Selected poems
Looking out from Kalorama
(for Bettye 1949-2011)
…upon the path there looms the barrier which no magic of words
can any longer help to circumvent, or to open up.
Philippe Jaccottet, Beauregard
…the gesture remains: it measures the emptiness, sounds its limits.
Eugenio Montale, Tempi di Bellosguardo
Departure
The tall mountain ash trees (Eucalyptus regnans)
lean back a little from the breeze.
Their loose bark clattering like clapsticks
measures the creaking primordial calls of the currawongs
and black cockatoos shouldering off
the thickened air and light across the forest canopy.
Our last walk was down this track beside the dirt road
on Easter Sunday to stand there on The Hump
overlooking the Yarra Valley at dusk.
You had turned towards me then and said:
‘I see the black wall ahead, and I know I have to walk
right up to it, press against it, work
my body right into its cracks and crevices
until I find the way on through…
I know, and you know, that you cannot come with me.
I feel alone now, and I am afraid.’
I’d tried to hold you, but was gently pushed away.
‘I am alone, more than you can know.’
And stood apart, in the night wind among those trees.
Six weeks later, it was accomplished…
You went elsewhere. It was hard, for you, for me.
I remained, and embraced that
absence as if it were your body lying by me every night.
I knew we’d never be in touch again.
It seems the kookaburras always have the last laugh.
Other viewpoints
On so many other nights I have gazed
from hills and heights at cities, at those winking
lights of settlement, unsettled by the way
that life inhabits space with all its tribulations
and its pleasures. The first time, maybe
aged eighteen, looking down at Christchurch
I had wondered what was being lived
there in the suburbs. Tragi-comic, despairing
existences that television programmes
claimed to know in versions we could recognise.
I had no faith in that kind of revelation.
I hoped there might be joys and deepenings.
And still it is a question, though now
informed by those further scripts and storylines
I’ve come to know, and all those ways
in which the passages of time are fulfilled
or just endured, made and otherwise
broken and repaired, or else prostrated before
the flickering blue light of a domestic
god that exacts its tribute, even sacrifice.
These long nights of uttered anguish
after all the house lights had been switched off,
and my hand closed your ungazing eyes
as you departed, stage left, off into the wings.
An eagle or else…
Sometimes you simply want to end it all. Winding