www.rainybluedawn.com

On returning home

Sitting quiet, drinking tea, I laugh at my old life;
whyever did I wander through the dusty world?
Love and war passed away like rain in the desert,
both of them as pointless as a game of dice.
My losses heaped themselves high as a stony mountain;
my winnings faded on the wind like seventh-month smoke.
Now I’m back again at last, right where I began.
Beyond my old windows the sparrows are still calling.

A poem for Shimona’s birthday

(Wrote this poem yesterday for Shimona Kee‘s birthday — just in time to perform it at The Merry Men with Kelvin Kuan on guitar, Deborah Tham on violin, and Shimona herself scat singing!)

*

When morning’s bell begins to sound
and all the world from silence wakes,
may music compass you around
(forgetting yesterday’s mistakes)
and lift you to the holy ground
of song, as daylight breaks.

When the delirious traffic’s hum
buzzes round the scent of day,
may the ukulele’s thrum
bear you sweetly on your way,
straight and steady, till you come
under music’s sway.

And when the sirens of the night
clamour with confused noise
and seek to drown all hearts in spite,
may the music of your voice
still pour out measures of delight,
reasons to rejoice.

Seventh-month ghazal

Tonight the moon is rising full over the fanged city.
It glitters in the eyes of dogs and men here in this city.

A tightrope for the stars stretches high between the buildings.
The stars themselves? They’re praying not to fall into the city.

They pray in vain. The muezzin’s voice plummets through the air.
Spit and dirt, not God, are the masters of this city.

In the seething bar, a singer strains herself to breaking.
Outside a hot wind hisses, then slithers through the city.

And I, Leonard, grit my teeth, imitate a smile.
Though built on dregs and broken hearts, this is still my city.

Sitting up at night

Sitting up at night, I listen to the traffic;
car engines quaver through the quiet air.
Where I sit, the room is swathed in shades of darkness;
beyond my window, the bright moon bathes the streets in light.
The bedroom floor’s tiles are cool beneath my feet;
a blanket, half-discarded, coils warm about my body.
A nine-tailed dream is scampering across the miles to you,
to slip between your sheets and hold you in its arms.

Christmas

You know we never dreamed to come this far
down the long road into Christmas, our feet tired,
our hearts full. The end, though long-desired,
still far ahead of us. Distantly our star
flickers on the horizon, faint, a beacon
burning in a window out on the sky’s edge,
holding out hope to us. Once more we pledge
to bear up, not to let our spirits weaken
against the buffets of destiny and chance;
and though every inn, full, turn us away,
though we find no shelter, still we stay
on our shared course. Tonight we will dance:
we know we have not asked of life too much,
embracing in the darkness, as our faces touch.

East Coast ballad

There’s a girl on the beach in the morning,
alone, in a shirt, on the sand;
the tide’s pulling out, the sand’s sticky, as she
traces patterns in it with her hand.

People sometimes walk by where she’s sitting,
interrupting her view of the sea;
but she’s barely aware of them passing, for she’s
busy dreaming of things that could be.

“How I wish we could sit, curled together
on a bench in the evening breeze,
the strength of his fingers soft through my hair
while the wind combs itself through the trees.

“And then those fingers would find mine;
we’d stroll down the beach, hand in hand,
And I’d kiss him at night, taking him in my arms
the way water embraces the land.

“But how can I tell him I love him?
Does he even know I exist?
Shouldn’t he be the one to be hunting me down?
Shouldn’t I be the one to resist?

“And if he were to find out about me,
Or if I were to lay down my guard,
I’d have nowhere to run; I’d be naked before him;
I’d have to earn his regard.

“And what then, when my soul stands before him,
embarrassed, with nothing to hide?
Will he hold me as close as the sea holds the shoreline,
or pull back from me like the tide?”

So she sighs, and her insides grow tauter
as desire and anxiety meld,
and with arms round her knees sits and watches the water,
wanting so much to be held.

Epitaph for a drowned kitten

The rapt heartbeat of your birth
has now gone silent; the soft skein
of the twisting net death wove
has drawn tight its silver chains,
purging you of grief and love,
leaving to our world of pain
your body, fragile as the earth
wrapped in early morning rain.

Between the monsoons

You and I becalmed now, still in port,
waiting out the wind in this season of sorrow
where we throw dice for sixes, come up short,
live on what mercy we may scrounge, steal or borrow,
take what joys we can afford. Each night
brings drunken song and the sullen lips of women,
jaded, tedious, nor pleasure nor respite.
The days wear us down. If only we could summon
a rising wind to speed us on our way,
launch us on the open sea, far from this island,
there to take our chances while we may
against the wave, salt, storm, and all the violent
upheavals earth may offer, vicious, proud;
better that, surely, than this clamour of the crowd.

New Year’s Eve, 2008-2009

Here in this moment when we watch the years
take their final steps on the tightrope of transition,
the past and the present, shrouded by nightfall,
touch fingers also in silent greeting.
Then and now overlap in this place.
I’ve known these walls twenty years,
coming here again and again as a child
to be enraptured by stories; those years are gone now.
But just for a moment the knife-edge of time
pares away the layers of now —
the Australian beer which shivers and warms
on the aluminium table before me,
the Vietnamese waitress, smiling and eager,
the plasma screens rattling with football —
and ghostly beneath, like a wrinkled slide’s image
projected on wavering air,
I see the dim phantoms of shelves full of books,
smell the damp paper, hear songs in two tongues.
The bar’s fairy lights fade out for a moment,
overlaid by the dimness of memory;
and then the vision is past, the new year is upon us,
and only a memory remains.

Saturday evening in March

First there was the eagle —
an angel-shape carving a haughty half-circle
across the face of the evening sky,
then speeding westward. Flight steady and unswerving,
implacable, cutting through the still air
like a scalpel’s edge. Evening below felt routine:
a moment for weathered old men, couples,
tourist families. In the boathouse garden
a man and a woman, wrapped up in each other,
imprinting their embrace on the air.
Across Cavenagh Bridge then. Suddenly
everything became very quiet.
Everything shifted into sharper focus:
footsteps, a man’s smile,
a bicycle chain. The city as if sealed
behind a glass case, motionless, surrounded by silence.
Just for a moment the pulse of the whole world
stopped beating.

Then in the river, movement.
Bursts of water, sudden as fireworks. A fish leaping.
Archers, firing over and over —
each jet sudden as a muzzle-flash
but lacking the shock of recoil,
smoothskinned, silvered,
almost as if fish itself. Insects flying low,
out over the water. A band of halfbeaks
drifted over, waiting for scraps to fall,
hoping for a handout. And a catfish rose too,
from the river bottom — skin patched and leprous,
unbeautiful, covered from tip to tail in mud —
but eyes still sharp, every curve and sweep
of that soiled body concealing a hidden power,
a wicked invisible strength.
A riverine Odysseus, returning to Ithaca.
Burly tilapia swaggered up, proud in their iridescent glory —
he let them bully their way past him,
hound him even, a moment before
he clouded himself in mud from the riverbank
and vanished from their sight. The fish milled round,
uncertain. I turned, eyes taken by a sandpiper
on the brick steps out by the pubs —
racing up and down, almost dishevelled,
as if searching for something dropped. Over and over,
part eager, part flustered. And then,
like stars shivered softly out of the pale evening,
the first drops began to fall.