23: CHILDREN OF MALLEY
Ern Malley: Escape Clause
I have presumed to mark the moment of conception:
I shall now commemorate
the hour of my final deliverance. Boing! Kenneth Koch's
giant soup ladle sweeps me into the sky.
"Gentlemen,"-tips hat, waves cane to faces below-
"I am delighted at the development
of the refluxomatic engine. The earth's burping,
if you will, affords opportunity & mechanism-
& a new dance craze-as well as the pattern
from which a novel midget racer
can be built, 'ready to assemble'!
This one I have painted a French blue
& drive like a Gordini-the Gordini of the mind
-or the Bugatti of the mind!-
keeping all the while my eye on the actual road
& hand steady on the actual wheel, a dream
of toast provided by a good woman, part Aunt Bea
part Salomé, toast & marmalade, &
a view of the garden (for am I not Bonnard,
or Vuillard-at some level, really? Aren't you? Isn't
everybody-aren't we all, at some level, to a degree,
hungry? Here, have some!), on my right
the morning paper: & I read
bauxite has fallen!
Bauxite! Get up you big galoot-I'll tell you
when you've fallen!
But that's my mind, cajoling. Ka-chink-ah,
change! (My mind again.) Reaches in till
takes out medium denomination, airs it, puts it
(airily) in pocket, breast pocket, a decorative edge poking up,
leans out once more, clears throat, the
thrusting chin of Lenin-"Gentlemen!" (Crowd
cheers) "Gentlemen!- (Mind you, .)" -
begins.
A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness "where happiness happens to like its poems written best" (in his inordinate phrase).
REVEALED!
As reported on Cordite News Explosion: "... despite our initial glee at receiving ten new poems by Ern Malley himself, we are humbled and disappointed to announce that three of these poems - namely Escape Clause, A Fool To Care and Prospect of KB as a Young Critic - were in fact written by Ken Bolton."
