Consciousness can never objectify itself into
invalid-consciousness or cripple-consciousness …
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
‘The Phenomenology of Perception’
The knife’s rehearsal sharpens phrases that impress
And are meant to show the wearer in a state of dress
That is his state of mind. If he has an ill body,
That is not the Me of his mind’s face which, though resting
With the cripple’s body, says “I do not like this body’s face,
But would not change it for another.” Or if his days
Are only numbers, and hours the decimals of a work
Which was meant to fill those days, and money their reward,
The cripple and his money sleep and dream together
And will not be lonely. Tell the cripple or the handsome man,
Then, or the banker or the florist, if they are mad,
That their madness is the smallest part of them. Say what is
— When it is not — to say what is possible and still true.
Say things that might, or things that can, and still be true.
Tell the chessman that he need not live in fear,
And the lover that love lives when the other is not near.
When death starts its process first we resist, hard to watch everything familiar and beautiful about the body shrink. We say to ourselves, “I want him back” or “Give me back that firm, healthy person!” When we are in the room with him all of us want to shout “But where is David?! Where has he gone?!”
Then, all together, we have the knotted pain in the eyes, recognising him among us as a poor remaking of the other man we knew. “Michael, is that you I see? Is it really you?” Bringing gifts and asking questions we have brought and asked many times before, when he was still himself, is a test. “Here are some chocolates I thought you might like, and yellow roses.” Are these pleasures the new Paul knows? And who are you now?
In the last year his head is full of creatures and animal hate, wide-eyed and terrified to live in the world where everything dies. If he is fresh and strong in the morning, he is warm-blooded, huge, growling in the garden. Afternoons in the heat he is worn blue as a slim lizard, lies about, breathless, bumps into the furniture.
The old friends leave him, while he makes the real ones new. No one dares come near who cannot answer questions: “Are you friend or foe?” “Will you fight me, even now, in the middle of all this?” and “Will I die? Will I truly die?”
Before the visiting hours the family takes a few stiff drinks, wanders in the numb maze of the hospital, with threads hanging behind them. All our tongues are pins and needles for lack of use, or telling lies. “Oh, he has cancer, a tragic disease; I did tell him not to smoke.” “Thank you for the card. He likes it very much, and sends you all his love.” “He is better and we hope for a remission.”
Afterwards, alone, he practises the scavenging happiness of birds, picks up crumbs from his own story, cries and laughs, vomits the soft dinner, starves quietly and more surely than anyone who waits for justice. Every sleepless night some part is stolen and in the morning he is less there.
He is awake behind closed lids, while we dream of planting onions, and hope for death. Even those who don’t believe can see he becomes more real; the soul is exposed and visible, resting on a cracked edge before it goes.
Published by ‘A First Hearing’, ABC Radio (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 31 December 1989, and then in Overland, Number 120, 1990, and various anthologies.
This poem received the John Shaw Neilson Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1989 (awarded 22 February 1990).
When you say yes… say yes to safe sex (Information flyer of the Victorian AIDS Council) Written by Stephen J. Williams
My lessons began with ‘A Bass to Heartsease’,
The harder work done on grand piano,
Comforting and accurate as a mother.
For being even-handed, there was the lesson
Of double stops; in perfect fifths, delivering sound
Which once was meant to be the sign of God.
I’ve learned already, though cannot master it,
That tension and position are closely linked.
No failure — and there are many — leaves me worn.
I squawk for hours, content with struggle, and pay
For patience and advice while teachers sigh (“If only
He were ten or twelve — we’d go farther, sooner”).
I’m late to understanding. It’s a common fault.
At 33, I could give up writing for the chance
To know how one note, rightly sounded — round,
Toneful, hair clinching string from top to end —
Shakes the matter in my skull and rests all trouble.
Still to come are mysteries, endless scales, harmonics.
What can the dancer say, moving with his arms that way, and with those legs and hips, that we, in our dumb bodies, say with tongue and lips?
He says that in the movement of my being, this breath, this life, “I am.” —And no one, even he who soon might take me, may be the dance I am.
Bruce Fentham died of AIDS in 1993. He was a dancer in Melbourne. Near death and unable to walk, his last performance was as the hood ornament of the car that led the 1993 Fringe Festival parade. See The Age 25 October 1992 (page 7), and 8 September 1993 (page 15).
Teachers, in their classroom mode,
Will point the way down any road.
Before you go, remember this:
That getting lost is half the bliss.
—But take a compass and a map,
The way ahead is full of traps;
And pack some warm and woolly socks,
The future is an oblong box.
I pray to speak as musicians
pray; those whom I trust, more than writers,
since they may speak without need to tell.
With this desire, without end of longing
for that sound to fill me, I am contrite,
and offer my imperfect contrition
to the hope I shall not end in Hell.
O God, whose music made me,
I beg you, do not leave me soundless
where I am, believing nothing, and my mouth
numb with lies. I am in pain.
Say only—to this silent, shapeless
form of life I have, you might give remedy.
With that uncertain knife I could untie my tongue.
Stephen J. Williams 
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