All the Beloveds

You, dear friend, back home for a while,

are about to leave again for your life

abroad. This is our farewell lunch. We sit

by the window, where the light pours in.

 

How the silences fall like

rays across your face. As usual our conversation

has that quality of having no beginning

and no ending. Years and continents

apart and it’s as if

you’ve just left the room and in a minute will

step back, through the waiting door. I

 

think of all the cafés, in all the cities – Melbourne,

London, Durham, Geneva, Singapore on and on – and

all the conversations with friends,

lovers, teachers, students, ex-lovers, my selves,

all the beloveds. Somehow

they all seem to end up

 

in goodbye. I’m sick of goodbyes, I say, pushing

away my cup. Fed up of leaving and being

left.

 

You, being wise, say nothing. We watch the rain

that’s started, slanting and slight, drifting

against the window pane. Then

 

it’s time to go. We step outside. You

kiss me goodbye. I hold you forever. Driving

home, I hold myself

 

fragile around the hollowness that has blossomed

in me. Ah, my friend. And doesn’t the rain

have such loving, leaving eyes?

 

 

The Unconsoled

Oh won’t you reach out and let your lips rest against my hair

The lightest touch will do, like the last breath of starlight in the morning air
I will stand still if you wish, so still you will hardly even know I’m there
I will stand still – so let your fingers drift where they will
and take all the measure of my upward, undefended face. So still, so still and so small, the smallest knot of yearning that’s ever been
and all turned trembling towards the sun of you. Will you not touch me? Nor cast some quickening smile my way? At least, then,
spare me the barest whisper of a prayer;
or some glancing kindness in some straying thought. I see your face
all full of desert days and no shelter anywhere; and though I know
I must fight to save myself, I fear that I am stronger than myself
and none of me can ever be
stronger than you. So if you must look,
see me not with the bleached airfield of your glare
Turn down those eyes; call back, call back
the wild exigency of your hate
I see it always straining at the breaking gate
and I cannot move past its yellow stare.
In dreams I see your eyes, lovely with the streaking rain,
I am breaking in the piteous dark. For heaven’s sake, find me.
Touch me. See me, want me, claim me;
Sound the one pure eternal note of me.
Hold me close to you again.

The Contingent World

 

The radio in the house next door

duets with the one in the house

opposite. A dog whines low. Tonight

I think of the unendurable losses we sustain

as the price of living. How they sunder us irrevocably

from the past, from our previous selves: you were here then,

now you are gone. I was whole then; now I am riven.

 

How we carry them always within us, a low-grade fever that lies

quiescent for weeks and then flares up, reckoning angel, in

an innocent moment. A photo falls out of the pages of a

book, a song dreams out at me from a doorway and

I am losing you, them, all over again. You are not

here; I cannot be there. Anymore. Immutable,

implacable knowledge.

 

 

The wind bleeds into the night; the young Buddha walks out

from his sheltered palace into the world, a constellation

dies away and cannot be replaced. The things that live

are mirrors of the ones we grieve for. A dog barks:

I think of the beloved dog I no longer have – the

silk of his ears; the level weight of his gaze –

 

Other dogs bark back; now the radios intone the

news to each other in a low hum. Down the street,

through the night, across loss and change, connection thrills.

Through my losses am I imprinted more resolutely into the contingent

world, am I able to take more of it into me. Now the radios fall

silent, now the wind fades gently away; and now, rising like

a promise behind the clouds – almost a buddhist moon.