already been sideswiped

Cold front

this shivering caravan

                            reeks of rum,

shadows smear an atlas

                    on a pillowcase

 
         idly silhouetting a rabbit

           on the masonite wall,

    iced-over scraps

on the laminex splashback
 

grey nomad buys clairol -

              the future looks bright
 

o        only a cold front 
 

                      is oblivion dark ?
 

come here for a moment,

                         sit and regard,

    gape at the landscape

                        we’ll never inhabit
 

en plein air

          is so much a sinkhole,

nowhere so zen

                   as some other place
 

who changed ‘the proposal’

                   into ‘the dream’ ?

I never said 

     ‘I’m living the plan’
 

I’ve already been sideswiped

                   and I was here last
 

my cup’s white interior

              tarnished by tannin,

  readers of teacups

                  expended by tea bags
 

such a dreamy hiatus

                    o       only a cold front
 

copying a trance

            is too difficult to do,

   sun on shut eye -

            deep eggy red orange
 

but pocket some wisdom

              when winter arrives

the grey sheen of sleet

              will cleanse us like windex

(By the Australian poet Pam Brown, b. 1948. One of five of her poems on the Lyrikline site; you can hear her read it too.  https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/cold-front-10619 .)

pillowcase: specified, instead of "pillow", to make us envisage its rumpled surface; like the rest of the small caravan (the bed near the sink) it has a lived-in quality. This occupant has been living the dream for a while. The sun that smears the shadows and invites the rabbit silhouette must be low on the horizon. With some hesitation I think this is an early morning poem, not long after sunrise.

masonite: a brand of hardboard (made by the Mason method, patented 1898). The surface is smooth, the back indented with a lattice pattern.

laminex splashback: Laminex are an Australian manufacturer of laminates, e.g. for kitchen bench tops and splashbacks. The one in this caravan needs a good wipe.

clairol: makers of Nice 'n' Easy and other types of hair dye. Rather to my surprise I couldn't find that Clairol have ever deployed "the future looks bright" as an advertising slogan.

o         only a cold front : the small "o" is like an anti-ejaculation: not surprise, not drama, but the deeper bodily response always stirred by weather events

is oblivion dark? : the poem begins to open out, with a thought that evidently picks up from "the future looks bright", but not in an obvious way.

come here for a moment : Is there really anyone to invite, or is the whole point that there's no-one?

gape at the landscape : reflecting the unhealthy isolation of a home, certainly; whether it's mobile or not. Also, the traveller's rueful wonder at perennially rediscovering that land is a plane, not a line. It can never be experienced in the completist way implied by "inhabit". And it's only by maintained violence that it can be possessed.

expended by tea bags : the poem is making us see something in that stained cup, but the language resists defining it. "Expends" usually applies to a resource (such as energy), and it's quite deranging here.

copying a trance / is too difficult to do: Someone who is actually in a trance is not "doing" anything. Copying a trance, on the other hand, is definitely doing something; and hence its difficulty, the failure is baked in. Though the words are different, I think this is still talking about "living the dream", another contradiction in terms. A dream, by definition, is something dreamt, not something lived.

sun on shut eye : If it wasn't for the "grey nomad", you might suppose our protagonist is a child; making rabbit silhouettes on the wall, remarking the colour of the sun through her eyelids . . . The sense persists of play, of amused wonder, though perhaps also of loneliness and lack of purpose.

windex: brand of glass cleaner. The comparison with sleet is openly imperfect, the two forms of imputed cleansing quite different. And cleansing, its desirability and its erasure, is a problematic that's central to this poem.

*

Michael Brennan's 2011 interview with Pam Brown:

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/article/104-19669_Interview-with-Pam-Brown

I was fascinated by the candid history of her early reading, her discovery of experimental texts and their increasing importance for her. 

*

I got on to Pam Brown via something Lisa Samuels said in a 2020 interview, talking about the work in progress that became Breach (2021):

I had started a formal imitation exercise model for my poetry students and it turned into a book-length poem with very short lines, the kind of line brevity characteristic of the poet Pam Brown, whose style I was setting the students to imitate, though I suppose the Breach lines are closer to Tom Raworth’s in style. I almost never compose in such short lines, and I found the extreme enjambments and lexical parataxis delicious.

Here's an extract from Breach. 

The globe’s a

round thing with

fuzzy coordinates

proliferating

it’s a mirror

look look the

ambulatory

memes

crawl on your skin

each story

draws the attributes of

lent

around the next

box your attempts

you open

two eyes spoon

bowls inside

your headmouth

every hole turns

page blank

tributes

hone on pull

the scrip the

blow-through

hull

whose pheno-

scope

appears

on flags

a Code does

all the buildings

raw

tweaked pharmacy

flut

side walk

flesh in a trance

the shred fabric

closed

the hungry

methadone child

all pre

trans

figured

numb in the arms

chalk wield head

harder

outlines

(I found it here: https://pandemicsresearch.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/pandemics-reflected/transcripts/episode-1/ .)

The term "palilalia" appears in some advertisements of Breach ("performs a vital palilalia of lockdown"). In its medical sense it means "a language disorder characterised by the involuntary repetition of syllables, words and phrases" (Wikipedia).