How to Domesticate a Pirate [What if if Only Remix]

by Amelia Schmidt

 

Else, else, else.

will the nappies last until Saturday?

Optus or Telstra?

what if interest rates rise?

is the car service due?  

who wormed the dog? 

accumulation or defined benefit?

when is enough enough?

 

She wonders whether she will ever again write poetry, now that her mind is full of so much else. There is nothing but else in her head these days, and else is all the language that is left between her and the man who comes home to her each night now in a suit.

 

Oh brave new world!

Who would have imagined

the glory of choosing

exactly the right bath tap!

Nightly on the news

American grenades

 

When her husband comes out of the bedroom in the morning and asks her a question, and she finds herself paralysed by its malice-less venom, she knows that she deserves it. That she’s asked for it. That she’s had it coming. That she carried the seeds of it on the hem of her small black dress, that she glimpsed the grit of it in the mucousy flesh of that oyster, that she allowed it to be slipped onto her finger, that she grew it in her womb, applied to the bank for it, wrote it on the shopping list for Saturday. She doesn’t over-react. He only wants to know if she’s ironed his shirt yet.

 

explode brownskinned families

while Australian tourists

fuck little seven-year-old Thai boys

up the arse while the planet coughs up

its diminishing oil reserves

 

The else is like packing foam, insubstantial and expansive. Her head is crammed with little dimples of it that are the same shape and colour as prawn crackers, but quite a bit smaller. Or else the else is like popcorn, clouding and crowding with sudden inflations. Soon cumulus pieces begin to tumble out of the holes of your ears. The poems from this time are, like her sheets, stained with clouds. She will never be able to wash it out, but nor would she want to.

 

so that humanity can

fry itself and here

in your middle class house

in your first world country

 

She suspects she might be depressed but finds herself too pathetic to admit it, so instead she stands in a supermarket queue and passes judgement. Here, she catches herself despising a woman in beige three-quarter pants because she has filled her trolley with her own sub-urbanity. And because, when this woman talks to her toddler, she refers to herself in the third person. But when she - in her internal voice - mocks another, she sounds just like …you.

 

with your husband

and your child

and your fabric softener,

you’re crying about what exactly?

 

Of course, though, she isn’t the person that she was expecting - she says, I never expected you. Stares at herself in the mirror, puts on a dress she’s not even looked at for twenty years. Ignores the crows’ feet that she said one day she’d do something about, remember the colour of the sea and how much it looked like her eyes that day. Thinks of the sound of the sand under the bottoms of your crunch-crunching shoes.

 

She experiences the strangeness of your childhood and your future blending together in a long stretch of white sand along an azure coastline, contrasting like a postcard only your imagination can send.

 

Puts down her Tupperware and stops the violent beating blades of the machinery in the kitchen for one quiet moment and realises that the beach is only down the road. That the sun shining through the fly-screens shines down on to the shells and the waves and that it reflects in splashes of bright, bright, blinding white as the sound of the seas hungry for shorelines wells up and down.

 

She leaves a note, but does not wait for it to be accepted. Looks back over her shoulder at the sad eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother can’t keep herself ashore. Looks back over her shoulder at the suburban boulevard, all grey and grey and green and white, as it disappears into a fractal pattern of a city. Looks back over her shoulder as she walks the plank.

 

My eyes, predictably, are blue. In my sunbrowned face this smile is a white cutlass. It forces her to seek warmth in the radiance of this man whose bare feet have the same rough-hardness as deck timber and who smells of brine and varnish.

 

So she steps onto my ship wearing a small black dress that is not enough to protect her from a wind that blows colder over water than it does over land. So I offer her a hat and a shirt, and wonder whether one day she, like us, will feel the dull longing for the land and sand between her toes. I ask her which way a lady wishes to sail, and she stares off towards the horizon. When I ask again, because I think she hasn’t heard, she won’t cry for a pirate and his roughbare feet. She’ll have him, and nothing else.

 

Else, else, else.

will the rations last until Saturday?

North or South?

what if the tides rise?

are the sails due for mending?

where’s that mangy mongrel?

scenic or direct route?

a mariner knows no limits.

            Oh brave new world!

            Who would have imagined

the glory of choosing

exactly the right course to follow!

            Nightly we tell stories

            Of how our gunfire

exploded brownskinned families

while coast-born landlubbers

took wenches to their dives,

bought them jewels and

rare treasures from ruined worlds

so that brave men of the ocean can

burn their noses bright

on the salt-stained deck

in the new, undiscovered worlds

with their lasses and broads

and their foundlings

and some rough, dirty rags

to wipe their homesick tears.