Title: Sport 39: 2011

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2013, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 39: 2011

Anna Jackson

page 285

Anna Jackson

A poem about itching

A poem about itching
is like a sandwich with sand in it.

But a poem about yawning
is like an open wine glass …

please, start pouring.
After I drink ten glasses

I will probably think up a better poem
and after I’ve only drunk five glasses

I will still be able to write it down.
I’ll show you it when I remember where I put it …

Oh yes! I remember!
I haven’t written it yet!

We were at the British Museum?

There is the smallest grain of something on the sheet
I have to keep moving away from only to meet
again somewhere else in this hotel room bed
and when I finally shift myself clear
there is a shiver in my ear
and my feet itch,
and my scalp,
as if there is something walking
page 286 from hair to hair.
Or is it my skin crawling?
And is it just going to crawl
around and around the edges of me
or is it going to crawl free
leaving me
to wake in the morning
unravelled, the bits of me that have travelled
not even me? And
if all night I have seen
what they see, calling this dreaming
would be like failing to see the holes between
the atoms and calling it beauty.
Oh, but that really is beautiful.
We were at the British Museum?
And the explanation offered
in the Egyptian room
kept dividing into three:
body, heart, spirit is just the start,
then spirit into ka, ba, and akh,
ka, the spiritual double of the body
pictured as a pair of arms,
ba, the spirit that travels, from
the body, in the night
and on beyond the life,
and akh, the spirit that aspires to be immortal,
the possibility
open as the holes between atoms
that human might be god
In the meantime, the resin and wrappings
for the body, entrapping
the itchy ba.
There was a mummified fish!
For the mummified cats?
Or to allow for fish ba
to flow to and from fish body,
merrily merrily merrily
without itch or seam?

page 287

Shut and staying shut

Your eyes are shut when I tell you
I am pregnant and they stay
shut. When your sister
rings up from San Francisco
you talk for two hours
on the phone without
telling her you’re going to be
a father. Father, what a funny
word. It could have been
a laugh. I find myself
two steps behind you
following you through
the streets, your back
like a leather cliff
in front of me as I weave
around tourists trying
to be a couple with you,
my husband, striding
past Boots the chemist
and Student Travel.
You kick a Burger King cup
at Student Travel.
It’s not like it’s going to be
a dog, you can take babies
on planes. But it stays put,
in me, for nine months
during which time
your sister, no longer
in San Francisco,
lives on our stairwell
and my sister, when she arrives,
has to sleep on the stairs
and the two of us—three,
I mean—can’t very easily
page 288 go anywhere at all.
After ten months I’m not so
sure it’s even trying to
get out, that constant
tapping against the walls
perhaps not intending
escape but communication.
Do you think you could tap back
the code for come on out,
your father’s eyes are open now?

Envelope

I stick a stamp on an envelope.
It is a lake, a little glassy, and a mountain, behind the lake.
A little bit of lake is left behind on my tongue.

I would not like to be a fish in that lake.
A little bit of me would always be going missing.
I would always be leaving the lake for the mountain.

Now it is several days later,
and I am waiting for a reply.
Then I see that the stamp is still attached to me.

So that explains my demonic energy lately!
That explains how I rose so high so fast,
what everyone means when they refer to my depth.

But where am I being sent?
And when I arrive, who will open me?
Roughly, with a finger, or gently, with a knife?