Blue Poles suite

Jan 6th                             for Iris and Marjut

6:10am
My breathing starts to slow, I open my eyes,
the blinds are raised a little, it was a furry night,
the scene is latticed, vertical trunks are gleaming.
Her arms wrap around my chest, my heart is slowing.
I realise with surprise that rain was forecast
yet sunlight washes the tips of the lime on the deck
and the bundle of banksias behind, scouts of the forest.
Lorikeets catapult across, always speeding
smaller quieter, probably Scaly-breasted from the glance.
Most of love’s species lie here with me.

6:25
Surprised – still lying here entangled, skins hot,
the sun departed, I can’t see the sky’s space to find out why.
Surprised – the sound of an oriole, a Lewin’s Honeyeater
and a Yellow Robin hanging in the trees
lighting up the day like aural lanterns.
Where have all the cicadas gone?
(In my head the line sings good times by the Kinks).

6:35
A quick wash and forage for paper and I’m back
on the bed edge in my underpants, retrieving a poem
that’s been drifting in and out of my swell.
Black bamboo flexes though braided reeds,
a glimpse of wu-wei, of creativity flowing.
By my feet, a scrunched up tissue of igneous origami
is sticky from some of my 300 million promises.
I think of yesterday’s interview – what can I say about creativity
when I just use ordinary things used by anybody’s tongue
everyday? These words are waiting for breath to measure
puffs of meaning, transpiring like small leaves fluttering
over the wide meridians and receding horizons.

6:40
Close by, a Pied Butcherbird is issuing that mournful song
that drops away like Cracow’s “Hey-now”. He may be the one
I photographed yesterday checking me out, and now I hear the cicadas,
can’t recall noticing their beginning, or the sea being silenced.
The world rolls on and enfolds everything at every scale . . .

1676
With his new microscope, van Leeuwenhoek investigated whether pepper’s heat was caused by spikes – he couldn’t see any. He soaked the peppercorns in water and was surprised by tiny lives – the first bacteria observed. Sceptical, the Royal Society sent a vicar and doctors over to Delft to see if it was a hoax. Now they could imagine angels on a pin head.

1677
Examining his ejaculate Leeuwenhoek saw tiny tadpoles swimming in the seminal fluid
and thought they were preformed humans nourished by the egg. We are not preformed – we live and love and learn as embodied persons engaged with the world in a particular place at a particular time – a dialectic of the whole organism interacting and developing with its environment. Another good reason to care for natural environments.