First published in Loom Journal, issue 1: Quaver.
Call Me When You're Free
Gabriel Curtin & Ender Baskan
Don’t want to endure harried flights after you’re clipped into a coma by the 96 or wait for your
cancer diagnosis to live together. Don’t want preparing meals during crisis to be why our
postcodes match.
Phone tennis, google doc, daughter pic, screenshot of song, your underlines in the book you
lent — we trade in trace encounters. When we get through you’ll remind me we’re already in
crisis and of all the obstacles we dissemble.
You were annoyed if I didn’t drop by when I was in your suburb. I was bewildered, are you
around? Should I come over? But you wanted me unannounced. Sophie, Elias and you
persisted, taught me eating olives together is the ultimate prayer. Now you call me a gift
giver par excellence.
Ascending your driveway I run into a stink, a hidden animal somewhere rotting. I had to look
up what RSVP stands for: Répondez s'il vous plaît. Usage dwindling in the country of origin.
Moral appeals have caved in, now everybody’s an escape artist outwitting commitment.
Please respond.
In university I wrote an essay on Agnes Martin and John Coltrane. My thesis was this:
improvisation in painting and improvisation in music are mutually inclusive, it’s the execution
that lags. Coltrane plays the note the instant he conceives it. Martin swaddles the godsend
and doesn’t touch it, labours it over ten canvases, shreds nine duds.
There are actual sensations, delayed proximities: how the pages crackle, crinkled by your
daughter’s urine after you left that book under her carseat, us underlining where we’ve
already been.
You like to salute Nina, who knows where the time goes? There can’t be anything but our
life’s work. Every read word and darned sock alive only in a love supreme.
In some places martyrdom is the highest praise. We know communion is the answer, but
what’s the question? Everybody wants to be a fascist. Do we detonate or perforate the holy
trinity: God, Nation, Family? We begin from refuse. A soiled book.
Then we improvise, whereupon material limits delay the portrayal. Everything beyond a hit
note — varying movements, speeds.
Maybe we should reread the entire thing, paying attention only to what we left unmarked.
You exist in relation to what you won’t do as much as what you will is another thing you said
on the phone. If crisis propels the family together, sparks the soul search, the road trip, the
reconciliation — and I’m still here — which relation are we sustaining?
Always planning on doing too little or too much, I didn’t deal with the dead possum for days.
It stayed in my front yard, then was gone. We live in communion whether we like it or not.
We move into a house and inherit hooks in walls at marvellous heights. Your painting hangs
low above my bed where a crucifix might've been. I am a believer, in the gift. I heard Italian
masters outlined figures with a single hair to make them pop. A bright vermillion. Suppose
that’s what mastery is, sensitivity to the ways a neighbour cradles what falls into its lap.
Flopping over this page — the kitchen table lilies. I like the dehydrated apology their stems
make. Lounge-room louvers muzzle my housemate’s dog (the one that bit you). They bark
into submission the man wheeling a gas canister up our drive. Whatever your world is
peddling ends up here too.
An external memory device we continue to make and make.
You talk of Coltrane like Musk might talk of Neuralink, a seamless supply chain for melody or
money. Not so much a direct drive, improvisation is a haunting of the present. And the
present makes demands. Yolk is whipped with minerals, the earth accordions pigments to
life, you move the brush while someone else cracks the eggs.
Indicative of the crisis is that we defer attending to it. What works for you? When’s a good
time?
We want imminence because we enjoy each other. I love you comrade. In this slow lament
for company, we’re painting now, but burn for the eisteddfod.