Graeme Chapman. Luminous Moments: Poems from the Year 1998-2002. Melbourne:
Privately Published, 2002.

 

 

 

Dedicated


to

the intuitions,
the inspirited cognitions,
the cascade and flow of
images
rippling the texture of
feeling states
that give substance and
energy to life,

to

embodied vignettes

and
to

the whispers of the
Spirit
that holds all of Reality
in its embrace

 

 

Contents

The Consultation 7
Friendship 7
The Years 8
Deserted Beach 9
Beginnings 10
Certainty 11
Red Saplings 12
Grains of Sand 13
The Music of the Trees 14
Revisiting the Big People 15
In Perspective 16
An in-flight Encounter 18
Beyond Hope 18
Thinning the Haze 19
Wisdom Years 21
We become by being noticed 22
We can only ever be 24
The Going Forth and the Return 25
The Chasm 27
Early Afternoon 28
The Clown 29
Soothing as the Rain 31
Young Turks 32
Eternal Embrace 33
The Belgrave Train 34
Old Faithful 34
Knox City 36
Collecting Eileen 37
Obsolescence 38
A Song of Wisdom 40
Angry Spores 42
Two Weeks to Go! 44
The Star: all you can eat 45
The Trail 46
A Daughter's Caution 48
On Reaching Ninety 49
Waiting for the Train 50
Interlude 51
Suspended 52
Feather in the Wind 53
Fog Bound 54
Awaiting Oblivion 55
A Day at the Beach 56
The XPT to Sydney 58

 

The Consultation

Friends at a distance
catching up across tables;
openings into intimacy,
arrested by stubborn agenda.

Building on repetition,
but never quiet going anywhere:
knowings that require an unknowing,
a fracturing of the surface of familiarity.

Signals of mortality;
blown hair
and the courage of a spoken destiny
creeping on.

Reworking the plan;
nourishing the soil;
stirring flagging enthusiasm
for reheated efficiencies.


GC
Whitley College
17 Nov 1998

 

Friendship

Yum Cha trolleyed to the table in shifts;
oolong refills and a meeting of souls.
Curded discourse,
opening wounds to the antiseptic balm
of an empathy
warm with compassion.

Striving towards a surrender
that is a the gift of freedom;
graced embrace of a selfless future.

Acceptance beyond expectation;
other-centred mutuality,
respectful of rituals
choreographed by our ancestors.

The silent foot-falls of the Dao
weaving an invisible fabric,
past-bound,
but luminous with the energy of the present.

Honest deference,
the fresh-faced issue of our years
and our pain.

Tumbled togetherness reeking of design,
beyond fortuitous coincidence
and human intent.

Collaborative friendship,
skewering words
and dark sesame rolls:
eating our way into the future


GC
Ringwood
15/5/99

 

The Years

When I was young
I counted out the years
and reckoned them mine:
but they have overtaken me
and I have been forced to conclude
that it is they who have owned me
all this time.


GC
Ringwood
15/5/99

 

Deserted Beach

A great loneliness:
granulated sand on a beach;
folded waves foaming to the shore,
filling the air with their thunder;
a sky floating pastel clouds
in an ethereal vastness.
Movement, sound, colour:
a primeval solitude.

Spaced birds on the wet sand;
slender-legged thoughts
claiming territory.
Broken shells studding the foreground
with yesterday's crustaceans;
spent life
beached by an inexorable tide;
life without memory
written into the structure of our genes.

The accumulation of yesterday's detritus
has become a children's playground,
a place for buckets and spades
and a highway for adolescent testosterone
atop throttled bikes
that leave their careless treads in the sand.

A past beyond knowing;
a present beyond caring;
a future that seduces consciousness
into mortgaging the present
with the promise of a slide-show at the end,
or a stuttering video that will bring it all back.
The lights go out,
the video rolls;
but we no longer have eyes to see
and we have lost interest.

Footsteps in the sand
washed by the tide,
harried by the wind,
disappearing with the fading light.


GC
Sandy point
21 June 99

 

Beginnings

Gaseous god of beginnings;
root-stock of the Big Bang:
Father Almighty,
breathing helic vapour;
bacterial ancestors
gushing from the floor of oceans;
boiling cauldron of life-substance;
trillion dollar jackpot.

Mastodons and pterodactyls
armoured against extinction;
frozen carcasses in stone sarcophagi,
splintered yesterday,
coming together under the caress
of human inquisitiveness.

Frenetic quest for the human tree
driven by a passion for dark knowledge;
bipedal carnivores
continuing to ravage the planet;
looking heavenward for delivery.


GC
Sandy Point
22 June 1999

 

Certainty

The ardour of youth and its passions,
born of the desperate need for security
in an ocean of adolescent uncertainty.

Mature commitments,
sourced in the need for order and purpose,
battered by domestic cares and compromises
dictated by the exigencies of survival.

Reassessment;
the task of our middle years:
trying to be true to ourselves,
to the realities behind our illusions
and the secrets our hearts whisper to us.

The certainty of uncertainty;
the glory of the flower before its petals fall:
humorous surrender to irresolvable
contradictions:
wise folly distilled into a gentle belly-laugh
at our outrageous idiocy.

A final waltz:
pity, compassion, generosity,
beaded onto a translucent threat of silence:
a morality beyond good and evil;

a willingness to accommodate the suchness of
things
in a fertile Emptiness.


GC
Cumberland View
4 July 1999

 

Red Saplings

Red saplings prostrated by the gale,
Terrified by the wind tearing at their leaves.

Machete-wielding genes
Flaying deliciously at the ancient growth;
Intoxicated by the slaughter.

Supermind:
Engorged neurons
In a sexual ecstasy of defloration,
Raping the soul of the nation.

Looted hopes;
Charred memories
Blood-etched into the epidermal tissue of
nationhood:
Wounds - palimpsest of a future story.

Hope beyond despair,
Written into our circuitry
And into the dance of nature:
God-burst or fictive illusion?
Whatever!


GC
A reflection on East Timor
15 Sept 1999

 

Grains Of Sand

Grains of sand,
moments of honesty,
scratching the insides of our beliefs,
roughing up the hard casing
and tearing at the soft issue of the soul.

Companion spirit of our faith,
dark-robed initiator into the mysteries of un-
knowing,
Insistent counterpoint to belief,
liberator from finely woven illusions of
consistency,
from cramped creeds -
testimony to our insecurity.

But who can live this new freedom -
this isolating freedom?
Only those who have learned to travel without
maps
and to trust themselves to the energy of a Presence
whose truth is self-validating.

The travellers are few
and the stakes are high.
But the air is fresh
and pilgrims are sustained
by an invisible matrix of energies
that shape the present
into an embodiment of the kingdom.


GC
Selby
6 October 1999

 

The Music of the Trees

The music of the trees -
winded-talk,
ruffled-chatter,
billowing waves of frothed conversation
unheeded by the species
that prides itself on its loquacity.

Birds volunteering their different calls,
swelling the chorus -
symphonic overture
thick with unrehearsed harmonies.

Dogs barking;
rusty horns and woodwinds -
the staccato complaints of territorians sensing
rivals,
warning off invaders.

Human vocables -
alien voices attempting to curb canine enthusiasm.
The occasional metallic cacophony -
deep-throated bane of the sequestered wilderness.

Soft ambience
cradling the soul in its wounded bosom,
fluttering its feathers into a new glory,
quietly proud of its gentle victory.


GC
Selby
8 October 99

 

Revisiting the Big People

Haunting memories -
yesterday's faces purged of death
and the odour of regret.

Smilingly present,
newly-burnished icons
cast from the stuff of memory.

Warm touchings,
slag-free intimations of a goodness
breaking through the skin
of youthful misperceptions.

Tutored judgment revisioning the past,
gently chiding its adolescent pouting.

They did their best;
they loved us -
Milt and Ollie,
Bob and Ruby -
fallible divinities of our infancy.

Our children -
plastic images of our figurements -
passing on our genes
and our meretricious karma
to the new season's stock.

Caught between the past and the future,
between two generations either side of us,
we hold on for the final cresting of our years
and for the inevitable descent.

The grasp that is no grasp
loosens its white-knuckled grip on life,
surrendering to the current that carries us
forward.

Wisdom's children -
self-understanding,
humility,
generous appraisal of the foibles of others
and hard-won relinquishment -
are our final companions,
moistening our understanding with compassion
and preparing us for the journey ahead.


GC
9 Oct 99

 

In Perspective

Fresh breezes tickling the leaves in an ecstatic
dance
and freshening the forest floor:
An eco-matrix caught in the rhythmic movement
of an evolutionary pulse:
Eager sap filling the green wood with sun-burst
delight:
Tender green leaves and podded seeds pollinating
the future.

Tiny faces eager for love, jabbing exploratory
fingers into unexplored space:
Embryonic adults reaching out through eager eyes
to embrace a world
that will rarely ever be more than an extension of
themselves:
Little people repeating patterned repertoires;
vulnerable, dependent,
taunting their parents with an assertion of
individuality.

We imagine that they are ours,
that we are the masters:
but we have been duped.
They are the puppeteers and we the puppets.
They manipulate us with their smiles.
They play the many manuals in our minds,
their little fingers unerringly stubbing the notes
that keep us at their beck and call.
Frustrated sometimes - even angry,
we cannot deny them the responses they evoke.

Answering the call of our genes,
the delicious seduction of our hormones,
we have unwittingly committed ourselves to these
fledgling creatures,
who will always be one up on us because
ours is a primal responsibility
that will savage us if we attempt to deny it.

Noiseless grace,
weaving freely through the knotted tangle of the
years,
touching our lives with mystery
and framing eternity in moments of timeless
wonder,
help us live unhurriedly, thankfully,
matching our stride to your effortless gait,
secure in the knowledge that all will be well,
that beyond the opposition
of light and dark,
of good and evil
of beginnings and endings
there lies a universe of ineffable love.


GC
For Parker Charlotte Stamford
23.11.99

 

An in-flight Encounter

Spangled effluvia;
hubris;
subtle insecurity masquerading as faith
and patronizingly proffering its largess.

Responsive wash
gently lathing a serrated arrogance
with labial tenderness,
dissolving away its disguise
without loss of face.

The conversion of the converted;
no longer needing to pretend not to pretend;
an opening out;
a further stage in the journey towards authenticity
and
un-self-regarding love.


GC
Reflecting on the past
26 January 2000

 

Beyond Hope

Grayscale optimism
labouring under a melancholy
evoked by recognition
that there are no solutions,
only accommodations,
within each of which is enfolded its nemesis.

Hope lies beyond
the lure of a different tomorrow,
beyond the prospect of a day of reversals
when justice will pull off a coup
and justify its justifiers;
hope lies
beyond the need for justification.

Beyond good and evil
and the false antinomy
that insists upon their separation;
beyond the atomizing delusion
of a rhetoric of cause and effect
and the sweaty propensity to blame;
beyond the illusion of separateness
we arise and are arisen.

The solution,
which is not arrogant enough to claim to be a
solution,
lies in the play of hope and anti-hope,
in the thusness of our dependent arising,
in the embrace of the whole
from which we cannot separate ourselves
and which we are;
the godness of the embraced self.


GC
Selby
10 February 2000

 

Thinning the Haze

Marshalled and marching to buried imperatives,
etched into our genes,

phalanxes of morphed thoughts press forward,
searching for affinities
that will enable the mind to domesticate the
unfamiliar,
capturing it in known templates.

Rituals of encounter
choreographing the perpetuation of accepted
beliefs,
masquerading as facts.

To decommission the desperate citizen militias,
programmed to give their lives in defence of the
realm,
is nigh impossible.

To encounter reality
without thrusting it into interpretive networks
that distort rather than illumine,
that castrate rather than exalt and embolden,
is a gift that requires long discipline.

It demands a degree of openness,
which both folk wisdom and formal learning have
discouraged,
and a measure of psychological security
that is not dependent on our maps of reality.

The product of a long labour,
choiceless awareness is the birth matrix of our
deepest insights,
the womb of our God-consciousness,
the foundation of their ultimate security
and the One Taste of our eternally rebirthed
world.


GC
13 May 2000

 

Wisdom Years

Wisdom years lie heavy with memories,
and a chastened idealism
that ambles towards the future,
alert to challenges,
but shorn of its freneticism.

Bones,
worn to a weariness
that occasionally stabs us awake,
advertise our finitude
and evoke a vigilant regimen of care.

No longer saplings,
lifting slender arms towards the future,
or bending with the wind;
we have stiffened up,
occasionally surrendering arthritic limbs to teasing
gales.

Our faces,
furrow etched,
eloquent narratives of our joy and pain,
complement the speaking of our eyes
and the sculptured timbre of our talk.

Faceted by the grinding of the years,
our teeth,
either reconstructed
or absent without leave,
forlornly call for absent companions
who have quit their servitude.

Filmy hair,
blown by the wind -
ovaline retreat from a crown
once thick forested;
departed glory.

Squinting eyes,
once alert to every nuanced line,
struggle to adjust their focus,
retreating from the night-glare,
and too many white pages.

Wisdom years:
the irony of an exhausted body
decaying towards obsolescence
and a spirit,
finally awake to the meaning of life.

Maybe;
just maybe,
this is an indication,
that we will no longer need this body!


GC
17 June 2000
Sandy Point

 

We Become by Being Noticed

We become by being noticed,
by being taken account of:
we read ourselves in the eyes of others,
in their responses,
in their enjoyment of our presence
and in their disdain.

Layer upon layer
we are painstakingly built up -
like paper mache figures -
constructed from throw-away lines,
body language and spoken judgements.

We are palimpsests,
scribbled on by a succession of critics
whose observations are reflected in our responses.

Crumple the figurines,
scratch clean the vellum
and what is left?
Nothing!

Nothing,
Unless we have shut our eyes and ears
to gesticulations and verbal projections
that weave their hypnotic spell.

Nothing,
unless we have descended
into the dark unknown
and embraced the solitude
in which our true identity can be discovered,
the identity of the no-self,
of the self that celebrates its connectedness
with all reality
and knows itself to be insubstantially substantial.

The double paradox
of the social self that is no self
and of the questing self
that loses itself only to find itself
and its eternal insubstantiality.


GC
18 June 2000
Sandy Point

 

We can only ever be

Million-year urges
absorbed into our genes;
hormonal cocktails -
rivers rich with alluvial sediment
countermanding the mind-rhetoric
of the layered civilizations
to which we are heir.

Studied probity,
scion of our fear of the dark
and its thousand watching eyes,
belied by our daydreams
and the feisty strangers
entertained by a colluding imagination.

Uninhibited dream sequences,
scripted and caste in the unconscious,
give the lie
to the verisimilitude of the persona
we have so carefully
and desperately cultivated.

The fact is
that we are what we are -
like it or not -,
an amalgam
of good and evil
of wisdom and folly
of mind and heart
of what we wish we were
and what we cannot avoid being.

We can only ever be
what we have the capacity to be,
and the sooner we admit to this
the sooner will we bid farewell
to pretence and illusion
to self-flagellation and judgmentalism -
the Siamese twins
that diminish us,
poison our relationships
and isolate us
in the world of our narrow egoism.


GC
18.6.2000
Sandy Point

 

The Going Forth and the Return

Fantasy years;
youthful exuberance
seducing innocence
beyond the safety of the harbour
into the excitement and terror
of the heaving ocean,
rich both in bounty
and finned carnivores.

With the elixir of immortality
dampening alarm mechanisms,
and hormonal passions spiking desire,
we blindly embrace a becoming-future,
anxious to slake our thirst
before the withdrawal of opportunity.

With pimpled arrogance
scarcely disguising
an ineluctable insecurity,
we gang-gather
in feathered flocks
swooping as one
into the pools and shallows,
not yet strong enough
to fly alone
or sufficiently wounded
to retire from the squadron.

Not realising what we possess,
we go looking for what we sense we lack,
until,
we return
by a long and circuitous route,
either
to bemoan the emptiness of existence,
or,
more rarely,
to discover that we have been
in possession of the treasure all the time,
but haven't known it.

The return is the secret:
but the going-forth
is no less important than the return.
Without the going-forth
there would be no return
and no secret.

It is only when the return
heads inward,
when the need for the return
drives the vision inward,
that the riches are discovered,
that we are alive to
the immortal suchness
of our evanescence.


GC
19 June 2000
Sandy point

 

The Chasm

Drunk with the guilt of lost yesterdays
that were mortgaged
to an ever-retreating tomorrow,
and paralyzed by the promise and threat
of the distant horizon,
we vault over the present,
unaware of the chasm that lies beneath
the thin fissure
separating past and future.

We imagine the chasm to be peopled with
demons,
whose sport it is to confront us
with the shallowness of our engagements,
the fruitlessness of our freneticism
and to slow us down.

But that chasm represents a different world,
a different time-space,
an eternal present,
within which we can be present to ourselves,
and savour a clarity of thought and action.

The demon-angels are not our tormentors,
but our liberators;
yet they remain strangers,
phantom figures draped with our fears,
incomprehensible to communities
suborned by primeval cravings,
by power,
avarice
and an inordinate lust.


GC
19 June 2000
Sandy Point

 

Early Afternoon

Clumped seaweed on a deserted beach,
mounded,
like beached whales,
on a carpet of sand
sculpted by the retreating tide.

Grey clouds
teased into spread wings,
like a giant stealth bomber
hovering over a grey sea.

Fringed by a border of filigreed foam,
the mysterious and powerful sea
retreats to a horizon of blue-grey gold.

Feathered energy on the wing,
flys in formation;
siblings,
gorging on worms behind the retreating brine,
take to the wing as they sense an approach.

The remains of large cuttlefish,
washed towards the dunes by the night tide,
dot the upper levels of the beach
like discarded wrappers
in a children's playground,

Purple mountains and far-off islands,
embrace the beach like the shoulders of a bay
that generously welcomes
the ceaselessly copulating waves.

This peopleless scene,
unreflectively aware of its primeval energy,
is self-answered by the pounding
of its silent potentiality.


GC
Sandy point
20 June 2000

 

The Clown

The red nose,
the chalked face,
the ringed eyes;
the dumb fool falling about and weeping -
melancholy comic.

Caricature of the human farce,
with its myriad hypocrisies;
where bluster masquerades as control,
ignorance as knowledge
and sordid abandon as bliss.

Where hollow men strut the stage,
dangling their keys,
mobiles and secretaries -
a piss contest in a urinal
stinking of bravado and banality.

The new Brahmins,
honing their political correctness
and lost in self-congratulation,
fail to discern truth's delicate tendrils
beneath their descending ideological machetes.

Justice,
decreed but not easily discerned,
has become the new justification for rage,
greed and war -
the rite of passage
for those aspiring to the New Humanity.

People and situations are rarely what they seem,
yet we opt for certainty over clarity,
because certainty -
which every politician knows -
promises security.

Such promises are cheap and cheaply won:
they are as effective as feeble intention
in restraining exploding emotions.

We are real people in a pretend world,
pretending to be other than we are
and suffering real pain
on account of our unchallenged pretending.

The clown at least knows she is clowning,
that it is all an act.
Mostly we don't,
except in those rare moments that come and go
and are forgotten.

To open our eyes to discern the truth,
to name the unnamable,
to have the courage to tell the king
he is without a stitch,
is the only way forward.

But who is equal to the exercise
and willing to wear the wrath it will evoke?


GC
21 June 2000

 

Soothing as the Rain

Soothing as the rain,
and better far,
a gentle word winged home with love
than starched,
confronting righteousness.

Purple wound,
raw guilt protected behind
layered denial,
will open to the ointment of knowing tenderness.

Stiff-necked resistance to self-insight -
the ploy of the blind
desperate to remain sightless -
invited into another's shameful story,
relaxes and begins its confession.

We are all defending our forts,
our wounds,
and,
crouching behind our defences,
we never meet.

But it is our wounds that advertise our kinship,
and that hold the promise of its consummation;
but only if we can first be gentle with ourselves.


GC
Sandy point
22 June 2000

 

Young Turks

Young Turks braced for an attack;
sword-talk
and a sworn enemy crouching in the shadows,
planning mayhem.

Conch shells blasting alarm -
nefarious doings
and a planned putsch.

Layered angst -
fear-driven paranoia
hermetically sealed against reason.

Self-justifying rhetoric,
disguised as patriotism,
lifts the drawbridge against further negotiation.

Two companies with swords drawn,
each claiming ultimate sanction
for ambitious rivalry
and a place in the sun.

Helots posing as patricians,
disguising their prejudices
in the patented logic of their language games.

Young Turks primed for battle,
needing an enemy
and a skirmish
to define themselves
and raise them from their torpor
and the inevitable boredom of the peace!


GC
Sandy point
for GW
23 June 2000

 

Eternal Embrace

Curled brine,
froth-dusted;
free-falling lace curtains
disappearing into the grey-green swirl
of surging water,
moving inexorably,
in liquid serration,
towards the beach.

Shell-treasures on soft-packed sand;
a vast expanse of gritty,
white-beige carpet,
sloping towards recycled sheets of liquid foam.

Embrace of land and ocean;
moon-moved caress,
advancing and retreating in an eternal courtship,
chaperoned by distant mountains swathed in
cloud.

Understated energy -
transcendent footprint in the granular beauty
of a privileged planet
marooned in a silent galaxy.


GC
Sandy Point
24 June 2000

 

The Belgrave Train

Friendly puppies,
gangling egos
jumping, pouting -
all legs and slobber.

Bantering courage
rooted in the insecurity
of emergent adolescence.

Hormonal efflorescence -
the first flowering
of soft skin and hard desire.

Generation in embryo -
foetal shapes emerging
from translucent tissue.


GC
28 September 2000
On the train from Belgrave to Box Hill

 

Old Faithful

Sun-drenched Yum Cha;
serial hospitality;
heart tendrils gently embracing.

Oolong lake cascading over the table,
dribbling damp warmth.

Life-flints awakening recognition -
Shared tissue.

Trolleys coming and going -
lid-lifted exchanges.

Grandchildren -
the immortality in our genes,
signalling an usurpation.

Ritual farewells;
separate orbits;
graced-filled moment.

Fluorescent fly traps;
rolls of woven colour -
tactile seduction.

Waiting at the station,
father and daughter consuming hamburgers.

Rattling home
rested, contented,
with full stomachs.

The end of the line;
a glance out the window;
a moment of apprehension.

Meandering lazily
through the car park
in the direction of Old Faithful.

Caught-breath;
looking more intently.
It's not there!

Silent groan in a pit of the stomach;
hardly perceptible.

Beyond any attachment
but that of gratitude.
Affection
for a faithful servant,
gently handled.

Reporting the loss and walking home,
numb-knuckled.

Feeling for Old Faithful -
violated spouse at the mercy of strangers.

Absent presence;
grief-garnished anxiety over unanticipated loss.

Riding the feelings -
shadowy steeds slowing to a canter.

What is life?
Good
and it's goodness
is beyond the pain of loss and diminishment.


GC
29 September 2000
NVT199.

 

Knox City

Legs,
wheels
and a riot of light and colour:
trapped noise -
canned static in a tubed temple.

Invitation to pleasure;
Midas touch
seducing the card-wealth
of those who can least afford
to gratify their fantasies.

Neon happiness;
veneered opulence;
marble walkways,
stair-studded;
cavernous interior of the white whale.

Habitat of addicts
and the merely curious -
voyeurs savouring the illusion of possession,
congratulating themselves on resisting
what they don't want.

Little children lusting for baubles
and a tongue-taste of paradise -
pushing the limits.

Awoken!
A touch on the shoulder.
I stand,
shaking old bones.
We walk off into the press
of ogling humanity.


GC
22 March 2001

 

Collecting Eileen

Gray sky through rain-speckled windows:
banks of cars below tree-decked shops:
slated mood running towards melancholy.

Days of my years -
phantom ghosts ghoulishly grinning in
upon my silent reverie,
punctuated by the rhythm of wheels,
tracks
and the flatulent murmur of hydraulic breaks.

Memories come and go like stations;
but mostly my thoughts remain at bay,
wearied lackeys of my fears.

Skull thickness -
tired afterburn of creative discipline:
letting the daemon rove free -
neuronal moratorium.

Pesky images,
following the scent;
stray frames lighting up the screen,
irritating trespassers -
nuisance-value.

Life stages come and go
backwards and forwards:
my mind lumbers on,
heavy with weariness -
a pleasant opiate
drugging the future with temporary oblivion.

Spencer Street?
I'm here!


GC
22 March 2001

 

Obsolescence

Richly-textured years,
thick with ambition and
the blind idealism of youth,
loosely strung together;
years of excitement and discovery,
of challenges and courage.

Doubt-laden years,
harnessed to a mind craving certainty and
to accumulating expectations and responsibilities,
heedless of the screech of axles complaining of the
load
and the uninspired repetition
of rhetoric and ritual.

Work-weary years,
stuttering to a conclusion;
years of increasing obsolescence
in which we are assaulted by new fashions
and bodies that are wreaking vengeance
for years of neglect and abuse.

Has it all been worth it?
Have we made a difference,
or are we merely the pawns of our biology,
the play-things of history,
whose self importance
is no more than an illusion?

Generativity and despair
wrestle for supremacy
in breasts laid bare by pain
and an awareness of the fact that
our lives will one day
be shrouded in anonymity.

We are not grand gestures,
but victuallers for friends and family,
sign-posts for those we have mentored,
doctors for the wounded.

We will pass on
and be forgotten -
footnotes in family histories that gather dust:
but appropriately so,
for our memory will no longer be
important or relevant.

This hustling with the unwelcome news of our
mortality -
an ongoing dialogue -
diminishes our inflated egos,
and our anxiety,
preparing us for the moment
when time will be swallowed up in non-time,
in the great Emptiness out of which the universe
was born,
the abyss of potentiality,
the place of our origin and destiny,
the god-place of our meditations.


GC
22 April 2001

 

A Song of Wisdom

Wisdom's ruse -
sly shyster beguiling the young,
piping them into the future
with the promise of
a veritable cornucopia of knowledge,
an understanding of life's larger questions.

We imagine wisdom to be a possession,
a superior certification,
a flag that we can wave to signal our success
and to guarantee our occupation of the best seats
in the synagogue.

Little do we realize that wisdom is an unknowing,
a challenge to our cleverness,
the slick repartee that plays with words and ideas,
counterfeiting reality.

Wisdom begins where wisdom is no longer
sought,
where we are willing to relinquish the quest for
omniscience
and the desire for a reputation among the erudite.
We must follow instead the urging of our hearts,
the murmuring of our blood
with a childlike hunger for the Real.

The path of wisdom involves an unlearning,
a willingness to be lost in the dark emptiness of an
abyss
that opens into the ultimate black hole.

Wisdom is the gift of Presence
that discovers itself to us in the ordinary
and the overlay of good and bad
of heroism and heinousness,
in that stab of recognition that holds us
for what seems eternity
in a moment of ecstasy.

Wisdom is the raindrop running down my cheek,
the silver residue of a snail strafing the ground,
the lifeless eyes of a friend
closed in the moment of death.

Wisdom is the belly-laugh
that arises spontaneously from the gut,
the recognition that I am many people,
that there are layers of you and me,
that the universe is an illusion,
a ridiculous absurdity,
a membrane accommodating limitless possibilities.

Wisdom plays backwards into paradox.
It does not boast
for it knows that it possess nothing
of which it can boast.
It feeds on the silence.
Out of its fecundity spins knowledge;
its bastard sibling.

Wisdom is the epiphany of grace, love
and the unspeakable Ultimate.
It cannot be sighted or named.
It is always in process of coming.
It is the breath of God that blows through our
human static;
a symphonic beatitude.


GC
2 May 2001

 

Angry Spores

Orchard blight,
smudging the leaves with dark powdered
resentment
and moulding the new fruit
with angry spores.

Expectations of efficiency
have rendered us powerless in the face of
the irregular stutterings
of life's overflow.

Knots in the stomach;
angry words strafing our equilibrium,
muscling our bodies with agitation
and belching into our conversations.

We have lost the ability
to flow with the tides,
to appreciate life's dappled texture,
to cavort in its pleasured pain.

We have created
a sterile prison,
a uniformity of pace,
a laminated landscape.

We rage when we are thwarted
because we do not recognise the value of
frustrated ambition,
of clockless time
and of spillages.

We have forfeited the wisdom
associated with seasonal knowledge,
with plant lore,
with the rich nutrients
hidden in clammy seaweed.

We need to escape the artificiality of clock-time
and to play again in puddles dimpled by rain-
drops,
to straggle home late after school
and smother our bread in condensed milk.

We need to enter a second childhood,
to discern the wisdom of a second naivete,
a wisdom born of pain and surrender,
surrender to the pulse of our hearts.


GC
24 May 2001

 

Two Weeks to Go!

Catching the wind;
leaf-ruffled weeks hurrying to a conclusion,
spilling their essence
into a few final tasks.

Forty-two years of vocational commitment,
retrospectively weighed
in the scales
of a mature wisdom.

What have I achieved?
Was I deceived?
Did youthful enthusiasm blind me
to the contrariness of reality?

It has been a journey.
The specificity of the path
didn't matter all that much;
only the getting there.

It was the learning that counted;
or the unlearning,
the discovery that reality
is not that which poses as reality.

The secret has been to understand myself
and to discover that I defy definition,
that I am who I am -
layered, knotted nothingness.

This has allowed me to accept others,
mostly, but not always,
to identify in their contrariness
the pain that keeps them running.

These two weeks concentrate this reflection
And encourage the acceptance
of a past littered both with fragmentation
and the grace of forgiveness.


GC
14 June 2001

 

The Star
all you can eat

Reaching across syllabic dissonance,
straining to catch each word,
wrapped in an understated intimacy
hanging in the intervals between mouthfuls.

Conspiratorial collaboration between two
languages,
rich generosity reaching across
yawning chasms of understanding and experience,
arcing two energies.

Gentleness born of strength,
a meeting of souls,
of strangers thrown together
by a conjunction of circumstances.

Pupil-teachers swapping roles,
deferring to the other,
proffering friendship and knowledge
hardly won.

Smooching centres,
emerging from cultural chrysalides
that can never comfortably dock;
a defiant coniunctio.

My friend and I
baring our wounds
and offering the solace
of our humanity.

Strength for the journey,
inspiration for the weeks ahead;
touching the springs of courage
with gentle humour.

Gift of the serendipitous Spirit
that flutters the washing in the wind,
shakes the crown of the tallest gums
and calls us to be true to our deepest intuitions.


GC
15 June 2001

 

The Trail

Worn siblings following a trail gone cold;
scabbed birth-wound eluding discovery,
buried beneath the dendrites of the years
and the trickle of newcomers
oblivious to bloodlines washed from the soil.

A journey of discovery
taunting the ingenuity of tutored minds
grown weary with the years
and the fading agility of bodies
that have seen better days.

Pub-strangers prying into the curtained past
with eagerness born of the need to connect
with grisled ancestors in a hard land
that beckoned the hopeful
with the promise of wealth.

Thin veins of gold
and an occasional motherload
appearing occasionally in the quartz of
conversation
in the faded sepia of yesteryear
and the woven narrative of history buffs.

Following dung-studded bush trails
to rakish palisades
and listing monuments,
to skeletal memories
evoking riotous conjecture.

Peering at the chiseled emptiness of ancestors
etched into a marble past
worn thin by the ravages of the years
and cradled in the embrace of a silent river
that is contemporary of both the living and the
dead.

Past records of human cargo,
hand-written manifests of disembarking
passengers
in the grip of anxious anticipation,
broke open the alabaster box,
bringing the perfume of the past into the present.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego
in a fire of enthusiasm so intense
it blistered the path before them,
causing them to pause for breath
and to confront the magnitude of their task.

Night-journey into dawn
through curvaceous hills
that stretched voluptuously towards the horizon
and seduced one into a preternatural intimacy.

The last of the Mohicans,
of the tribal elders
familiar with the myths and stories,
offering hard-won facts
and a disciplined narrative.

Canny hunters urged on by the scent
but weary from the chase,
dispersed to their separate lairs,
to catch their breath,
reflect
and stockpile their spears and hatchets
for the next assault upon their prey.


GC
Bundarra
10-17 November 2001

 

A Daughter's Caution

Daughter-love filleting the nexus,
transforming the generational bond,
reversing directionality
and requiring of me the self-care
I asked of her.

Love and fear of loss,
empathy born of connectedness,
and an awareness of the diminishment
and vulnerability
that attends ageing
moved her to press the point.

She is right:
I do need to consider decreased energy,
narrowing limits
and a re-working of my schedule
to match the wisdom the years have brought,
and the altered rhythms of my body.

But I am not yet ready
to put away my paints and brushes,
to fold up my easel
and retire to the security
of a measured round -
a stressless pseudo-nirvana.

This,
of course,
is not what she asks;
merely that I be more careful,
that I consider my years
and those my love holds in its embrace:
and this I will do,
for my daughters and their issue
grow more precious with the years.


GC
27 Nov 2001

 

On Reaching Ninety

Whimsical sanity
plainly spoken;
the delightful choreography of mind and heart,
and a fearless honesty
tilting at senseless cant.

Hospitality of the heart and skillet,
dreaming up new palate-teasing delights
arranged like works of art.

Haven for the weary heart -
practical down-to-earth advice,
insightful gems
enveloped in a gentle empathy.

Bubbly humour
breaking the surface now and then,
frothing wave after wave of astute analysis
with rippling irony.

Surrounded by tiled matadors,
soft-grained flesh,
and walls draped with brushed memories
captured in umber hues
and the soft grays of yesterday's remainder.

A quiet strength;
a life of un-self-conscious achievement
running its full course
into swollen joints
and the gentle reprimands
of solicitous progeny.

Reaching ninety
with all your marbles -
a full life crowned with wisdom and
the soul at full-stretch
straining against the abatement of opportunity.

Honour to whom honour is due;
generativity's come-upance,
karmic reward for a life lived for others
in utter-self-forgetfulness.


GC
Freda Morris
6 December 2001

 

Waiting for the Train

Sun shining through windows misted with road-
grime;
cubicled in a heated capsule,
a cone of silence,
broken by the hoot of a departing train.
Buses changing places
like counters on an abacus.

Bright afternoon in a gray summer,
promising a thaw in the tedium of rain-music -
the choreography of depression.
Children returning in dribs and drabs
from the torture of learning,
in tired oblivion -
sentences suspended for another evening.


GC
Belgrave Station
13 Dec 2001

 

Interlude

Intermittent noises throughout the night:
fetal bundle,
occasionally puncturing the silence
with muted alarm,
or the sound of loose dowel
pummeled by thrusting limbs.

Smiling bliss-bomb,
cornucopia of innocent intrigue
and investigative enthusiasm,
sleeping the morning away
in tired oblivion.

Dependent and independent,
fearful and confident,
snuggling into a comforting embrace
from which she eventually breaks free
at the behest of gnawing hunger.

Exploring known haunts;
practicing incidental repertoires
familiar from previous visits
when they were affirmed by the forbearance
of wrinkled minders.

Imminent rescue,
spied through the window;
unrestrained excitement,
thwarted by a barrier of brick, metal and glass,
and the inability to comprehend
that the consummation of desire lies
in the opposite direction -
in retreat towards the back door.

Ensconced in her throne
in the rich interior of a wagon,
high off the ground,
her mother at the wheel,
with silent satisfaction
surveying her surroundings with the calm aplomb
of a royal
about to take leave of her subjects.

Lucy's Visit
25-26 Dec 2001

GC
3 Jan 2002

 

Suspended

Full and empty,
relative and absolute,
illusory and real;
palpable nothingness,
bundled experience
beyond dichotomy,
beyond the denial of dichotomy.

Being without trying to be;
fear beyond the fear of fear;
riding the present without a saddle -
bridledless exultation;
quiet fullness
emptying its burden
noiselessly into the past.

Agitative trigger
held in suspension,
in the release of mindfulness;
deflated tension,
powerless for the moment,
bubbling peacefully.

Beyond self and non-self;
suspended in awareness
beyond belief;
cabbages in the garden,
leaves rustling in the breeze;
fecund nothingness.


GC
Emerald
15.1.2002

 

Feather in the Wind

Goal-sickness;
forlorn quest for a Shangri-La
beyond discontent,
and fear -
its genetic marker.

Better to identify,
to live with the fear,
beyond intimidation,
to ride it to exhaustion.

Acting without intending to act,
beyond lethargy and freneticism,
flowing,
fully alive,
free of goal-fever
and driven intentionality.


GC
Emerald
15.1.2002

 

Fog-Bound

Fog-bound neurons;
lazy excitation;
lumbering thoughts
clambering through the mist
and tangled undergrowth
thick with the elixir of forgetfulness.

Ageing brain,
alternating between rich memories
of a past long gone
and an elusive present;
taunting recollection
in a game of hide and seek.

Rich wisdom
seeping spring-like
from soil heavy with decay
and rich in rotted pain,
prescient awareness -
gift of the years.

Strange interweaving
of leathered age
and pliable dotage
garlanded with the gift of insight.


GC
Brian Dunn's waiting room
Emerald
22-28 January 2002

 

Awaiting Oblivion

Gentle direction on noiseless carpet,
softening muted anxiety,
trailing it along,
numbly acquiescent,
towards the waiting room.

Details scribbled on a scripted inventory -
past illnesses and suspicious weaknesses;
sculpturing the anaesthetic choreography:
undressed for action,
gowned and led to the theatre.

Friendly direction;
lying on my side on a trolley,
pumping recalcitrant veins,
swabbed and funneled;
a few moments of lucidity
before a delicious letheward oblivion.

Wondering whether I was sufficiently out to it;
confusing before with after;
gradual clarity
and an invitation to disembark.

Anaesthetic calm,
sunken in a padded armchair;
sweetened tea and biscuit
assuaging the craving.
"Another?"
"Please!"

Nothing found;
three-year respite from the purging;
relief mingled with
preternatural euphoria.

Dressing again
and walking to the waiting room:
familiar face at the door -
beckoning eyes
questioningly observant.

Being driven home,
comfortable in the role of convalescent;
familiar community of towering gums -
welcoming ambiance.


GC
Colonoscopy
4 Feb 2002

 

A Day at the Beach

Foaming lace dribbling towards the sand;
soft sound intersecting in a wash of gentle noise
ceaselessly falling back upon itself
in whispered echoes.

Sand and sun concocting a blinding glare:
liquid jade rising and falling:
bubble tents, boogey boards and crumpled towels:
washed sandstone crumbling into the ocean;
tufted hilltops and shade trees.

Weathered bodies
browned by weeks of exposure:
white-skinned innocence;
voluptuous lines curving towards desire:
the cawing of gulls and the shrieking of children.

Concave paradise -
damp-edged promenade;
somnolent skin-bags -
waging the ultimate sacrifice,
hopeful suppliants.

Fresh ozone and muted conversation;
seaweed and feathers;
translucent sky
scripted with smudged hieroglyphics -
filmy clouds suspended in an ethereal heaven.

Relaxed inaction;
Bundled programmes -
pain-laden tension beneath passive exteriors,
Every now and then breaking through in a
grimace,
or a twinge of the eye;
nightmares and fantasies
seeking momentary oblivion
in a day at the beach.


GC
Torquay
13 Feb 2002

 

The XPT to Sydney

Strangers in a silent tube;
muffled conversation;
the sudden crackle of canned voices -
intrusive interview;
breaking news
munching the quiet.

News addicts feeding their addiction,
heedless of others -
fellow passengers:
becalmed after the effort of outfoxing the dawn.

Observing each entrant,
anticipating possible companions,
hoping against hope that some would pass -
wishing them into other seats.

The soft sound of muted wheels -
a mechanical centipede,
sliding past freight trains
and wrecks burdened with disuse.

Reaching for the open country -
undulating hills,
parched, tufted stubble,
islands of gums
and the occasional cluster of houses.

Chilean tourist -
sensitive, open,
exploring the continent:
friendly blubber -
polite, educated,
speaking locomotives into a cassette recorder.

Coming and going,
buffet traffic -
cardboard trays and polystyrene cups,
scones and muffins;
ritual mastication.

Warmth,
gathering conversation,
welcome momentum
and an opening to soul-talk -
a gentle Latin.

"Business engineering" -
a rather dull occupation offering few opportunities
in a depressed economy;
statistical possibilities.

An opportunity to travel;
yearnings for an Australia
cautiously trickling migrants
and caught in a bitter debate over asylum seekers.

Wagga Wagga!
A change of partners -
silent companion
Cootamundra bound.

The remainder of the journey
dusted with conversation -
a new interlocutor;
intelligent exchange of life-histories,
jointed at points.

Almost soul-talk -
moral depths,
common interests,
the interplay of balance and creativity.

Griffith -
fruitful garden
shaded in notoriety;
stories of perfidy
courage and song.

Brain-fag;
gapped conversation;
sliding through Sydney suburbs
replete with memories.

Farewells
as we struggle with our bags to the concourse;
timetables and time-clocks.

Two out of three -
an engaging of strangers;
ignition transcending suspicion.


GC
19 March 2002

 

Electronic text provided by the author. HTML rendering by Ernie Stefanik. 2 October 2003.

Luminous Moments: Poems from the Year 1998-2002 is published
as an online text with the kind permission of the author.
Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Graeme Chapman.
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