So, listen: it’s morning now and the sky’s as blue as it’ll ever get”- 8 Poems by Mark Tredinnick

Fire Diary

Fire has stormed the mountains of his sleep, and he wakes in ruins.

There is ash

on his workbench; the six stories of his bookcase have collapsed

Into one, which lies on the concrete floor, and from it splay the broken

bodies of poems, leak

the lexical souls of reference books. He is a fireground, after.

Nature, he thinks, is bipolar and worsening with age. Manic,

one day, she spikes high

into the forties and runs naked, blazing with ideas, through

The foothills. Down again, the next, she looks out from under her hair

at the wreck she’s made

and cannot think where to go from here. For days she weeps.

Is it possible, he wonders, to mourn like a forest? Like a house

that’s just a tin roof now?

For that is how he feels in the blue-black morning, but he hasn’t

Earned his sorrow. His is only risk fatigue—the shadow side

of beauty. Fire is the madness

in us all. And with it, periodically, he torches all his dreams

Of safety and starts over. When the future comes, if ever she comes,

she’ll speak, he knows,

a new species of language, in which one word for love will be fire,

And the other will be rain, and he will sleep like silence on the black terrain between.

Lotus Pond

For Major Jackson

If you want heaven, start in mud.

Begin transfiguration

Where you’re stuck. Take your pilgrimage standing

Up to your ankles in sludge. And if the ground binds

and if your boots stick, and if you step

Out of them when you set off; if the odour

On a summer’s day, when the water ebbs, is noisome

where you begin, so much more pure

Your thoughts will be when they flower,

so much sweeter the garden’s scent when

You breathe it in, so much more like birdsong

Your voice when you begin at last to speak. Start underwater

if you want the sky. Start in the abject

Underworld, if you want the lighted Earth; start among

The throng of ears that cannot hear. Sink in detritus, seed in

the strife that your life, and every life,

Falls into now and then: Serenity

springs from squalor; love is only love if it

Can bear the badlands out. These wastes—good for nothing more substantial—

Bloom light and outshine day. The lotus pond,

a repurposed wetland well south of its days,

Is a perfect picture, empty, of the imperfection of your soul,

Helplessly in love with the vulgate particulars

of the secondhand world; in flower,

The pond is your Buddha self

at her ease; the Christ of St Thomas come down

From the cross. Freedom starts, but refuses to stay, in want;

Literature takes its first steps in slur and slurry.

Put down roots where no one

Else can, in the compost of loss, in the suspect terrain

Of the only life you may ever get to grow in.

Nothing is wrong for long

And hope cannot stay lost,

if beauty can walk from the wreck,

And the lotus can raise heaven

from the dreck and the dross.

Notes:

Christ of St Thomas: the Cross of St Thomas features a lotus
well south of its days: “South of My Days,” Judith Wright

Cleave

Last night I sat on the seawall and watched a woman in a purple bra,

slow black hair falling past her waist, dancing alone in a lighted window

two storeys up at midnight. She danced mostly with her arms, as if she

were climbing a rope, her body twisting behind her. There are things

I cannot turn from, and this was one, a study in muted abandon, probably

not meant for me. But hey. She was still dancing when I walked away

Like a thief. I live my life in curves, my love, and you live yours in fractals.

I hunger for form the way a martyr hopes for heaven. As if the shape

of things might fail if I don’t look on them and hold them close and write

them tenderly down. I long for the body of the world with a purity

that would shame a mystic. Sense is salvation. Men fall in love, they say,

through their eyes; women, through their ears. Which is lucky for me.

So, listen: it’s morning now and the sky’s as blue as it’ll ever get. Walk with me

around the point. Let’s see if we can piece the shapely world together again

out of its vivid geometry of chaos. Hear how the shalestones in the cliff wall

behind the beach want to teach you silence; see how the sea wants to preach

you wildness and fire. Beside the path between these two points of view, a

white moth flies from one yellow flower to the next, making up its slender

Mind. Below us, the rock shelf, a petrified map of several city blocks, is losing,

decorously and imperceptibly, its eternal argument with time. Out beyond

the whitewater, a hundred surfers, so many recumbent monks, bob their liturgy

of thanks for the first decent swell in ages, and two slick silvergulls play their

plangent voices out behind them down the break. Thirteen tankers wait out

the weekend along the horizon, and above, a small plane slopes insolently

South. The Bogey Hole looks like a Raymond Carver story waiting to happen

to three men staring down the implacable sea, and a blue cattle dog behind

them chasing a lime-green ball, and a brownhaired girl wavering at the edge

of her mismatched bikinis, her breasts escaping no one’s notice. But we turn

and leave them short of their denouement, the sun a klaxon in the catatonic

sky, a blaze in your flaxen hair. The tankers have drifted together now like a pod

Of whales, a convivial moeity of heavy industrial behemoths passing judgment

on the current account. Down on Wolfe Street, a violin walks a chromatic scale

upstairs from the basement of the redbrick terrace at the corner, and a rogue

tanker crosses the street below us at double time and a half—business that can’t

wait till Monday. But the world can wait till Tuesday, at least, to get its story straight

on us. At the docks, two cranes slowdance with midday, arms above their heads.

The Birds of Qionghai

ACROSS the shallow waters of Qionghai,

The shorebirds of Xichang send out their shot

Silk cries, bittersweet falsetto lines cast

In borrowed time and sung in tongues as wise

As other worlds, as plangent as the plaints

Of love.

Among spent lotus leaves, the mist

Sleeps late. Upon the pier, night heron bows

Her head as if the morning were a wake.

I punt still waters with my love, my friends.

We slice a silence ages deep, and calm

Descends, and mist relents and gives the sea,

Captive here among tall hills, back to all

The freedom of the skies.

In the middle

Kingdom of my years, like bamboo I bend

And—like the bird-belled silence—do not break.

On winter limbs six or seven shags rest

Like children spent from swimming all fall long,

Waterlogged as afternoons sluiced by squalls

And sad that holidays, like all things, end.

All things but the silence of the heavens

And the earth, given second birth in song

Across the shallow waters of Qionghai.

But Did You Ever Feel

For Lucy

But did you ever feel

more like a species

Of happiness, an inhabitant of tides, an oystercatcher among oysters,

Than you did late that day standing in the undertow,

lifting your small daughter high—

her cries an ekphrastic kind of weather

Pealing all the way out and all the way back—flying her high over sun-drunk waves

that came like laughter and would not stop?

And no two syllables of that rising tide connoted anything like the same sea

Twice; each wave a child of the moment’s mind, each swelling

a telling of your whole life—and of the child’s life—

a joke at death’s unceasing

expense

Inland

West of the divide smells like

sadness and eternity,

smells like ancient history

and forgiveness. Smells like red

gravel and white spinifex.

I take the plane’s rear stairs out

into the aftermath of

rain down onto slick tarmac.

Canberra. Brindabellas.

A good sheep station ruined.

Not far west, but far enough.

III

West of the divide, the land

smells like itself, not the sea.

It smells like country, old, old

rain, like cattle and granite.

Inland the air has the tone

of sheoak and cockatoo,

dry creek and geology—

a dry peneplain of doubt.

Wherever you are, the smell

of rain coming or just gone

is the smell of the same rain

locally inflected. Here

it’s limestone and politics,

paddocks and poplars and grief.

West of the divide smells of

lichen and salt and dryness

itself, bore water and wheat

silos, crows’ cries and distance.

A continent of long time.

West of the divide smells like

where you’d want to come from if

you knew who you really were.

—Canberra, November 2005

Splitting Wood

“Enemies—

Part of a world

Nobody seemed able to explain

But that had to be

Put up with.”

—Seamus Heaney, “A Herbal”

Splitting wood, I think of my enemy.

It seems to me a useful kind of striking

Back, feeding, as it does, fire with a better

Kind of fire: it’s an upcycling of lost limbs, a judo

Of redemptive violence, and it leaves no one

Very much the worse

for wear. I raise the splitter

High and swing it low, baffled by the poverty

Of my enemy’s soul, so very like my own,

Sorry to have been the cause of such banality

Of thought and word, but very, very certain

Of my aim: not at the log,

But through it. And when this afternoon—

Thinking of the head, in particular, of the one

Who’s chosen me as his work, and libel

As his play—when this afternoon

I brought my splitter

Down, and brought it down hard, on what

I’d thought would be the toughest round

Of all, it split like a pumpkin and spilled a million

Termite larvae, pale unheavened angels, across

The rainy and all-hallowed end of day.

MARK TREDINNICK—whose many books include Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Red Writing Book—is a celebrated poet, essayist, and writing teacher. “One of our great poets of place,” Judy Beveridge has called him. His honours include the Montreal and Cardiff Poetry Prizes, The Blake and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, the ACU and Ron Pretty Poetry Prizes, two Premiers’ Literature Awards, and the Calibre Essay Prize. The Blue Plateau, his landscape memoir, shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize. He travels and teaches widely, in schools and at festivals, through Australia and in the US and UK, and he works with the corporate sector to explore the truths and graces poetry gives access to.

The Italian translation of these poems appeared in La Macchina Sognante N. 14. A special thanks to Lucia Cupertino for introducing us to this very thoughtful poet.

Article cover image: painting by Carolyn Miller, Missouri Woods – Spring N. 3.