Unrecognised

    National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

 

At five, the doors click shut. Security

walks a final circuit and clocks off. The eyes

        of the prominent are lost in the middle distance

 

beyond office, sports field or studio. Hair and skin

of oil, watercolour, polymer, the reassurance

        of names everyone should know. Not ours –

 

we are without shelter, without conservation.

But they cannot keep us out. At dusk,

        white walls become grey, darken.

 

When it’s safe, someone gives the signal.

From the coal-black cloakroom chiming

        with empty hangers, through a broken

    

shutter at the gift shop, from underneath

the doors of an out-of-service toilet, we emerge,

        move through the gallery as smoke

 

or pheromones. In the dim cool,

minute cracks in the canvas, paper, plaster,

        open like pores to breathe us in.

 

Morning, the first visitor examines

each portrait, as if trying to remember

        or forget. Something about that black scar

 

of paint, the dishevelled bed in the background,

soft fold of belly-flesh, or the polished glass

        from which his own face gazes back.

 

 

When a line of determined ants carries away my nail clippings

 

I remember this pale skin will be taken by the sky

my knees are already dedicated to the cracked earth

 

lungs, possessed by the ghost gums along the railway line

my inner ear, by shivers and nothingness

 

these feet belong to some restless, prayerful abstraction

language waits to inherit my expressive fingers

 

shares in my larynx are held by everyone I love

my blood, though, is anyone’s

 

cloud-drift, mould-bloom, worm-hole, the waxing moon,

the cat’s sensitive chin – all hold interests in this flesh

 

my leaning tower of vertebrae can go to the highest bidder

these tear ducts, to the lowest

 

sometimes it seems lost property holds my tongue

but who owns these elbows? this nose? these lymph nodes?

 

some valves and tissues will be given to people waiting patiently in a line

my chest cavity has given itself to the song of shy birds

 

and these eyes, to the claim of your eyes