Posts Tagged ‘Speaking Places’

Mexico

He asked me this silly question, ‘Was Mexico good?’

I said to him, ‘Good’ What do you mean, ‘good’?

‘What happened in Mexico picked me up and shook me. It threw me on the ground and made love to me. Then it left me alone and I cried like a child. The mountains skirting Monterey opened my eyes to a vision of God’s immensity, and I was dumb with it.

And all the time Mexico revealed its poverty to me, and I saw its orphans, the weak ones, with cross-eyes and vulnerable. I held the lovely girl with the scar across her head from her father’s machete attack. I met the young boy bursting with intelligence who was trying to exercise his mind, but only had a dud battery and broken electric motor from a toy to do it with.

I watched birds under the eaves of the house rearing their young, and saw the small ones fall back into death.

Everywhere there were children on the streets, working, trying to sell to eat, and there were places with waiters dressed like servants to attract the American dollar.

For weeks I had the shits from the food. But my guts developed antidotes and I ate and slept and dreamt wonderful dreams, feeling and losing my manhood to age.

In Mexico, before the rains came, and in the dark of night, love spoke to me. It opened the deep rooms of my heart, where a child hid and waited. And love spoke to the child of my heart in its own language. Then the child came out from its hidden room, because it had waited my lifetime to hear those words. For Love said, ‘My darling child, I want you with all the passion, longing, and desperate pain that you want me. I must reach out to you always, else I am lost.’

And the child received those words and was made whole.

Then Mexico fed me with experience. It exercised my soul to its extremes, until I collapsed laughing and crying. Anger tore at me until I kicked the wall and fell on my bed beating it in frustration and loss. Anger because events parted me from love, until I found peace in the difficulty.

Mexico took me from everything that had been home. My work, the good facilities of my house, my longtime friends and loves were gone. And she and I transformed an empty house into a home, and in that home created warmth.

Mexico has her face etched upon it in my soul.

Melbourne Bars

Vengeful bars vomiting their breed
Of people onto the pavements.
Like clusters of wasps buzzing
From the noise of the
Electronic vibrations
That have irritated them.
And restaurants
Instilling hurry and worry
Into the commerce of
Eating.
Pay the bill.
Pay the price!

Walking into home
Removing the street clothes
To bathe in the warmth
with bare skin.
And the dog moves a paw
In recognition of my passing
As he soaks the cool from the wall.
And I sit in the shade of the house
Watching the cat spread on the
Path away from the sun.
The flowers shine colour
without moving,
Touching me
As the breeze moves things,
Slowly.

Kin

At the bottom of the yard today,
Down where the ground slopes
Into the creek
I sat near the great fir tees
Listening to the breathless hush
In which we each make our sounds
And commit our movements.
Looking up I saw the crows
Flying with twigs in their beaks
Building their nests.

I had built a nest for my children
With the help of my mate.
I had worked
A day
A week
Years – to feed my chicks.
I know the struggle
I know the joy
I know the kinship
With these birds
Whose young,
As did mine,
Look awkwardly
Through bright eyes.

These trees
I know too,
Who have toiled
Establishing themselves
From tiny seeds.
Haven’t I
Been a tiny seed,
Braved the journey of growth,
Of winter and storm,
Of competition
Disease and fall?

I witness
Upon the body
Of these trees
The marks of life
As upon my own.
I am a kin
To this wide garden
In which
All manner of things
Exist with me.

It Was A Quiet Day

It has been such a hot dry summer,
And I stood on the bridge
Looking at the shallows in the river.
I wondered if the salmon could come upstream yet.
There was so little water,
Even the trout seemed quiet.

Idly standing there
I noticed a drop of water
From the recent shower
Fall from a branch and strike a berry
Hanging near me.

And in that moment I could see
Everything in the droplet’s fall,
And the berry’s gentle swing.
Everything and everywhere
Were in that moment —
In each moment and its movement.

The sun, the wind,
The Earth’s slow circling,
Clouds and living things,
All had taken part
In the production
Of that moment.

It was a quiet day.
I spoke to no one.
What need was there?
In every moment — everywhere.

Then time was so wonderful,
When for years I had longed
For it to halt.
There had been too many days
Testing my life
And asking so much.

But now I wanted to look
At everything,
So grateful for spaces
Between things,
And that it all came
One thing at a time
So I could appreciate
Each new thing.

Enmeshed – Merging and Emerging

Tonight I walked from the cluster of houses into the warm desert. There I became a surface for the full moon to shine upon, and food for crowding mosquitoes.

Living by myself has grown that habit, of walking alone, of looking at things from a distance. Yes, I am enmeshed in the life around me, in other people’s lives, in work and relationships. But there are degrees of involvement. There are shades, steps and angles to the way we move and exist within a community and within the world.

On this stage, and on this full-mooned night, I am made aware of this. I feel the place I stand intensely. With sadness I know a breach was made, a connection severed, and my place in the life of my fellows altered. I never previously saw the extent of my links with the normal, with the acceptable, with what people respect or feel easy with. But now, standing in this new place, sitting alone in the desert, feeling the mosquito bite, I know it clearly.

The known is that I am sharing a house with a married woman whose husband has only just become present. If I were a servant, separated from the woman of the house by the firm social barrier of employer and employed, of servant and mistress, there might be some programme in the minds of observers that shows a green light instead of the red light of suspicion. But the questions are asked, ‘What is this man doing in the house of this woman? How is it her husband allows this? Why does the woman want this?’

It means that any care or contact must be hidden. Love must be denied. Any depth or freedom of communication undertaken only when there is no possibility of others present.

Essentially, while living with another, I am alone, denied, hidden. There is no wonderful intimacy I might have with a lover or wife. I am devoid of the social status and acknowledgement I would be offered as a husband or committed partner.

These I have known in my marriage and in other relationships. I took them hungrily, holding my woman in public, taking her hand, feeling secure in intimacy. I was proud of our social recognition as a couple.

You seldom know how good those things are until you have lived with them for years, then lost them. And I lost them, and stand-alone under the moon, hearing the dogs bark and fight in Los Frailes. The woman and her man are away somewhere together, and I am sitting on a rock wondering about what I have lost, and what I have gained. I look at the emptiness in my left hand, the emptiness of loss. In my right hand is what I gained, and I search it to see if it satisfies.

I wander back over the years, meeting and warmly greeting old familiar memories. From being with them again I see that I wanted this aloneness. I moved toward the freedom enabling me to explore new relationships, to go in my own direction. This can be a wonderful feast of choices. But I want to warn this woman I feel love for, that it is also a torn place, an experience of separation and divorce. Few of us can tolerate freedom in someone we depend upon or need. It is too painful. Anxiety, jealousy, anger or hopelessness, the destruction of dreams, arise too easily. Few of us who ourselves want freedom, can tolerate it in others we love or are bonded with. It is one of those paradoxes of human behaviour. The man who so easily has an affair, is riven and angry if his woman behaves in the same way.

I walked slowly back into Los Frailes, feeling new bites from mosquitoes, and still hearing the dogs barking. I quietly explored roads I had not seen before, feeling, as I had intensely felt many times before, that human love has a finer face than we see when jealousy, possessiveness, competition or childhood pains not yet outlived shape its features. I had longed to find an expression of love in myself and others, not evoked by human frailties. My dream has always been of a new family, a new form of trying to build carefully and caringly within the strange and often awful world of present-day societies and cultures. I see it built upon mutual support and sharing of skills, on a form of love that is not possessive, nor ignorant of sexually transmitted diseases. In my dream, I see this Family mutually owning property, goods, and the larger needs of everyday living – not as a collective, but on the understanding that this mutuality has enormous benefits. Not least among these would be security through ownership for one’s children and oneself, that in the past was only known by the church through its enormous riches in property, by large corporations, and by families who had accumulated enormous wealth through the work of underpaid, or enslaved employees.

Perhaps this is only my personal feelings, but I love to walk in its quiet streets, looking at its beautiful walled gardens and hearing the cicadas sing, as I am doing here in Los Frailes this warm night.

A Stand of Trees

Above Coelbren in the hills,
There is an ancient Roman road.
One bright November afternoon,
I sought that road.
Along unmarked footpaths,
Through the creviced hills
Of river valleys,
I roamed in hope
To set my feet upon the stones
Of that old way.

Then, discovering an unpaved track,
I followed its sloping downward path
Toward another valley.
Past inclined meadows
Rich green, and reeded,
Mossy with the rain,
Across sounding rivulets
Spattering in their flow,
Down into sunshine.

Turning a right-hand bend,
A wonder stopped me.
There, across a river,
A grand hill sloped wide
Across my vision.
And on its rise,
In clear fresh sunlight,
A stand of trees.

Quietly I adored them.
The birches,
Like a dappled nearby edge
To this great wood,
Are leafless now,
Making a billowing misty purple
Against the dark green power
Of the many pines.

Playing other notes of colour,
Swelling and falling
On the soft curves of that hill,
The oaks, still holding leaves,
Play yellow and amber music
With the sun.
But here and there,
Peeping through,
Hazels shine spring green.

The voiceless voices
Of their great limbs;
The artless art,
Of their rich colour;
The river sounds,
The framing meadows,
All gave to me,
The stand of trees.

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