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,

maybe, he smiled, a replay

of 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. 

COMA AROUSAL

Dear head, listen while I speak.

I’ll tell you short mysterious stories now,

sagas cast from hot metallic ore

mined in the nether reaches of the sky,

poems of love of life and laughter, 

pain’s heat, if only they will drive

through the cold silence of your mind

and there by methods quite unknown

relight the candles blown

by a sharp and unforgiving wind.

The foggy “why?” the mist that greyed

many a seaside harbour dawn before

obscures the sky. I cannot say

that I am closer now

to its edge than then.

But if, when the lottery were drawn

your luck ran in - - dear head!

I’d kiss the stars, weep

and caress the sky,

sing praise

that love is life,

that sun is warm,

that magic is not dead.

1987

CALLIGRAPHY

Pen or brush stroke thus.

Indent. Conceal and

reveal at once, half tell

in cryptic tapestry, triptych

or single cell,

stand back and let another read

the character itself

and hand.

Certainly retouch

with ink of DNA. Incorporate

the mystery of ancient temple

smoke, paint what you feel

of love and heart disease and cancer,

father and motherhood,

of food and God,

each matrix dot a

bit of one man’s question

or a woman’s answer.

It is, one may pun, an

occident of fate that we

express our earthly stint in

12 point print. Come, come!

Reorient the heart,

informalise and free!

Obscure to some extent

in real-time calligraphic art

and let them see!

1987

NOVEMBER IN THE RAIN OF QUEEN VICTORIA

Rain drags slomo waves across

the roof of glass. We peer

like tourists of the Barrier Reef

 in a boat (upside down of course)

through the ocean sky

to the blur of Centrepoint

and contrapuntal minaret and tower

of  the grey coral kingdom

of Sydney’s commercial buildings.

Eda Michelle hurts a little

from the tourists lost because its wet.

Pearsons know

the flowers won’t sell as well and

Alter ego, Monza, Duty Free,

Bristol and Brooks, inmates in their

competing deco cells,

nevertheless together curse the rain

a bit I bet today in QVB* 

The most ginormous artificial Christmas pine

of plastic spines and lights,

a phallus uber alles, points

via a crowning star

to the dome of glass.

Protected from

the rain and pain,

not even synthetic

Christ’s at home

as far as I can see.

How far can I see?

Skylights as colourless as

doubt that stretch above and

bless the multistoreyed halls

on both sides, under rain

to-night will transmit

radio outlines from space

of lonely but nevertheless

real stars.

*Queen Victoria Building, Sydney      

1987

SHUTTLE

God’s gone – gate barred and bolted,

clanged shut, riding his own vapour trail

of rocket fragments

out of the fireball

into a frozen sky.

‘Uh-oh; what the (expletive)’s that?

We’re riding free!’

Applause! Applause!

See! The pyrotechnics are superb!

‘Fancy our daughter being in the capsule

that produced so bright and shining a display!’

And all by day,

outsunning the sun

and melting the sky of iridial blue!

1986

SINGULARITY

‘…it seems inevitable that there was a time when all mater in the observable universe was concentrated into a tiny volume of great heat and density. Go back far enough and it would all have been concentrated in a point of infinite density called a singularity. The further back towards the big bang you go, the hotter the universe becomes…at the Planck time (10 ^-43 seconds after the big bang), all the forces and [atomic and sub-atomic] particles would have been indistinguishable.’

The Economist;

1/11/86

Ten to twenty billion years (within an ace) ago

you and I and all of China,

suns, galaxies, stars and space,

dwelt nascent in one modest-sized

seminal or ovarian vesicle:

The Red and the Blue,

awaiting our Pleistocene video cue,

the starter’s gun,

the Big Bang,

to begin our universal marathon.

History and geography, science and sex,

music, peace and wars,

warmth, cold, Jesus’ body,

love: one speck

in the cosmic crucible:

madness, politics, fruit of the spirit,

your job, my clothes, his hair,

all there, times one billion,

as was fire and

what became water,

blood of ’86.

Red-shift of the expanding universe;

ten to the nineteenth White Dwarfs; Qasars;

space at -27⁰ C; Black Holes.

choirs of Pulsars

sing on Radio Infinity –

too shocking when their broadcast song

wakes me from original silence at 1 am –

a lyric of fearful relativity

that one millennium,

one microsecond, now and then,

and I’ll not be.

1986