JULIO

The casket was not carried out:

instead was wheeled

appalled family

walking either side

his mother riding in a chair behind,

reaching out to touch

then hold the lid

somewhat obscured by flowers.

He was forty-eight,

dangling at the end of schizophrenia;

voices having torn his soul,

with strident assertions

instruct him how

to plait his hair, to tie the knot,

to place the chair and kick it out.

“This is the best that we could do –

we are short of resources                                                              

for mental health.

We have to fund

forces in Afghanistan

invest in new buildings

do countable things.”

He was an artist at times

pencilling the Blue Mountains,

arcades in The Rocks.

After years his wife left him,

a frowning alien

cut off from relatives

who found him,

cut him down.

Argyle Place, The Rocks, Sydney

BLUE LIGHT DISTRICT

My garden has a blue light district lit

by a lantern with a foot-high fluoro tube

behind wire netting charged to six thousand volts

that seduces mozzies on their nightly search

for opportunities for swopping body fluids.

They hit the hi-volt wall and crash

like fighter pilots unable to eject.

The zapparatus does its thrilling, grilling stuff  –

enough to cause the nearby TV voices

to pause for a quiet moment to reflect.

The net is cased in plastic –

a green mesh sized to exclude

moths and flying creatures

innocent of lascivious desire.

But for them there are other threats.

Spiders, they of the eight eyes looking

and eight legs each with hairs

as in our inner ears that sense vibrations

through which they hear their dinner cooking,

have built their webs, like sexual health advisers,

at the base of the outer mesh,

under the blue light and the wire net,

slothful and overweight on welfare,

connoisseurs of cooked insect meat

for their nocturnal feast.

A mozzie-meat Σουβλάκι might not come

and spiders then will seize a moth

that seeks only to celebrate the light  –

caught like a youth in a rip at night.

140310

THE QUAKE

‘5.5’ by Birgitte Hansen

THE QUAKE

When an earthquake registering 5.5 on the Richter scale struck Newcastle late-morning on December 28^th, 1989, thirteen people were killed and ten thousand buildings were damaged, some irreparably so.

Christ Church Cathedral, overlooking Newcastle, was cracked and its fine transept windows shattered in the quake. One shop in King Street shed its ceramic tile facing, revealing a foundation stone laid ages ago by Sir Earle Page.

After three weeks a Service of Commemoration and Renewal was held in the Cathedral, early in the evening of Friday January 20^th, 1990. Toward the end of the service, threatening thunder clouds began to rain heavily on the city, its homes, damaged shops and streets, some still decorated for Christmas.

CATHEDRAL

Summer evening clouds weep

on the cathedral and its city

the tears we shed at funerals for our dead.

Thunder rolls a deep antiphony

in memory of that momentous noise

of ancient dragon's breath

setting fire to wood long dried

when the quake struck

when walls fell,

clocks stopped

and birdsong died.

Blood of smashed memorial glass

lies on the cathedral floor -

blood of founders, blood of saints,

blood of workers -

our communal grief.

We remember

and touch the scar

of each past private grief.

'Season's Greetings!' hang in unlit shops

on barricaded streets.

The heavy rain lets foundations reappear,

stripped of paint and ceramic gloss,

runnels clear the dust and grit of years:

tears clarify inscriptions.

Yes, we realise

it’s here that we'll rebuild!

EVERY LOSS

Every loss, every loss

erodes the intervening gloss

of built-up lacquer layers

of life over the last loss,

last year’s,

yesterday’s loss.

Every place, each

and every place

I visit is redolent

with what’s been, where

I’ve been before, and lost.

He was here, he was there,

but now is not. Somehow

the fishing image

has the most power

to resurrect the hour

of lost intimacy.

Emptying his garage

as I did last week

of rubbish, failed electric

motors, mowers

all speak of lost power

and life,

like his wife,

I suppose.

Every pleasant sad event

catches, old smells,

touch of things, tells

of what were or seemed to be

but maybe never were,

or will be,

loss without end.

Amen.

14 November 1989

THUS WE PART

I

Dull’s the day and hope,

slips the mooring rope,

ends the quiet handshake.

Surely I could reach you,

jump across,

walk your deck again,

admire your paint,

see my face

reflected in your brass,

check your maps and canvas,

smell the sea-sweat in your wood -

surely we could sail again!

Whether we could

is a leaf-thought drifting

through the sepulchral space.

II

Tide moves you on.

They’re wrong who say

that parting can be sudden

even when by death.

Instead the mind spins a dreamtime

complete with your voice,

your words distinctly heard,

smells of food you prepared.

  

Slowly the dust of days

settles softly on the glass,

and blunts the familiar

edges of your face.

THUS WE SEE

A sixty-five year old man consulted me in 1986 complaining of a band of chest pain that two cardiologists had investigated without diagnosis. He was Polish and had been a prisoner in WWII and enslaved in a German coalmine in Silesia, starved and inadequately clothed. He described to me how as winter progressed, he and his fellow prisoners would wire the decaying pieces of their clothes together.  His shirt was reduced to a band of fabric around the middle of his chest.  His current chest pain was in the same anatomical zone as that covered forty-five years before by the remnants of his shirt.

Thus we see and sew and save

the triangular, square or without form,

colored bits of fabric, even love,

to keep us warm.

Thus we see

the landscape under snow,

‘the infected winter of our condition,’

and in seeing, know.

Thus we sew,

as freezing prisoners of war,

the remnants of the clothes we wear,

Dole. Too rough:

thread of repair is not enough

to make us whole.

Thus we save,

as lining for our trap,

flotsam rescued from the wave,

the storm, from life’s enthralling compromise –

worn and wet rags

to fill the gap –

we have only man’s eyes.

THE ACCOMPANIST

I found Handel’s aria by chance again today

at the base of a decade of my papers

with annotations written back then

to guide my playing to her style

and the word ‘Hannah’ and the date

on the top right-hand corner

of the first page.

Eighteen and full of life

a fine soprano voice,

her older sister

was to be married

the following week

and she’d been asked to sing

and this piece was her choice.

I can see and hear her now as

we rehearsed in the cathedral,

late Saturday afternoon light

slanting through stained glass

touching  her youth

with ancient colours

as she stood to sing.

Four hundred years since Rinaldo

was acclaimed and now again

via voice and organ

it reached into high gothic space,

the glory and tears of lamentation,

echoes touching us softly before

settling once more into silence.

A group of three friends

heard her sing,

full of beans and the joy of life

as she was, bantering.

She smiled to me

when we had finished,

waved with happy anticipation.

It was more of a thump than a bang

and then the sounds of a panicked crowd,

a little later the sirens, stricken disbelief,

the cordoning off

of the pedestrian crossing:

Lascia ch’io pianga

mia cruda sorte.*

*Let me weep

My cruel fate

IF ON A SUMMER SOLSTICE FLIGHT…

I take my seat

in Sardine Class

on QF31 for London.

Despite my belt and press

of fellow passengers

I shout I am a god!

I raise my arms

for more hours

of light on this

the longest day!

Our Boeing lifts and soars

west through twenty hours

of sunshine then,

deserting memories

of hot beaches, fires, drought

and sundrenched children,

lands, a beached fish stranded

in Yuletide dark damp and snow,

battle lost at last against

the longest night. 

THE TROUT

A clinker-built row boat afloat

Lough Doo in the morning light

summer zephyr, Irish hills,

Tom the ghillie smoking his 20^th cigarette

as he rows us to where the trout

now swim, or so he says.

We cast lines, flies skipping,

lost in sunlight. “Too bright!”

Tom complains, lights another cigarette.

We wait. A quick snap,

a hand-sized trout is on my line.

Excited, I reel it in, hold it, then let it go.

Fifty years since I last fished

with my dad in a clinker row boat

in an estuary at Davistown!

He, like Tom, had his thermos flask, sugar bag

for bait, lines, knives, hooks and sinkers,

hours of waiting, teaching patience.

Fancy such old boats still about!

My dad is long gone, his sunburned hands

an image in memory’s bank

in mint condition, the smell of prawns

in mid-summer Australian holiday heat,

the gasp of bream flapping in the bottom of the boat.

I hold these clinker-built memories,

plank upon plank, sealed and waterproof,

and place them in my own small boat

as I row on my life’s lake,

journeying I hope with patience

whether or not I catch a trout.

CARPE DIEM

In my Rubik’s cube of carpal bones

dwells the silent but articulating

triquetral that proved my equal

when recently I fell

arm outstretched in the supermarket

as though reaching in competition

for a special bargain

on a shelf.

Even if true, which it’s not,

I got more than I was bargaining for.

In Emergency, under the quiet gaze

of x-rays the triquetrum expressed

distress, not in words of anger or of fear

but in hostile fragments.

“Today’s the day!” it said, “That’s what you get

for ignoring me all these years!”

EREBUS: 77.32S; 167.09E

- for a friend who plans to spend a year in Antarctica

The jetsam of life is so easily erased –

terror covered by one short fall of snow.

We know that only a minor error

in the plan and not man

scattered the wreckage so.

I’ll spend a year reviewing

what fate and life have been doing,

uncovering from the ice the

ill-fitting pieces,

seeking the lost places,

replaying the tapes,

the programs, paths through time and space,

going beyond the last frontier if need be,

facing the fear of a white world

without faces, without trees,

reciting the rhyme and dissecting

the algebraic form of the silence,

the singing of aurorean fires until

I unravel from their contrapuntal patterns

of light messages that rank in glory

with those sung by Bach’s choirs.

This may explain it all.

I’ll fight to see if I am strong enough.

I’ll stake my life, use whalers’ pitch

soft from my hand-blood’s heat,

cut planks from an ancient frozen tree,

roughened wood from recent wrecks

and fashion them and lash them

together to make a small boat

that I hope eventually

will bring me back.

COME BACK IN A YEAR

‘Essentially clear’, the report read,

but what did ‘essentially’ mean?

“Come back in a year!” the doctor said,

smiling a smile that implied

that she knew best

but what is best, I wondered?  She said

“See if you can rest.”

I accept the categories of anxiety

that Paul Tillich described when struggling

to splint the German psyche

shattered with shame after the Holocaust.

Worry over purposelessness,

guilt and death, he said, mark our existence –

natural, unavoidable qualities of our lives as mortals,

of our separation from our essence –

the Ground of all Being, as he termed God.

Tillich’s explorations may not exactly resonate

but cancer of the breast feels like

a little holocaust. Captives in white gowns

with bald heads, we participate in trials of new drugs,

lie down for weeks of x-ray in dark bunkers.

We move in small spaces with high walls seeking peace,

with threats over summer holidays and seeing our grandkids grow.

So when six months passed, undressed,

I found a new lump, there was no further need

for puzzling adjectives like ‘essentially’.

The report was clear. “Next stage,” the doctor said

adding kindly, “See if you can rest.”

HUBBLE

The Universe goes beyond the Milky Way galaxy

Edwin Hubble's arrival at Mount Wilson, California, in 1919 coincided roughly with the completion of the 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker Telescope, then the world's largest telescope. At that time, the prevailing view of the cosmos was that the universe consisted entirely of the Milky Way Galaxy. Using the Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson, Hubble identified Cepheid variables (a kind of star; see also standard candle) in several spiral nebulae, including the Andromeda Nebula. His observations, made in 1922–1923, proved conclusively that these nebulae were much too distant to be part of the Milky Way and were, in fact, entire galaxies outside our own. This idea had been opposed by many in the astronomy establishment of the time, in particular by the Harvard University-based Harlow Shapley. Hubble's discovery, announced on January 1, 1925, fundamentally changed the view of the universe.
Hubble also devised the most commonly used system for classifying galaxies, grouping them according to their appearance in photographic images. He arranged the different groups of galaxies in what became known as the Hubble sequence.


HUBBLE 1925


Massive stars that breathe once
in months, half a million times
brighter than our sun
were what caught Hubble’s eye in 1922
especially the Andromeda nebula one:
this starry spiral he worked out must lie
beyond the Milky Way.

‘Beyond the Milky Way’
was like saying the earth is round
before Pythagoras 600 years in
front of Christ’s birth
or that the earth circles the sun
ere Copernicus did his sums
in De Revolutionibus in 1543.
Conventional wisdom was till then
that all there is to the universe
is contained in the Milky Way
but no. Hubble was the one to show
that galaxies exist beyond our own
spiking the myth again
that we live
at the centre of all things.

Hubble used the Hooker telescope
In California.

FALL

First light of red and gold touches

the Blue Mountains maples and

liquid ambers: the calm

clarity of autumn is at hand.

When we were young

we caught the sunshine,

like the chlorophyll,

to generate our sap and scent.

Now the chlorophyll retreats

from us dangerous front-line leaves

seeking safe haven instead in branch

and solid trunk till spring.

Wind, rain and heat –

once friends with whom we sang –

now threaten; but our skin

is tough and we hang on.

Of our class, so lightly green

in 1966, a few have fallen.

We who remain see colours change

as hours of sunlight shorten.

CARDINALS

CARDINAL SIN

I had come from Illinois

to charm and not annoy

on very special business

from his holy papal eminence

to tell our Mainestream flock –

all those of solid stock –

that spring had truly come

but it seems the call was bum

for the sunshine’s turned to snow

and my rochet, you should know,

that matches all this white

I left at home last night.

Wearing red was right I thought –

given spring I really ought!

Cassock and biretta

felt significantly better.

and to add a little show

a touch of zucchetto

But God has a happy play

changing weather every day.

We do not know His plan

but an environmental scan

shows I’m conspicuous in red!

Must wing it on my way

lest a predator, let us say

or a creditor, comes along

and unaware of cardinal sin

eats me, there and then!

It took me many winters

of hard work, bent knees,

prayer and supplication

on stone steps,

of minding the sheep,

conducting myself

with circumspection,

a priest among fellows

not all blessed

with the absence of jealousy,

writing acceptable material

for papal endorsement

and publication,

of imperceptibly growing older -

before I became a cardinal.

Thus this had been my ambition.

But when the day came

for my ordination

I wondered if what

was left of me

to take the vows

was me.

SHE RAN OUT OF STEAM

How well the iron seems

to iron flat all creases

steam out alternate seams

until the ironer ceases.

210710

EPIPHANY

Rex and John, both Australian neurosurgeons, were attending a conference in Oxford.

That high summer day on the deck

of the Head of the River,

relaxed by his Ploughman’s Lunch and ale,

Rex looked into the cloudless sky,

saw several far-off small black dots:

maybe Canada geese, if not,

he smiled, old Spitfires

replaying the Battle of Britain?

Hard to be certain …

But the dots stood still.

Rex set down his glass,

stunned by rapid-fire thoughts

of probabilities.

“I think,” he said quietly to John

“I have secondaries in my brain.”

Ten years ago Rex had

a melanoma on his back.

There were questions then.

“One never knows,”

his surgeon said.

  

“Are you sure they’re not floaters?”

Rex closed each eye in turn.

“Positive.” he said.

“Migraine aura?” 

“Never before.”

Rex knew the drill.

For a decade he had savoured each day,

freed it from bureaucracy and strife.

Fancy him, a wise man from the east,

receiving this epiphany in Oxford –

Oxford, home of Tolkien

and other master weavers of fantasy –

this clear, prosaic sentence!

How ironic that its execution

would be inside his head!

“I think that we should finish lunch,”

Rex said slowly.

John touched his arm.

Both turned again to their cheese, meat

and bread, emptied their glasses

and left with the calm they assumed

as they emerged from theatre,

weary with effort, seeking

relatives in the waiting room

desperate for news of a miracle,

to confess that it was not within their powers

to remove all their loved one’s tumour

though they’d tried for hours.

SILENCE BEFORE AND AFTER SOUND

SOUNDS AND SILENCE

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides. – Artur Schnabel – 1958

Artur Schnabel touched the marble

toes of Michelangelo’s

six-ton tower of David.

Although I’d been told they’d feel cold

they felt warm to my fingers.

 “Like keys!” I mused amazed.

But it was in the carved spaces

between the toes that I found

mysteries of beauty.

All of my life I’ve been searching

for the faultless expression

of magical spaces,

spaces of silence, places of rest

between phrases and notes -

now in my hand.

Schnabel touched a marvel between

toes of Michelangelo’s

six-ton tower of David.

APHASIA

THE WORD AND THE FLESH

Late seventies, silent,

immobile face, he viewed me

with the eyes of a Beagle.

I smiled, walked close,

softly rubbed his back,

touched his hand.

He gripped my fingers,

fingers of an urban man.

I feared – foreign,

illegal, canine –

where he might take them.

In fact, he carried them

calmly to his mouth –

I felt his tropic breath –

then turned them over,

kissed my palm.

GRADUATION

OCTOBER 2011

On suburban palisades

and trellises in Sydney

wisteria wakes

and in self-conscious haste

pulls on mauve bubble-wrap

to hide its naked narrow winter

wires of branch and stalk.

Miner birds, obsessed with nests,

fuss, squawk and bomb the cats.

In the classroom brows furrow

as Year 12 students search for words,

for non-imaginary numbers,

defence against examiners’ demands,

shed uniforms, face east and like moths,

eyes opening on their first day,

sense the existential trap

of the HSC and of what

lurks beyond the sunrise.