MARK ALLINSON
Beauty's Truth
"Death I recant, and say, unsaid by me,
Whate'er hath slipped, that might diminish thee"
†††††††- John Donne, "Elegy on Ms. Boulstred", 1609.
I went to the football game,
and the players, because they were
dying, played with grace and skill.
The enchanted crowd, who were,
everyone one of them, also dying,
shouted, cheered, and urged them on.
At the concert, the musicians
played with the inspirations
and expirations of their dying
breath and fingers, and the audience,
amazed at the beauty of the dying
notes, dying in thousands
on the floor and flowing down
curtains and walls in gorgeous cascades
of grief, praised them with dying applause.
In the art gallery, the fading works
of art touched chords of wonder
and recognition in the dying patrons.
In the libraries and book stores the dead
forests of re-leaved woods glistened
with words of the dead writers and poets,
and the dying eyes of readers and lovers
of the Truth, gleaned and collected
their words like rich, sustaining fruits.
I walked home through the streets
and saw bushes and shrubs and trees
aglow and pulsing with dying flowers.
And there in the east, the death-mask
of the full moon was lifting
above the houses, and the mauve tinge
she cast upon the clouds was a gift
for the heavens, and for all uplifted eyes,
courtesy of the dying sun.
An Intimacy Shanty
They say I've got EE, which is
Emotional Exposure;
I opened up my heart and now
all I want is closure.
I interface with counsellors
and we share tea and tissues,
while non-judgmentally we speak
of intimacy issues.
I'm getting on with my life now
dysfunction's being healed,
the group massage and rolfing works
(except my skin has peeled).
After hypnotherapy
the doctor offers tissues,
then non-judgementally we deal
with intimacy issues.
My biggest hurdle now's to face
the harsh discrimination
Emotional Exposure victims
face across this nation.
No one understands our tears -
they groan and pass the tissues,
and so judgementally avoid
our intimacy issues.
Decree Absolute
From grey to grey
the blood
of the shark
blossomed on the sand:
geraniums of anger
growing
petal
by
petal.
I remember touching
the skin
so cold,
and thinking
that even here,
in the places
we are so soft,
so warm,
are teeth:
tiny interlocked ice-
blade teeth.
The shark
was all tooth:
fins like teeth,
skin of teeth,
teeth within teeth:
death served chilled
on a silver platter,
still
expressing rage,
drip by drip
through hooked jaws.
Why,
when I think of you ,
do I see
this shark
I killed?
Get Ready
Soon comes a day when the wind of chaos
will belch its hot breath down your neck
blowing all the safety maps
of where who what right
out the window.
Then you may find yourself
alone between twilight and hope
behind the wheel of your father’s car
(since he had a heart attack and can’t
drive the thing)
wrong-headed for some
power station stinking
of death.
Lost, you must go on.
But you will stop
as sulphuric rain drops piss
at a badly lit roadhouse from hell
where a jerk on the pump will spill
your last dollars on the wet cement
just to make more evil
smelling chemical rainbows.
And when you enter
the hot food hades of the diner
some hair-flicking harpy will tap
her foot while you try to decide
between a black-rimmed curl-top pie
and a dead-dick chico roll.
And you will not be capable
of deciding
nor know the difference between
whether you should eat it
or beat it.
Hungry you must drive straight
off into the fetid maw of darkness
as the hot wind of chaos
buffets and bashes at your headlights.
Insomnia
The bells quiver-chime
like dental nerves.
Long trains of night rattle
metals in my room.
The tics from the clock
start breeding on the floor.
I feel the pressured fish
swim in sightless gloom.
Police siren scores
little chips from my ceiling.
A dog with a howl
from the back of my brain.
Bottle-shatter in the street
shivers my yawn.
This night's a cat's hunger
for the birds of dawn.
Lawn Order
The lawns around here shine like polished badges
of the let's club Nature club.
Lines strict as sixteenth century rule by ruler
parterre gardens of life-detesting Paris.
Even the worms are forced to endure green plastic
hosiery to keep their awful slime from the paths.
Yesterday I saw a man on his knees before a dollop
of bird poop on his driveway, scrubbing with detol.
Another man collapsed in a faint at curly pubes
of grass fuzzing from a crack of virgin concrete.
At night you can almost hear the jungle of dreaming
being strip-cleared by nembutal dozers.
At least once a week they go out wrapped up tight
as double-thick garbags with yellow plastic ties.
Spring is bad enough, but the filthy autumn war
with its massacres and dysenteries and choleras of colour
is the worst time of year. Just ask the man in No. 23
swinging his mop at the clinging clots in his maple.
No wonder now and again one of them cracks
and runs through the house with a skull polished axe.
Moving
It was late, and the rain was coming. I was moving
mentally through all the rooms, touching things
with the hands of my mind, trying not to forget
anything important. And then, after all those long,
long days, and the nights that seemed to grow
like the blackberry brambles - dark and dense
and clotted in sweet-panged fruits - it all came down
to a final wave. And there you were, standing
in the rear-view mirror with your face
in your hands, and all those days and nights coming
down with the rain, and the wipers whispering
and blurring the way ahead.
Pandemic
It was amazing, really. Her face just shimmered
and glistened and gleamed
with idiocy.
You could almost smell the waves of it
coming off her
like wafts from a junk dump.
And she was running the little town's
Neighbourhood House & Education Centre!
And she shone with an imbecile sheen.
Lucky for me she always turned
her back when I entered the room:
a vast arsed harpy with a hatred of ideas.
Why offer a course on the great poets
she snarled - we all know how to read around here!
In short - my idiocy is very precious to me.
Don't you dare threaten
to take it away -
it is all I have to call my own.
She was very happy
to offer courses on macrame or doily stitching,
but nothing she couldn't feel superior to.
I hadn't noticed it before,
but when I walked off in contempt
I began to observe she was not alone.
And now everywhere I look around here I see
the rising rippling shimmers of idiocy
distorting the faces
like heat waves twisting the features
of the granite faced hills
to shimmering jelly wobble blobs.
Tarn
That summer floating on the mountain-
lake, dark as the tarn in Poe's tale
of the Ushers, was an initiation
into reflection. Lying prone on the air-
bed, looking into your own face, you
could see you were nothing but
a skied image of the deeps, the halo
of gums and wattles around your head
a fragrant wreath sent up from Hades.
The lake was a sermon on the truth
that the way up and the way down
are the same. When a goshawk tailing
finches passed in the tarnished mirror,
by staring down you could see precisely
how high he was. The sun you noticed
was dependent upon a cool-quivering void
to cherish its fire. Upward looking water-
lilies found reflections in cumulus
blooming in the deep black-blue. At evening
the swallows fell from the west and tore
at their doubles with thirsty beaks. Now,
whenever I feel down I float prone on the mind's
air-bed, watching as that tarn stills to show
troubles like bluebirds deep in the sky.
Waiting on a Change
In Melbourne the wind from the north
in summer, leaches and sucks moisture
even from dust and feathers. Wraps you in
blottered shrouds of sheet, and by 4pm
on a Sunday at 115_ would make you scream
for mercy, if you could dust your throat. A stinker-
wind worse than dragon-farts. People are jammed
in pools, in the sea, jammed in their Jacuzzi-
tubs, panting like porky pugs on treadmills. People
are on their knees at windows, scanning horizons
for a blemish or fleck to focus prayers for a change.
People are ready for total surrender, rolling
their eyes, not just from despair, but to keep them
from seizing tight in their sockets. As for me today,
I only feel a vague amusement to see the whole city
reduced to the state I've come to feel
as the norm - waiting for you to rattle my door
with a cool gust from the south.
Initiation
Who says the myths are only myths? No more
will I blaspheme the Gods as others do,
who laugh because they have not felt the awe
and shock of being dragged into the blue.
Persephone, I was a type of her,
so innocently gathering the flowers,
enjoying all the easy joys that were
as if forever in my fields and bowers.
I gathered up the violets of love,
weaving them with lilies of romance,
and there was not a hint of cloud above
to mar the idyll of my languid dance.
But then one afternoon the cool wind fell,
bringing down the silence on the trees,
and from the earth there rose a certain smell
of sulphur that evoked a strange dis-ease
which turned into a rising rumbled sound,
and then I felt the earth begin to beat
breaking up beneath me as the ground
revealed the empty space of my defeat.
And so I came to know the realm of death
where every thing and person was a shade
while still my heart was beating and my breath
affirmed that I was living, and afraid.
Now I must describe my greatest shame,
to tell how I was held against my will
and I was forced and broken, stripped and shorn
and ravished on the filthy floor of hell.
But let me tell you that I learned to love
because I saw the truth that he loved me.
And with this love I let the world above
go on without me, and this set me free.
Returning to the motherland I knew,
of flowers and light, it is a different place,
a gem set in the velvet blackish blue
I carry in my eyes with Hades’ grace.
Wisteria
Late spring when we first saw the house,
with its back door a cave obscured
behind those breaking waves of blue
and white surge froth of sweet blossom.
Bees, pollen and petals made it
difficult to weave a way in;
and in the drench of sun-showers
the water-falls of flowers purled.
Summer slowed the fall to trickles.
And since you’ve missed most of autumn,
let me say the wisteria
now is mostly air and grey cloud.
The few curved spatulas of pods
rattle like the wood slat clackers
of a ghost-dispersing wind chime,
high against Himalayan grey.
Published in Seeker Magazine, February 15, 2004
Li Po’s Fire Poem
Some say Li Po burned
only his bad poems,
freed them like fire-flies,
to spark down the rivers
of night.
But that is all wrong:
I recall a night
of ice and frost,
high in a cave
in the Tai-hang Mountains.
Surely we would have died
that night, but Li Po
unrolled his best work,
read each poem softly,
then handed them
to the flames.
I remember one -
about a young girl he caught
praying to the moon -
the warmth from that poem
keeps the chill from my marrow
even now.
Published in Ardent, April 2004
Noctornus
I never thought he was a god, that night;
more like a velvet-pelted beast with stars
dripping as he rose out of the sea
to arch and show the world his awful height.
But when I felt his breath caress my face
and move my hair and mingle with my own,
I breathed then in the presence of a lord
and stilled as if being held in an embrace.
The rumbling of the surf became his voice
resounding in the marrow of my bones,
shaking all my memories and thoughts
until I was attending without choice.
And without choice I was soon swept away;
gone completely, while the night remained
luminous and moving, filled with being
of potent darkness brighter than the day.
Then he revealed a truth surpassing sight:
that light is drawn up from his font of dark,
and strewn like starry diamonds on black felt
our lives float on the living breath of Night.
The Common Bond
We seem to be so far away
from all these sea-born floods of death;
sighing, giving, we cry and pray
as we watch scenes that catch the breath.
But all of us, in varying ways,
know death may come to us like this
in beds on roads or tranquil bays,
a sudden flood, and no last kiss.
A Glimpse Behind a Fence
Red hair red
as stilled blood and eyes
green as the green
verdigris on a garden-
buried knife.
Introduced some weeks
before, but too late
for either of us to pretend
we hadn’t seen each other
on the street,
and she said,
from a place where the weather
might have been,
"Your dog has been seen
wandering the road
where I live; I lost
a dog taking liberties
down that wandering way:
you should shut your dog
up tight."
A friendly word.
Friendly as friendly
fire.
I told her my dog
risks nothing
for his freedom.
She stared
while I listened
to the desperation of claws
scrabbling
behind the green fence
of her eyes.
Published in Ardent, April 2004
Risk
You lying naked in a wet
towel, covered with fierce
thirsty bees. The heat buzzing
almost as loud as wings.
Me in a wet towel, too, with a sun
so hot it knocks larks from the sky.
Honey badgers have been found
stung to death in hives.
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