Instructions for Learning the Saxophone

   i.

Open the case, black rectangle lined
with velvet like a magician’s bag of props,
capacious, enticing,
full of golden chaos
and the smitter of stars.

Lift out a goose’s gilt neck, snap on
the lustrous black beak; you are making
a creature with which to dance,
a fairy tale animal.
You have to kiss the beak.

Learn how much mouth to give it,
how much air to fill its lungs
and make it breathe.
Your fingers will turn base metal
to pearl, you are assuming darkness

like a cape, summoning spells
and a witch’s ability for incantation.
The goose takes shape.  It is golden,
svelte.  It fits under your fingers
with folded, waiting wings.

   ii.

It is time to rediscover your tongue,
intimate appendage
like a small pink liver
that when you think of ‘body’
you overlook entirely –
limbs, heart, lungs, toes,
head, skin.
Tongue is the silent achiever
giving shape
to sound;
taming the goose.

   iii.

When your mouth
shapes its wet warmth
to the beak
and you breathe
your dreams deep
into the goose’s body,
when your tongue
overcomes its tendency
to whisper
instead of tongue
as if kissing,
when you hold
the goose
with tenderness
and the desire
to leave mud
and clay behind,
then this bird
you cradle
will open wide
its golden wings,
shake its head
as if waking
from a fairytale
and lift you off your feet
transforming
breath and metal
into feathers
and the miracle
of flight.

Words

A body immersed in the sea
is no longer human,
it absorbs the running silk

and lassoes the curves: sea horse belly,
dolphin back, skate wing, crab carapace,
until it’s no longer a thing of uprightness

but comfortable with the horizontal
and the acrobatics that soften its spine,
washing it into the shell of itself.

Perhaps it all comes back to shells,
how some creatures carry them
on the outside, tough but crushable

and others contain their shell at the core,
firm but malleable, capable of rolling
with the ocean’s perpetual joust

of force and gentleness.  Some words
are like this: when you come across
the right ones, their electric stab

is like stepping into the ocean,
being broken and made whole again,
drawing a body to a different realm

where uprights and verticals are gone,
where sky and water stream in,
jettisoning all the mind’s freight.

       
Birdsong

All night, her mind,
like a half-crazed adult bird
taken from the wild,
has banged its broken wings
against the bars,
waking her each hour,
heart fretting and leaping
in its bone cage,
her ear turned spy
on dream spaces;
every breathy sigh,
every squeak or flung limb,
her son’s baby galah returned
and she scrabbling uselessly
in a violent lunge
to grab it in gentle hands.
She knows it is the chemo
beating in her brain,
patterning it in dreadful frenzy;
each night an ordeal
worthy of the King of Ireland's son,
only she's no prince, more a mute
helpless in the prison of her flesh,
its betrayals incomprehensible
and mounting.

Endure is the word
that spikes the dark
like the white rash of stars
when she steps outside
to check the cage, imprinting itself
on her eyelids when she closes them,
trying to conjure sleep
like a neophyte magician.
It banishes the image
of their escaped galah,
frightened, forlorn, wings shrivelled
in the vastness of the blinding night,
that flaps at the edges
of her thoughts,
persistent as the handfuls
of hair she used to find,
slung around her shoulders
like birds' nests, until she took scissors
and hacked it to mutilated wing feathers.
Her head is downy now, like a baby bird
safely stowed in its nest;
the thought eases her into fitful sleep,
her body perched at the bed's edge;
outside, the aviary door
swings open on its hinges.