MARKING TIME

This little clock began to tic toc

when Apollo 8 circled the moon

and the astronauts read Genesis

as Earth rose blue and white

on Christmas eve.

In those days computers

including Apollo 8’s

ran on tapes – long gone

but the lo-tech motor

in this clock keeps on.

It has endured myriad meals

cooked in the kitchen,

the grime, the renovator’s hammer, 

his stirring up of dust.

It has aged much less

than those who have consulted it –

to time an egg or calculate

what must be done  

for guests by when.

But reducing time to hours

the clock obscures time’s harsh reality.

Eight today on its face

looks much as it did yesterday.

kidding us it could tick on

unchanged forever.

CLEAR SHINING AFTER RAIN

From Sometimes a light surprises – in praise of recovery

by William Cowper (1780)

Beige permeates 

all that’s viewed

through the fine gauze

of a cataract.  

Like the inability to recall names

or complete a crossword

it grows by stealth

simulating aging.

  

You have to hand it to technology:

it’s uncommon to find a fix for age.

But in the case of cataracts

things can be done.

Pay the right price,

lie under the microscope,

dream on midazolam

while things go on.

A tiny instrument in the surgeon’s hands

screams at the cataract,

its sound shatters it and with a microsucker

she pulls the bits out.

A new plastic lens is fitted,

takes ten minutes,

and costs more

than an Indian peasant

earns in a lifetime.

FRAGMENTS

I’ve grown old without effort.

Now I can’t hear without aid,

eyes and brain fail to perceive

what were once simple solutions

to complex problems:

(Never mind that they were

usually wrong.)

A brilliant medical lecturer

– with a wry smile – told us as students

that when he was a clinician,

he observed several patients die

“in perfect biochemical balance,”

diminished bowel, bladder, brain in harmony.

The thigh bone is joined to the hip bone

so as one reduces its range of movement

the other follows –

both are workers on an assembly line

adjusting to the other’s pace.

Sitting becomes easier.

(Sitting is bad for your health –

invoking correlation as causation

we argue that those who sit are less healthy,

live fewer years than those who stand.)

“How are you?” they ask.

“Just fine,” you reply – if you heard them –

referring to your balanced numbers,

reaching for your stick (where did you put it?)

as you alight from your chair –

or not.

Blow Me Down

I’d forgotten the wind –

maybe it was hiding, at work

in tornadoes over America –

but now here again,

a door-to-door salesman of yore,

selling brooms and pots, smiling,

pushing, never taking no for an answer,

pressing, through cracks and half-closed doors

to be in your face.

It brings power rather than peace,

flinging yachts across Bass Strait,

raising the waves,

snapping masts,

heaving sailors overboard;

its business is busyness

and shove-iness, laughing

behind the noise and fury

at its desperate mischief.

Rarely benign or gentle,

when it assumes the mantle of a breeze –

it is at its fullest – malignant –

when furiously fanning bush fires.

It is a variant of rage.

Wind is one face of fate.

We may don our ’cheater

but ultimately we are cheated:

wind is the breath of death.

ICHTHYS

No cruel mouth, no eye,

born in the deep heat

of the sulphur plumes

of the Mariana Trench,

no words to implicate, only

an outline of fearful symmetry.

We know but we do not speak,

we belong, reciprocate,

our secrets safe in silence,

we treasure an uncensorable symbol,

twenty-seven letters of power.

no intellectual property to steal,

nothing to offend – an acrostic:

ησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ*

Augustine read it, reflected,

and understanding

made it part of his confession.

*Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.