Title: Sport 38

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2010, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 38: Winter 2010

Rachel Bush

page 122

Rachel Bush

Show me the way

Where did you learn the way to do this hard strong common thing?

On a clever single bed you forget to cover yourself in your big dying, forget the geography and landform of yourself.

Who has taught you to pluck and pull at sheets?

Who discovers the bruises under old dry soft skin? Who could name these dark new lakes?

Now there is so much to forget such as:
  • The stiff articulation of your hips, the particular walker you push, its tray and basket with your crumpled handkerchief, a crossword puzzle book
  • How you want new clothes but in the sales they only have clothes for pygmies and it's not fair
  • How in the Day Room at the home we sang Show Me the Way to Go Home.
  • Ballroom, all that dancing, the pair of you at RSA dos
  • And you sailed round the islands in a banana boat
  • Then Miss Inez who whacked you every day for nothing
  • Or the brother who ran like the wind, but rheumatic fever, rheumatic fever
  • The matching outfits, black and white, your mother sewed for the girls to wear in the competitions
  • How you were made supervisor, but the noise, the din, it gets to you in the end
  • That vodka is no good, you did it once, but in the morning you paid for it.
  • How you would sit in the sun with your striped grey warm cat called Cleo
page 123

Your eyes almost focus, tilt themselves to my face.

Why is your hair still brown? Why does it crinkle from a perm (your permanent wave)?

I want to wave now. Bye Bye you say to me. I say it back, wriggle my fingers as women do.

Permanent wave.

Maker

I hold a fat black pencil
that has six sides and read aloud
the indented gold words. They say
KOH-I-NOOR HARDMUTH JUMBO.
They make me think of an elephant
at work in India or another country
that one day I might visit.

The elephant is dark and heavy. Its skin
is lined and hairless. Its trainer wears a turban.
He shouts commands in a language
I can't translate. The animal lifts in his trunk
a log with rough bark. It must carry this to a river
where the log floats downstream with others.

The black paint ends in a perfect wavy line where the sharpener shaved it to make a point. What I want to think about is not the strength of the elephant nor the big precision of its gait but a pencil maker with a pot of black paint and one of gold who sits in a factory and imagines an elephant and a writer.

page 124

Feet inside

We kept with us the archbishop's slippers,
hid them in a trunk with my grandmother's wedding dress worn
once, 23.01.1901.
One day we abandoned the trunk
gave the dress to the museum
who lost it in the fire
that destroyed moa bones
Chinese porcelain, artefacts
(putorino, a pounamu mere)
and their only mummy,
the seventeen year old daughter of a brewer.
The slippers stayed in my wardrobe in a Vogels bread bag
on top of my photograph album with its matt black pages.

When I left town I gave the slippers with unease
to a Cathedral where they displayed them in the crypt behind glass
along with a lock of a saint's hair and the same archbishop's missal.
The subdued sheen of these slippers stays in my mind.
It suggests two sunless feet, the elderly joint below a big toe
the blue threads of veins that stand out from pale skin,
also the thick toenails and the movement, the push forwards
of one foot then the next, how each enters
its own soft silk dark red interior.