Fiona Hile, Subtraction

Winner of the 2017 University of Sydney Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest.
The 2017 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest for an unpublished full-length manuscript by a

woman poet was judged by Pam Brown, Kate Lilley and Gig Ryan.

Acknowledgments
The Age, Australian Book Review, Arc, Axon, Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2016, Cordite, Land
Before Lines, Lyrikline, Overland, Poetry, Poetry International, Rabbit, Southerly, Vlak.

Sources
Plagiarism Dreams: The first two lines of Plagiarism Dreams allude to the first two lines
of Philip Larkin’s We Met at the End of the Party; ‘the Bacchanalian revel in which no
member is not drunken’ is from G.W.F. Hegel, The Preface, The Phenomenology of Spirit;
‘Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice’ is from Much Ado About Nothing, occurs
as ‘reclaims my heart with false dice.’ Muster: ‘troops of gentle thought invest’ is from
Ralph Waldo Emerson [‘troops of gentle thoughts invest’ from https://genius.com/Ralph-
waldo-emerson-friendship-annotated]; ‘compounds our pains beyond their proper share’
[‘compound their pains beyond their proper share’ is from The Odyssey]; The satisfaction of
speech: ‘I feel too much the surfeit’ derives from The Merchant of Venice [‘I feel too much thy
blessing. Make it less. For fear I surfeit’]. Recollections of the mortal body: ‘shame enters
only through the recollection of the body’ is from G.W.F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings.
Misdirection: ‘to hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit’ is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet
XXIII. The Bells of Hell: ‘Since my becomings kill me when they do not eye well’ is from
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
First published 2018 by Vagabond Press
www.vagabondpress.net
© Fiona Hile 2018
Cover image © Helen Johnson 2009. Things people say they should give up (for Andrew
McQualter). Acrylic and pencil on paper mounted on ply, rope and cobble stone.
240 x 262 x 100cm. Courtesy of City of Yarra
Design and typography by Michael Brennan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The information and views set
out in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
publisher.
ISBN 978-1-925735-02-4

FIONA HILE

SUBTRACTION

VAGABOND PRESS

CONTENTS

Plagiarism Dreams .... 7
The illustrious formations of absolute contingency .... 9
My Views .... 10
The inevitable beauty of the viewer .... 11
Blandishments .... 12
Song for an Indifferent Italian .... 13
Forget the Stars .... 14
Recollections of the Mortal Body .... 15
Liptrap .... 16
Swimming to Leander .... 17
Friday Night at the Lock-in .... 19
The Gates of Headley Grange .... 20
The Satisfaction of Speech .... 22
Oleanders .... 23
A Portable Crush .... 24
Bizarre Triangle Fetish .... 26
Muster .... 27
Underworld .... 28
Clickbait .... 30
Albedo .... 31
Here Come The Roses .... 32
The Bells of Hell .... 35
Body Double Waltz .... 36
Queen, Unplugged .... 37
The Curse of Resources .... 39
Aubade .... 40
Reverse de Bergerac .... 42
The Negotiation of the Detour in the Psychic Economy .... 43
Back to How You Have Wronged Me .... 44
Scindere .... 46
Current Blood .... 47
Murder Ballad .... 48

Quicklime .... 50
Community of Lovers .... 51
Wuthering Heights .... 53
Misdirection .... 55
The Family Trust .... 56
Relocation of the Big Prawn .... 57
Snakebite with Anecdote .... 59
For Love Alone .... 60
Whatever .... 62

PLAGIARISM DREAMS

We met at the end of the chorus
when all the lights were fouled
with drink and even the self-titled
Ouzo Animal was yawning in protest
at the Bacchanalian revel in which
no member is not drunken. I sipped
soda water from a cracked glass and
refrained from removing my jumper
while a twelve-year old Bob Dylan
with a voice like Hank Williams
stood silently in the corner stirring
vinyl motes with his fingertips,
a younger more cherubic version of you,
Prince Valiant or some other slender
sword-bearer infiltrating the childhood
of your celebrated prettiness preparing you
for a lifetime of repetition and inaction
till your appearance in the space between
the bar and our oversexed pinball machine
conjured foxes, chickens and all the abjured
mythologies of early twenty-first century
mating games, obliterating the desire
for friendship that skulks behind the false
advertising of every sexual advance.
It’s only men who think that they and women
can’t be true, a self-serving dialect delivered
by an absent emperor, your king in waiting,
so charred, so easily bruised. Poor Scorpio
clichés of speech overcome in me
and reinstituted as a kind of structure.
The possibility of being immortal is something
I will have to give up on. Scattered to the pigs

7

in the rent-free cage, conversing in a language
that is not so different from the one you deride.
In which all the worlds tetrahedron and give up
on the cause of the Frisky Mothers of Bullaburra,
now entwined, night squad of rabbits waiting to chew
your stumps to cavities in an externalized display
of waking fictions. I decay and suffer a mannish twinge.
The first of the plagiarism dreams reclaims my heart
with false dice. All behaviour is suspicious.

8

THE ILLUSTRIOUS FORMATIONS
OF ABSOLUTE CONTINGENCY

Walking in the country you remember how to write fiction.
Pineapple pines stringing dirty boulevards of sunlit infinity.
Choosing motion sickness over poetry, sheep seep through the petulant
Watching you gaze into another woman’s face / I feel I’ll always be /
What she gave up on to secure her father’s affection. How to Coincide
with life. If the syntax won’t admit us we will have to break it.
Salt and pepper lies. The singular accoutrement of the country-wide.
I am always on your mind. As evidenced by the way songs used to end
with a meaningless flourish and are now just content to trickle.
Handing you the jumper leads inevitably proposes connections—
Like a red phone box in the middle of a paddock, the touch of her fingertips
on your wrist is best forgotten. The way to connect is out of sight just beyond
that hill, or inside the box, beneath the carpet. The grinding loss of a man
with a face like an apple looms over you as you sleep. Old and full of grace
and nodding by the fire. Into this world the hills look smooth from a distance,
the weeds spin silk and stories of genocide. Perhaps I’m not equipped for love
she thinks, only for the companionship of unruly affection.

9

MY VIEWS

Twenty-two days since I’ve seen the sun
I don’t have time to arrange my views
Things happen quickly so I don’t remember
you know my name but it’s a pile of glasnost
The way you draw yourself up through the song
Giving in to the sick side of sensation
A parody of love when it was half a mantel
Garbled light illuminates a gallowed sublime
And I hear myself speaking in the voice of Mao
‘Something frightening lurks in the song of birds’

10

THE INEVITABLE BEAUTY OF THE VIEWER WHEN
FACED WITH THE PARTITIONIST TACTICS OF THE
SITUATIONIST LOVER

You and your beauty ask questions of the viewer such as

What is Form and Why is this Happening?

The viewer not wanting to exceed the beauty

of the inoperable sees she must match its unstoppable

theory to overdue notions of the apartheid of literature.

Nothing to see in the spectacle of your lips

but the insistence of the letter in the mire of situationist abandonment.

Keep telling yourself that

the poem is a container for the formless horror of your eyes as emotion

skinning you to the scrutiny of the automaton as inadequate

representation of the poem as a container for the formless

horror of the delimited passion of the never stops not being written

11

BLANDISHMENTS

Growling and erudite in the crucible
of every situation is doing you channeling
circadian remnants of ‘must I reject
everything You are’ like ‘I used to
transcribe every syllable of your liquid
bohemia, as if words were the lead singer
of Verona viewed from every possible.
If it means something to you I can’t say I
understand what you’re filtering Torrents
of black sand underwiring my silken
jaw taste of Colombia and tripwire panties
with barely a low rider to rub between
the impasse you said, hopefully, but I don’t
know, I always thought there’d be more
Bloodshed. Arguing with you is somehow
Delightful, like having your head held
beneath the tenacious skin of a four foot
wading pool when even the chemically
identical of the outer regions of the
chlorinated think you’re beautiful and
now that Chrissy Amphlett’s gone
what more is there to say?
I thought love was Science Fiction
until I saw you today

12

SONG FOR AN INDIFFERENT ITALIAN

In the stillness of the sauna you are nearly naked first
What tightly held molecules comprise your microclimate?
Load-bearing finitudes protest and all the ladies comprised
find tranquility in your curls; in the sweetness hid therein
I see my death. Oversensitive ventricle, dilated lapidary

How can you say you don’t believe in Spring
when our trajectories collide with calamitous outbreaks
of Physics? Semicircular canal means you tilt
to the right, while I flatten out in Fast Lane Three.

Friendship comports within the parameters of a cheating
speculation. In which I am given to the silicon trajectory
of the Teutonic hairpiece, supersonic miasmus, septic fritter,
cooking temperature legitimates butterfly trills.
Fluttering sacrum, tantric beatitude of hills,
preoccupied with aggression and corpulent negativity.
Whatever the cause, the feeling was contagious, produced
in her the desired response. After all you’ve been through

the sight of a near-naked man is not enough to undo you.
Tackle the spectacle at close range, tease the bullet through
aspic. Torture futility with the hope of a scrap,
attracting attention to that which it proposes to conceal.
What it feels like for a man. A wall of windows irrigated
by flights of sluggish moths, whirring in the chest of the

Moreton Bay Fig. An electrified bolt splitting the carapace,
plastic flowers strewing the dashboard, longish knuckles
ructioning the parquetry, the top half of a terrace
with its affordable glimpse of the harbour, her collection of nice
looking but impractically small suitcases

13