Michael Farrell

Listeners


Have you heard the 70s? Those soft pop sounds, slowly expanding till
the adding of beats, of bad guitar and screech seem inevitable. This
is a universe known as the West, where Ladies of America are, I’m
afraid to say, just cut-outs for Michael Dransfield. On the street, the
communists, the witnesses of atrocity, were ahead of their time. Let
extinct species come again … let them munch and make frightening
sounds. The dinosaur on Lygon St was that just that and more than
that a reader. Making can be a curse. Words are equivalents, but letters
aren’t – no more than gods. ‘The Christ complex is universal’: graffiti
on the gallows tree. When speech seems a form of corruption, that’s
not an end. There are many destinations, and tensions in their names
The cheaper the writing the noisier. Remember the University we had
in our small, small town? It was made of hardwood and lavender grew
round the doors. There was a moat to prevent entry and it was our proud
open secret. The mayor was the dean and the matron. The matron gave
lectures in the operating theatre and we sat on our folding chairs, and
listened to the reading of a library book. ‘Bring back the beauty spot
mine’s on my left hip; T’s is in the centre of his chest. He left an earring
in my bed. Aghast, feeling our lips
                                                         with our fingers, we hear nothing
Form is icing. We enunciate it/are enunciated by it. The tell-tale tragedy
has worn its way in. The love that it is and the love it will never be, more
on that a nevertime. Achilles sees the warriors; he has a VCR in his backpack
he’s glad that life is over. When we turn up, we find a spot to lean on and
speculate on today’s scene: we have until midnight. Yet we resist. The
fairytale of midnight is meaningless to us; some even renege on the
movement of the stars. To lean is to italicise! Fine. Even the most ordinary
doctor’s cough is emphasised. The job’s always there. It beckons. It
fumes. It wants a monument to itself. Is it loud there? Does it sound
like the north all the time? We fall about on the lawn, as if it would
give us something. But the lawn is merely a pause button, crawling
as it is with miniature creatures: little cows and sheep that fall on our
faces, foxes that run round our ears, barking in Arabic. You tilt your
head away from this red game … we iron the lawn with our hot shoes
encouraging the boys to do the same and head towards the silent Austrian
breasts of the bronzes. Their quiet is so muscular, so lacking in nostalgia


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