A Memory to Love

It must be the same for everyone;

we hold special memories

of when the world felt balanced.

Here's one of mine: walking into

Winchester Cathedral, late afternoon

with the light slanting horizontally

along the arches and the organ

pealing. I rang with joy.

“But what about people?” you say.

If you want people,

I'll give you my three year old

inciting his cousins to kick a ball

up and down the long aisle.

This memory is part of who I am;

I want it to outlast my burial,

to be released it into the world

so that long, long after my body

is mulched into the ground

my memory will still be drifting

over oceans, hovering

across hills and mountains.

No Thoroughfare

My inner maze has blocked both ways;

I am cabin-fevered with sameness.

Myth would have it the goddess

is sitting cross-legged at my threshold.

If I am to dislodge her,

I need to loosen, undo, untie

fling open winter-shut doors and windows,

let in fresh air and sunlight.

But my courage and the goddess

have developed an inverse

symbiosis. I can have one

or the other, but not both at once.

The Whims of Chance

Life is made up of conditional clauses:

if . . . , then . . . ,

especially the subjunctive,

if I had . . . , or worse,

if only I had . . . .

I've been examining

the road map of my life,

seeing how little input I've had.

A slight, unplanned change of direction

and everything is different:

places, friends, activities.

Its like being a character

in a novel by someone else.

There will be an ending,

but I have no way of knowing

what form the ending will take.

I am insignificant,

blown by the whims of chance.

Yet, on one occasion

I was farewelling Paul

and he shared his gratitude:

“Out of all the possibilities

of space and time, we're here,

together, on this Melbourne station.”

The world expanded under my feet.

The Art of Weaving

Death steals a person away,

but leaves feelings intact.

Now, grief, like my rogue wisteria,

takes over my life.

I need to create a daily ritual,

write my grief with bird song,

with dappled light and shadow.

I need to weave it with honour

into the fabric of my days,

I Need More Time

Time is so variable:

take this exact moment,

it's gone almost before I've noticed it;

in the blink of an eye,

tomorrow has become yesterday.

Time as a succession of pixels.

The wise tell us to concentrate

on the moment but that's like trying

to keep hold of one drop

in a rapidly moving stream.

Anyway we need time:

sentences are temporal.

Without time, we can neither think, talk,

understand, read nor write.

To communicate we need

words or images in a sequence.

So I have grave doubts

about eternity.

It lacks pixellation,

it lacks communication.

I don't think I am ready for it;

I need more time.

Bric-à-Brac

i

I am an image junkie,

always on the prowl

for metaphors

ii

If I'm to write poetry,

I need the nourishment of time.

But my illness is bulimic,

devours time and spews it out

undigested. Where's sustenance

in gobbets of time

mixed with stomach acid?

iii

I always thought my final

resting place would be the quiet earth.

So great literature tells us;

never mind moths and harebells,

I wanted a small piece of ground

where I could slumber peacefully.

But that is not to be. My grave

is situated plumb above

an active fault line.

My skeleton, together

with my neighbour's bones,

will rattle and clonk

percussively until the end of time.

Homage - for John.

This is threshold music.

After his wife's death,

Bach wove chorale melodies

into his solo violin works,

mostly Cantata number 4,

Christ Lag in Todesbanden,

Christ lay in death dark prison,

with its ringing Allelujah

at the end of every section.

But with voices and violin

matched together,

the Allelujahs take on

a more sombre form:

not the hubris of certainty,

but a human hesitation

and self doubt, good listening

when a loved one has died.

Bach's wife and my friend and brother

deserve the wistfulness of hope,

Allelujah.