Insubstantial as a skeleton?
As the X-ray a doctor holds to the light?
Celluloid strips down the flesh
To black and white, bones and air?

The minimal carcass. The functional tree.
Carpal to metacarpal pushing
Across a page, words fumbling down
To fingers from skull and cartilage...

the scan declares a brain is free
Of tumour or haemorrhage
But doesn’t comment on the mind’s possibility.

Idle, industrious, the faint white streamers
Which streak the filmy cortex
Must be sentences.



Under the tongue, after meals
the little pill melts. A mongrel dog
infects an embryo with its indolent lick.

We can bear it, we say. Look now
at the human genome, a shiny new ship
emerging from the dock.

Ambitious, on schedule. A precise faith
that might yet fall apart
like a soft clay pot failing to centre.

But see the wheel still spinning
splattering muc. Hippocrates wants
a perfect pot. The potter is patient.



Gilles de la Tourette ticks
through time’s returning minutes.
The nerve’s wire ineffable clock
sees no reason

to mourn shame’s stranded whale
ignominy, stigma
a beach washed up
among its own shells.

In the front rows of the auditorium
the deaf flicker. Their hands
shout for news of Martha's Vineyard
where sign’s grandmother rocks

on the porch, in mute twilight.
She daydreams on a piano of air.
She signs in her sleep, the mnemonic
pull of oars over water.

This vagabond of afflictions;
this Rumplestiltskin wets our appetite
for spinning gold from straw.
Umbilical words

flow almost too brightly.
We comphrehend
the fable’s vicissitudes
the pseudonym’s narrative

and the brute wave which comes
steamrolling in from out there
spilling calamitous tons of fairyland
across our sticks.

His Awakenings are resurrections.
They will make an opera to celebrate
...fragments of music
to synthesize the right and left mind.

He flares the sulci’s dark crannies
the brain’s fallow plains
game continents
stretched between cells

the quivering jungles of Africa
ladled into skull bones.
Itis, osis - no - not the right name
for the neuromélange, the mystery.

What is normal shuffles to the bottom.
What is new ascends.
More than compassion
more than categories

more than aluminium wedges of literature
more than the tissue wrapped
around a tray of china cups
there is more we want

and more to ask for
more beyond the imminent wave
the body map of sand.
Perhaps we only want to want.

Substantia nigra.
Encephalitis lethargia.
The caconym stinks of starfish rations
the clinical sea washing over pebbles
washes cold as nostalgia would have it.

Music can teach the lame to walk!
And now I am thinking
about what part of the brain applauds
what part doubts

what part defines the otherness of this man
whose humane fame will seize
a new palette and in the next book
paint eleven magic swans
somewhere else.



My deaf friend said to me: our conversations
    are overheard, everywhere we speak.
He teaches me the sign for Sydney: the shape

of a harbour bridge, skin webbing blue water.
    I hear a quiet voice in my hands
in the silence when I am speaking

and foam, rubber, snow and glycerine
    seem softer in the fingering span
than spoken words falling short of what they name.

I once saw a baby catching sunlight in his hands -
    everywhere the child touched
he laughed at what he could not touch

until language wheeled his pram away
    and he learned that silhouettes and sun
were called chair and where.

Precisely, in mother tongue, we categorise
    the conch shells, sea hollows
the safety pins and taboos.

My friend said: I will teach you
    what you need to know...
other signs belong only to the deaf.

He teaches me the sign Forget
    it is a fist placed against the right temple
the hand opening, flicking sun away from the head.



Nijinski’s velvet groin
    throbbed across a nymph’s scarf, and then
the foal’s soul was wrenched out

sanity itself another dream
    moving sideways across a darkening stage
(as though across the mind’s vase).

Nijinski leapt into the frieze, catatonia of stone
    where perplexed feet no longer know
how to find the earth.

A phenomenal forest rustles far away
    murmurs closer. Green tongues in a brain.
Conversations cannot be grasped.

Curtains open, close. Delusions
    perch ten claws in the wings.
There! Just then! Was it you Mallarme who spoke?

But did you see that filthy salivating war walking
    running dancing heel-to-toe?
Did you see Rome’s savage faun

saunter on, just to show himself
    as he once was, beyond the meaning of events
in the bold gold of a muscle’s ripple?

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