Constellation of the Heart: The Geology of Psychology
by Charlotte Kelly Maguire
Is much easier to navigate this way.
When we bring it home we see
It’s easy to stay.
But instead – take the brail trail.
Two hours in, your feet are feeling everything and then
Cleopatra’s Pool reveals itself to you.
You slip on the ancient lichen
But It’s your own private waterslide
And see how the diamonds are falling waist side.
Slipping under the skin,
Blue crush can now begin.
Blue Crush
You are visiting me in hospital
After an extreme wipe-out and near-drowning incident.
This has temporarily halted my surf career and left me
with deep-seated fears.
White sheets cover my lap.
I’m almost better now and you deal me three?
Set Match.
You say there is a sequence,
You seem to know it well
But I can’t see a pattern – blue crush begins to swell.
Do you like this game because you always win?
You know, a language of foreign symbols is not a concept
foreign to me
But you see, your databank is fuller,
You are potent and way smarter and so,
I grab the lever and I pull it down.
Three symbols start spinning –
This time I have dealt them to myself.
Yellow smoke escapes from the hand grenades I’m throwing
And I’m reeling as I breath it in.
Aqua’s and silver’s light me up –
Sonically blowing the visual powder around.
If I recognise this design I’m making,
Then it’s mine for the taking,
Not yours, Ok – stop.
I’ll take you back to Sumner Beach
Where I am learning to surf with my friend the peach,
It’s 2002 and we lay down our homework the night before;
A film ‘Blue Crush’ – came out earlier that week.
Quipped with the lingo and stripped to the sun
We set out next morning to lie in the calm,
Edging our boards,
Applying bait
And balm.
Beginning to clear a threatening young swell,
Picked up so high it’s both truth and dare.
Up for a second
Then I close my eyes
And bomb.
Smashed under this salt dog wave,
I check myself against the blue backdrop for proof of injury,
Crystalline minerals rapidly forming their crust all over me.
I head back to the yellow shallows and heap my nectar into piles.
I bathe in the aqua tints and realise I’m leaking mercury.
Of course – I don’t reveal any of this to the inter-mingling beach goers.
Can we measure the fever?
Hit the love-o-meter and hold up some shimmering powder to the light?
Perhaps it is the diamond cutters who decide.
It‘s this search;
For ‘the wave’
Promising ‘thousands of luminous spheres!’
Found in
Blue light, audience fright,
Sub pop, shoo-wop,
Fan blowing,
All the cards around.
I see three.
The only pattern I see,
Is the way the fan blows
On the digital heart beating and I’m digital illiterate – so
I don’t know – but I can disconnect too.
And when I do, I’m free.