Melbourne I

By Nam Le

The alkyd paint in Rothko’s Black on Maroon series contains egg, dammar resin. Under UV light you should see the resins boil. They spring into fire saying be strong where you’re strong —

Face-smushed on Meyers Place he saw the series again, instantaneously — across all frequencies — having floated forty steps without touching ground. Now he makes out the structure of the stampede:

Somewhere, a burst mains. (He loves those

words’ sounds.)

Glazed heat on wet concrete. The city is one great throat: its protest is joy it chants its song through true choke, blue choke breath with

haemal fret.

What the crowd wants, only the crowd can give, the crowd fears. He feels pressure waves.

Fluid dynamics.

‘I was just walking down Australia when the blue line cinched,’ he imagines saying. Cops on horseback,

black-helmeted, ballistic-body-armoured. ‘I ran because everyone else was running. Pushed because everyone else was pushing.’ Crushed into acrylic glass, iron godowns, pushed down by big skips

onto bluestone kerb. Thinking: that power pole’s slanted. Those wheelie bins … backyard cricket.

Tasting concrete dust, metal dust. The Urdu poem: O Lord, how beautiful must have been some of the faces trampled in the dust.

Untravelling now roads beneath this road — basalt, coaching road, gravel, cinder, dirt—remembering Rothko slashed his wrists. And beneath: the clay body,

the winning.

He was playing tiggy in childhood streets when the cops

digressed him — shunted him up close into hot-mix asphalt so photorealistic—full of scratch, warp, hiss — but also mica dots that outglinted even the glare — metallized, micro-prismed — of their hi-vis vests.

And the wood-backed lacquer paintings his parents, whom he loved, used to love inlaid with egg shell. The sudden gleam of fuchsia on that pigeon’s neck. The hyoid bone floating in its bath of muscle.

They knew, the police: the body was a problem they could always solve. A matter of flexural strength, resonance frequency. He thought: feldspar too. Quartz. All of it and all at once. Resist nothing.

But this was his only face and fear began in him. Someone put their palm against his cheek, shook their head, which could have meant anything, not seeing he was now himself a highline uninsulated

surging with raw current thrilling to behold where he’d been all along. ‘He’s saying something,’ someone said but they were wrong, he was past that, ungrounded, shaping to the shine sleeper-held home:

Nick and back fence’s out. It’s one hand one bounce. Car’s out, garage wall’s out, over the fence is out and you have to get the ball. Roof. All the windows. Every part — and that means you! —of the bin’s stumps

— and out.