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.

LIBERTY

This was once New York –

this desert so extensive,

so grey it could be

the moon –

I was told this

by the only man

I’ve seen

for days.

I don’t know

how many of us remain.

Desert –

and this massive

head, broken from its neck,

bearing a bent diadem,

an aureole

of the seven seas,

the seven continents and seven rays

of the unrelenting sun.

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.