The manuscript I am currently working on, The Wide Starless Silence, is a book-length sequence of poems, each ending in a quotation from a poet or philosopher who has, at some stage, spoken a lot to me.
The Wide Starless Silence #33
The night inside the night has the colour of straw.
Very gently it combs your face, enters your nostrils,
trails its fingers over your eyelids.
It's clear that much of what is here you bring yourself
but there are others here as well and others' voices.
You can sense them starting to speak
in the numb soles of your feet,
the emptiness of your hands.
Or they come towards you as long-ago people
seen once in childhood on a vanishing railway platform
snatched away by the miracle of a departure
that instantly erases all that it leaves.
They can be heard in the hammering of old pipes
or the high-pitched monosyllables of birds
and you follow them down tunnels
of the night inside the night.
In the luminous blackness that settles on all sides,
writing your name on the stones,
writing your name on the sky,
it was time to begin but you were still
in transit, moving gracefully
through waterlily ponds between sandstone escarpments,
imagining you could run alongside yourself
cheering encouragement over the brink of night.
As if your one escape was to live always in fast-forward
but the night inside the night
takes a lifetime to understand
and you wake so few times inside it,
bereft of all light, all past or future,
space and time sealed off,
groping your way
to a loneliness that is also
its own kind of beauty,
the opening of a dimension
that can never again be closed.1
THOUGHTS IN A CAFÉ2
Day and world on a road that leads beyond.
I pass them by
and it’s good to know
sparks left behind have lodged
in the leaves of the chinaberry tree
I saw in a photograph of a Cuban sidewalk, circa 1912.
Nothing is lost.
Sitting beside a mirror that runs
the whole length of this café
I wait at the very edge
of a double life. Every person,
every table, cup and plate
persists in its glassy being
and the tree outside, the buildings of the street
swim towards me, ignorant of death.
Men and women lean into each other,
stand or drift. The stillness
of a Sunday without end
muffles their voices. We have
all the time of that unmoving cloud resting
above the shoulder of the young girl
with her far-away smile and long long ponytail.
My eyes lift to see your face
on the threshold of the corridor that descends,
goes on descending through
the mind’s still centre:
gone gone utterly gone.
The Wide Starless Silence #44
I drink in your presence
as if through my will alone
I could hold you wrapped in stillness,
safe beyond the jagged
lightning-jolts that go on
drilling down into the rawness
of your bones. Here in this death-room
light binds me to your body
that collapses over and over as you attempt
to will yourself to stand up,
to walk free.
Outside beyond the windows
a boy bouncing a ball in a backyard,
a flight of cockatoos
tilting towards evening.
I count them off:
this stand of trees, this car
entering a driveway, these towels
still hanging on a clothesline
and, as I name them,
everything I see is in the past.
The closest, the most distant, both
woven with silence's one substance . . .
the soul that inhabits you is also
the gaze of the sky that includes you.3
FOR A BEAUTIFUL POLISH LADY4
Now that Death is dreaming
in his vast summer house by the lake
and the floating pools of iris and of nenuphar
shimmer in midday sun
a dancing girl takes the boat ride
with her protector’s son.
Timid, her weary hands gripped close together,
she is free in the day’s rare stillness
and delights in these curved bridges flung against the sky,
in ornate walkways of a vanished Tsar,
in this slow lightly dipping boat
circling where the swans lie down and love.
Over them a white-haired destiny
endlessly tosses a tennis ball to a dog
on the balcony where speech has died:
this red-faced figure in a hunchbacked jumper.
Bleak stones are growing moss
and the dainty slippers of the dancer
skim the black-rimmed water
as she crosses.
On the brief jetty to the rosegarden
her feet pause and arch.
Freckle faced and proper
the boy beside her,
growing like a wheat stalk,
basks in her shadow’s warmth.
And now the wind turns fretful.
The sun deserts the tarnished terraces.
Turning back then
you, the dancer, look about
and say
that love is what is left:
it is the last emotion to die,
even later than resentment or envy,
out in the wasted stone hills beyond the palace walls,
in the wilderness where gardens end
and half-bitten cherries
stain the snow.
The Wide Starless Silence #56
Pure flow of water through my fingers.
The waitress Cristina is wiping a nearby table ——
she has the clear joyous face
of a student I fell in love with
fifty years ago. Outside,
the sky stretches the seconds
into lozenges of rain that hold
tiny planets of water in their grasp.
I am waiting for the others to arrive
in a bar opposite a station in Spain
two years ago. With a fresh renewed intensity
the sea of my seventeenth birthday
sucks grit through my toes.
Strong winds in stony country --
I have reached the bleak upland fastness
where a millennial prophecy determines
the narrow tilt of ancient houses leaning into
whatever will become of our lives.
Beyond the multi-coloured mountains
I am still asking what time is.
We know we are shining,
Though we cannot see one another.5
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p 151. ↩︎
- Originally published in Ghostspeaking, 2016. ↩︎
- Olga Orozco, ‘Al pájaro se lo interroga con su canto’, Poesía completa <my translation and adaptation>, p.355. ↩︎
- Originally published in The Age Monthly Review, 1985. ↩︎
- James Wright, ‘Yes, But’, Above the River: The Complete Poems, p. 376. ↩︎
