Free Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy Page A

every kind of love recognises.
    III
    I wake to death
    in the night.
    The cold weight
    of a child in a mother’s arms.
    Locked from her grief
    and the whole archipelago of parents
    weeping with her—
    the uselessness of tears.
    In this public ward
    her private room of pain.
    IV
    I bring my child home
    to smiles and somersaults.
    Bedtime rhymes
    taken after meals
    for the treatment.
    I watch her by night
    dreaming through her fears,
    her small milky breath
    smaller than tears.
    Ratepayer’s Ode
    He walks through an afternoon
    of sunlight and neighbours.
    Along avenues of home loans,
    almost paid.
    Slow flies bump at his face,
    webs itch like memories.
    The cosmetics of summer surround him—
    the detonation of fruit trees,
    the shallows of lawn.
    A paperboy rides towards him
    throwing novels into every yard.
    He unwraps the headlines and reads.
    It is science fiction again.
    It is always science fiction.
    The Dark Side of the Head
    After a line by Wittgenstein
    I.M. Gwen Harwood, 1920—1995
    Just around the corner of the eye,
    at every reach of its big screen,
    there is a magic which is neither
    black nor white, but only absent:
    the disappearance of all world.
    Even when the eyes are shut,
    and all the field is pink or dark,
    it still unhappens, at the rim
    —a sudden gradual nothing,
    beneath the notice, or beyond.
    I sometimes hope that if
    my head jerks leftwards, quick
    as warp, I might just catch
    the edge of right-side visual field,
    as if there is no dark side of the head
    but one world only, seamless,
    like the small curved universes
    painted on Grecian urns,
    or like a Mercator projection
    of the globe, that having mapped
    itself, bent weirdly at the polar ends,
    for flat-screen eyes,
    now unmaps in reverse, becoming
    whole again and full and round
    and as satisfactory as heaven.
    Eye of the Needle
    I.M. Philip Hodgins, 1959-1995
    i
    In the earth
    there are doorways
    from this earth
    but they are narrow.
    ii
    the weight of matter
    keeps it down to earth,
    as if the property called mass
    is store-security, a clip-on
    tag-alarm that stops us
    taking our garment
    when we leave the shop.
    iii
    Thoughts are already things
    before they’re set to ink.
    Their heaviness is hard
    to measure, but material,
    being stuff in the head.
    Weigh the brain before
    and after thinking,
    the difference is no
    laughing matter, too real
    to follow us through Exits.
    iv
    Even light
    is far too heavy.
    It must be dark
    through there.

DEATH AND THE COMEDIAN
    An essay by Peter Goldsworthy
1.
    Tell me your favourite jokes, and I will tell you your worst fears.
    I sometimes use that line, across late night dinner tables, when conversation flags. It should not be confused with S.J. Perelman’s request: tell me your phobias and I will tell you what you are afraid of — which is, incidentally, one of my favourite jokes.
    I once dined with friends at Kinsella’s, a Sydney funeral parlour turned restaurant. We were seated in the inner sanctum, the former chapel. Mid-meal, the poet Elizabeth Riddell recalled that her last visit to Kinsella’s had been fifteen years before, for a funeral.
    Her late husband’s coffin, she announced, had occupied the precise spot where our table now stood.
    Such ability to look death calmly, even jokily, in the eye, and continue eating, impressed me no end. It also suggested the possibility of finding a narrative tone with which to handle the various stories of death, and grief, and near-death which I had been collecting — or which had been collecting me — for years.
    A few weeks before Philip Hodgins death from leukaemia in 1995, I prepared a newspaper obituary after a request from Philip had been passed on through a mutual friend. Philip had finally decided to discontinue the chemotherapy which had caused him much suffering for many years. I sent him the obituary — he was curious to read it — and a few days later received a bottle of his favourite wine, Passing Clouds, accompanied by a congratulatory