Wednesday, June 30, 2010

you have loved.

In the mornings your love sings.
In the cold we need your face.
In our weakness you are close, beautiful.
On the mountain your heart calls, resounds.
In the fortress you are our song.
In our sorrow you have loved, deeply.

Your glory is the word that reigns.
Your fire stands like a solid rock
that will never break.

You are our desire
and all that our thirst waits for.
You are faithful hope
and all that we live here for.
By your mercy we are yours,
our God.

You have come nearby to us:
held and formed us by your light,
raised us from the earth and spoken here.
As our lives leap bright you dance with us.
In our dying you are poured out.
In our summer you are strong, shining.

I will awaken.



Tonight a water mains burst in our front yard. It threw water twenty metres high for an hour or so. So wasteful and waiting, so long, for someone to turn the water off in our street... Yet awesome. Some of my family hurried for showers.

There's a flash for this photo; the real thing was monochrome dark, cold, huge and loud. The moon and streetlights caught glimmers in a heavy outbreaking of water as high as the gum-trees, where you had to look right up when beneath.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

hear it.

In love with the mythical,
we found the mystical.
As we remember,
particulars of culture
have always filled

our words regarding
largeness.

Under the heavens,
catch this world
in vapour webs.
Matter and form are all song,
silver notes buried
in the depths of bass;

else, we befriend the solid souls
of rivers, of dense hills
swollen under our feet,
the breeze
that sweeps over them both,
glistening in autumn.

Trees will clap their hands.
Lift your hearts up
for a great choir:
rich with soil, echoing
voices that all bow
near the roads to that mountain.

Though myths feast under crowns
of bright surrender
at this table,
there is one note,
one love,
a single friendship,

that we must never empty
into many.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

men at forty.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors of rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

(by Donald Justice)

Friday, June 4, 2010

evening by the lake.

It's but three years
since we sat 'round
those yellow desks, mosaic’d
in Pollock’s genius.
All precise, that tangle
of moment and fire
split and spilt—
memory sent
to its burrows
as staple-guns war.

(When will he rise
on the white-primed sea?)

Hand guides mine, with the brush
in mine. As I paint lately,
my hand is that hand.
Children of aether, or children of earth...
There is developer
all through my clothes.

We have witnessed Memory.

Autobiographical persistence
wanes away.
Understand these hundreds of layers
of worthier strokes,

lost in someone else’s worlds;
images dart in and out
of these feast-hall windows,
warbling.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

and we'd rejoice.

The Best Of It
Kay Ryan

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn't matter that
our acre's down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we'd rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.