Selected poems
Crows (slightly gothic) in Croydon
They're a jagged black hole
light disappears into, re-emerging only
as their dismal call:
narc ... nah ... naa-aarc ... !
The sort of noise the world might make
if you could crowbar
open any of its aching surfaces
and let out its primal cry
this mouthing of such bleak utterances
at passer-by pedestrians.
Bad black jokes
flapping down pole to pavement
yet no one really notices the crows
encroaching on the nerves
of Croydon, scraping
pain from the loosened edges of the mind.
Behind the locked loo block
out the back a homeless man needles
embroidered veins
and staggers off through the gate
into those van Gogh
cornfields the crows continue to inhabit ...
Though with dusk
even they fall silent, disappearing
in the cracks of darkness
spreading all along the elm's branches.
The gate forecloses
on any further possibilities.
The zen of mud
Consider mud. Buddha
did, in fact extolled
its virtues to the monk
who asked the BIG
questions. The Buddha
replied: what do you
see beneath your feet?
Thus, consider mud
a good place to begin.
The faithfulness of mud
is one thing. There is
nothing quite like it
for cooling the blood,
for instance. The monk
must've realised that,
his ardour for another
kind of enlightenment
quite quickly quenched,
for the big questions
still remain unanswered.
Is he still bogged down
in them? Is the monk
muddled? Consider it ...
Mud doesn't put on airs
but just gets on with it,
sticks to the job at hand.
It knows its limitations
and that's why Buddha
thought it so apposite.
Here's mud in your eye
(he might have said)
so cleanse the windows
of perception. Blake
thought London's mud
too much, but Buddha
would've told him just
to keep his eye on it.
At the departure gate
Partir, c'est mourir un peu
(Edmond Haraucourt)
We have made a pact, never to look back
when we say goodbye. Practice
makes perfect, you've said, so we continue
practising, assiduously. However
practice only makes more practice, I'd say.
We are far from being perfect.
Still, we count down 3-2-1 then turn away
unravelled into a peopled hall
bereft though certain it's the only way to go.
Later, I confess I did look back
once to find you gone, and your image in me
turned precipitately into salt
and you reply you'd also looked back, once.
I'd been folded into distance ...
Thus we will remain here, forever taking leave
Rilke told us, but forgot to add
that in departure we will be our own remains
strewn like burnt-out ashes
through some abandoned tourist destination.
Parting means to die a little.
And shadowed by that larger story, we forget
to look each other in the eyes
when again we back away from one another.
Afterwards, your eyes are all I see.
Theatre piece
One's real life is often the life one does not lead
(Oscar Wilde)
There's a kitchen table, two chairs, and a light
hanging over the table, and two people, a man and a woman
come into the room from elsewhere and sit in silence
and they do not speak and only sometimes
do their eyes meet, yet still they do not speak, and later
they will get up and walk away, away from
the table and this room, away from one another ...
There are other rooms in other places where they
will not meet, where other lives intersect and then diverge
but part of them remains at this first table
ghosts to one another, asking silent questions
and in each place there are these leavings, scripts
and stage directions cast about, scenes not enacted, phrases
lingering near the open doorway, still unspoken.
Just occasionally someone voices what has been intended
all along, or else some random gesture of a hand
awakens someone else to memory, and
they find themselves gazing towards what might have been ...
Suppose we live just a part of our lives, fulfilling
only some of its possibilities, what happens to the un-lived
substance of those lives? Another man, another
woman might come into that first room, sit down at that table
and picking up the traces take the story down
along some other path, towards that other
life in those other places, in those prior habitations ...
So we find ourselves, gazing towards what might have been.
As it is
Voyez, près des étangs ces grands roseaux mouillés
Voyez, ces oiseaux blancs et ces maisons rouillées
(Charles Trenet)
A friend in Perth once suggested I should live there, and when
I said it felt remote she looked around, scuffed at the dusty
ground beneath her feet. 'Really?' she replied, 'it's just here.'
Such is the theatre of distance. I dreamed Thoreau told me
that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I
but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost
then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ...
So I've lost and found myself. Once in Iran, in those arid valleys
Estarkafteh and Estaroftideh where not even a local villager
would go; and in the karst mountains of southern China where
poets etched their poems on the rocks, at least their words
surviving purges; and across a meadow in between the granite
walls of Yosemite where an Ahwahnechee woman glanced up
from her weaving to thank me for my silence; and from the
West MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia gazed towards
Tnorala where once the star-child came to earth. Now, here in
the Camargue, we look across the Middle Earth Sea, its blue
deepened by blood, through centuries of joys and sufferings of
light with shadow, while behind us the flamingos spread their
wings into the breeze, flash pink-vermilion, settle and go on
stalking the waters of L'Étang de Vaccarès. Several white egret
sentinels edge the saltmarsh as we walk on back ... Distance
looks our way, looms up suddenly so personal, asking what we
might become. Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates
into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk, this fading light
offering its private spaces for our grief. Far offshore, twelve
refugees drown. Somewhere beyond the sea a mother weeps.
Note: Charles Trenet wrote the lovely chanson 'La Mer' in the mid-1940s, from which I've quoted for my first epigraph, to be translated roughly as: 'See near the ponds / these tall watery rushes / See these white birds / and these rusted shacks'. Then in the final line of my poem I quote a familiar phrase from the English version of this song as popularised by Bobby Darin: 'Somewhere beyond the sea [she's waiting for me ... ]'
There are a couple of celebrated passages quoted here from two New Zealand poets: ' ... the trick of standing upright here' is of course from Allan Curnow's sonnet 'The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch'; while the phrase 'Distance looks our way', is from Charles Brasch's poem 'The Islands'.
'[Colours are] the joys and sufferings of light with shadow' is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 'Farbenlehre'.
John Allison has had poems published in some 250 literary journals worldwide. His fifth collection, A Place to Return To, was published by Cold Hub Press earlier this year.