Call Me When You’re Free
Don’t want to endure harried flights after you’re clipped into a coma by the 96 or wait for your
cancer diagnosis to live together. Don’t want preparing meals during crisis to be why our
postcodes match.
Phone tennis, google doc, daughter pic, screenshot of song, your underlines in the book you lent — we trade in trace encounters. When we get through you’ll remind me we’re already in crisis and of all the obstacles we dissemble.
You were annoyed if I didn’t drop by when I was in your suburb. I was bewildered, are you around? Should I come over? But you wanted me unannounced. Sophie, Elias and you persisted, taught me eating olives together is the ultimate prayer. Now you call me a gift giver par excellence.
Ascending your driveway I run into a stink, a hidden animal somewhere rotting. I had to look up what RSVP stands for: Répondez s'il vous plaît. Usage dwindling in the country of origin. Moral appeals have caved in, now everybody’s an escape artist outwitting commitment. Please respond.
In university I wrote an essay on Agnes Martin and John Coltrane. My thesis was this: improvisation in painting and improvisation in music are mutually inclusive, it’s the execution that lags. Coltrane plays the note the instant he conceives it. Martin swaddles the godsend and doesn’t touch it, labours it over ten canvases, shreds nine duds.
There are actual sensations, delayed proximities: how the pages crackle, crinkled by your daughter’s urine after you left that book under her carseat, us underlining where we’ve already been.
You like to salute Nina, who knows where the time goes? There can’t be anything but our life’s work. Every read word and darned sock alive only in a love supreme.
In some places martyrdom is the highest praise. We know communion is the answer, but what’s the question? Everybody wants to be a fascist. Do we detonate or perforate the holy trinity: God, Nation, Family? We begin from refuse. A soiled book.
Then we improvise, whereupon material limits delay the portrayal. Everything beyond a hit note — varying movements, speeds.
Maybe we should reread the entire thing, paying attention only to what we left unmarked. You exist in relation to what you won’t do as much as what you will is another thing you said on the phone. If crisis propels the family together, sparks the soul search, the road trip, the reconciliation — and I’m still here — which relation are we sustaining?
Always planning on doing too little or too much, I didn’t deal with the dead possum for days. It stayed in my front yard, then was gone. We live in communion whether we like it or not. We move into a house and inherit hooks in walls at marvellous heights. Your painting hangs low above my bed where a crucifix might've been. I am a believer, in the gift. I heard Italian masters outlined figures with a single hair to make them pop. A bright vermillion. Suppose that’s what mastery is, sensitivity to the ways a neighbour cradles what falls into its lap.
Flopping over this page — the kitchen table lilies. I like the dehydrated apology their stems make. Lounge-room louvers muzzle my housemate’s dog (the one that bit you). They bark into submission the man wheeling a gas canister up our drive. Whatever your world is peddling ends up here too.
An external memory device we continue to make and make.
You talk of Coltrane like Musk might talk of Neuralink, a seamless supply chain for melody or money. Not so much a direct drive, improvisation is a haunting of the present. And the present makes demands. Yolk is whipped with minerals, the earth accordions pigments to life, you move the brush while someone else cracks the eggs.
Indicative of the crisis is that we defer attending to it. What works for you? When’s a good time?
We want imminence because we enjoy each other. I love you comrade. In this slow lament for company, we’re painting now, but burn for the eisteddfod.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Gabriel Curtin is an artist and writer living as an uninvited guest on unceded Gadigal Country. He is a current PhD candidate and sessional academic at UNSW ADA. His research seeks to trace the production of social formations via the various cultural languages evoked by the popular iced-lolly ‘Calippo’. Some of his work can be found in Best of Australian Poems 2024, Meanjin, Minarets, Rabbit, Cordite, Un Magazine and elsewhere.
Ender Başkan is a Melbourne-based poet, novelist, small-press publisher and bookseller. The the winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, his poems have been published in HEAT, Meanjin, Cordite, Unusual Work and Best of Australian Poems. He has also published a novel, A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man. His first poetry collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers was published by Giramondo in November.
Phone tennis, google doc, daughter pic, screenshot of song, your underlines in the book you lent — we trade in trace encounters. When we get through you’ll remind me we’re already in crisis and of all the obstacles we dissemble.
You were annoyed if I didn’t drop by when I was in your suburb. I was bewildered, are you around? Should I come over? But you wanted me unannounced. Sophie, Elias and you persisted, taught me eating olives together is the ultimate prayer. Now you call me a gift giver par excellence.
Ascending your driveway I run into a stink, a hidden animal somewhere rotting. I had to look up what RSVP stands for: Répondez s'il vous plaît. Usage dwindling in the country of origin. Moral appeals have caved in, now everybody’s an escape artist outwitting commitment. Please respond.
In university I wrote an essay on Agnes Martin and John Coltrane. My thesis was this: improvisation in painting and improvisation in music are mutually inclusive, it’s the execution that lags. Coltrane plays the note the instant he conceives it. Martin swaddles the godsend and doesn’t touch it, labours it over ten canvases, shreds nine duds.
There are actual sensations, delayed proximities: how the pages crackle, crinkled by your daughter’s urine after you left that book under her carseat, us underlining where we’ve already been.
You like to salute Nina, who knows where the time goes? There can’t be anything but our life’s work. Every read word and darned sock alive only in a love supreme.
In some places martyrdom is the highest praise. We know communion is the answer, but what’s the question? Everybody wants to be a fascist. Do we detonate or perforate the holy trinity: God, Nation, Family? We begin from refuse. A soiled book.
Then we improvise, whereupon material limits delay the portrayal. Everything beyond a hit note — varying movements, speeds.
Maybe we should reread the entire thing, paying attention only to what we left unmarked. You exist in relation to what you won’t do as much as what you will is another thing you said on the phone. If crisis propels the family together, sparks the soul search, the road trip, the reconciliation — and I’m still here — which relation are we sustaining?
Always planning on doing too little or too much, I didn’t deal with the dead possum for days. It stayed in my front yard, then was gone. We live in communion whether we like it or not. We move into a house and inherit hooks in walls at marvellous heights. Your painting hangs low above my bed where a crucifix might've been. I am a believer, in the gift. I heard Italian masters outlined figures with a single hair to make them pop. A bright vermillion. Suppose that’s what mastery is, sensitivity to the ways a neighbour cradles what falls into its lap.
Flopping over this page — the kitchen table lilies. I like the dehydrated apology their stems make. Lounge-room louvers muzzle my housemate’s dog (the one that bit you). They bark into submission the man wheeling a gas canister up our drive. Whatever your world is peddling ends up here too.
An external memory device we continue to make and make.
You talk of Coltrane like Musk might talk of Neuralink, a seamless supply chain for melody or money. Not so much a direct drive, improvisation is a haunting of the present. And the present makes demands. Yolk is whipped with minerals, the earth accordions pigments to life, you move the brush while someone else cracks the eggs.
Indicative of the crisis is that we defer attending to it. What works for you? When’s a good time?
We want imminence because we enjoy each other. I love you comrade. In this slow lament for company, we’re painting now, but burn for the eisteddfod.
Gabriel Curtin is an artist and writer living as an uninvited guest on unceded Gadigal Country. He is a current PhD candidate and sessional academic at UNSW ADA. His research seeks to trace the production of social formations via the various cultural languages evoked by the popular iced-lolly ‘Calippo’. Some of his work can be found in Best of Australian Poems 2024, Meanjin, Minarets, Rabbit, Cordite, Un Magazine and elsewhere.
Ender Başkan is a Melbourne-based poet, novelist, small-press publisher and bookseller. The the winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, his poems have been published in HEAT, Meanjin, Cordite, Unusual Work and Best of Australian Poems. He has also published a novel, A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man. His first poetry collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers was published by Giramondo in November.