The Shape of Water

When I first moved into the house and garden where I live I imagined an extravagent water feature, with a rockpool and a fall, perhaps a rill winding in from the side path, or a formal pool dropping down into a fern edged pond. Then one blistering summer day, watching a currawong drinking from the film of tepid water collected on the lid of the BBQ, I put out this ikebana bowl, full of water for the birds. I have been watching it ever since, a seismograph for deck steps, a mirror for the sky, a landing for rain drops, a watering hole, a bird bath, a barometer of the state of household equaninimity - if all is well the bowl is full of clean, clear water - and an object of contemplation.

The Shape of Water

Why do they still come to this last inch of water,

claws pivoting the bowl’s rim

to dip further, further into a mixture tainted

by flecks of undigested fruit and seeds,

with its history of wind set out in leaves?

Rosellas, magpies, currawongs know this bowl,

the surety of its blue glaze,

know its reflections of sky and cloud and wind,

its surface tremolo from the beat of wings,

and the times when there is so little

in it but it is water still,

know by faith the shape that water comes in,

and return as lovers to it again, again,

through emptiness and dregs and miraculous re-fillings.

This poem first appeared in The Australian Fabian New November 2010.

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

The Shape of Water

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