In Weather Like This All The Years Run Together
Mark Tredinnick
It’s not true, what they say, old Marquez writes
to tell me: the old never do stop falling
In love; it’s only when a man stops falling that his number’s up.
I sit alone like a revenant today. Don’t dig up the past,
You say, as if one ever took a spade to it.
In truth, on such a day as this,
The weather reckless with redemptive intent, coming at you broken-hearted from the west—
It is the past that digs one up and turns one out for another quiet look.
But I am a sociable anchorite, I think; a recidivist
virgin; a rococo minimalist. Like the weather,
I am every one of my ten thousand known
Contradictions,; quite often I am all of them at once.
And trace elements of everyone
I am and was and used to think I couldn’t live without, live on without me in every other
Moment of myself. Today, for instance, memory
Has fallen back in love with something in the way of the afternoon moves:
December 5 is out there tearing the entire present
tense apart, the rose from the brick wall,
the limbs from the weary alder.
My mind is out there somewhere, too—trying the outside on, scaring itself to death.
My body, though, is a hand-me-down suit, and it’s slumped here at the desk,
And it’s falling like autumn from my soul.
Tomorrow, you can bank on it, the weather will be a turquoise;
The goddess will be a butterfly, and the only breeze anywhere
Will be he slow soft velvet lapping of her long black pious wings.
But today, in savage sunlight, Kali Durga’s
outside turning summer inside out,
Slashing the season’s lining and calling it a shroud.
Exhuming ancient Carthaginian winters. Waking the undying
Dead. Doing to the weather what love never stops doing
To one’s heart—no matter how long ago,
no matter where, no matter who, no matter when. The years
Run together, all of them your lover, none of them ever quite over you yet.
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo at Dusk
Mark Tredinnick
We sense and we experience that we are eternal
—Spinoza, Ethics, Part V
The white bird high in the crown of the elm is a better idea
Than any you’ve had all day; a smarter prospect than her name
Implies. She’s a flag of erotic surrender, an outbreak of love
In the middle of June. Behind her, the whole sky is a ghost, hunched
Inside his famous grey raincoat, and a rainbow hangs from his pocket
Like an old joke. Dusk swells and strands the tree in halogen floods.
You, at your window, are the bird’s entire audience, and she knows it,
And she drops from the treetops and flies at you as if she doesn’t mean
To miss—until just metres from the glass she departs hysterically,
From the script, and does. The world works best when it misses
Its mark. Good ideas rush you, but never quite arrive, leaving room
For doubt and time for questions. A life lived there is a life in love: desire,
Growing wise in the attempt, flies from how things look to what they are
Or might be yet, and your body, losing its footing, becomes your soul again.
