the window

with her mind ...

"a season after hell"

Sidney Nolan, a painting
[remembered detail],
ripolin enamel on hardboard1


While still a child, 
I admired the obdurate convict 
on whom the prison gates always close. 
I visited the inns and furnished rooms 
she hallowed by her stay. 
With her mind 
I saw the blue sky
after I set her free
   a child

Rimbaud's words intertext with the helmeted man looking into the window where a woman is being molested. In the courtroom the policeman's guilt, the courtroom's guilt, a nation's guilt ... all seems to melt together with the outlaw's guilt to fill the air. For the woman, though, there is no courtroom: in that legal system she becomes the helmeted one, without face: both accuser and accused.

The word hallowed embodies the confusion for the child.
The room/s were both hallowed and hellish.
The child is hollow, filled with confusing messages of the most horrible kind.
Often the person bringing with them incest is their most hallowed, their most esteemed friend. That hallowed convict(ed)-person-lover-non-friend is never convicted in any sort of
courtroom belonging
to an established system of criminal law, but s/he is imprisoned inside the human psyche of a captive child, one who is locked inside the most appalling and impossible memory. This text, this (inter)text is one which must be edited out. But how? Can the child set both herself and the convict free?