Noel Rowe Poems

For Bluthorpe another day
has begun badly. The morning news
includes the story of another American shooting kids,
then himself, this time an Amish school and seven girls,
five of whom have died. He let the boys go free.
Someone, perhaps a police psychologist, a journalist,
or even a stranger passing by, explains it all:
some twenty years ago he molested girls;
it's a way of blotting out his sin. There's a note
to this effect, written to his wife, who says
this is not the man I was married to, he was kind.
Bluthorpe, who has been known to complain
about the tendency he sees in American culture
to justify self-expression as if it were a basic
human right, wonders how long it will be before
there's a film made of this insanity and which child
actors will be asked to simulate the innocence
of Amish girls who'd never seen a gun before this
ejaculated death at them. Perhaps it's just as well because
as news it sure aint getting a whole lot of notice; already
it's being consigned to yesterday's bin, along with revelations
from a respected journalist that the American government
was warned about September 11 before it happened. Viewers
in the meantime are being asked to vote
on-line: do they or do they not think
the war on terror has increased our status
as a target and have they finally had enough of celebrities?
Bluthorpe, whose idea of a celebrity is Bette Davis,
all cigarette and diction, not the local weather man,
thought ricotta cake and coffee might elevate his mood,
even though his doctor is concerned about his intolerance
to sugar. So now he's sitting in the one café he can rely on,
having had his cake, and is halfway through his coffee, when
the broad and breakfasting businessman he'd seen chatting up
a pretty blonde assistant gets up to pay. He should have seen
it coming, that out of control shoulder bag, no doubt
full of apprehended violence orders, clipping his cup
until it runneth over, with froth and fluid on the article he's been reading
by an Australian politician who says
he'd like to bring Christ back into politics.
Listening to the businessman ordering him another cup,
Bluthorpe decides if Christ is anything like he imagines him
to be, he'll have more sense than to accept the offer.
...

For Jim Esler
Yes, Simeon, there was sorrow, but much fun
too, when he set about making contradiction.

I should have known: for when the glorias first were sung,
it was to celebrate my son, born among the dung.

Ever since, I've been hearing heaven's laughter.
Cana's newly-weds, absorbed in what was coming after,

did not even notice how the water changed its mind.
The Pharisees got a holy shock as a man born blind

told them if they didn't get a hold on their desires,
so taken up with Christ, they'd land themselves among his followers.

Sacred irreverence. It is a gift to those found free
in the spirit. Even Zaccheus found it in himself, up a tree,

and Lazarus, sauntering around in his shroud.
There was a time too when, expecting stones, a crowd

got instead some bread and fish. I heard a thief steal
his way back to paradise. The structure of the real

is mercy. Having seen so many reversals,
I should have known he would test his muscles

on the stone, and walk away from the dazed
grave, leaving its mouth open and amazed.


From Magnificat
...

Bangkok never really sleeps, it turns
it seems endlessly in and out of streets
that once were klongs, but now

are fierce cement, where motorbikes and cars,
quick and greedy, grasp each other's fumes.

You lay awake and watched his back,
hoping there to find a place where beauty was
invincible, but saw instead the rise and fall of breath.

He spoke of love, water buffaloes and going home,
and if you know now
it was a lie, do not hate him, there isn't time.

Today, when you visit Wat Phra Keo
to see a Buddha carved green as deep water,
you'll hear the wind release the temple bells:

Ani'chung. Impermanent. There isn't hate,
isn't love. Ani'chung. There isn't time.

Ani'chung, ani'chung, ani'chung.
...

The morning news reports another massacre,
Australia's first (or so they say). Port Arthur:
stones that might have housed
a monastery at prayer had they not
been packed for retribution, and so
ready for the man, the semi-automatic scene,
the thirty-five who died considering the violence of the past.
"Australia's Greatest Massacre", they say, as if size mattered,
as if the man who soaks a boy, a six-year-old, in petrol,
then takes a lighted match and touches him,
has somehow made a smaller madness.

After this the news is of Zaire: civil war and famine
fierce enough to turn stomachs into dust and wire.
The cameras grab enough to keep ‘emergency' alive:
packs of food are raining down like hope,
an old woman stealing flour from a teenage boy
is being beaten till she gives it back, he has a votive leaf
of blood clinging to his lip, another woman crawls
after powdered milk while, strapped across her back,
her baby looks the world straight in the eye.
In the south of France the press interview
the President. He hasn't quite decided yet
if he'll permit the charities to help, but he has
a gold chain around his wrist and a seaside smile.

Pathfinder, meanwhile, has been launched to see
if ever there was life on Mars. The probe will land
a rover, sixty centimetres long, to move
across the planet's surface, sampling soil. A scientist explains
he's long believed that life, intelligent life,
is not confined to earth. Bluthorpe isn't sure
about that word ‘intelligent'. He sometimes thinks
Mars could be the planet humans wrecked before
moving on to earth, and now wonders if that is why
the red planet, as it watches them approach,
is as patient as a landmine in a Cambodian field.
...

Could it be
the hills have learned patience
enough to lie lightly on the sea,
not to cling, instead to make their touch
complete with emptiness, as a dancer's hand
will train the air to wait, will borrow beauty just
for a while, then, wiser than the thieves who tried
to steal the moonlight, throw it back.

Could it be
the fishing boat
has netted peace:
red, white and weathered,
it's sitting on its haunches like amusement,
as motor scooters pass it by with noise and speed.

Could it be
as simple as the Buddhist monk's instruction:
while the mangy kitten stretched itself,
hair by hair, along a careless stroke of sunlight,
while a hazy green untied the room and trees
until the mind had lost its hold,
while his loose arms moved easily, as pity might,
asking ignorance to put its power down,
while his hand, attentive, touched his glass
as if to keep its water cool, while his eyes
were opening suddenly corridors calm with bronze,
he said a single word: ‘Impermanence'.
And laughed. It sounded like a shell
breaking.

Could it be:
the clear-hearted sea.
...

They were older then, like their kitchen floor,
linoleum and love worn together more
by each treading heart. They were never sure:
had they found happiness, or simply a way to endure?

My grandfather's faithfulness was tough and taciturn.
Builder and fisherman, he did not learn
patience, except for fish. He's hook his fingers in the air,
alive with cigarettes, and catch its burning as ashes in his hair.

His eyes were full of stories we never dared
disbelieve. Looking back, I think he cared,
at least as best he could,
his hands hard with working over water and wood.

Every time we visited, my grandmother gave
us scraps. "For the dogs," she'd say.
Staying in love; knowing how to save,
make a little go a long way.

Such a brave economy of emotion.
it was the best lesson my grandmother taught,
something we might lean on,
knowing how she'd fought

her way into believing. Her rough
knuckled rosary, her tea-towel with its thin-skinned pride,
had to be, for her, hope enough
until at last: a knocking at the door, a veil drawn aside.
...

It is a simple thing for you to light the fire
early in the morning. You take the wood,
smelling still of earth and air despite the axe,
you take the smallest pieces first, barely more
than splinters, place them cross-wise
on yesterday's discarded news, and touch it all
with your finger spreading flame until the dead words
begin to glow, and break.

Yesterday, we buried him:
and with him, more than half your life. Habits shaped
for thirty-six years of marriage hang about the house
and wonder what to do. So you, though you know
he will not need his usual cup of tea,
will get up, all the same, will touch
above the fireplace the shelf he made for you, and let
your whole sorrow hang by one hand,
then bend to make the fire,
to take its fierce shadow in your palm.
...

On this the first after many days
of illness I am able to walk,
I make my way to where I can see
the Anzac Bridge held
like a wishbone over the roofs of Glebe.
Above me clouds appear to be
a paddock that has felt the plough,
until I smell again earth being turned
at the corner of the farm,
where what we called the log paddock sits
beside the swamp, the great damp dark
in which my brother and I used to play
jungle games. Like heroes from our comic books,
we slipped between the shadows and the rushes,
swung from trees, and felt
together we could never really come to harm.
In a moment he'll arrive again
to sit beside my bed and we'll remember
eating redbill soup our mother made,
sundaes on Sundays with our father at the Greek café,
the milking stool cut from a camphor laurel branch,
and evening light putting its hands into the sides of
paperbarks.
Yesterday he brought me, for old time's sake,
a Phantom comic with a story called
"Healing Hands." It is, he tells me, a sign.
...

Thomas Merton teaches happiness
is found by those who know the fullness
in (not of) time, those who learn to be
fully present to the moment, even
listening as well as they can
to birds. This morning a magpie
takes the day by the throat. I try but
the old man next door has his ladder up
just outside the room
where I was wanting to stay asleep.
He's been painting since six o'clock
wanting to avoid the heat
getting his house ready for Christmas.
Soon his wife will call to him.
They'll talk about the colour of the paint
or what they'll eat for lunch or whether they can afford
to buy the grandchildren many gifts.
Then I'll tell myself it's time
to crawl backwards from bed and get
ready for the nurse who promised
she'd be early today. She also said
the wound is clean and healing well.
...

The problem for Lazarus is: he's never quite
come back. He can cook a proper meal, he can eat it,
but the taste isn't there, not since his tongue got itself
snagged on the flavour of something levelled, cold.
He can talk with friends, or for that matter
strangers, taking in their words as if they were angels
or emergency packs of medicine. But as they speak
he worries if they're real, if they'll crumble should
he grab suddenly their wrists and hold on a moment more
than possible. He can read a little, mostly easy fiction but even then
he finds it difficult to concentrate; after a while the writing's loose,
floating on his mind like crumbs of bread
that someone threw on water for gulls to feed on. Before
he knows what's going on there's a movement, quick,
greedy and only the water's left. Empty and nameless now
a plastic bottle goes drifting by; it's likely it once gave
energy to one of these runners making more and more
circles round the water with measured, rubbered feet.
He can sleep, but not much because he has to sit
upright in a chair, listening to his breath, surprisingly still
coming in, going out; he is afraid any moment now
his lungs will remember and give themselves back to the soft touch
of dust, lifting off the sepulchre and lowering itself over him.
He can pray a bit, in bits (perhaps, he thinks, he might himself
be a picking gull), but even though he's prepared to say
there's mystery, even perhaps miracle, at work, he doesn't dare
imagine, whatever he hopes, there's a being sometimes known
as god opening his file and taking out an answer that is kind.
And he can get himself out of bed each day, have his toast and coffee,
and wash, still trying to clear the dark from underneath
his fingernails and rub away what seem to be cinder marks
on his lips. He can get himself dressed, and head to work,
but all the time he knows his shoulders have been
turned down, taking his eyes with them.
...