October 2017
As light preceeds the dawn, the honey scent of crocus flowers preceeds her onto the stage, the silence of her footsteps disguise the gravity of her purpose. Starlight seems a heavy weight upon the floating petals of her dress, which drift and sigh with every note the musician lifts fingertip and palm from the gleaming gray steel elispse upon his cross-legged lap. An instrument named a Halo.
In the shadow of a blue light dulled by rough black curtains, I crouch offstage, crowded in beside the stage manager and the twinkling forms of the next dance troupe, as we all, in total silence, watch Regan dance, and Tony play.
Dance and Play.
I remember the sand pit. Of my childhood memories, playing in the sand pit is very strong for me, hours upon days upon weeks upon terms, semesters, years...and now a life well lived with my hands in the dirt. I remember dancing in the sand, twisting my feet around and making patterns like snakes. Or flowers. I imagined I could dig to China. Dance and Play. The instincts of children.
Up there, with the lights in her eyes and that look upon her face like all of life is as beautiful as this moment, and without a word being spoken, we all agree that it could be, life could be everything in this moment, and that right now, all of life is as beautiful as a woman dancing upon a stage, her red dress like a flower in spring.
*
Who are these ghosts? Why do they linger in weed choked alleys, on street corners, in shops and alone on the higway as I drive home, driving towards midnight, moonlit, the booming thrum of music ringing on in my mind, my ears congested with sound. Who are these masked desperados? These pale faced devils in plain clothes who stare blank as walls and who cannot be moved with word or force?
Where are the angels? the heroes?
Where is the whistling man? The mistress of keys? Here where the shadows have shadows and even deeper filth festers and fidgets in the unseen gutters of the spirit world. The city is not a safe place. And yet...and yet...neither is it unsafe, nor is it unknowable, for while these masked creatures who wear the shapes of men do linger, they do not malign, and my passing seems for all the world to be unnoticed, unremarkable. The ghosts too, though animate and conversant, have a society and interests of their own, and pay me no heed as I walk amidst their comapny.
With runes marked out upon the soles of my shoes, the dust does not move with my passing, shadows cling frozen upon the slate gray earth, unruffled. The masked forces of nature stand observant, pillars of stillness, mountain motionless surrounded by the rushing of time, entropy and order washing as waves upon their shore. While I, oh I, watch them. I stare into the emptiness of their eyes, their masks up close I see writing upon them, the fine calligraphy of whatever magic is granted to they who wear, or are worn by, the masks.
All my ignorance, and all my knowledge. That is what I see written in the masks. I see the infinitesimally tiny speck of light that is my existence, against the broad view of all existence. I look away. I must look away.
I break the spell.
Who are these ghosts? Why do I linger with them in weed choked alleys, on street corners, in shops and alone on the higway as I drive home with them, driving towards midnight, moonlit, the booming thrum of music ringing on in my mind, my ears congested with sound.
Where are the angels? the heroes?
*
The sun is high, the day bright and wondrous.
A distant, lone saxophone player blows his solitary music echoing beautifully, loud and perfect as I walk beneath vaulted pavillion arches. I look up from my boots, and standing right there before me, a mysterious woman stops in the shade to light a cigarette, blowing smoke up into the air with a cinematic wistful sigh. Tall boots. Mirrored shades. Red lipstick.
There are moments so stunningly arranged by fate as to leave one breathless, all the histories of man and beast had to preceed before this could occur. A scene-like theatricality, straight out of an old time detective movie, complete with musical score.
But...here is the lesson easy to miss.
This moment was not special, not unique.
All moments are these moments, waiting for us to look up from our boots and see.
All of time, all of creation has waited since the birth of the first star, for us to look up and see.
See what? you ask.
Whatever is there.
*
In a field in the borderlands.
I lay down in the tall grass
I forget about time
for a few minutes
the clouds
the wind
everything
just as it is
*
At a Market.
The dancers in black, the dancers in white, in orange and gold, the drummers who are led by them, and the rolling waves of sound that follow upon their convergence. From the four corners of the city, trailing the perfume of their intent through crowds thick with the press of a marketplace, theirs is a confluence of culture and joy. In the sunny courtyard, a bespectacled gentleman in hat and shirtsleeves makes coffee while his two children take orders from the press of thirsty spring tickled supplicants. Dancers in black, dancers in white, in orange and red and blue and gold, and the drummers who follow the snowbell tinkle of their steps upon the floor.
*
There
in the tall grass...
a rock in the sun.
Upon it
a
black
winged
Ibis.
One step
two, three...
then it flies on through the woods
with more certainty than I have known
in
my
whole
life
*
Walking with the family across hills and rocks and through the tall grass we come first to the Goblin lookout. From this rocky vantage we look down to the realm of the Fox King in the dark green reeds along the banks of the northern lake. Far beyond it upstream, at the intersection of two valleys stands the Tree of the Ancients. Skirting the tall reeds and tramping upstream along the boggy edge of the creek, we cross and pass a thistle patch, following the curve of the earth to the mighty tree just beyond the hill. A tree beneath which we lie and stare up into branches that looked down upon a hundred hundred generations of Aboriginal faces, walking in search of intitiation, for this land was magical even before I imagined it to be so. Before I populated it with Goblins and Skags and the swift wild tribesmen of the Razor Clan.
Leaving the Tree we cross the plateau to the Waterstone, where we leave a tiny glass bottle as an offering and cross over into Razor Clan territory, along the Running Flag Race leading all the way to the Cupstone, and to the path leading down into Skag Gully. Passing by, we continue along the highlands until we can see The Twins, last of their kind in the valley. Tall and beautiful, swaying in the high wind, carrying messages between the Whispering Trees in the east, and those in the West.
But what's this? A third? Their child has survived the first year in the wild and now shows its green fingers above the grass. Where there were two, now there are three. Where there are three...?
Nearby we pause at the Viewing Stone. Once a portal to another world, it is now closed, locked for reasons lost to history. On the hill we see, crouched and almost hidden, a wild woman and her daughter, our kinfolk, resting in the sunwarmed concealment of golden grassblades.
The shadows lean long across the lowland fields as we turn for home. Crossing openly through the fallow pasture, fearing neither predators nor bandits, making straight for the southern lake and wetting our lips with the mineral water. Noisy as the sunset birds above us, we talk and laugh and stumble and play our way back along the road that leads to our homestead, tucked neatly beside the woodland creek crossing that leads back to the Goblin lookout. Nearly a full boundary trek from start to finish and a story told along the way of the land and the inhabitants of our imagination.
Or maybe none of that happened. Maybe I just walked around the paddock today with the wife and kids. Saw some weeds by the creek that need spraying and the fence is down on the edge of the track leading to the top paddock, next to the big rabbit warren. Dam levels are high and creek is flowing slowly.
Or maybe there really are Goblins in the tall grass, spying down upon the Fox King, and playing frisbee on the hilltop.
Maybe.
*
I follow in the footsteps of cows.
The rhythm of their
easy
steady gait
becoming my own as I step quietly in the
rut of their routine.
The easy path,
the middle way across the hill
offering the least resistance,
offering the simplest solution
to a problem far, far older
than humans.
*
The beautiful lie
of poetry
sometimes seems
more important
than truth.
*
Standing on the crumbling platform at the train station in a coutry town, the crowd gather waiting for the train and I could be standing on this platform in any year in the past one hundred as the children cheer and the adults cheer and everyone rushes to the edge, peering uptrack as the collossal noise of the whistle blasts all the world into silence beneath its mountainous wave. Hissing smoke and steam, the mighty and beautiful iron beast rolls smoothly to a halt before us, passengers within the antique wooden carriages looking out at us as we look in at them and they drink wine from tall glasses and converse in their travelling stillness, nearing their journey's end. One more town and their sunset disembarkation shall be a spilling out of people somehow out of step with time. All of modernity has yet to match the exquisite aesthetic of the steam train with its noise, heat and grime, its shuddering carriages every part the lumbering pendulous weights they are, pushing and pulling against the engine. The ornamented exterior in wrought iron and timber, always mixing function with beauty, matched seamlessly with the grease coated linkages and complex array of moving machine parts. It is real. None of its workings are concealed. The furnace heats the boiler which creates steam pressure, this pressure drives the machine. Yet, with the very soul of its function on display, it retains both modesty and pride beneath the sheer artistry of its design.
I did not understand trains before my son was born, but through his eyes I have learned to see them as a child see's them, as huge, noisy, bright and beautiful machines, like a rare striped bear roaring in the rocky barren wilderness of the rail yard.
*
Rain in the night and I dream of you, pale skinned in the moonlight, naked and unashamed, a wild animal. I awake to the sound of cockatoos and you are still asleep beside me in the dawn pink, the air outside awash with a veil of fog. The world beyond our window is both exposed and private, for there is no fence like a mountain, and no freedom either. In the day when we don our boots and walk upslope to the standing stones, we stand hand in hand with the sky, our hair the sudden plaything of wind sprites and we laugh and smile and even beneath the bright sun, your smile is brighter.
Rain in the night and I dream of dreaming, waking from one form into another and finding myself in the body of a forty year old Englishman with pale skin and red hair, and I knew the story of his life as if I had lived it and I felt his loneliness and resentment, his despondence and fear, but I knew his love as well, and when at the end of along and tiresome day, he slept, I woke again in another body, another life...
How far into the dreaming had I come? How many dreamers had I skipped like a stone on water across? Each time I slept, I woke again in another life, and like a body floating to the surface, from the deep dream of that Englishman, I rose up through the dreams of others to myself, and woke at last in my own bed, my own body.
Rain in the night and I dream my dream and in the morning I awake to the sound of cockatoos and you are there beside me, naked and unashamed, a wild animal in the dawn pink.
*
I want to tell you now about the barefoot priest, and the soldier.
Three years ago...
First, the priest, barefoot on the hot bitumen, I saw him cross the street alone. Bald, dressed in a black suit, with the white collar of the clergy tight around his throat. A small crucifix hung on a chain, swaying against his chest as he took deliberate, slow strides, out of rhythm with the pace of the world. A man out of step with time. He made the world around him seem blurry.
He was tanned, he had spent a lot of time in the sun, and did not show discomfort from the considerable heat of a January morning in the city, but despite this healthy glamour, there was something off about him, a hollowness to his gaze, perhaps I saw a shadow mark beneath his eye or upon his cheek. This man was privy to dimensions not known to the common man, cognizant of conversations unheard by the common ear.
On the same day that I saw the barefoot priest, I saw the soldier. He was young, in his twenties, but the burdens dragging him graveward carved lines into his face on their way down from his beautiful, blue eyes. Like eroded rock, he sat slumped against himself, elbows on his knees and head tilted up, his uniform matcing the dull green of his duffel bag which lay on the ground at his feet. He sat alone in the useless perspex shade of a bus shelter, sweat staining his shirt and glistening on the rough stubble of his shaven head, his westward shadow cutting a frightening shape into the surface of the earth.
I saw the soldier again later that day.
On the other side of the city, hunched over like eroded rock, slumped against himself in the useless shade of another bus shelter. The sun now burning his other cheek as he turned but did not see me with those beautiful, blue eyes, his shadow cutting east, a canyon in which to fall.
That night, on the radio I heard the news of suicides all over the Queensland wheat farming lands, children as young as eleven succumbing to the despair of a drought that seemed to have no end.
The next night, Adelaide flooded. The garden festival grounds were half submerged in the morning when drainage teams showed up with pumps and shovels and sandbags by the truck load.
All these things are connected. I said to myself. All these things are connected.
