A dead Raven is in my hands, it is heavier than I had imagined. Neck bent in a gentle posture of sleep, wings tucked down, sleek and perfect and warm from the sun and with the faint fetor of decomposition quick upon the air. I saw it die, knocked aside mid-flight by the car ahead of me. The Raven hesitated as it rose from the road, and was lost. Tumbling though the air, wings askew and flapping with a final effort to escape its fate, there was no life left in the flesh when it fell into the dry grass.

I drive past at first, but I return later that day to collect the body, it is heavier than I had expected, but perfect, sunwarm and sour. I carry it home in my car.

I spend the afternoon reading about native American techniques for preserving whole birds, as well as techniques for clean dismemberment and feather plucking. I am both disturbed and intrigued, my stomach turns over, but my eyes read on.

Long after the sun has set I put on my gloves and set to work. I pick up the bird and say to it You are not your body. I know immediately that I am not my body, that the flesh I inhabit is only a part of what I am, and that when I die, my body will break down and return to the earth, just like the Raven in my hands.

I look at death for a moment.

I take the wings, the tail feathers, the feet and the head, the rest I return to the wild.

An experience both macabre and natural, gruesome and ordinary. I have not handled a dead animal in such a way since I was fourteen, when I caught a rabbit in a trap, then skinned and cooked it with butter and pepper over a campfire out bush. I cured the skin with salt, keeping it as a little memento for years.

So I guess the story about the dead Raven takes us here.

My father was a hunter. As a boy at home I would fall asleep beside the fire, laying on a fox pelt complete with glass eyes, the whole thing carefully mounted on thick felt. In my father's study, mounted on the walls were wild boar tusks, trophies for marksman competitions, memorabilia from his years in the army. Above my own bed, a pair of mighty goat horns were mounted on a wooden shield, I would stare up at them every night as I went to sleep. I went shooting with my father, my cousin and my uncle in the school holidays, year after year, filling tin cans with buckshot and cracking rocks with .22 bullets, staying up late sitting around the campfire, walking up and down the scrubby hills around Palmer, collecting old Yakka stalks to use as walking sticks.

Now I am a man, plucking feathers from a wild bird, taking it's useful parts and returning the rest to the earth.

*

I was given a shortbow when I was about eight or nine years old. I was taught the rules of its use, as I had been taught the rules of firearms, a code of behaviour that was not, under any circumstances to be contradicted, and which I never did. For years I fired at my backyard haybale target, learning how to breathe, steady my limbs, focus, draw and release the arrow in a fluid motion. I was never a master, but I knew how to handle the weapon and how to shoot straight over both short and long distances.

When I was about twenty and living in the suburbs, I gave the bow away to another young boy who lived in the country, and so the wonder of archery was passed along.

Today an old friend came around, bringing with him a new compact, collapsable shortbow and set of carbon fibre arrows. I set up a target for us, and when he handed me the bow it were as if I had forgotten nothing, shot after shot finding its target, seven out of eight arrows hitting each time.

Nock the arrow, (breathe out), draw the bow as you (breathe in) lift the bow and take aim (and slowly release the breath) as you fire.

It has been about twenty years since I have handled a bow, but my hands moved with absolute certainty and when I was most centred in my self, my arrows struck the centre of the target. If my breath was too quick, or my thoughts too clouded, I would hit off centre, always the result of my ego intervening in the process and wresting control from my body.

Archery is a meditation like no other.

*

The sensational permeability of love, the infinite gradation of its seasons of sunlight. To paint a picture of love is to paint a sky from dawn to dusk and through the halls of night to dawn again, and to paint it forever more for no dawn is alike to another, and no night lasts forever. So it is with you and I, my dearest, my Love. Forever painting and being painted, forever waking to the dawn and sliding soft and warm into the the bright day, to live hand in hand.

*

How humbling it is to be in the presence of such humble greatness. To share in your presence the joyful gaze of the crowd, and witness the testimony of your beauty. All day my hands have been in the earth, my back to the sun, digging holes, planting shrubs, trees, flowers, swathed in the silence of nature.

We are transformed by the night, garbed in the colours and fabrics of foreign lands, our daily labours invisible, our tribulations a forgotten fable as the purpose of all our striving finds purchase amidst the noise and haste of the clattering city. In the night you dance and I play and we eat and tell stories, and mesmerised by the fluid precision of your movements, I find it humbling to be beside such humble greatness, and to share in the gift of your art.

(for Kylea and Regan)

                                                                                              
*

The season changes, and I with it.

why not? am i immune to the laws of nature?

is my sentience somehow more powerful than the push and pull of the moon?

I am an animal, a rock, a river, a tree, subject to the sun and rain and

a subject of the sun, and the rain

Those ghostly faces who stared out at me from the receeding shadows of winter are nowhere to be seen, instead I glimpse tall dream people, smelling flowers, shimmering as heat waves in the air, they float past me in the rainbow hue of glimmering water and everywhere the trumpeters proclaim the reign of the Summer Court.

Cloud banks heap against themselves building sky-quake mountain ranges that collapse and rise and collapse again, and rise again in their windblown procession.

I catch a flashing shadow, a scimitar curve black against the green earth, and above me a hawk floats triumphal, weightless and defiant of gravity, floating hollow boned upon the self-same winds that break the great blue sky with cloud banks heaping one upon the other, mountainous and trembling in the sky.

*

Low sunset laid upon the stones, I step in trick-step on the broad flat paths, side-step and slip past stains upon the pave, fresh from this eve's early imbibations. The city is drunk already upon the heat, pressing like skin upon skin, we feel our own bodies passing through air and sensual, silk bedsheets of breezes spread pleasure as they pass over sweat gathering on backs, bellies, necks, ears, noses and all parts exposed or concealed. The air is wet with sound, the sway of a violin street performer surrounded by children who whisper and gape at the sweet wonder of her song, the carillon choir of town hall striking the hour, the burdensome roar of traffic straining against itself.

And out of the day, come the drummers.

With drums slung across backs or carried under arms, they sway their way through crowds and conversations. Where they take up seats and play, the booming voices of their drums are louder than the traffic, louder than thunder, amplified and reverberated, and collected in the ears and hands and eyes of passers-by who stop, or turn and twist their necks to see and to hear. It lights fires in the minds of the children who come to look closely and to play, and their mothers who stand by with the faces of mothers everywhere who see their young ones discovering music.

Out of the day come the drummers

　
(A link to the poem by Steve Silberman, Out of the Day come the drummers)

http://ezone.org/ez/e3/articles/diga/drum.html

*

With my toes in the sand and my heart racing, I find myself upon your shore again. Like last time, I am as much changed as the time before that, and I can see all my past selves who came here and who made pacts with you, just as I am here now again, making a pact with you. My breath near frantic, I step into the water and let the ocean wash my feet and my hands and I wash away the dust of these past years. My fingers running wet through the curl and black tangle of my hair, I wash away the debris of trauma, the burden of clinging fear, the knots of my own anxiety. I wash these parts of myself and glance only for a moment at your immense beauty, knowing that I will return tomorrow to complete what I started here today. Tomorrow I will swim in your fullness, and you will know that I have come back to you.

Mother Earth

Mother Ocean

Mother Moon

Mother Sky

*

Now deep in the night, I sit with my woman and my son and we listen to the gentle surf. We listen, we sit in silence, listening, and when a wave bursts upon the shore with particular colour and music, we comment, talking for a moment, lifted from the silence of books and carried gently back into silence by the susurrus of the surf receding and advancing in the far off darkness of the night.

No clock ticks in this place.

Legend tells of a sorcerer who smashed a clock at midnight on New Years eve here. It is a legend I witnessed and can attest to. It was magic, myth, a mysterious and perfect midnight that I now find myself facing again, as I listen to the waves in the far off darkness of the night and remember the pact I made with the ocean, on the night that a sorcerer smashed a clock against the wall at midnight...

Tonight I make a new pact, a promise. A secret.

*

I see him.

Razor clean scalp, meticulous, white skin, clean. A strong face, sturdy jaw, pale eyes. The three top buttons of his white pinstripe shirt are undone revealing a portion of a circular symbol laden tattoo in the centre of his hairless chest. He is strong, very strong, and I think at first that he is a sailor, or a soldier. His huge pecs and arms bulge in an obvious display beneath his tight shirt. But there is something off about the whole picture, something that looks like a disguise, like these are not his regular clothes. I don't think he has regular clothes.

His face and eyes are fixed in a stern purposeful gaze, searching through the crowd for a specific place, or person. It is not a kind face.

He's not alone. Walking behind him are three young girls, all in glittering gold mini-dresses, all with blonde hair and high heeled shoes. The middle of the three wears a 21st Birthday sash, and in some way resembles the man with the tattoo, like he chose the dress, like he chose the clothes for all three. Like they are all in costume.

I get a creepy feeling when I first look at him, but I brush it off, telling myself that I'm just feeling edgy in an unfamiliar crowd, paranoid in a noisy nightclub, seeing menace where there is none. But then I turn as he walks past me, and I see his hand. His right hand, held behind his back just below the belt, about where his hand would be if he were standing at ease on a parade ground. This hand makes a gripping motion, and as if in slow motion, I see him make this same, steady, intent filled gesture a second time. I close my eyes for a moment and see, blurred slightly through a sub-visible translucent glamour, his shadow on the floor. Painted on the darkness of it, scrawled in white chalk, I see overlapping, interconnecting, arcane symbols, and in his clenching fingers I see a gold chain, and on that chain I see three girls in glittering gold dresses.

That is all I see of him. He is folded into the crowd, and with his girls, is gone.

I do not see him again this night, and am glad of it.

*

I have never heard a woman cry in a theatre before, and the sweet guitar melody that was being played while she did was like water trickling through the stones of a dry creekbed, and the swaying of the wind and the voices of trees were brushed softly from the cymbals and all the room fell quiet around us. In the dim blue light between scenes, towering shadowed stage props cloud the dimly glowing sky of the vaulted ceiling and all the darkened wings backstage are filled with the silent costumed forms of children, holding their breath.

The actor upon the stage breaks character, stands and strides up the steps to the director, throwing her arms around her and speaking softly in her ear. It is the expression of love and compassion felt by everyone in the room, but it was the young girl in striped pyjamas who said for us what needed to be said.

　

An angry one may kindle strife

a cruel one may wreck a life

a timely one may lessen stress
and a loving one may heal and bless


What am I?
From the play, The Worsmith's Cat, by Joanne Sarre & Paul Cleaver