Monday 10 May 2010

On Les Murray's "Performance"


a little chickadee, on the window sill, performs a ditty,
as a storm to the right, almost capsizes the composition,
On the left, a Madagascan orchid, if you will, open
to receive a reference to an American woman artist,
whose flowers were genitalia, the imagery cached in cachet
of prominance, as the bird of paradise from New Guinea
in jeweled plumage, manages to bring in the diy
bric-a-brac approach to poetry, as the black capped tit
by any other name, chirps to a vintage postcard of Tantiana
Whateverovich, whose countenance of disdain for revolution
Has the Chinese poem in calligraphic contortion
Somehow, the performance, holds together, a string of happenstance
then would you know it, the birdy won't stay still, and twitters
a satire of a nomenclature that needs a German-French dictionary
to translate, name that poem in one, then the gameshow ends. Finally.

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