Kate Fagan
The Octet Rule
The mind turns around, no longer
facing in its direction. — John Cage
=
You built a house & refused
to furnish it. No salvation,
blue orchids in a window
taking dew. I wave to your life.
You wave to mine. Anyone else
on this damn ship? He complained
about the spelling but I hung on,
brilliant as nowhere special to go.
=
You could try double blinds,
upsize screens, the matchless zest
of lime curtains. Why compromise?
The dips were bad so you
blew it off & swung in circles
to ‘Theme Belvedere’. Grates
doesn’t it, his shirt riding too high,
her burning sober neckline.
=
Engines roar, body electric
leaves outside. Comedy
is a kind of basic displacement.
A & B are lost objects competing
for primacy. If asked for a shape
I’d say: define cylindrical.
The poem is not exhausted,
atmosphere new on location.
=
So what if machines parody
all future empires? An instinct
for novels, last ride home.
Say hello to the supermarket.
I find true authority unbearable.
Subtract components, lousy
with typing, your call lights up
like a year from Monday.
=
All this talk about meaning
is making me dizzy. Translate as
practise self-control, don’t lose it
when your books start acting
recklessly & telling people
to shut up. Pass the cheque.
Fancy collars strut like scenery,
power ballads on the go.
=
So long Johnny Cash,
nothing can take your place.
Plug-in devotional icons at
Cash Converters make me think
about fake annunciation & tides
of cheap belief. Commodity
is a kind of basic loneliness.
So long, you’d know.
=
Let me scale the bromine hills,
iPhone in hand. Aggravate
purity. Still life with turnips.
My kingdom for a porsche!
Where are you, sweet muse
of the expert horizon?
Clipped into my bag, a note
from the drycleaner: tough luck.
=
The octet rule does not apply.
Chances are I’ll fall over
while looking, sky exceeds
prediction, so outlandish &
all dolled up for town. The CBD
is further away than space. Usually
have to break it. Turn up
mind radio & sample freely.
Kate Fagan’s books and chapbooks of poetry include The Long Moment (Salt), Thought’s Kilometre (Tolling Elves) and return to a new physics (Vagabond). Her work appears in The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and the Paper Bark anthology Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets. She is a former editor of the US-based journal of innovative poetry How2 and works in the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Kate is from one of Australia’s pre-eminent folk music families, The Fagans, and her album Diamond Wheel (MGM) won the National Film & Sound Archive Award for Best Folk Album (katefagan.com).
Fagan writes: “I wrote this poem in sketches over a five-year period. It began in part with a provocation: how can applied rules open a work to unpredictable associations? When does the upshot exceed the constraint? The poem is interested in popular culture, sampling, experiment and the iLyric. Incidentally, the octet rule of atomic theory seems like a magnificent fiction.”