Not Katherine Anne Paterson’s Bridge
to Terabithia,
the one that Leslie and Jess cross
to get to their magic kingdom.
Nor that bridge too far.
Not the one Over Troubled Waters.
Nor that terrible one on the River Kwai.
Not even the bridges you burn
so there’s no turning back
but that rope suspension bridge
dangling high over the gully
that me and my faithful mutt, Salem,
can’t bring ourselves to cross
photo by Andre Amaral on Unsplash.com
Look, I’m going to be honest. I made a mess of this.
You shouldn’t try to explain the inexplicable.
I wrote a poem. Big deal.
People write poems all the time. They don’t try to explain them. They just present them. And that’s what I should have done.
But instead I went all mystical: probably the result of my religious upbringing and the time in the Pentecostal Church when I was speaking in tongues. Well, that’s what I thought I did. I probably spoke gibberish. Come to think of it, that’s what others around me sounded like.
The trouble is I don’t stay grounded long enough. I never have. You heard that story about the boy with his head in the clouds, well, that was me.
So I wrote this poem or someone did —- do we still subscribe to ‘the Muse’ theory? It was sort of compelling and confusing at the same time. Are you familiar with that feeling?
And okay, I put down stuff about jabbering seagulls overhead, and the guy with a metal detector who found something and went a bit gaga with it, like I did with the poem I found in my head, the one I carried around like a precious fluid till I got back to the car and wrote it in my notebook, without a drop being spilled.
That’s what I was trying to do all along. Get that last line in. Well, I did it. Sorry I messed up along the way
*pic courtesy of Pinterest by Veronika Gilkova
1
my coffee cup
is
an atlas
of stains:
a dark blotch vast as Asia,
another,
a continent of khaki
shaped like Australia;
there’s a South America too
[but no North]
And around the rim
an aurora borealis of brown
when the sun
lights it up.
2
Clean it, a visitor declares.
Clean it? I say.
This miracle of incidental art?
This repository of rudimentary remarques?
It’d be tantamount to the Taliban
blowing up
the Buddhist statues
in Afghanistan!
No!
I have had a good think about this.
What is the best position to have a good think?
My first thought was of Rodin’s sculpture,
You know the one, the naked male figure hunched
over in deep thought usually displayed in public.
Nude thinking in public especially on a cold stone pedestal
does not appeal to me. Does it to you? Apart from the fact
It would lead you in hot water with the law, possibly
Not a bad thing if you were out there naked on a cold day.
There must be a better, more private way, I thought.
My favourite ‘think position’ is to throw myself on the bed,
head on the pillow, close my eyes and let my brain take over.
I am looking for some modern day Rodin to sculpt me
in this position, preferably not nude, and immortalize me
in public, a possible title being ‘The Prone Thinker’.
What is your favourite ‘think position’?
Reading when one person dies the whole world is over, a bleak and beautiful scratchy black-and-white graphic novel. It rains a lot inside the panels. Even for Melbourne. Even when it isn’t raining, the sky is dark and broooding. After a while the pages become soggy; the panels leak into each other; water begins dripping on the floor. I go to get a bucket but it rains and rains. The bucket overflows. In the end I have to close the book and take it back to the library before the house gets flooded.
On a road trip the other day
we got talking about birth marks
and how you never see them any more
then at the airport
I saw this barista
with a mulberry stain on his face.
I had to ask him,
is that a real birth mark? I asked
we were talking about them
and how you never see them anymore.
Yes, he smiled
as if it were just another feature
on his face
like a mole or scar.
It looked almost beautiful.
Then he made me the greatest cup of coffee.
Thank you, I said
glad that I had asked him
and didn’t wuss out.
It’s okay to be curious.
is anyone else fascinated by birth marks ?
what would you have done?
It’s a good day, I said, the sun angling through the red gums hooking our attention.
I don’t know, he said, Friday was pretty impressive too [referring to the hailstorm]
then he looked at me, knowing I’m a poet, and said, you gunna write about it?
& I said, without thinking, when I get time, Mark, when I get time
& I thought about it afterwards, how you could write about almost anything at all
even the least bit startling — a rock maybe metamorphosing into a frog, the hurtle of creekwater rounding a bend, a screech of cockatoos tearing up the sky
there’d be so many you wouldn’t know where to stop. You’d be writing all day
& the night would hold some surprises too — a spider abseiling down a branch, a fuchsia sunset or a blood moon, the soft sounds of love —-
everything offering itself into words: there’d be no end to it; in the end you’d have to
avert your eyes, close your mind, do what you were told never to do and NOT listen
to the Muse; only then would you get some peace, the world so ablaze with glory
the problem is not too little but too much.
is that the problem with your writing — too much to write about?
or is it writers’ block?
how do you deal with it?
Creativity is a terrible thing,
He says,
When it gets you in its clutches.
It won’t let you sleep, rest.
It jerks you awake,
Kicks you out of bed,
And before you know it
You’re at the keyboard
At 3 a.m.
Belting out a poem
Belting through the bleariness
To get it down
Then head back to bed
Where it starts again
The brain twitch, the jerk,
The plummet into wakefulness.
You don’t even make a living out of it
But it’s the way you’re living
The gift, equal curse
But when that sweet chariot swoops you up,
Oh the rush, the voltage,
That gift
You’d trade your grandmother for it
Were she still around.
I envy the patience of pearl oysters
Which can labour up to twenty years
To produce a pearl of great price.
The freshwater ones lacking the deep
Patience of their seawater cousins
Produce a pearl in a mere six.
But I have the shallow patience
of a gnat: a poem in a few minutes
else I lose interest.
No wonder I produce little of lasting
Value.
You shouldn’t have written that poem, he said.
What poem?
That short one about brain tumors.
But I wrote it before her daughter …. I protested.
Doesn’t matter. She needn’t be reminded of it.
I can’t take it back. It’s out there now.
You didn’t have to give her the book the poem was in. Each time she reads it she’ll be reminded.
But …
You could have pulled it, he said. It didn’t have to be there.
He was right. It didn’t. But it was a good poem. My editor said it had to go in. Anyway it wasn’t about Jess. It was written about a tumor I had seen in Scientific American, how beautiful it was, how like the wings of a butterfly unfurling into the hemispheres of the brain.
Are there subjects we should not write about?
John Malone 