HAPPINESS HAPPENS MONTH

                                      I

Sextilis was the name of the sixth child

in Romulus’ family of ten months

then Popilius produced two more month-babies –

January and February – in 700BC.

Popilius decreed that Sextilis had 29 days

to do its business but out of kindness

Julius Caesar added two in 45BC.

Sextilis’ name was changed to August in honour

of Octavian who conquered Alexandria

in that month in 30BC. Octavian went on  

to change his own name to Augustus

pursuing propinquity and pride.

His conquest of Alexandria

gave Augustus such joy

that August is now the month

we celebrate how happiness happens:

no one is certain, it’s true,  

but for various reasons

we presume the creative method  

has to do with the moon and in 2012

August began with a full

and ended with a blue,

so happiness may be

doubly abundant this year.

                             II

How happiness happens

is a peculiarly American industry.

There are questionnaires about sex,

happiness-enhancement classes,

positive thinking courses,

biblical quotes to memorise,

smiles to learn alone or with

Norman Vincent Peel in the mirror,

hand-clasps to practise in company and

many happy-making things to buy.

For those itching to know

things that explain

how happiness happens

comes to be celebrated in August

include August being

Psoriasis Awareness Month

and Goats Cheese Month.

Its first week is World Breastfeeding Week

so a choice of dairy is available:

August is also

Get Ready for Kindergarten Month

for those who have finished with the breast

and whose psoriasis is no longer contagious.

If you feel you are failing

in your pursuit of happiness

and your brain is disintegrating

here’s your last hope:

August is also Neurosurgery Outreach Month.

DOG

Was it the Bishop of Barking

who announced that Dog is dead?

Was that really what he said

or was he just skylarking?

The dog had strayed into my school

and I made friends with him, or he with me.

I was seven and too enamoured to see

we were each in our way a fool.

He followed me the mile to my home

where I lived with my dad and mad mother.

I thought of him as a possible brother

though I could see he was likely to roam.

Each day I fed him, hugged, had a chat.

I grew much attached to Dog:

a friend to hold in the fog.

I should have left it at that.

He followed me back to the schoolyard.

The principal called the cops who rather

with pleasure shot him, I gathered,

and thus my new-love died.

I watched from afar as they wheeled him

in a barrow, with kids shouting with fun

and buried him in Judd's Paddock. The gun

intrigued the kids and the cop showed it to them.

Later I looked in the tall grass

for his grave with a mouthful of dread.

After three days I saw him in the distance - risen from the dead!

A secret, secret thing that I kept from the class.

SINISTRA

When I and my symmetric brother

were born it could not be said

who would dominate

or be preferred though custom

meant that he would be

the one to shake

and with time we learned

that he would write

open doors

hold the bow

play the major note.

I had an alien role:

clumsy, I had no right

to take the lead

or cut the steak,

or make the model boats

or brush the teeth.

The best that I could do

was squeeze the paste

hold the fork

lift the case

perhaps share

a wash with him together

and then with face.

I had my place

at the piano, true,

to add the bass

to his excursive treble

to help with typing

but not with pleasuring

either the body of my owner

or that of another –

well, sometimes perhaps

but with a lot of trouble …

But when the right was damaged

my lack of education

was reformed. 

Suddenly I was taught

to shave,

to guide the penis as it peed,

cut as well as hold the steak

scribble crumpled messages

with pens,

compute.

Once over, I took back

my old dysgraphic role

a slave to all that’s right.

No voice,

today I have no choice

but to live on handouts

and the occasional leftover.

AIR

The God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,

he learned as part of his youthful catechism

but now at eighty, breathlessly awaiting cataclysm,

he wonders if He also weeps

as he does, in the early hours awake,

scorned by the darkness, choked by panic,

impotent in a dream of drowning, frantic,

gasping, ‘What step, O God, to take’?

He was an engineer and knew what ticked,

worked on tall buildings, watched his wife

as her motor neurones lost their life

thirty years ago, saw her slacken, food stick.

The irony was not lost on him that both

she, no muscles, and he, no lungs or air,

were united in a book of common prayer.

A unifying recitation, welcome death.

Clouds of incense smoke at his funeral mass

embrace the word and prayers.

“He was never one to give himself airs,”

the priest says, and Freud lets the moment pass.

MAKING MUSIC

The cobbles of Arezzo,

their order and community,

were sermons for the pious

monk named Guido Monaco

as he walked along the road.

While wondering what God

may be saying to him

Guido’s mind strayed to ways

whereby he might follow

the example of the stones, their fit,

permanence and community,

to create order and stability

for the music in his church.

Music had no written record,

was passed from generation

to generation in Christendom

for a thousand years

by laborious recitation,

endless repetition.

It travelled from one place to another

by father’s voice to son

who journeyed with it,

its glories shackled by

the boredom of rote learning

its accuracy blunted

while the liturgy and the chanted words

were written, unchanging yet open to exegesis

but not to the distorting caprice

of imperfect memory.

From the sermon in stones Guido took away

a vision in which the music of the chants

was secured like the cobbles

in the ordered pavement

as were the words written

in the chants, a dream of system,

permanence and metalanguage

where notes and cadences

high and low and in between

were written down as were the prayers.

His contemplations

led Guido to write basic notes

above the lines of chants

He assigned letters

to the syllables of music,

each for a different pitch,

tracing their passage

on four horizontal lines.

The sequence of neumes

hung like small black birds along the lines.

Guido then used his antipher

of lines and neumes

in his church in Arezzo

praising God for its wonder and order.

At the pope’s request,

Guido took his music to Rome in 1020,

winning John XIX’s endorsement.

Although Guido’s music was not popular

Rudolf of Moustier-sur-Sambre

brought it to choristers in Belgium:

though they did not know Italian

they learned to sing

as from Arezzo

using Guido’s system

of annotation.

Asked why he wept so often

Rudolf replied it was from joy

as, he said, he had found a ladder into heaven.

               

PARALLEL PARITY

       Sydney                                                           

                                                                                     

       

Three weeks and my milk is in

and Lucas is feeding well

and I am learning

the soft tug of his suck

his smell and his opened eye,

his jerky movements

his tiny penis and his skin of silk.

My vagina is healing

and my strength returning.

If Megan were to hold him

close for hours

I think that her breasts too

would soon

yield milk.

When we decided to marry

we had not discussed a child

but after two years we decided

and our dear friend

Hugh provided sperm:

I wonder what relationship

might develop between him

and his sort-of son?

                                  

Somalia

Three weeks and tomorrow
Ashkir will die. 
I have no milk.
The soldiers at the camp
have no interest in babies
and the famine continues
for us but not for them.


Ashkir was conceived
on a drunken raid one night:
soldiers – ‘guarding our camp’!
One whose name I never heard
swaggered, rattling with strings of 
ammunition, laughed and jumped me:
there was no help.


I shall follow Ashkir soon.
I still lose blood
and grow weaker.
I’ve seen
many mothers die.
I wait.
Next week I would
have turned fourteen.

MORNING

It comes softly

moving aside clouds

as gently as a lover

opens his sleeping partner’s eyes

with a finger and a smile;

eyes that were closed like doors 

of a theatre where dark dramas

played out on the stage

of deepest imagination,

complicated thoughts, dreams of fright,

of agendas of anxious meetings

that fail, of lost parents, children,

passports, of flying in planes

between tall buildings

not far above the ground.  

                 

What we see we see with eyes

like fingers that can play

the keys of only one octave

of six pianos side by side

that make up the electromagnetic band.

To right and left are infra ultra red

and violet waves, of radio and x,

that wash up foreign scripts

in flasks made from rare metals –

peridium, lucidanium – and alloys

unknown in our solar system,

forged ten trillion years ago

at the time of star formation

and galactic collision.

Perhaps our brains that sweat

and toil at night  

sense directly messages

from these sources

or instead, like the strange fish

that live in freezing or boiling

waters a mile deep – bioluminescent –

their large eyes comprised

of several retinal layers,

see only by their own pale light?

The light comes softly,

moving aside the night

with its alien invasions of the mind

nightmares and alarms,

resolutions, fabrications,

decisions that don’t last

and palpitations.