Off the Cuff 30: Meditations on Letting Go & Gratitude

APAD 30    prompt: "letting go"

Meditations on Letting Go


1.
Low weak sun insists
we let go of summer
let winter squeeze through
curtain gaps.

2.
Last night, driving,
my father's hands reaching
through time's curtain; I still
regret not being there
to hold them.

3.
And where is my daughter
going? Come back, my hands
implore, stay young, stay
home, stay smiling.
She massages my head
and hands. She smiles.
And yet, she is going.

4.
My worst nightmare
involved being on high dry land

hundreds of feet above ground
all around me the drop:

I would stop the fall through
sheer will. Why not let go?

5.
Why not let go?
Regret makes you
slow. To be fast
don't fasten, hasten
just let go
of the past.
Good advice to self
so often shelved.

6.
My mother tells me
the newspaper reports
at least one hundred and seventy
people, mostly women, of course
aged over the century are
alive in our state, Victoria.
My mother, almost eighty-four
aims to reach the dizzy heights
not let go of life, be
one of the select
to reach her centenary, and like
Agave americana, bloom again.

7,
Ferns and herbs renew.
Birth, maturity, death
for the rest of us.


Gratitude

you, plump
artefact of desire
you over-ripe melon
you soft sac:
so happy I didn't
lose you to
surgeon's cuts
happy to feel you
floppy survivor
feel your painful
reminders yet
feel the lack of
weight, absence
which makes my heart
grow fonder
feel free to take you
to bed, free
of the fear
breast
cancer bred.

 NaPoWriMo  30

Off the Cuff 11: The Last Thing & The Nurse's Last Stand

APAD 11    prompt: "The Last ___________" (fill in the blank)

The Last Thing

The last thing I want to do
is kill you off
but you have
crossed the boundaries I set
two years ago
once too often.

How dare you stand there, unmoving
beautiful, so alive!
while I fume, wanting
to cut you down, dreading the moment.

I have googled you:
read the rave reviews
the rapturous praise.
Too bad, I know the other side -
that relentless will to dominate
destroy, strangle
all possibility of competition.

Have I loved you?
Oh yes. Do I know you?
Yes! And the last thing I want to do
is kill you, but
as I said: once too often you have
broken my rules.
This murder must
happen soon, or
I'll be forever powerless against
your heartlessness,
your cruel fingers
couch grass.


The Nurse's Last Stand

We sat in a yellow and blue room
with a view. She completed
black page after black page
for her only son, soon to turn
twenty-one. Two albums as her
legacy, knowing there was
nothing to be done.

She took the treatments, both
mainstream and alternative,
calmly. Over the black pages
bright with primary colours
and family adventures, she said:
When the pain ... I will take
myself away.

And she did. Lying in
in a tropical apartment with
white sheets and white walls
the blue sea and yellow sands
she let the pain take her
through morphine heaven
to freedom.

NaPoWriMo

Off the Cuff Day 6: The Cloud

I had such a brief look at Robert Lee Brewer's instructions, I thought at first he was asking us to write about any painting. Dismay! I'm not somewhere where there is art. However, when I sat down in the kitchen at work, I faced a painting I've always loved.

The cloud

It's a shame about the bright fluorescent light rectangles
reflected in its glass and the clear images of blue water containers
(for emergencies such as earthquake, bushfire) on a shelf above
the staff's food cupboards, reflections foregrounded by lack of focus.
No matter where I stand, there's the reflection of a door
a doorway, two fridges, chipped cream walls, myself.

Behind those distracting elements, a moment in time -
one eternal moment in Australian time - draws me to change
focus. I've been here before: trotting head-down with the kelpies
behind a mob of unshorn bums, and bleats, perhaps swishing
a stick (dropped by one of these shaggy tired gums)
through the calf-high yellow grass, awake enough to step

around horse manure and fresh sheep pebbles, rabbit holes
and other fallen slim branches. I've been here before, but
not as the rider of a plump palomino, leading a second
of the same, into the crowded trees where a ghostly drift
white dust soft as silken powder always stops my eye and thought.
Annie, dead from cancer these two years, donated this, her father's

masterpiece, to an unworthy wall in a workplace kitchen.
I think of that dust as her shadow, her legacy, a spirit arising
from the sharp hooves of sheep and pursuit by a man, perhaps
her father, driving the sheep, the kelpies and himself towards her
bringing the second horse (though her death was a total
expression of her nursing skills) to bring her back.

NaPoWriMo

Off the Cuff 5: So Glad To Be Alive & Driving the Geelong-Bacchus Marsh Rd

APAD 5    prompt: "Too Much Information"

So Glad To Be Alive

He recovered from the bowel cancer.
Raising his kids alone.
Of course she had breast cancer
as well as the Hep C. A very stressed
liver! No, no chemo. Radiotherapy.
It wasn't what killed her, y'know
She had two breasts off. A bit
different from you. She wasn't
even fifty.
Yeah, him, he died young too.
Lung cancer? Or was it the intestine?
Can't remember.
It's never the breast cancer, it's
the secondaries. Those lymph glands
'n' things. It c'n go right through ya.
Oh, him? He's having two more
skin cancers off next week.
He reckons he's gonna cark it any day.
Well, he is sixty-five.



NaPoWriMo

Driving The Geelong-Bacchus Marsh Road

Three eagles high on a thermal
would regard cars & the black tar
as natural.
(We are discussing the downsides
of industrialisation)

How do the You Yangs, Brisbane Ranges
and intermediate sand dunes appear
to three eagles high on a thermal?

(We discuss a well-organised horse farm
its white-fenced paddocks, the long
cream stables building, a few small trees:
nothing out of place)

Rough and tumble, the land still
an inland sea, but of grass, dry-washed.
The colours of dry country - how many?
tan beige cream pale gold rich gold
brown lemon: a patchwork pelt.

(We discuss the possibility of touring
the open cut coal mine on seeing
the brown [here's a tourist attraction] sign)

(We work out - for the engineers - exactly
how to alter the junction with Woolpack Rd
to accommodate trucks)

Dead scrub like chooks' claws and dead ti-tree
among living brethren give way to a fine
hedge's filigreed top edge.

The three eagles and the thermal
from which they scan the ground
our progress, the changes from
black tar to grassland to farm
are well behind yet I am absorbed
in their intense watch.

The long eras of shaping this earth
the short time it takes to revegetate
the brief fifty minutes we take
to cross the state between ocean
and Great Dividing Range - all these
present and unaccountable.

(We discuss when the car needs
a service. And as we cross the railway
debate the advantages of creating
a fourth car park there)

Off the Cuff 4: A History Poem & Community

  APAD 4:   Prompt: a history poem

"Here is always now. How can it be anything else?" Robert Dessaix

Let's say each brown crumbling fern frond
I've snipped off this morning (then)
is a chapter in my history and the fern's.
Let me announce publication of a book
starring dead leaves dumped on a garden bed,
the past informing the future of serial growth.
Continuance must and does matter.
I must wear long sleeves and gloves
since the cancer. To separate these two facts
would seem dishonest. I sweat freely
as I lift and dump and snip, and press down
on more weed than I have bins for.
Let's say (then, now) that my arms
enfold - embrace what was (there) then
is Here Now and only here. Now.

NaPoWriMo

Community


She sees them as she drives to shops:
tall, narrow, the girls short-skirted

the boys who swing hips, look down
at neighbourhood caucasian friends.

The mothers are swathed in gorgeous colour,
backs lacking babies snug in shawl or cloth.

She hears the community church
has offered help. She doesn't belong

but thought of knocking on their door
offering a casserole, afternoon tea

She is surprised at her timidity -
the street was hers before they came.

But isn't that true for any tenanted
houses with unmowed lawns?

She remembers how a different colour
can be a justification for advantage.

Remembers, too, the food offered
in welcome, too tough for her teeth.

Let the church marshall support.
She happily relinquishes guilt.