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The pivot
I
Does it not stand apart? ~ westringia
dense grey-green, mauve-flecked with flowers?
I step across and stroke the not quite
spiky leaflets on springy twigs.
Through eye and hand I’ve taken in
that plant and made it part of me.
I consider now the space
it fills, the way it holds together
in a solid form, foliage
densely packed and blocking light;
I note its breeze-brushed movements,
picture water rise from root to leaf;
think on the heat and light it draws
from sun, and carbon sucked from air,
it turns to growth and wood. Are these not
four aspects of its being much
as mine, the ancient elements?
Earth, air, fire and water suffuse
that plant and me, that shrub I’ve taken
to my consciousness.
And would I not feel diminished
a little, were that plant to die? ~
just as I sense concern to see
the leaves on three or four twig-clusters
lately turned from green to dun?
I am already lessened.
II
Womb-brother I enjoyed for years
before he moved a continent
away, seeing him, say, a little
more than thrice in three decades ~
could any stand more apart than he?,
except some friend, perhaps, who dwells
almost a full half-world away?
Yet when he died it felt as though
a rock had crushed my chest.
III
I find the barrier is porous
between myself and all around me:
my living leather holds neither
the outsides out nor insides in.
Rocks and rivers, fish flitting
shadow-like, the eucalypt
that caught my eye across the paddock,
because I thought two branches rubbed
but saw instead two white-breasted
sea-eagles launch and beat their flight
across the field towards me, all these
and houses perched on ridges or snugged
in valleys, windows glowing in the night,
smiles passing in the street, or frowns
deep furrowed, rats at play – they all
have slipped into my inmost being
and stayed.
And like this poem, thoughts
have risen from my deep recesses,
climbed up in consciousness and flown
abroad as I have shaped them.
IV
Looking inwards, can you even
see an inmost being, a you to stand
apart? Thoughts arise and sink;
sometimes they return, sometimes (but how
would you ever know this?) they
return into the background flow,
never to rise again. Objects
penetrate: shapes, colours, sounds,
odours, touches, tastes. Sometimes
you recognise, and sometimes strain
to know them. Broken thoughts arise;
you try in vain to join them. All this
is discontent. Greater the pain
to find no core in all this movement,
only to find the ever-shifting,
the sometimes slow and sometimes quickstep
dance about an empty centre.
Murray Alfredson is a retired librarian and lecturer, who has also worked in Buddhist chaplaincy at Flinders University of South Australia. He has published poems and essays in Manifold, Cadenza, Reach, Ocean, Touch, the journal of healing, Overland, Eremos and other journals and anthologies in Australia, the USA, Canada and the UK, and a poetry collection, “Nectar and light,” in Friendly Street new poets, 12. (Adelaide: Wakefield Press and Friendly Street Poets, 2007.) He has won a High Beam Poetry Award in 2004, and the Poetry Unhinged Multicultural poetry prize in 2006 and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A second collection, The gleaming clouds, is forthcoming in 2013.
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