|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The motorway finishes near here, or begins, we’ll come to its source, I said, imagining black tar bubbling out of the earth in a gravelly snake rivering away to the east. Would someone have built a shielding wall as they would at a spring’s birthplace? Not sandstone or square cut oolite but raw con-blocks, with a sodium light as a candle to hold a driver’s prayer. Does St. Christopher travel the motorways?
Still you sleep beside me in the darkness. My hands are gripping the wheel too tightly, there’s too much traffic, too much sleeting rain. I am afraid to be part of this deadly rush-hour avalanche, afraid I might fail. I should be armoured, constructed of metals, computers, stripped bare of all abilities to imagine, to feel, to sense Death’s angels hovering in these breathless inches between speed and certainty.
But the cab of the lorry coming up close beside me is painted with forests. Oak leaves sway by the windscreen, ivy clings to the door. Deep in greenness, a stag stares out, his antlers lifting the moon like a cup of light. High in his travelling tree-house the driver smiles down at me, pulls past in a long powerful thundering, shaking the world.
Smoothly curving, the road arcs into four points of the compass. Still you sleep, your face soft, as if you dreamed of love. Briefly, I touch your lips with my fingers just to feel your breath.
Stars float out into the ragged sky above the road. We are coming to the borderlands, beyond here lies unfamiliar territory, another country with its own signs and wonders. Another country with its own language of the heart for us to learn.
I ran from my Mother before I was born (and she’d tried so hard, made me of star-ash, clay, rain) but I raced downtown and went chasing the easy speedy routes over fields of fuel (feet dirty, heart hungry) trawling the wide mouth of my Fendi sack for spoils, discarding and trading: uranium, copper and cotton, bodies and palm oil, sugar, coffee, coal futures, gold —
Someplace I spilled babies, somewhere I drew crowds, but I rushed on faster, eating and spitting out riches, winding higher and higher through wasteland and mountain until I reached the edge and stopped — with nothing before me.
Sirocco and shadow have formed the last of my family: Grandmother Earth, stick-thin and bony, so fragile, so easily broken; scorched, hairless, dry breasted, abraded — Only the two of us matter, only us in existence.
I could leave her. Go on running on empty — or take off my Prada jacket and wrap it around her, set tinder to flame in my shoes and sit at her feet, listening to Wisdom: the First voice of Spirit, breath of the future.
And what I hope for every winter is to find a way through to the other side where the jubilant light begins again in a hesitation of birdsong.
I am learning to see in the dark, recognise that this is a sign and this, these sudden sensual chances and clues — as in melodic fifths on the radio or a rain-diadem, or the unexpected arrival of white cyclamen in cellophane — things the body perceives first as elements of light and offers up to the spirit, so shut in its hole, mole-blind.
And there are the synchronicities that puzzle you but make me shiver with their meanings: three aligned heron feathers or the time and thought of meteorites; I bring them back to you like trophies from a race of joy.
I had always believed I would die young not making the markers of thirty nor forty-five. In a way then, this is all extra and more risky than any year, this precious time of coming-to-knowing, but even my acceptance that what is, is, can’t fully protect me; Autumn still brings the familiar fear: Winter will be here and I will be in darkness, groping forward nervously trying to remember that the black dragons and dogs of shadowland are guided by dark mothers carrying secret gifts of pearl — still I’ll cry for kinder weather.
This then, is the origin of fear: that the sun will not rise and there will be no release from the dark; this, set beside our knowing of how we must wait always for the hour when we will not go on into the next season. Like a film of ghosts, the family, the quick rivers and flowers, the music and horses will stream past us covering the brightening land as we are turned aside into a strangeness we can only trust.
This morning the air reminded me of the country where we learned to love each other; I know now that was not better than this. All our symbols and armoury all our footsteps and collisions are spirit paths, showing the way through, complex and simple as the lines held by my hands; and how I hold love between them.
Your face now is thinner, as if the years starved towards the skull.
What would my hands seek and hold in the long laden night if you should go on disappearing?
You and I dancing on the table slow waltz all alone in a Marienbad landscape, cropped trees of black and white. We floated, light-stepping the spilled flutes and tulips, the spoiled loaves, drew a whole dreaming solace out of the rainy air.
Dawn — or some early hour of possibly false light — somewhere beyond the blackout curtain I thought you had risen, were standing close to the door, but it was Shadow, tense as the energy of Jupiter trapped in a water-glass.
Love me. Don’t be bones and riddles. I am a cat of nine furs to be stroked and fed, you are gifted hands, perfect bread.
|
|
©
of
all poems featured on this site remains with the
poet |
