Asterism

“Asterism” is written in the form of a verse letter to friend and fellow poet, John Watson, partly in response to one of his own poetry pamphlets, Brief notes on Brahms. It represents a work of autoethnography that proceeds from a consideration of my relatively new experience of living in an apartment in an area of Sydney which long ago housed both sides of my family, mixing up that history with asides on music in a series of autobiographical reflections on the nature of home, and the question of how to be at home in the world – especially if that part of the world you inhabit constitutes stolen land. These elements are held in suspension within the metaphor of the constellation or asterism: the self as an inferential shape picked out of a galaxy of memories. Drawing on the baroque image of the Harmonia macrocosmica, the seventeenth-century star charts of Andreas Cellarius, as well as the map of Sydney Trains, the poem concludes by wondering how to make, in the sense of manufacture, a home in the world out of the random and scattered parts of one’s being, while dancing in the sky.