at 21:26

When Years Take the Stars Away

Show Me The Treasure 21:26 Edit

If you’re reading this in one-hundred-million,

two-thousand and seven AD, that is, after all the stars

have inched away, taking their tails of light with them,

far off to where the universe strikes a light against

what, at the time of writing, has no dimension, the timeless

place that time is coming to, I want to tell you

that here – right now – the sky is prinked

with nebulae in clusters and symposium,

the light is mostly white, so you get the true idea of blackness

and the abundance is such that it presses infinities

into the foreheads of children lying safe in their beds at night,

and those who can get out from the cities

and take the time to sit outside, make up elaborate

stories, concerning these embroideries of starlight, and if

a meteorite rushes, burning, into the earth’s air,

wonderment bubbles up, into this strange satisfaction

which might be happiness. I want you to know, as you sit

reading this on your black and starless planet

that you should not find that blank

blanket of night a reason to believe that stars do not exist,

the galaxies, the Milky Ways and the jewel of Magellan’s Clouds,

still shine and burn abundant in distant orbits.

This is one of the poems that often gets a run when I am invited to give a reading. Of course, while it is ostensibly about the expanding universe, it is a love poem.

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

When Years Take the Stars Away

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