Paul Hetherington

Rooms

for CA

1.
When you are in the desert and undulations of dunes slide toward you, you may remember a room. Under shiny stars, in the cold sweep of night, you’ll hold that room close. And in blade-like morning, when light strikes the ground like scattered gemstones, you may stare at distance and know that room as if it were in your body—a place in which you’re strong, no matter how small its dimensions. It is like a skin that knows the flow of your blood. It’s where you discovered the value of limitation.

2.
Sometimes it contains a staircase; at other times it’s small and spare, smelling of plum cake and tart cumquat liqueur spilled on linoleum. Occasionally it has ornate furniture and colourful half-pulled drapes. A boy hides behind a chest; a girl rubs a dress’s green satin between fingers. A dog pants; a bath runs nearby. The girl stands on tiptoe, looking through a cobwebbed window. Later the boy sucks the inside of her thigh and she holds onto his hair. Sometimes the room is elongated, high in a building. There are dark floorboards; light squeezes through shutters.

3.
Rooms are informed by what’s no longer there—light that wonders at you lying in a cot; space circling; dark drowning; walls like an unfixed firmament of mind. You grow up and forget those rooms but they cling; become stairs without end; an intimate boudoir of dreaming; a lit mystery behind doors—always old-fashioned, as if belonging to a different century. They are like early touch, haunting every exploration.

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Burnt Umber (UWA Publishing.)

**

What Was Left

A towel and bathing cap remained, and a tattered copy of a novel: The Red Room. They belonged to 13-year-old Lena, his Swiss pen pal, who stayed for five weeks during a ferocious summer. Nearly every day his parents took them all to the beach—his sisters, friends, the next-door-neighbor’s kids—where they ate canned beans on balmy evenings. An uncle took them to a riverfront resort. They played table tennis and quoits, swam in a long blue pool. Twelve years old, he felt shy, while his sisters kept company with their dolls. Lena made friends with older boys. Twice his uncle brought her back to the resort—but negligently, as if enjoying her truancy. On the last night someone saw her in a dinghy near the falls. Rescued, half-undressed, she left the next day. His mother would not speak to his uncle. The novel lay for months in the spare bedroom like a remonstration.

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Burnt Umber (UWA Publishing.)

**

Inchings and Belongings: After Paul Strand

1.
The building’s torn down—an irreducible light, the blow to the knee you received there, flights of literature in stacked paperbacks. As books possessed our balcony we glanced from slow pages to the grimy street. We shook traffic noise from ears. When a blue-inked notice arrived we stood in outrage, debating what to do—we would not have our lives resumed. But we had no rights in the matter and months absorbed us in shifting away, silos of being and memory suddenly at odds. On the day of demolition Thomas Crimmins Contracting moved equipment in. Walls fell on our doings; light flooded damp ground. I saw a paper bird among rubble like one you’d made last Christmas. You’d already walked into the alleyway where the baker had riddled our mornings with yeasty smells. “No,” you said. We left dust to permeate that air and gathered the spectral into our seeing. We found no further words in the broken morning.

2.
Every morning, light washed us in avenues; each evening we swam in yellowed glass. Summer pressed us like a stamp being fixed. Regularly we bathed in the dirty sea near the harbour mouth. We knew love like twitchings of light at the end of bed frames. We harvested our sense of being, like fishermen netting fat, glistening prawns. The city steamed and glowed, summer stretching like a body on a bed. In the morning we saw ourselves as a photographer might see us. On evenings we were pale fish swimming and turning.

3.
​Roots spilled on dark sand like wild calligraphies. We climbed, slid back, clambered again, grasped the long tendrils. You held on to my ankle and hauled yourself up my leg. Our backs held down sand even as wind collected it. We scrabbled forwards and upwards, finally within reach of high ground. A pathway and cottage, a broken window allowing us in. Two stones on a bench and a smashed porcelain statue. On the cottage’s other side, a cliff face and cleft sandstone. A painted flock of sheep. We stood above fluctuations among fingers of sun and irascible air.

4. Anna Attinga Frafra
She has three books on her head. They’re the occasion of an improbable dream, or like someone’s laid and not-so-heavy hand. Light meets her white dress; her dark skin burnishes the wall. She looks out of the frame as if towards a time when the books may be gone; as if into a time before books lifted above her. One day they may be remembered as an unwieldy halo. She recalls their words—something about ways of living and strange obliquities. They’re a small part of what she knows but she begins to read more into them. These things that have become thought; black marks like scrabbles on air.

5.
Still he wants to be someone else—perhaps that man in the street. Is it a wheel of parmesan, hoisted high on his shoulder like a scooter’s tyre? Or might he be that woman’s lover, although he can never know her? She lifts a child on her hip and begins to smile. He sees a peasant’s wiry muscles and wants to adopt them. He’d grasp the old woman crossing the street and call her mother. She’d offer him cake and say “as always.” He’d lie on a bed and look across her Mexican town under a moon like poor neon.

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Moonlight on Oleander (UWA Publishing.)
​
**

Mythologies

1. Travelling to Ithaca
The broken plastic cup spills gin-and-tonic on the leg of my jeans, the flight is full of Greeks returning home. One of them is Odysseus, reading a book that tells how the world came into being—on the glorious isles that succored him. Circe has written an email, asking for her animals back—something about a lack of goat’s milk for her cheese—and Penelope has sent a text about her failing loom. She says their bed has turned into a veritable grove, leaves thick about the bleached and tucked-in sheets. “I sleep badly without you,” she comments, and he immediately thinks of the suitors she’s alluded to, imagining arrows in their throats. A hostess brings a wet cloth to soak up the remaining spillage and Odysseus leans back, murmuring a name. “That’s me,” the hostess says, “Helen. Can I bring you a coffee?”

2. Ariadne
“There was an absurd moment. She’d shifted position near the table, looking for her wine glass, and her gown was holding her figure like twenty smoothing hands—or that’s how a friend of mine characterised it. Her lover ran into the room and everyone watched him fall on his knees. It was preposterous but she accepted his pleas and before long he’d left her on some island. She began to sign her letters Ariadne, and sent threads of that gown to everyone she knew. There was a story that she was painting again, after twenty years of neglecting her art, and also a rumor that her live-in companion had manners like an animal. No doubt her exquisite sense of decorum remained. I tried to seek her out but she wouldn’t have a bar of me—her former husband, her one reliable witness. I’d given her that gown and it irked me to think of her scissors upon it.”

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Moonlight on Oleander (UWA Publishing.)

**

Eggs

He took two eggs from her hands and broke them carefully into a white bowl. A yolk held against its side, like an unsteady mountain climber; he thought of her hands on the ledge, how he’d grasped her, how she didn’t slide. For seven years he’d kept the image and as he beat the eggs with a fork he asked whether she also wanted tea. “Just the omelette,” she said. He wondered what ropes and hooks of words kept them here, recalling that long white vista, her trembling hands, his slipping hold on a future.

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Moonlight on Oleander (UWA Publishing.)

**

Uncurling

There are days when water from the kitchen tap uncurls languorously; when the cat’s slow shimmy out of the hallway’s patch of light looks like sudden activity. Thoughts coalesce, indwelling and picking at smallest morsels: they might be mice climbing to and from a wheel; or bumblebees raiding a host of flowers—zeppelin-like, luxuriously weighed with pollen, navigating with dangling anchors. Then, as the small grows large in the gaze, so larger things vanish or—like sidelong stilt walkers—step quickly towards different destinations. The cat’s languor settles. The absent lover’s brief call opens a space like a canyon.

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Moonlight on Oleander (UWA Publishing.)

**

Apartment
​
In that small apartment where a rusty fire escape clung to the kitchen’s back like the descent of an arthritic trapeze artist, they cooked eggs and bacon and relished them unreasonably. They pushed late-harvested asparagus spears into water to keep them fresh during the ticking heatwave as, outside, riots began. The city was haloed in night light and anger. They walked the neighbourhood chased by stares. When they made love it was usually against the damp bathroom wall while the cold tap dripped and their sense of themselves became vapor. After weeks they knew they’d leave their mutuality there. Dragging her suitcase, she handed him a note saying “no way forward.” He inspected the rooms and found no history he could keep. She phoned twice. There were sirens backgrounding her voice as if a few streets away.

**

This was first published in the author's collection, Moonlight on Oleander (UWA Publishing.)

**

Paul Hetherington has published 18 full-length collections of poetry, including Sleeplessness (Pierian Springs Press, 2023) and Her One Hundred and Seven Words (MadHat Press, 2021) and his poetry has won or been nominated for more than 40 national and international awards and competitions. He founded International Poetry Studies at the University of Canberra in 2013 and is co-founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. In 2014 he founded the international Prose Poetry Group. With Cassandra Atherton, he co-authored the monograph, Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020).

​