In The Year Of Our Modernism 1922

We tend to gender our
grandparents more than we do ourselves. He dyed his
hair…she had a more serious operation. They first started
publishing things in Europe
There began to be
articles about them. They were always having rebirths –
comebacks – cleansings. Some of the language seems very
dated now (some offensively so). Did you really have a
spider tattoo, asked my cousin Deborah, seeing our
grandmother’s scar one summer? We barely knew them…I
think they didn’t know each other that well. They seemed
more

affectionate than our parents but were actually more literary
…self-conscious, quoting things we didn’t know were quotes
It might seem arch or precious yet I think was in some way
meant as a keyhole to the past, their pasts, plural. A verbal
equivalent to the music I’d play or food I’d eat when around
them. I wasn’t quoting anything I’d written, but what if I’d
become a musician or food-something? For example, saying
that her only weapon was love, or his announcing the story of
the
hand towel. When I watch movies about the 1920s I feel no
recognition. They were never married…never had anything

as creepy as a patio. I think I get my narcissism from them…
the way the colour of my skin falls away just under the cheek
What are you lot colluding about now? my parents would say
when they came to pick me up. Quite disrespectful language
now that I think of it. There would be time to unpick all their
issues later on. In the year of our modernism 1942, say. My
grandparents would never do more than give my parents
looks
They had had everything first hand or at least in a more
immediate sense than my cousins…I. They’d waved on
piers
Seen food being made for prison visits. Not that my parents

were siblings but I have to conflate this a bit to get it all into
one poem. Occasionally they get mentioned in the northern
hemisphere even now, but you’d have to go to Wikipedia to
know they were Australian. All for Empire, my grandmother
would
say, handing me a tea towel or my grandfather, handing me
an
axe. Somehow she caught on to Dead Or Alive’s ‘Turn
Around…Count 2 Ten’ when I’d never even heard her
mention Josephine Baker or Liberace, or listen to anything
pop. It was a sketch about

their relationship. It’s sad. Funny though that that song’s
more recent than the one we sang camping with my parents
(‘Oh Yoko’). In the middle of a poem I call their names
(Norma, Harold). If
it’s sad now, too, it is more loving. My grandparents lived
under a pine
tree…called needles line breaks. They lived by a river…
were visited by ducks, fisherwomen. They didn’t write
anything there, as
far as I know, apart from letters which were firmly set in the
present. How much did you get for that? They might ask if
their correspondent had mentioned selling something. When

I was ten the stamps were exciting enough…now they seem
bland…kitschy. My grandfather spoke more…more in
pastiche when he became widowed. Came down the Paris
boulevards looking for a mouldy stick. Who would’ve
thought
the ladies would save the Jews from Pétain? Guess they
weren’t so caricatural after all. They called even damper a
stick or log of bread…had cats called Salon…Mondriaan
My dad once referred to them sarcastically as Bush Parisians
Yet I think they really only passed through. What’s a year in

a long life? My grandmother talked more about TB
(tuberculosis) than any
war, but I realised she was more careful than she seemed
I have her mother’s portrait of her at eighteen, looking witty…
cranky, some kind of campaign in mind. She was briefly
famous for a Hemingway parody called ‘Nursing a Boxer’
I found her copy of A Farewell to Arms on a shelf, looking
half-read. Later I associated him with Kirsty MacColl’s
‘Walking Down Madison’ as if the distance from anyone’s
birthplace
(Oak Park, Illinois) to that of death (Ketchum, Idaho) (or in
her
case, Croydon, UK, to Cozumel, Mexico) is ‘not
that far’.