Graeme Chapman. Edges of Awareness: Poems from the Years 1995-1998. Mulgrave, Vic.:
Privately Published, 1998.

 

 

 

CONTENTS

Linda and Steve 7
Crossing the Pacific 8
Anxiety 10
The Cabin 12
Return to the Source 13
Creativity 15
Virginia's Wedding 16
A Delayed Visit 18
Sunday Morning 19
Point Lonsdale 20
Hope 22
Waiting for the Children 24
Upwey South Primary School 25
Facing the Demons 26
Is there a Me? 26
The Road to Govett's Leap 27
Requiem for Home Sapiens 30
Conifer 31
Expectation 32
Knowing Unknowing 33
Weltgeist 34
Spirit of Our Flesh 35
Remembering 37
Outside the Lade Room 38
Silent Echoes 39
Which Path? 40
The Juggernaut 41
Blackheath 43
Winter 45
The Test 46
Revisiting 47
Olga 49
Sandy Point 53
Back to Front 55
Flesh of Our Flesh 56
Offsprung 58
Ruah 59
Waiting 60
Father's Day 61

 

Preface

In 1994 I published A First Offering. Many of the poems in that volume reflected the pain of a severed relationship and were deeply personal.

The poems in this second volume, Edges of Awareness, are not free of pain and are no less personal.

Life is a mixture of bitter and sweet and most of us, if we are able to recognize the degree to which we distract ourself, or deny our disquiet, are aware that there is a part of us that is quietly desperate. This does not necessarily equate with depression and is in constant tension with an optimism which is equally persistent. Hope is set against a background of despair and despair can be understood as hope under challenge. This interplay of hope and despair gives birth to pain and to the richness, or wholeness, that is a consequence of positively engaging that pain.

The poems are personal, in the sense of being subjective reflections on life and intuitive explorations of an internal essence. Both factors betray my introverted orientation and my conviction that our engagement with external reality, however dominant our extroversion, is governed, more than we like to admit, by elements of which we are mostly unconscious. The exploration of this shadow side of reality I have found beneficial. It has fostered self-understanding, self-acceptance and a cleaner, more comprehensively intentional engagement with external issues. I suspect that, if we are going to address the violence and inhumanity in society, we must first confront it in ourselves.

We cannot avoid metaphysics, however much we may wish we could. We betray our view of reality, even when we protest that reality is no more than a linguistic, culture-specific construct.

I am happy to come clean with my view of reality, reflected in these poems. I see us all as intimately interconnected at a level far deeper than systems theory would suggest. In the language, both of the mystics and the New Physics, my sense is that everything is connected to everything else and that God, or a Universal Mind or Consciousness, is in everything as its constituent reality. There is no way of proving the latter. An intuitive awareness that comes with meditation may be no more than a projection, onto the universe, of libidinal energies or intense, neural excitation. It is a punt either way. I have chosen to identify what I experience as Presence with a transcendent Spirit.

These poems were not the result of self-conscious rational processes, but of embodied intuition. I descended into my body, opening myself to feeling responses. I have found that, at least for me, mental contrivance aborts the process of creation.

The title of the volume is the opening line from the poem, Back to Front. The poems are arranged in chronological order.

In offering you these poems, I am giving you something of myself, something very deep within myself. It is my hope that a line, here and there, will find an echo in your soul.

 

Graeme Chapman

 

LINDA AND STEVE
on the occasion of their wedding
A Reflection

Soft rain
moistening the soil,
softening the earth
to
gulp a downpour.

Love,
gentle,
unspectacular,
silent windlass
freshening the sweat
of those
mining the future.

Dance of intimacy;
passion descending
to
the quiet flow of the Tao;
the rhythm of
Yin / Yang;
the ritual of
Tai-Chi;
the oscillation
of
love and war
reduced to
fruitfulness.

Releasing
and
taming
the energy,
the pulse of consciousness.

Embodied splendour of the dance;
symbol of a past
etched in our blood.

We dance separately;
We dance together.

Tutor us,
free us,
O Lord of the Dance!


GC
8 Jan 95

 

CROSSING THE PACIFIC

Anxious excitement
playing with tightened muscles
and
dribbling acid
into a stomach
anaesthetised to fear.

Winged adventure;
honeycombed inside a metal tube,
rending the sky
above the mutant sea
and the carpet of white fluff
gathering moisture.

Community of strangers
sharing inanities;
convivial pugilists
testing defences;
isolates drilling the ice
fishing for intimacy.

Extroverts
talking away the time;
introverts
avoiding disclosure;
both
wedged into the hope of an oblivion
forever delayed
by the drone of jet fuel
and
the cramp of bodies.

The light of dawn
through an opened window:
tired faces anticipating release
into the second dawn
of
a day we chased across the sea.

Growing queues
either side of the cubicles
and a light breakfast,
pushing the limits of plastic food;
preparing us for the marathon crawl
through immigration and customs.

Long descent
through cloud and rain;
electronic vision;
trust:
spiralling onto the runway
in one final,
forward thrust.


GC
16 Jan 95

 

ANXIETY

Stumbling hesitation
scrambling to avoid
a phantom Mafia
wealthy with knowledge.

Cold Steel,
edged with terror,
dissolving into
expectant faces
flushed with
trusting anticipation.

Ducking the
canopy of words;
earnest verbiage;
embracing soliloquies
opening into dialogue.

Eyes
inviting access
to
soul country,
vigilant
but open,
hungry for
the touch of
recognition.

Treading softly,
challenging
the
overlay of shadows,
calling to the children,
befriending slithers of
darkness.

Dissolving into
the
flow of the present,
etching hope
into tissue
raw
with pain.

Beyond Gratitude
and a
confidence born of grace,
we surrender
saviourhood
and the
ploys of intimacy.

Vulnerable
to
maverick biorhythms
and disappointing performances,
we offer
our incompleteness,
beyond the anticipation
of reception.


GC
Oklahoma
15 Feb 95

 

THE CABIN

Silent world
touched by the kiss of Spring
and the dance of squirrels
burdening the branches of trees.

Fairyland,
Shivaic choir of groping sentinels
hallowing the moment.

Knotted grain,
timbered yesterday,
shading the past into the rich umbers
of a textured present.

Quilted cubes,
redolent with the feel of love
and the symmetry of eternity.

Generous hearts,
delicately crystalline;
the warp and woof of helic beauty
freighting togetherness.

Beyond gratitude and the magic of words;
evocation of a oneness beyond duality,
of the God whose being we live.


GC
Noel, Missouri
25 March 95

 

RETURN TO THE SOURCE

Silent wisdom,
the suchness
of an
apophatic emptiness
pregnant with the potential of
a gestating universe
of
apparent antinomies.

The flow
of
Consciousness,
choreographing
the primal metamorphosis,
the seeming transmutation
of energy to matter;
the Alchemist's illusion.

Hermaphroditic dance
of Yang and Yin,
billowing into
a
riot of diversity
and
the pain of gendered duality.

Probing for truth,
buried,
tick-like,
in
the soft flesh
of shared delusions
and the inane rationality
of common wisdom.

Caress the silence:
Divine the stream:
Find the courage
to
flow with
the unknowable
and
to surrender
to
its embrace.


GC
20 April 1995

 

CREATIVITY

Threaded silence
teasing fretful intention,
seducing
its compulsiveness
with
blatant sensuality.

Contemplative vortex;
creative potentiality,
heavy with presence
and the
gift of play.

Unravelled grace,
neonate,
scion of
felicitous connections,
exciting wonder.

Distributing
handfuls of energy,
touching
the tender filigreed veins
of consciousness
with
recognition.

Elusive moment,
feather-light,
embracing us
with its
yearning ambience.


GC
22 August 95

 

VIRGINIA'S WEDDING

Limbic liquid;
swirl of greys and blues;
joy and fear
strafed with melancholy
and the anticipation
of
phantom accusers,
friends
folded into a
fallen past.

Family,
tensive musculature,
threaded genes
standing tall
in the energy of a moment
weeping bliss and pain.

Brothered togetherness
and
the kiss of in-laws.
Grandmotherly delight
speaking connections.
Sculptured silence
breaking like waves
and
veining the soul
with brittle corrugations.

Tiara'd queen:
Inner luminescence,
holding the moment
and the
play of energies
staining the fabric:
Graced spontaneity
oozing wisdom.

Dusty images
mottling the present
with nostalgia:
hawking news,
interviewing teachers,
sweeping hair,
the manic dance
of
grit and enervation.

Shuffling feet
and
pummelled eardrums,
speeches,
flashing cameras,
shouted conversations
and
final goodbyes;
ritual space,
passage to the future.


GC
21 October 95

 

A DELAYED VISIT

Silent thread, gossamer-thin,
gently whirling, feather-light,
through a cacophonous vortex
of splintered reverberations,
aerating the liquid jungle,
flashing fish.

Urgent necessity breasting the bar
serviced by voices
quietly offering comfort
and inscribing pained anxiety into vacant spaces,
delaying apprehension until tomorrow:
an analgesic interlude
chasing fretfulness into a darkened alley.

"Mr. Chapman" - a voice from the stairs;
an enticing summons inviting pursuit
into a bordello-like cubicle
of rubber gloves, face masks
and a cushioned recliner
armed with instruments of torture.

A mouthful of metal and splintering teeth:
the price of age
and an ever-grinding anxiety.

The final ritual -
Profuse thanks to the tormentor
and his masked accomplice
and a sheath of notes to the Madam.


GC
26 Nov 95

 

SUNDAY MORNING

Skin-bags
serially juxtaposed in serried ranks;
individual centres of consciousness;
vortices of anxiety, insecurity, vacuity, numbness
and fleeting euphoria,
seeking an easing of the pain
and a lifting of the fog.

A connecting of energies,
synaptic intimacy
bridging distance
with the embrace of consciousness,
dissolving into the fragile pulse
of a shared psyche.

Ritual rhythms,
evoking communal mythologies;
symbols sparking scented recollections of
yesterday
and bucketing water from wells
beneath the crusted shale of modernity.

Fragility, vulnerability,
idiosyncrasy and perversity,
swaying to the entrancing music of divinity;
transcending limitations
of time and place,
of inclination and ability;
grace in motion,
healing, enlightening,
building courage for a new day.


GC
3 Dec 95

 

POINT LONSDALE

Coiled springs
thrown together on a ribbon of asphalt;
Individual centres of consciousness
playfully engaging the fringes of reality
in political safe-talk:
Peripheral synergy
pummelling manikins.

Comfortable habituation;
Carpeted memories;
Seductive repertoires
inviting dalliance,
Softly Bacchanalian.

Budded sheets of butcher's paper
greased by the oily stamen
of fish and chips:
Hands and voices
raised in syncopated small-talk
punctuated by balls
of gusted brine.

The tread of feet on a jetty;
A school of set rods
apathetically breasting safety rails;
Clumps of tufted grass
clinging to the sand
and a gentle, bubbled wash
playing with the ragged edges
of ground shells.

Filleted streets,
Shop-crusted;
The lure of a room
Polyp'd with books;
The orgasmic ooze of wicker stalks
dimpled with ice-cream.

Conversation,
Rich food
and the stimulation of fire-water;
Vulnerable energy
Teasing the conversation
towards honesty.

Bodies meditating,
Relaxing,
Scrambling for cognitions
to fill the void
with the familiar;
Gasping for silence
against the drone of suggestion.

Aims,
Goals,
Manic wisdom,
Sense beguiling sensibility
with its plain song
and the promise of a future
glutted with achievement.

Retreat?
Advance?
A moment of togetherness.


GC
Feb-Dec 96

 

HOPE

A cacophony of innocence;
the shrill excitement of children
burdening the moment
with unrehearsed spontaneity,
drumming impatiently
on the taught skin
of an arboreal silence.

Children, weeping the loss
of an unreflective naivete,
grimly pretending to be adults;
locked out of the present,
swallowing the past
and desperately trying
to outrun the future.

Doing;
the patent analgesic
that hoodwinks us into accepting
its promise of oblivion
because we have no-where to turn;
masking our pain by temporary distraction
and creating a narcotic dependency
that burdens our bodies
with the stench of decay.

Whispers;
seeds of hope
threading the pain with promise
and gasping eternity
into lungs relaxed by defeat
and the nectar of exhaustion.

Living the moment;
flowing through
in the relaxed energy of the Tao,
with eagles' wings
buoyed up by the warp and woof
of fielded particles
in a universe empty with Presence.

A second naivete
challenging faith
and the nihilistic ambience of the human
shadow:
divinity,
scion of creative chaos and relinquishment:
eternal vibration.


3 Feb 96
Orientation Camp

 

WAITING FOR THE CHILDREN

Suspended in mid-air
from an umbilical chord
attached to a heart-beat:
Transcendent blank
withdrawn from service,
observing the textured otherness of the world:
The suchness of phenomena
etherealised into the
epiphenomenona of nothingness.

Children's voices
and the chatter of
young womanhood
diminished by children;
sword voices clashing stories:
The anxious sound of responsibility
bartering swap-cards.

The final bell disgorging
small balls of green and yellow energy
into the playground
and into the arms of adult replicas
of these anxious, mischievous faces.


GC
4 June 96

 

UPWEY SOUTH PRIMARY SCHOOL

The wind holds its breath
and the leaves on the gnarled trees
cluster motionless in feathered fullness;
olive pom-poms chasseing motionless
against recumbent limbs.

Pastel-blue palette of ethereal emptiness,
cloudless expanse of invisibility
wrapping us,
like crisped lettuce,
in afternoon shadows.

Winter sunlight sheeting brick walls
cheekily inviting its embrace,
edging them with the illusion
of intensified reality.


GC
11 June 96

 

FACING THE DEMONS

Misted anxiety,
weighting the silence,
seeping almost imperceptibly
through the fabric of awareness,
pinpointing an irremediable aloneness.

Those with the courage to restrain
a re-activation of hyper-activity,
a retreat into sensual overload,
or into compulsive closeness,
will face the demons
and own them.

Unless we confront our existential anxiety -
this aloneness,
heavy with dread,
that keeps us self-contracted -
we will never know,
or be,
our true selves.


GC
2 January 97

 

IS THERE A ME?

Hollow time, spooking the present
with an opaque evanescence;
The absorption of being into non-being;
an occasional enantiodromia.

An out-of-body experience;
Detached consciousness
observing the play of illusion
pretending objectivity.

A division of energies;
balls of awareness teased apart;
two subjectivities
alternatively observing each other.

Sticky clods of materiality
disappear
in waves of densely-patterned ethereality.
Which is the real world?

Do I carry my body?
or does my body carry me?
The substantiality of the self
reaches its apogee
at the point at which it dissolves!


GC
29 March 97

 

THE ROAD TO GOVETT'S LEAP

Blue sky
and the sweat of laboured feet.
Lung-fulls of
crisp air.

Red, white-spotted toadstools
beguiling the amateur connoisseur.
A carpet of green stubble
newly mown.

Ancient pines,
thick-barked,
proud sentinels
scalloping a buried past.

Bushed dryness
in a riot of greens.
Houses clinging to
dusted rock.

Individuated masonry,
edged by a carpet of persistence;
filigreed ferns
and hardy cover.

Stubborn gums,
individually sculptured,
trowelled with
a patois of swirled umbers.

A ribbon of asphalt
nibbling open gutters,
carrying coloured sounds
and humidified stacks of sight-seers.

Cliffs,
cut away into deep valleys,
brazenly bearing
the witness of the years.

Shoulders of azure,
decorative icing
smoothed over the caps
of massive upthrusts.

Valleys
lapping the rock-face
with sprays of green,
falling back into the ocean.

Streams,
rivers,
pubic crevices
dripping fecundity.


GC
30 March 97

 

REQUIEM FOR HOMO SAPIENS
or
A Salute to Cassandra
[An after-dinner conversation at Valley Heights]

Perspicacity - boon / curse of the intuitive prophet;
leaden prescience.

A world heavy with human weight
and foetal dung of millennial Leviathan.

Voracious carnage of the heart pulse:
fiscal engine of the libidinal daemon.

Unstoppable;
deaf to entreaty,
disdainful of Gaia litanies,
and heedless of the plaintive cries of the damned.

A scientific clerisy,
victims of a necessary duplicity,
crying answers when there are no answers.

Conscientious politicians,
intelligent to the point of fearfulness,
avoiding the truth in the interests of a final moment of calm.

Quo Vadis? is lost under the descending curtain,
on which has been etched,
in invisible characters,
Ne plus ultra!!


GC
30 March 97

 

CONIFER

Rolled-grey clouds,
hovering over the deep-blue silhouettes
of layered mountains,
breaking now and then
into vertical strands
of falling moisture.

Conical greens
carpeting a foreground
broken by up-thrusting rocks
undisciplined in their distribution;
a statement of permanence.

Timbered comfort,
generous invitation to hospitality:
quiet industry
at the service of
hearts burdened with searching.

Return of the sun,
laying shadows on the timbered patio
and dusting the beige of easy chairs
conversing in silence.

Unspoken eloquence,
ethereal emptiness
heavy with presence
and the kiss
of an eternity
threading the intestacies of time.


GC
Mountain Retreat
17 July 97

 

EXPECTATION

Layers of expectation
weighting the present
with slag
and filleting graced intention
from the future.

Freedom,
subjectivity's essence,
a yes or no to God;
winged intuition
inviting surrender.

Deep resonance
reconnecting soul;
forgotten synergy
resurrecting bliss-burst
authenticity.

To be my own person,
to follow my own guidance;
a sapling
bending to the wind
but holding ground
against a deluge of oughts.

Beyond ignorance
and
numbed resignation;
patient surrender
to a gentle life-breath.

Spirit sheath
of the body / self,
Cosmic Presence,
wave function of the Divine,
grant what you promise
and
ask what you will.


GC
3 August 97

 

KNOWING UNKNOWING

Teasing questions,
like bothersome flies
on the sweaty skin
of fretful answers,
taunting illusions of coherence
with contradiction.

Explanations
fraying into strands
of tangled contradiction,
defying the constraints
of an architectonic mania.

Ride the questions.
Live them
and surrender to the
energy of their ambience,
distilled into an
active quietude,
beyond nihilism,
that is content
simply to be.


GC
20 August 97

 

WELTGEIST

Breath of life,
thick with materiality;
ethereal as the wind;
present within and without;
transcendent immanence.

Sheer ubiquity,
traversing the
cosmic ocean,
blow-waving
the intestacies of infinity
into a matrix of
holographic cross-stitching.

The universe within,
the soul without;
seamless divinity
echoing
the deep-throated resonances
of a primal embrace.


GC
26 August 97

 

SPIRIT OF OUR FLESH

Unravelled yesterdays;
dance of sense and spirit;
flesh-spectres
firing memory
with buried enthusiasms

Gentle faces
and sad,
exuding confidence
or lined with private griefs.

Unspectacular heroism,
generosity and affection;
spontaneous intuitions
hurtling like comets
across the benighted horizon
of human ignorance
masquerading as daylight

Cameos
reclaimed from the layered
sediment of the years;
webbed gestalts
evoking forgotten scents
and the plaster effigies
out of which we were created.

Hip-brace,
allowing us to stand tall;
icons of our visions,
peopling them with
images of fallible greatness:
boon and blight of our years,
clipped from celluloid rememberings,
and zoomed to full screen.

Who we are
is whose we've been;
creations devoid of innocence
in a cauldron of sane insanity:

A smile,
a tear,
a confident vulnerability
strong in its weakness.

They reflected it all,
those heroes and villains,
goodies and baddies at once;
these templates
of our lives.

Let's honour their humanity,
sifting the essence
through the body-plexus
of the self,
honed to discrimination
by the soul.

Spirit-gifted tutors,
we remember you
with fondness and forgiveness,
for we have forgiven ourselves
and accepted our place
in this eternity of silence.


GC
26 August 97

 

REMEMBERING

Memory;
burst sap
of the Letheward
arteries of the soul;
pained pleasure of a past;
dotted seriata
of an ever-present
mildewed with forgetfulness.

Graced forgetfulness
lit up with the
brilliance of love-bursts
suffusing warmth
and an ambience of well-being.

Recollections,
cowering in fear,
hiding in the play of shadows,
dancing a death-march,
intimidating consciousness
with the threat of insurrection.

Disciplined remembering,
inspiriatrix
of the body-spirit,
blown-whisper
of an intimate otherness
embracing us all.

And there abides
faith, hope and love;
and the greatest of these
is love.


GC
26 August 97

 

OUTSIDE THE LADE ROOM

Sounds of the afternoon;
mechanised motion
stuffing the silence with
metallic static.
Interlaced acceleration
burdening the quadrangle
with the noise of
a city in exit


GC
18 Nov 97

 

SILENT ECHOES

Cool band of silence
splaying an artificial temporality
generated by compulsive cogitations.

Pin-points of awareness
funnelling beaded moments of perception
and the vacant fullness of an eternal present
heavy with potentiality.

Embodied awareness
smoothing the spirit
into a delicate organ of apperception
and receptivity.

The ticking of a clock,
defiant intrusion of a maya presence
held at bay by occasional echoes
from an emptiness
resonant with Presence.


GC
31 Dec 97

 

WHICH PATH?

There are as many guides as there are paths
and the paths are numerous,
each one promising enlightenment,
salvation
or a new world order.

Even those who argue that reality is intangible,
if not illusory,
the product of our idiosyncratic imagistic constructions,
work themselves into a frenzy
if you challenge their covert devotion to nihilism
or their strident evangelism.

There are those who generously,
or languorously
contend that all paths lead to God.
Others are too busy avoiding the questions
or have given up
and conclude that none of the paths leads anywhere.

Some contend that each of us must follow our own path,
as those in whom we find inspiration have done,
whose intent was not to develop a following
but to evoke authenticity.

I have come to the conclusion that the path finds us,
that the way embraces us
and that reality is the most substantial of
insubstantialities,
a mist-like potentiality that continually births us and our world,
an emptiness that will eventually subsume us
into its eternal creativity.

The secret is the interplay
of awareness and surrender.


GC
31 December 97

 

THE JUGGERNAUT

The mind,
that juggernaut that stumbles upon a pastiche of images
and confuses it with reality,
labours on,
voraciously devouring ideas, philosophies, aphorisms,
fuelling its inexorable mascinations.

Fearful of falling headfirst into the oblivion
of a meaningless universe,
the heart-pulse steers this scarcely manoeuvrable
caravan of cognitions
towards the knowledge patch,
towards a cornucopia of bleached,
homogenised understandings
and irradiated possibilities.

All this effort denies us the realisation
of the secret intention of the heart,
the mostly unrecognized,
but frantic desire to be at peace with ourselves
and all that impinges upon us.

To achieve this
the mind must be stilled -
the tiger tamed,
the body relaxed
and the Present discovered:
the easiest and most difficult task to achieve,
because it cannot be achieved.

What we take to be reality,
the reality informing and underlying the hard edge of exoteric
phenomena,
cannot be known,
but by experience.
a special kind of experience,
a form of experience that is the fruit of egolessness,
an egolessness which is the essence of wisdom.

Be still and know that I am God.


GC
1 January 98

 

BLACKHEATH

Respite from weariness
in pillow-fulls of sleep
and the safe narcotic
of other lives and times.

The skein of the years
wraps round the fibro-cube
and its extruded appendages:
pleasure and pain
mingled in memories
that have seeped into its texture.

Grandparents,
whose angularities are
fascinating testimony
to a generation
that escaped homogenisation;
Grandparents
who loved us
and provided us with
a world of magic;
Grandparents,
whose greatest gift to us
was to help us appreciate
that we were loved.

Parents,
whose rituals have
half-choreographed our dance;
nurturing jailers,
templating reactive responses
that evoked the illusion of freedom;
Parents,
more honoured in their decline
than in the exercise
of child-moulding.

Dreams,
vestiges in wood and cloth,
in rakish laminate
and tired wall-paper,
wrap the present in a ghostly past,
manicured by slow decay.

Children's laughter
and insistent entreaty.
Towels on the seats,
shading a row of sandals.
Forgotten fun,
often begrudged,
filched from a programme of deceleration.

Kaleidoscopic images;
windows of joy;
slithers of pain:
a past,
settled beyond recall,
generating nostalgia and regret.

Holly trees,
gums and giant pines,
a stray waratah
and
bushes laden with crab apples.
An old man in a beanie standing tall,
lost in the eternity
budded in the flower in his hand.


GC
January 1998

 

WINTER

We welcome Spring,
not realizing that each flowering
brings us one year closer
to a final Autumn
that measures out our lives backwards.

Spring's seductive fantasy of resurrection
blinkers us against recognition
of a final equinox,
until we are old enough
to read the ending in our bodies.

Gathering up our bones
and stitching our weariness into
a few final tasks,
we sit,
without celebration,
in the faeces of our years,
confused about the present
and reliving the phantom pains
of a past long gone.

Family,
weighted with their own concerns,
and reading in us the ending of their years,
trudge on,
garnering solace from the treadmill of
responsibility
and the demands of a world we find
alien and confusing.

The reward of our survival is that
the questions slip from our grasp;
the familiar leaves us blank and wrinkled -
fleshless thought hangs lifeless from the bones
of a consciousness
racked by osteoporosis.

Winter's darkness promises oblivion
and relief from a burdensome weariness
and the enervating demands of an ego
so long captive to reputation and duty.

Paradoxically,
it also presages a light,
the shadow of this darkness
and the source of our inspirations.
But there is no guarantee;
only a sort of stubborn hope.


GC
3 January 98

 

THE TEST

Side-swung heads and scribbling pens,
muted woodpeckers intent on mental defecation
onto virginal parchment lined with anticipation:
A silence heavy with energy.

Scrawled script loosening its discipline
under the pressure of scrambled ideas
force-fed into the mincer and dragged,
web-like over the page.

Gathered briefs folded into anonymity,
curse-blessed in drawn-breath
and offered hesitatingly to the warden,
secure in his pampered isolation.


GC
11 May 98

 

REVISITING
[Pre-Flight Ruminations]

Quantum noise:
packetless energy
misting the lounge with static
bristling with part-phonemes.

Parallel worlds of nervous excitement,
ethereal reality.
blue-gold comfort
offering respite
from the laboured wasting of time.

Revisiting the past
on the cusp of the future.
Memories;
snatches of intimacy
lying in limbo.

Friends;
traces of soul-substance
awaiting identification,
the re-emergence of embodied community.

Low-grade nervousness
settling comfortably into
the grace of Presence:
embodied calm
fringed with tiny tendrils of anxiety:
spiced anticipation.

Ambient dance
of consciousness;
pranaic Spirit;
Atman.

Turbine whine;
sun through a plastic window;
gyrating music at a distance
and the click of lockers
trailing tailored calves.


GC
PD Chaplains Retreat
Wahroonga
18 July 1998

 

OLGA

Fickle grief;
Contradictory intimations
of ponded acid
And sure-footed resolution.
 
II
Distance and closeness,
structured care
blemished by anaesthesia.

The bent freshness of youth;
intelligence strained through
the carotid arteries of time;
repetitive stories
narrated as if for the first time.
 
III
Swift execution;
wheeled negligence
and a starched room,
heavy with silence.

Digitalised care,
one-on-one;
tubed obsolescence;
respited calm;
devastated volition
hanging onto life:
silent dripping of the life-pulse.

Day after day
fighting for life,
or fighting to be relieved of life.

Squeezed communication
and a slowly swivelling eye
struggling to open.
Souls touch in the energy of the moment:
limp exhaustion.

Embraced grief
heavy with pain,
shaking convulsively;
daughter/father;
generational lamentation.

Grown sons,
erudite dinosaurs
reconnecting;
silent communication
across a triangular cubicle
peopled with strangers.

Faithful vigil,
running the gamut of hope,
arrested:
assisted passage;
staring opiate.

Quiet exit
beyond farewells:
the letheward passage
of a bark well-filled
with years and wisdom.
 
IV
A life
celebrated by the family
and
friends and neighbours
old enough to remember.

Ollie,
our Mother,
tough root of the vine
that nourishes us;
sap of our lives
Milt's wife,
grandmother
and great-grandmother.
 
V
Mountains of dust,
plastic bags
and
squirreled treasures;
heavy-laden house
weighted with accumulated memories.

Disembowelling the whale,
clearing the debris,
filling the cracks,
apportioning the heritage.

Rediscovered brothers
working the pain,
finding the leaks
and freshening the skin.
 
VI
Moment of life
shaded by the overhang
of yesterday
and the stuff of destiny;
numbing the ache of evanescence.

A state beyond knowing.
Layers of Mothered memories,
light and dark,
intense and gentle,
young and old.

With studied superficiality
and the seduction of the
evolutionary demon,
each of us is a statement
punctuating the rhetoric of time
with the gritty illusion
of meaningfulness.

Our Mother,
laden with strengths and weaknesses,
made a courageous
self-sacrificing statement,
richly provisioning her sons
for the journey ahead.

Ollie,
Mum,
Nan,
Grandma:
We salute you!


GC
On the train to
Valley Heights
18 July 98

 

SANDY POINT

Wind in the trees,
sun-tinted pom-poms
dancing in sympathy
with the gusted breath
of a late afternoon,
crisp-dried by Winter's chill.

The gnawing heaviness
of fancied expectation,
drumming anxiety into
the silent spaces of our togetherness,
birthing a paralysing hesitancy;
one long abortion of intention.

A god-send of an opportunity;
the promise of emancipation
in the gift of time:
but how to grasp it;
how to wrestle fantasy into accomplishment,
how to begin!

Scraps of work;
virtual retirement;
creative vortex.

On your mark,
get set;
holding steady,
waiting for the retort,
the crack of the pistol.

Delaying the test
of competence;
freezing the moment;
bridling opportunity,
riding it backwards into the past.

Anaesthetising
fears of success and penury
with the opiates that have
always proved seductively successful -
books,
books lying close at hand;
beckoning bordellos,
escapist reality.

The time has come.
tomorrow:
tomorrow I will begin;
the story will unwind
from me like a spider's web
and glisten with
the jewelled gifts of the night.


GC
30 July 98

 

BACK-TO FRONT

Edges of awareness,
flame-cindered,
ever retreating
into yesterday's ash:
moment of brightness
illuminating the darkness.

In a back-to-front world.
geometric shapes
are confused with reality
and quantum indecisiveness
with illusion.
In the conflict between
the Prince and the Fool,
the wise fool is laughed
off the stage.

Simplicity and its shadow -
wisdom's goal
and the retreat
of the simple-minded
avid for answers
and scapegoats.

The pain-needle
threading enlightenment,
weaving its magic through torn flesh,
suturing suffering to gut-knowledge,
to the tonal cadences of solitude.

To live the truth,
one's own truth,
is a life-long quest
and the paradoxical victory
of illusion over reality,
emptiness over fullness,
wisdom over knowledge.

Only a fool
would begin and persist
with such a quest.


GC
8 August 98
Youth Vision
Monbulk

 

FLESH OF OUR FLESH

Pink flesh in fluid;
age lines
preternaturally etched
on dimpled skin;
soft-boned fragility.

Long journey
through liquid night;
pain-birthed into light;
wonder of our love
alchemy of evolution.

Softly tender
bundled scream,
milk-sopped into silence;
non-returnable responsibility.

Genetic miscreant
of our dreams;
life-sentence
and joy-burst
rolled into one.

Custodial God-gift;
awesome charge;
lotteried pawn
of our fallibility.

Generational extension,
libidinal engine of perpetuity,
tender lust
and helic nurture.

Moment of recollection,
time-paused eternity;
child, parents, friends -
dedicatory tryst.


For
Cooper Lawrence Stanford
25 August 1998
CCTC
Retreat

 

OFFSPRUNG

Blood-red connectedness,
wisdom's irony,
threading tissue
with laughter and pain.

Loaded expectation
unravelling care
from yesterday's
knitted warmth.

Love's engagement
with itself
and with its
dark sister.

Anxious expectation
of an unsigned tomorrow
that will critique
today's intentionality.

An impossible ask:
pattern-making
devoid of loose ends
and knotted mistakes.

Flesh of our flesh;
genetic taunt
to the illusion
of our good will.


GC
Retreat
Hartwell
25 August 98

 

RUAH

Breath of my breath,
thought-stuttered starter
drawing downwards;
more truly me
than my "I"ness.

Rustling wind,
leafing joy from the moment,
playing the branched connections
of my days.

Serendipitous synchronicity,
fluted fugue,
kissing my pain
and opening hope
into the future.

Deep stave of distress;
world agony;
mute powerlessness;
girth-girding
gored hopefulness.

Permanent evanescence;
intangible textuality;
turned edge of despair;
back-blown ballast
recovering balance.

Anima Mundi;
spark of consciousness;
vivifying presence;
God-tracks into the dark.


GC
25 August 1998
Ashburton
Retreat

 

WAITING

Bliss-burst;
running rivulet
opening to possibility,
slowly,
ever so slowly,
opening out.

The Word that can't be named,
the Spirit that can't be seen;
synchronicity's denial
of mute facticity,
its faith-like credulity
anchoring experience.

Pulsed evolution
leaning into the future,
beyond artifice
and constrained definition.

God-gift,
against all the evidence;
unknown tomorrow
gently oozing into the present.

Grace,
Gift,
Guidance.


GC
Nunawading
27 August 98

 

FATHER'S DAY

Unsought celebrity,
ritual recognition
of paternity;
by-product of a lusted-love:
uterine embrace

Daughter love
reaching out,
evoking fatherhood;
unlearned knowing
playing out the script.

Three times willing dupe
of the seductive ritual;
thrice prisoner
of a daughter's alchemy;
carrying the sweet venom to the grave,
banished by rivals.

Pained fallibility
redeemed by wisdom's
absolution,
unrequited longing for connection,
grappling for holds
on an unforgiving rock-face.

Exquisite moments;
tempered gratitude
acknowledging the impossibility
of perfection,
embracing disquietude.

The cycle,
part-sped,
stitching the generations
into the future,
layer upon layer of skulls,
history's ossuary.

Three daughters,
loved with a bitter-sweet yearning;
a gift to posterity.


GC
Sept 98
On the plane
to and from
Adelaide

 

Electronic text provided by the author. HTML rendering by Ernie Stefanik. 1 October 2003.

Edges of Awareness: Poems from the Years 1995-1998 is published
as an online text with the kind permission of the author.
Copyright © 1998, 2003 by Graeme Chapman.
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