.        Milarepa

turned nettle-green Shiva was blue

and Baba is Hep. A yellow          the rest

of us lonely & trying     hooked on distances

on vertical time on all reasonable dharmas

though the opium is crude it’s cheaper than love

& his useless loose thumb is the most perfect

thing there is. In the morning we can expect

the eight cold hells and rituals of cobbled shame

giving out rupees      lusts & forgetfulness

knowing there is no time that nothing

taken nothing gained is the only

slow    sure    road out of town.

Dharamsala, January, 2001

Read Full Post »

Untold technology to short-circuit

‘mental fight’         even here.

“armies amassing”            (synaptic doubt)

you look again

ascertain asymmetry

of the real

between hand-held video

depth-of-field and

sheer lines of jagged high mountain

tumbled within a window frame            beyond.

perfectly quiet and clear afternoon at snow-line.

not far

they build fortifications on either side

of the Border

Young girl waits by village pump

plastic bucket in hand

radio music resonates

inside her questioning eyes

never yet seen car-bomb    town-square    carnage

of the Border

aged mother who

turns off TV    slow headshake

brings goats in from high pasture

the boys demonstrate wooden rifles

we fight for our country      our honour sir

protect the interests                    as anyone does

of the Border

Always that margin

neglected further edge

detested pull of the other

always that further place

for which we must keep vigil

must keep

there has to be a line somewhere

(in the dirt            washed by monsoon)

where children safely play          lives tethered

against this space

Mongol hordes Visigoths damn redskins

gypsies & cretins & supernumerary Jew     swept clean

to under-side            of the mind

keep em out         other side

stealth planes too fast to see      from both sides

of the Border.

Jammu Kashmir, 2001

Read Full Post »