Stephanie Holt

Except from A quickening (on learning of a long past death in a favourite city)

i.

Did you really glide across a near-empty nightclub

in a carefully just-a-little-tight 60s suit?

Shiny with wear, cheap fabric worn

just right

— lustrous.

A lesson in self-assurance.

A lesson in semiotics.

A lesson in sardonic postpunk glamour.

While I, your target,

swathed in polished cotton,

leaned on the bar.

Or less louche, more likely,

perched beside it,

chatting to the barman.

They rise now unexpected,

grieftossed, fragments …

I close my eyes chest tightening —

make out your words but cannot catch

your voice. Instead

my own breath catches

                                             and the pictures follow

                                                                                    the words

fraught blurry

backformations.

I wonder, now, why you were there so early, fret

I can’t be sure which club it was —

I thought Hurrah, but Privates maybe?

Perhaps you came with one of the bands, with muso mates,

or like me grew easy with

the work, the purposeful before,

the moving parts exposed

as busyness echoes sharp in stale mute spaces

 … cool competence … hot promise … slow build …

the imminence of empty nightclubs

as yet unwarmed by bodies massing,

the imminence of empty dancefloors

as yet unblurred by heat and heave and flow.

Getting my bearings.

This much I know: I was new to all of this.

In Melbourne I knew the pubs and clubs. I knew their free nights, their free food, where friends would sling me drinks. I knew the trams rattling past, how late they ran, when they’d get me back to the suburbs. I knew the inner-city streets to reach my twin brother’s sharehouse and how to get safely, drunk, to a spare couch. I knew where we gathered. I knew where we lingered. I knew when the bands came on.

But this was New York and I

just arrived

at nineteen, eager, shy and gloriously alone

knew very little

knew no one in the city

and had arrived that night way too early

advised — misled —

by a gig ad advising only when

“doors open”.