Living poems

by Diana Neutze

Andante Maestoso

A desolation of empty time,
a treadmill of hours and minutes;
there is no escape.
All journeying must be inward.

I would be filled with silence,
free-falling floating between worlds;
but first like blowing an egg
to leave an empty shell,
I must be flushed clean.

A passing barge fragments
reflected sky;
crisscrossing images slowly settle.
I wait for a drift of clouds.

iii

Sycamore shadows move
across the carpet measuring
the afternoon; the cat unwinds
one circle curls himself
into another.
Cat, tree, sunlight, shadows,
enter my being, become the crucible
wherein I seek alchemical magic.

There are many ways of moving house;
I try letting in more light.
Sycamore trees unfurl a semaphore
of green flags as the vibrant air
new mints each leaf,
highlights each tiny twig.
As in a cathedral crossing
where four choirs intersect and blend
and golden notes cascade in streams of light
from the clerestory,
I am filled to overflowing.

I measure time by raindrops,
by the restructuring of a spiders web,
by a flurry of wax eyes elegant
in olive green and white eyeliner
foraging for food
around the strawberry tree.

Light laps and ripples like polished water
and calling blackbirds resonate
within time's boundlessness.

Now

This is enough:
far removed
from the world's deformities,
a bee in a foxglove
persistently in and out
with me, caught in the sunlight, watching.

Moment by moment

Now is elusive:
set boundaries
and it becomes the past.

Today, the sun's warmth eased out
the southerly chill;
a monarch was hovering
above a silver birch;
a chatter of fantails chased
around and through the apricot tree.

But even as I held the moment
separate from what had been
and what would follow
it became the past
overlaid with memories:
the sun on my face
after a childhood swim;
a monarch taken into the sun
for its first free flight;
a fantail having a bath:
in, a quick shimmy, a hop and out
repeated ten or twenty times.

What had been a long sustained note
had become an orchestral suite
counterpointed against
a chattering background of birds
and the gentle nudge in my mind
from my recent reading,
The Tibetan book of living and dying

Today, I could have managed
with the orchestra
of the age of enlightenment;
yesterday I needed
a more contemporary attack
repeated and staccato
with lots of brass and timpani.
A buffeting wind
roiled and seethed a silver birch
against the sky
so with all the agitation,
it was impossible to isolate
one single moment.

The now of the present moment,
is rooted in space and time.

The moment of the silver birch tree
lasted as long as the wind blew
and my watching was incidental.
The other moment: of the sun,
butterfly and fantails,
because of its layers of memories,
is still resonating:
a joyful break in the clouds,
a fantail scouring my window
for insects, and a newly emerged
monarch twitching resentfully
at the first feel of raindrops.

Two unique moments
caught in the now of memory.

The trickster mind

The trickster mind is a know all:
take the language we use for eternity
life everlasting,
generation after generation,
for ever; but world without end
also means world without beginning.
Eternity has no need of time.

Or, consider the language
for nothingness:
the mind incurably binary
looks for definitions;
baulked, it resorts to metaphors:
a silence, an interval, a space.
But the silence between two notes
still has a time signature.
Even to think about nothingness
confers substance.

Floundering in these contradictions
the mind can only cling
to elusive hopes:
death's ending is a return
to the nothingness of the beginning,
eternity is now.

The waiting

There is only one thing required:
we need to be poised and ready
not ill prepared
like the foolish virgins in the story.
There is no way of knowing
when there will be a summons
and we may no longer
recognise the language.

There will be no more
Old Testament prophets,
no Renaissance angel,
nor even a messenger at midnight
dismounting wearily
from a horse mired with sweat.

And a fierce summons is blessedly rare,
the spiritual vertigo
when the world turns on its axis
the road to to Damascus,
the third cock crow of denial.

Instead, there is a lifetime of waiting
waiting for the shell
of our busyness to split open
leaving us vulnerable and exposed.

Until, in the end, the waiting
is the summons.

Recognition

This morning I reinvented the wheel:
I sat in my garden
thinking and thinking again
until, with all the surprise
and delight of discovery,
I came up with ideas
that have been thought
and beautifully expressed
for centuries.

Discovery, no, rather recognition,
putting theory into practice,
like always knowing that a straight line
was the shortest distance between two points,
and after a lifetime of meandering,
stumbling upon a Roman road
where I can walk, erect, in sunlight.

For the brief while I walk this road
I know for certain,
know all my questions will be answered
and the answers will be
rich and satisfying.

Recognition, after all,
means that what I now know
I have known long ago.
Recognition is a return.

Crocodile

I used to hold the crocodile
of his midnight fears;
rampaging only after dark
it disappeared during the daylight hours.

My crocodile snarls at me
on the most sun-drenched days;
with crunching teeth and whiplash tail,
I can find no one to hold it.

Maybe, like Beauty and the Beast,
I need to welcome it,
find a mud-soaked pool,
feed it on living flesh
until it turns into a handsome prince
and rescues me.

Uncertainty

I am here in the brilliance of now
but my attention wavers
I consider tomorrow.
Like a child, I would ask:
"will there always be tomorrow?"
Like an old woman I would ask:
"will I be here when tomorrow comes?"
I know that it is always now,
that tomorrow never comes
I do not have the right questions.
I do not have the right answers.

Searching

The day's task, and there is no other,
is to convert the day's inertness
into ringing gold.
But there is so little space
no crucible of silence
and even if we transform
the day's heaviness into a dusting of gold
a ripple of wind can blow it away
and it's all to begin again.

By studying results
we bind ourselves
into a straitjacket of rules.
Each of us seeking the centre
on our very different journeys
only as our paths converge
perhaps there will be
recognisable landmarks
and fellow travellers
outside the curse of Babel.

When we cling to results
the whole enterprise looks foolhardy;
an ocean can survive
a lifetime of buckets, so why begin?

But even so, the great ones
tell of the ache of deprivation
so maybe we will have to learn by absence
not the presence of God
stealing over us
like the scent of winter violets.

There is no proof, only a sharing
and even that a metaphor
The occasions of enlargement
fullness or emptiness,
living or dying
the first minutes of life
the gasping for air, the yawn, the sneeze, the
cry;
a father stumbling incoherently
through his son's funeral prayers;
or metaphors for beauty
a great church filled with light
and an organ pealing;
music that extends the self beyond its limits
but, at the same time, contains and comforts.

Running full tilt
through a shimmer of grass
then turning under grateful,
pine scented shade.
And all the time a grey warbler sang
as if the very day
depended on its song.

Then there was the day I took
my turbulence of spirit into the garden
five minutes, ten minutes I gazed
up into the trees and then,
in the same way that fish are contained in water
I was contained in light;
like a fourth dimension
its silent invisible presence
offered a clarity of vision
focusing the branches, the leaves,
and the spaces between the leaves.

A canal, with its mirrored perfection
of park and sky crisscrossed by a passing barge
into a maelstrom of colours
will reveal in patches of blue, green, white and
grey
the wavering outline of sloping lawn, trees,
clouds and sky.

But epiphany along the canal
or under the morning trees is not enough;
it must still be taken back
into the mundane world of people

III

As if I am living in a house
of considerable antiquity
colour and decoration
can be of my choosing
but there must be no structural change.

Or I have discovered an old map
dismissed its seeming irrelevancy
only to find when I study it
an accurate and detailed account
of my living territory
even to running water, trees and a hint of
birdsong.

Brightness and Shadow

In these latter days of my illness
I have tried to fill the interstices
of my days with beauty:
light on the walnut tree,
a ripple of bird song
until now they are inseparable,
the long shadow of suffering
and the tree of beauty
looming protectively over me.

And what about the future?
Will the tree grow higher
and in the winter season
the shadow lengthen across the lawn?
Or will I achieve high summer
with the sun at its peak
and the shadow absorbed
back into the tree?

The waiting days

I wait, as women
throughout the centuries
have always waited
feigning a patience they did not feel;
like them I try to shape
the endlessness of time
and quieten my restless fingers
by stitching at my tapestry.

Penelope waited twenty years
before the gods relented;
not for her the blood-stained hands
of Clytemnestra, but twenty years
of faithful weaving and unweaving
to keep the rioting suitors at bay.

Arachne wove a flawless tapestry
depicting the dalliance of the gods;
it was unravelled by Athena
in her jealousy.
Now, transformed into a spider,
she reconstructs a careful web
after a bumble bees intrusion.

My kinship with these weaving women
comforts my solitude,
as, stitch after stitch,
I fill out the waiting days.

Meaning

Thats all there is;
sitting in the late afternoon sunshine
with the cat for company
and a blackbird singing.

The whole day,
as if waiting for the sunlight
and the ringing song
has narrowed to this point.

It could have been
a squeal of swifts at twilight,
or a lime tree electric
against a navy sky.
Instead it was a blackbird at rest
in a weeping elm, a tangle of branches
peremptory against a crystal sky
and the day is flooded with meaning.

Here and Now

Eschatological,
the four last things;
death, judgement, heaven, hell.
But what about now
when sunlight riffles through the leaves,
the cat lies in a ball of sleep,
and blackbirds chime the afternoon?

A Zen master once escaped death
because even at the moment
of execution, even then,
when light flashed off
the approaching sword,
instead of an abject cowering,
he smiled for joy.
Even for death,
he wasnt willing to lose
that one moment of crisscrossing light,
eternity in a afternoon.

Forthwith

This morning, I took my grief
out into the garden
and whimpered it to the trees.
Silent in their growing, they received it
amidst their tracery of branches
then tossed it to a passing gull.
A salt tang cry acknowledged the gift
and it was relayed upwards.
The sky, already concealing
a time line of galaxies,
finding a tiny human grief
of not very much account,
dispersed it forthwith
in layers of white and blue.