A bit of a bonanza for me in this edition of Plumwood Mountain, thanks to Managing Editor the indefatigable Anne Elvey

I was thrilled to be part of the amazing collection, The Sky Falls Down: An Anthology of Loss (Ginninderra Press), edited and lovingly curated by Terry Whitebeach and Gina Mercer. It was launched yesterday in Melbourne by Carrie Tiffany (having already been launched in Hobart).

The book is available through Ginninderra Press or at Readings in Hawthorn, where it was launched.

As Mary Oliver put it, ‘Loss is the great lesson:’ if we’re going to be open to loving we need to learn how to be open to and manage loss. The diverse contributions in this Anthology I think are all ways of struggling with this great lesson of being human.

My contribution was a poem about the ongoing experience of loss – written on the five year anniversary of the death of my father:

 Five years and still –
  
 Five years –
 and still there are days when
 I want to pick up the phone and 
 call you;
 time seeps by,
 and though grief
           loosens its cruelest hooks
 I remain bereft,
 perplexed –
 where are you?
  
 Are you still sitting at your computer
 tapping out the stories of your life –
           the boy in the Queensland bush,
                      the young man stationed
 in Darwin,
 poring over radar?
  
 Or will I see you
 coming into the kitchen –
           a cup of tea in the offing –
 joining us around the table,
 the arc of your arms
 still
 wiry and strong?
  
 And if I could get a line
           through to you –
 what would I say?
 The children are growing,
 beautiful,
 I left my job,
 the old cracks in the family
 widen and groan like
 lathe and plaster in the drought –
 I admit we are all
           diminished
 without you.
  
 Most of all,
 unreconciled,
 I would ask you to
 come home –
 it’s enough now, 
 please
 come back –
  
 And here it is again:
 the persistence of that old,
  mad dream of
 restoration,
 when the patience of mourning,
 the gratitude
 for all the rich
           love you left amongst us –
 gives way
 to the shocking
 need for the miracle:
 the past
                      intact and
 cupped
 in the broad palms of your sun-tanned hands.
   

I had great fun on the weekend reading at this festival event: thanks to a wonderful and receptive audience for making this such a enriching experience.

Here I am -in black and white and in colour – reading amongst some of the terrific art works!

I think maybe the most enthusiastically received poem was ‘Clothesline’ – a poem that comes from my book, Even in the Dark (UWAP 2013). It’s a little window both into the pleasures of doing laundry and the possibilities for that interstitial moment , when we see the ordinary in a different way:

Clothesline

To walk between the brightly coloured flags

of washing –

to gently stroke the fall

of drying fabric,

rearranging peg and angle

so that every fold

might find the fullness of the summer air;

to smell the hard-won clarity of

cotton,                 

rising crisp and warm in the sun –

is to find a sweet hiatus in the day,

a moment

in the linearity of task and achievement  –

in case you’re wondering,

this is not masochism,

or some throwback to the rigidity

of ancient roles:

instead, listen –

a faint hum amongst the tomato plants and

the marigolds and

it is possible to hear this

humble poetry of the backyard,

this ceremony of daily love –

gathering, sorting,

washing,

ready –

for the rich harvest of the basket.

Is there ever a straight path forward? What happens when we wander in the so-called weeds, a ramble of body and ideas?

I’ll be giving a poetry reading on Saturday July 6, 2pm at the No Vacancy Gallery in the QV centre, as part of the women, work and wandering festival. This is a free event, but you do need to register.

It would be tremendous to see you there.

As many of you will know, it’s just recently been the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth – that amazing American poet of teeming cities, meditations on life and loving, and of course that great and terrible experience of the Civil War. My poem, selected for this celebratory collection, Endlessly Rocking (ed Stan Galloway and Nicole Yurcaba), takes as its point of reference, the figure of Whitman as he travelled to the hospitals of the Civil War, horrified by the scale of the suffering and spectacle and beauty of so many violently damaged young men.

The poem is dedicated not only to Whitman himsef, that ‘bewhiskered emissay,’ but to my friend, fellow writer and Whitman -o-phile, Lindsay Tuggle.

I hope you enjoy my review in Mascara of Tricia Dearborn’s fantastic new collection, Autobiochemistry (UWAP 2019)

This is from a cycle of poems written in memory of my dear young friend, Sophie Ellis. This particular poem is for her mother, my dear friend Kerry.

Pietà

For Kerry Dawson

Lay her here,
heavy as stone
across my shoulder, breast, the generosity of lap;

I long for this weight

Let the cataract of her hair fall
over my arms, across my face,
covering my eyes:

Child of my blood and sinew,
beloved daughter of my dreaming,
turn your face toward me
again,
here, into the crook of my neck;

I have shielded you before:

And in the hollows of the night when
my arms lie useless and
desperate for you –

then lean against me again,
returned to me on this crushing
tide of longing,
scooped out of darkness –

be present and
homed
beside the persistent beating of my heart.

Grey Fantails

On the rise in the middle             paddock, grey fantails twirl and

arabesque through morning air dense   with possibility, catching

the hands of the leaves and the light and our                    patient attention.

I wrote this paper a few years ago now in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges – but I’ve been returning to this ‘epistemology of wandering’ as evoked so wonderfully by Oliver’s poetic.

Ramble! Enjoy!

‘Drifting in the Weeds of Heaven: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of the Immeasurable’

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue13/lucas.html

Last week I did an inspiring workshop with Mark Tredinnick – a whole day dedicated to listening to, writing, thinking and talking about poetry. He introduced us to the form of the Sijo – a kind of Korean version of the haiku. I think I may have taken some liberties with the form, but here is another I wrote today.

Autumn Morning

You don’t have to go far   to feel the kindness of the

Light      to sit in a well of quiet sun beside the rosemary, the

Crush of mown grass, the heaviness of spent lavender    nodding as I pass.