Museworthy: Burnt Things
eyes widening into screens where animals-run-in-herds, someone shooting
the scene from a helicopter (one is always shot), the split-second
of a blink,
and darkness becomes the sort of sleep analogous to death,
all we can do with it,
is imagine...
and back at the hotel — her hair, smelling like burnt things — he leaves
his camera on a chair by the window, lens cracked, this room
asks him to be soft,
takes his clothes; the woman took hers all the way to where her intentions were
misunderstood and she's been paid for it ever since. Together they are
hunting
for the most comfortable — the most gratifying — position, (at one point
her toes curl around his ears and he imagines he sees her from the
air). Hair
covers his eyes widening into the darkness of her auctioned breast and it
becomes sleep. Tomorrow he will take more pictures of animals being killed
and she will spend the day doing for her mother the things she did when
she was a girl, cleaning and preparing the dead
for burial — rituals, repetitious —
and the baby sucks, its father is on safari, but one of the ones with guns,
not a camera. They told her that fertility is greater
in killers
and she offers some kind of thanks for that and as the beast that runs
at the front of the pack crashes to the ground she blinks and wipes
her eyes
widening into those of all the men who come here to live cheaply off her flesh — it burns,
for them
her [peculiar, fiscal, carrion] ritual [of survival] — doing things with
burnt things
BY MTC CRONIN
MTC Cronin has had six books of poetry published, the most recent being Talking to Neruda's Questions and Bestseller (both Vagabond Press, 2001). Another collection, My Lover's Back, is forthcoming in 2002 (UQP). She is currently working on a PhD, Poetry and Law: Discourses of the Social Heart, and has recently received an Established Writers New Work Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Her books are available by contacting her at: <margie_cronin@hotmail.com> or ph: (02) 9550 2918.