David McCooey |

This poem is from ‘After Kubrick’, a loose sequence responding – sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly – to various films by Stanley Kubrick. It is a companion piece to Maria Takolander’s ‘Alien Signals: Poems After Stanley Kubrick’ in her Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009).

 

—

Notes on 2001: A Space Odyssey

Inside, there is the sound
of technology.
Outside, there is the sound
of nothing.

Inside the space suit,
there is the sound
of respiration.
There is no

outside the space suit.

      ٭٭٭

The film essays
the gap:
the slight delay
on the phone

when a father
talks with his daughter;
the hours it takes
some signals

to reach a space ship;
a message
buried in a computer’s
memory.

Even light
has a history.
(The light in the sky,
the light on the screen).

      ٭٭٭

HAL is one-eyed
(like a camera).
Bowman, so otherwise
calm, has a

murderous stare,
stored ghosts ago, sunk
within the base of
his prehistoric brain.

      ٭٭٭

The ambitious imagination—
a universe of analogy.
A famous montage,
from bone to space station.

But also the movement
across a stream
and across space;
the rotation of

that space station,
and the rotation
of the planets;
the early humans

in their ape suits,
and the moderns
in their space suits—
the literal-mindedness of creation.

      ٭٭٭

How many science-fiction
films have focused
so resolutely on the soft,
primitive violence of eating?

The primates and their flesh
(of fruit, of pigs);
the in-flight food;
the astronauts

with their TV dinners.
And Bowman,
having crossed galaxies,
spends his final

days eating and sleeping,
showing that every chamber
is an antechamber,
that every inside entails

a wild, unfathomable outside.

Bio

David McCooey is a prize-winning poet and critic. His latest book of poems, Outside, was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and was a Finalist of the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s ‘Best Writing Award’ in 2012. His album of ‘poetry soundtracks’ (original poems, music, and sound design), Outside Broadcast, was released as a digital download in 2013. David is Personal Chair at Deakin University, Geelong.