No Pablo Neruda
Essays on life, work and literatureArchive for January, 2010
The Work Day
A general malaise
settles uncomfortably around me
from the first email
the glare of sunlight
on a laptop screen.
I try not to wish
for any moment but this
and be a tunnel
light at both ends
and dark in between.
But I am discomforted
by the light and the click
the cound of the keyboard
the tempered dull voice
of a room
that is swaddled in arguments
and debts, lately paid
that is a burden on some
and to others a boon.
The last lecture dreamed
and of things he was certain
though this is uncertain,
he knew,
but i can not figure
the place where I’m heading
and i can not go back
and have old dreams resumed.
I’m different now,
I am not what once was,
but am present
I am absence, not substance
but resistance as well.
Just knowledge of wanting
is my faithful companion
this I can not expunge.
Not All Bad
Someone’s tragic morning
Is a midweek pall
We idle by the roadside
As the ambulance is called.
The cars stall and veer around it
People watch it travel past
Sympathetic to the person
For whom the siren blasts.
For wound or vein or heart
we pray without our knowing
Resilent sympathetic nature
that goes where it is going.
What I Want to Know
The more I learn
The better I understand
My place
In this place
Though it may be hard
To realise
I am more sky than soul.
But what I want to know
Is when
Understanding everything
Makes love for it
Less tender?
Words will not remove
My want
What I wish I’ll always have
I can’t
And so as sweet
As these slow
Truths may be
My learning
Brings also
Melancholy.
Louder than a sane woman can bear
My privilege
This liberty to move about
My private room
I stop too soon
I sit, a thump above
A cloud of noise
A voice that roves
The scent of smoke
Entrapped by bathroom walls
Never one, to ever
Get away from it all.
My privilege,
This mess,
My loneliness,
My sacred space
Not sacrosanct
But perturbed
By voices deep in conversation
All overheard
Yet repressed
I make not one attempt
To silence or to
Ask, desist,
I live with it,
My privilege and
Pain, cacophonic
So closely knit.
Ealry Morning Coffee
I woke early. I was rested. I hadn’t drunk red wine the night before. My feet fell to the floor and I pulled on a robe. I was bathed in sunlight.
The shower was cool when I turned the faucets. I stood under it – purified. Sweet smelling. Then swaddled in a downy white towel.
I moved a gentle palm across my slopes and valleys and rubbed in cream. I left my face bare. I slipped on sandles and a light cotton dress. I pulled on a scarf and I pressed my hair back from my face.
He was still asleep. I kissed the bottom of his spine, which was exposed. He never knew what he was in for, but now – all mine, all mine.
I left the house and walked down the sunlit streets. It was early morning and people were going to work. I didn’t follow them. I turned the corner and I picked up a paper from the corner store. I skipped over some leaves which were damp from last nights rain.
I found the cafe and I waited behind two young girls to order my coffee. Toast and coffee and fresh baked bread. Cereal piled high with fruit and berries and unfolded newspapers. Dust on the windows and a light breeze collecting from the distant city and softening from the mountain peaks.
All the little things, the very little things, that one wants to cocoon about themselves on every morning. Every single one.
Jazz music and marke stalls. Good books still unopened. The return to the apartment and the rolling over of a supine body to reveal long stretches of skin and things making sense. Ideas that will populate conversation and a hand reaching for coffee as a dozy eyed look asks ‘and what today? what do we do?’
The novels waiting to be written, the children that come later, the century of life we likely have. The renovations stabilised, the gardens tended, and the people who weave in and out, the art galleries and the paintings we like. The soft gentle timing of all things. To all things a rhythm.
And tragedy now and then – once and again, a subtle reminder, of this very temporality. This inability to hold onto all that we love.
But I like grasping at the wind.
It is tender and immortal, though I am not.
