Edging the night
Obsidian silence
Hot with hush
Solitude and I are long-time lovers
Forget that fact
Savour this sweet second
Autumn ignoring infinity
The hoarse whisper of sea throwing itself at sand
Air chewing the hollow flute
Of my trunk, a blackened slash
A mountain of ash,
Still burning
Remembering snow
From five winters ago.
Reduces this matter
This once living, grown dead
Into bone-coloured powder
Into black chalk
Fragrant clouds
That tar everyone’s lungs
This once occasional
Necessity we stumbled upon
Night spotted with the marsh frog
Building future selves from staccato backhands
Filling the gaps in our speech
Once as hasty with replies as yours
Cool air for a summer night
Normal for a season within a cycle
Hot breaths that burnt up the last year
It all comes back
A fire ecologist said
He’d seen, high intensity or low
Same assemblage at climax
The only difference is time
Do you gift yourself the space
To engulf that reaction
On the inhale, do you give thanks
The exothermic removal
The liberation of all that potential
Black you page
Back there was an
Instant you missed it
Sense for
Body
Comfort, your alien
Enemy friend end
Lasso for the future you
Their cries like wind,Mary
Contrary to what you were taught
Thought higher, respiring
Toxicity, tears recycled
Too unlinear now, no respite
No edges, no end only
curve pick a point any
You
It’s still
Thorns
thin
skin
Was an efficient assassin
That’s not the whole story, she says
Without giving her a timeline
I make my offerings to hope
Without needing a true name
I leave my cave and begin with slow, eager, thankful steps
Back towards your mystery
Going by old trails of birthright and mountain singing
Cool solitary air and visits from hands
Expecting nothing except
Correction
Peace
Pain
Sorrow
Goodness without limits.
Here and everywhere she has been, nowhere fits except that she makes it. Bliss only exists in manufacture, for all its singing and scheming to get her attention. That she knows this should be a boon, but it feels more like a burden she’s refusing to lift.
After times of flow, these shallow doldrums are always more testing. There’s a current of petty discontent swirling. She should look at the sky more. Clouds make her own evaporate. She watches inkspots instead. She’s misusing matter, shallow-breathing and keeping the Spirit at arm’s length. This time will be less underground perhaps, or perhaps not because no-one needs to see these slips; it can’t serve any purpose to be talking about your lamp’s flicker.
Repeat and fear and repeat. Far too practised in this skill. Maybe the mould is in her heartwood, and she’ll have to wait with its fruit standing out from her weak points. There’s no-one who would pay a surgeon to deal with this. Besides, even she knows the hierarchy of needs and signs off daily on her own contentment.
Stay, seeker. That’s all you need to do.
That’s all she doesn’t want, and all she can’t help.
Here it is
It’s at this point you remember
You were always a lazy swimmer
The wave is coming
To break you, and all you can think to do is
Stare and make some internal comment
At its voracious inevitability,
Instead of kicking
Feel it dragging you back to powerlessness
While you were half-turned,
Watching your childhood float past
Your face thrashes the seaweed sand-pit
Tumbled by tidal giants
Sunward and gasping
Don’t look to them for help
You wanted this beach deserted
You wanted this familiar defeat
Welcome the jelly-flesh rashes
The sunburnt tongue,
The scorched eyes
It’s the same argument you love to have with yourself
And lose.
Honey, you are more than sweet but
I have been in conflict over
Your goodness and my evil
Since fairytales died.
Desires make fables of my sleep
You rescue me still
But restlessness is slowly killing
This tree, dying where it stands
Bees caress Marrai’uo
Tuggerah gunya’marri blows in,
Muttering promises of warmth,
Of impending growth
The gardener’s hand is poised to prune.
Do You ever seek assent
From the languishing vine?
The winds have not yet passed
But yellow floss of wattles cakes the dirt
And now a new generation of flowers wakes,
Unexpected early blossoms
Tremble in the snow-winds
Shaking, humming with the force that
Splits imbricate fists into stars
Silent five-petaled witnesses
Life is bursting out of frost,
Buds on the old wood
Stubbornly portend the Spring.
I will wait with you for our harvest,
Not counting the good or the bad
Toes in the chilly earth
Until the wind shifts or I fall.
echologos.net 
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