And so, on the final day of the year,
a few ‘American sentences’ –
broken into several lines, as
seems to suit:
Numerology –
seven, a challenging year,
moves to eight: balance.
*
So many dying
around me now –
rude, popping off
when they’re younger!
*
Tonight with my TV –
best seat in the house
for the new year fireworks.
(For ‘house’ read ‘country.’)
*
I explore zuihitsu,
decide not to get caught
in that form (yet).
*
In a garden corner,
the splash of
red poinsettia’s
big flat leaves.
Year’s end. My daily verses,
what have they shown? Mostly, just
love with small cat. It’s enough.
This week between Christmas and New Year
I’ve been in retreat – at home, doors and windows,
curtains and blinds closed against the heat;
neglecting the marketing I should be doing
for my new books, and the dusting and ironing.
‘Next week,’ I tell one who phones to meet. ‘Now
I have appointments.’ (I don’t say they’re with me.)
I’m dabbling in some of my old books of magic,
trying out new spells and rituals, toying with
lapsed meditations and manifestation techniques.
I’m preparing idiosyncratic but tasty tidbits to eat;
deferring the exercise routine; catching up with
the new Doctor Who, and of course the yacht race.
‘I might never emerge,’ I whisper to myself, and giggle.
I’m looking at a picture of penguins
standing stiffly upright, wings/flippers
clasped to their sides. They are covered
in fluffy white fur; perhaps they are
youngsters? The ground and the air
enclose them in unrelieved white.
What must it be like, surrounded
by cold like that, knowing nothing
different ever? A whole world of cold.
I am sprawled in sarong and thongs
in front of a large electric fan. And
I’d rather. I never want to experience
unchanging, immersive, monotonous,
all day and every day, paralysing cold.
Heat and thunder.
Fire and flood.
I live in a small oasis
of little damage so far.
My astrologer friend
predicts worse in future.
I tell her, ‘Probably, we
won’t still be here by then.’
‘That’s a rather strange
kind of comfort,’ she says.
She half-wakes and cries,
curled on a cushion
on the next chair to mine.
(She likes to be near.)
I reach over, cradle
her tiny skull in my hand,
stroking gently. She sinks
back into peaceful sleep.
(Some wicked, un-Christian thoughts)
The wits who sneered at me
when I was young and awkward,
the close friend who dropped me
suddenly when I grew witchy,
the confident ones who always
knew how to dress, with their
unhidden, patronising smiles …
among the pleasures of old age,
I enjoy forgetting all their names.
My mother comes back to me
around food. I open the jam –
Davidson's plum – and hear her,
in my childhood, say another name
lingeringly: ‘Damson plums!’
I knew by her tone they were
rare and special, connecting us
to some kind of tradition, a treat
for those occasional moments
when we were a little bit rich.
And reconnecting herself
to her own childhood in England,
the calm properness of that.
Davidson’s plum, however, is wild
rainforest Australian, just like me.
Someone’s written a book
collecting poems he considers
worthy of re-recording, and also
advising us how to read them.
Thanks but no thanks.
I don’t want to be instructed
in how to respond to a poem;
I just want to respond –
to let it all absorb me, wash
through me, creating images,
feelings, sensations: known
and loved or thrillingly new.
So many expenses –
green slip for the car reggo,
replacement TV
for the one that died,
the rising cost of food –
I’m dreaming up
‘creative’ Christmas gifts:
a free Tarot reading
or Reiki treatment,
a rare book already pre-loved …
I learn to move slowly
so the feet won’t trip
nor the fingers slip.
I move deliberately, oldly,
not freely, not boldly —
mustn’t lose my grip!
The Buddhist friend
who brought me
this wooden statuette
back from Cambodia
(or was it Thailand?)
thirty-plus years ago, told me:
‘It’s conditional. The Buddha
must be kept high, above
all other objects or images.
You have to promise.’ I did.
The highest point
in my present home
is atop the kitchen cupboards.
No matter how often
I place the statue facing out
into the room, overlooking us all,
I always find it moved. (By itself.
No-one here any more besides me
to climb up and do that.) Buddha
turns always towards the light.
