What's out there so far

(Design reproduced from the original by Jesse Breytenbach, with her kind permission)

The eye of the mind, the eye of the heart

In moments of ecstatic illumination,
brief and rare, but memorable,
it can be pitch dark and it wouldn't matter.
Seeing becomes perceiving
and evidence becomes understanding.
You don't need your eyes for that;
you could walk blindfold through an unfamiliar room
stacked with crystal glasses and not break a thing.

Moments like those,
when they do occur,
seem so illuminating that they make you think you see
everything else just as clearly, for a while.
But they're deceptive
as the afterimage of a flash lighting up your retinas;
and before you know it,
you're once again clumsy even in broad daylight
and spilling secrets as if you were drunk.

(First published in Carapace 62, March 2007; and then in A Look Away Issue 7, Quarter 4, 2007)

After as is before

When you go,

silence will fall with the rain

so soft and heavy it's

evident only when a drop

strikes a leaf,

strokes each place in me that is yours,

landing on gestures that

have people pinpointing parallels that

we know for what they are;

such is the power of assumption.

When you go,

I will lose and find and lose again,

I will find and lose and find again

in a process I've learned

can be endured,

can be the reward of endurance.

One way, I am here because of you.

And I'll remain, in a way because of you.

We know each other for who we are;

such is the power of belief.

When you go,

you will have known, perhaps best,

that there'll be at once so much

and nothing more to be said.

And in the ceremony of tears I will

stand and feel your falling

with the silence,

with the rain;

and be forever traced,

borne and bereft.

(First published in New Contrast 142, June 2008)

The weak spot

There is a place for him in her heart.

A weak spot

like a sprained wrist that

years later

gives way under an impromptu handstand.

(First published in New Contrast 143, September 2008)

Rest for the third eye

I want the sleep I used to have

when the fall was shorter

and the rise longer;

supreme sense of comfort in each -

a taste craved by the mind.

Tongue stilled,

silence gained.

A shift

to which gravity is beside the point

and thus is neither plummet nor ascension

but something in between -

a kind of suspension.

Movement enacted by thought in the vast velvet sea.

A kind of meditation, humbly meant.

Yet I continue to lie awake.

(First published in New Contrast 147, Spring 2009)

At table we met

At worst, and rarely,

you reached down into my throat

and pulled me inside out,

spreading every visceral element on the table before you,

pointing and identifying,

presuming the past, pronouncing the future.

At best, and much more often,

you opened the curtains,

your hands warm as the sun,

your gaze fixed on me.

From you, I received the gift of successive awakenings to joy,

invaluable breakfasts.

Burned but simmering,

you frog-leapt over the present and into the future,

asking what if again and again,

with the false certainty that a question sometimes brings;

trying to create what you had imagined,

trying to capture what you had created.

You didn't want information,

you wanted to be spoon-fed.

Like a child with Asperger's,

for you each morsel had to be laid out on the plate just so,

else the entire meal was inedible;

the whole less than the sum of its parts.

This is the role we sometimes play:

to be another's mistake.

We cannot help but learn from the lesson ourselves,

and if we're lucky

there is good in the good and good even in the bad;

and though the fairytale ends in nothing like happily ever after,

what comfort there is

just in the after;

what nourishment there is

in successive simple meals.

(First published in New Contrast 148, Summer 2009)

Every 19th of December

One form of memory presents the past as photography - images of arrested experience. It shows how something or someone looks in the duration of its passage from is to was; it elicits its potential to be (again). And our eye sees this in the precision, or the haze, of a moment.

But what about tradition? Tradition isn't photographically preserved in our mind's eye. It seems more ingrained in our bodies. Yet it can be lost. From one generation to the next, it can fade like a lullaby for years sung soft and certain, then hummed, finally succumbing to silence. How do we save it? While some gestures remain, the words gradually slip away. The underlying reasons have long been unspoken. The intention endures, but reality intrudes because the circumstances have changed - borders crossed and re-crossed, countries departed from and returned to, reinhabited but not as home. Pains have been taken to establish a new life, in a new place. That doesn't mean that everything should be new. To some people, roots are valuable, even essential. Roots can tunnel across the earth from north to south, so strong that should they burrow downwards they would eventually meet at the core. Belief rises from depth as deep as this.

What happens, then, when the believers are gone? Perhaps the idea of the tradition remains, diluted, discernible. Like a break in a bone, a hairline gap that is evident even when the bone has healed. It endures in being passed on in those very sounds that fade and cease. They descend through the stages of articulation, through the layers of our apprehension, to the place where they become a type of memory like but not the same as the halted image: a progressive memory. In this place, we hear the believers' voices when they have stopped speaking. Along the way the words have travelled from is to was; now, in the country no longer new, we appreciate them and thus fulfil their potential to be (again).

Tradition progresses in us as fibres of the roots that stretch from there (the origin) to here (the continuation), and we extend roots of our own. Our words may not sound quite the same as the old ones, they may not be what they were, but they convey the belief that we have inherited and made our own.

I'm singin' in the sunshine

Lightening the hues of the housework blues,
with a jazzy lilt
and a merry tilt to the chin,
here we go:

Summer sun

you are the one

for me.

Summer air -

from way up there

in the sky so truly hugely blue -

you float down

to me.

Your balmy embrace

soothes my upturned face,

and I'm in love with you.

My flat is clean,

my work is done.

For the next three weeks

all I'm gonna do is have fun.

This afternoon in the gathering gloom

clouds'll pleat,

lightning'll flash, thunder'll crash,

rain will rinse away the heat.

Oh, sunshiny day,

you're the best gift our climate can give;

you make everything wanna live, live, LIVE.

Your balm-y charms

fill my outstretched arms,

and I'm in love with you.