Today’s Weather
In the end, as
in the beginning, it is about contractions:
not bursting out now but falling inwards,
the way water falls into dry earth,
the way life is sucked up by death,
an inexorable
chipping away at the dominion of presence,
a discarding of life’s souvenirs —
their comfort made inconsequential
amid the erosion of faculties,
the faltering
betrayal of flesh, memory’s slipping grip,
the de-acquisition of a life’s strivings,
the scattering and withering
of all those carefully tended crops.
In the end, as
in the beginning, it is about breath,
not bursting in now but sucked in laboriously
through the pain of lungs tired with
air,
filled with a wheezing hesitancy,
the pressing
imminence of departure.
But today’s weather is not preoccupied with such things:
beyond a glance, the acknowledgment
of a mental nod, I am immersed in forecasts,
sifting for
meanings still, following clues.
I have appointed myself detective to my own life
and am busy tracking down motivations,
fears, agendas, all those fingerprints of behaviour.
I am convinced
I have years yet to solve the riddles
even as the pile fattens and deepens
and that I will make some progress
before the case is finally closed:
there are leads
heading off in every direction —
some false, no doubt, to throw me off the scent,
but I am stubborn and persistent
and appreciate the chase,
no matter that
I am slow and fuddled,
that I hold things in my hands
without knowing what they are,
that I may not like what I find.
We must hope in spite of despair,
because of our despair; we must not give despair the victory. I do not believe
the world is learning. And I cannot hide from that fact. And yet, I do not
believe in despair. People speak of a leap of faith. I believe we require a
leap of hope.
- Elie Wiesel 1
In a blink of time’s eye, the world changed —
one unsuspected intersection, one stone in the pond
rippling outwards, infection toppling
the dominoes of our vectored lives
suddenly rendered light as windswept dandelions.
Once more faith is tested:
what plan of God’s is this and who are we to ask?
The questioning faith, the faith that dances
with doubt, that flings its angry questions
into implacable silence demanding answers
knows time’s eye has blinked before and will again,
the dominoes of our vectored lives
repeatedly testing such faith, asking it
to wrestle with doubt, to fling its angry questions,
to ask, and ask again of God: what plan is this?
Now we must break the chain of dominoes
to arrest unsuspected intersections
in this changed world, whilst time’s eye blinks again,
trying to slow so many stones and their ripples,
all our lives rendered light as windswept dandelions.
There’s nothing new in faith being tested,
faith questioning, faith dancing
into implacable silence demanding answers,
questions intersecting, so many stones in the pond,
even with our lives floating light as windswept dandelions,
rippling away from one another into isolation,
another implacable silence without answers.
Wrestling with doubt, flinging angry questions,
faith does not abandon us, faith dances,
daring to ask of God: what plan is this?
Hope lives inside our tested faith
even as we float light as windswept dandelions,
the precious dominoes of our vectored lives
constantly rippling outwards,
multitudes of stones in the pond,
every blink of time’s eye changing the world.
[1] Quoted from Witness – Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger and reproduced with permission.
Such is the Gifting, Such the Receiving
for Eitan
Every time I place my three-month-old son on the change table to change his diaper
he looks up and light
enters his face,
his dark blue eyes
gleam,
his blonde wisps of
hair shine, his mouth breaks into delight,
into a beam, gifting
unsought light and lightness to me
and I am touched, I am
moved, I become luminous,
as when thirty years
ago on the streets of Aarhus, in a few fleeting moments,
an unknown girl
alighting a bus smiled at me with such radiance,
such unexpected warmth
that I glowed for days,
glow in the moment
still, and understand at last that each time it is beauty itself,
unabashed, generous,
telling me that I, too, am beautiful:
such is the gifting,
such the receiving.
Making My Way
Memories, now, are a flood I try to keep at bay,
as I swim each chore-laden day
towards a shore
where I might rest, where I might
find a little quiet,
a little solace in solitude, a
rarity at best,
or where I let them in though
half may be
imaginings, images confused with
one another or dreamt
in wakefulness, yet I will take
them all
and turn them in the light for
what they may
reveal of who I’ve been and who
I’ve become,
this tangled mess of a life with
its rich seams of gold
I hold beneath a miner’s lamp,
flecked
and shimmering. Dad, it’s almost
fourteen years
already, and today I miss you
something fierce,
the solidity of your quiet
presence,
and I wish I could be to my
children something
of what you were to me, but it’s
a different world
now and not for the better.
It’s the second week of winter
and the magnolia
is already flowering, rich pink
bulbs emerging
so soon after dropping its rain
of leaves, even the seasons
unreliable. We’ve finally gone
through all your papers,
the reams of your neat,
fastidious handwritings,
letting go of a lifetime, so many
pairs of cufflinks,
hole-punchers, lists, keeping so
little of what you left
it felt like desecration. I never
felt the need
to call out insistently ‘dad,
dad, daaaad’,
like my kids do, tempered my
demands to those
you could meet, and that poem I
gave you
after your birthday dinner at
Amalfi’s
that we never mentioned, your
sister Renee
dying just days later. It’s more than a decade
since I have lived in the city
where you are buried
and I don’t visit you enough,
except in my thoughts,
where you have taken residence in
the mansion
of the dead. I hold you gently
there
with all the others, whilst I
spin my web
with the living, those that have
stayed,
and those that came and went and
have been found
again, sometimes after decades,
with the joy and longing that
comes with
reflections of younger selves.
We are all at different points in
our march
towards the end, and who knows
who will go
next and when, and what will be
made of what
we leave behind, the floods of
memories
and all they contain. I’m one of
the lucky ones
who can pluck the harp of
gratitude,
celestial notes hanging in the
air,
sublime as my daughter’s violin
playing
the William Tell Overture at her
school cabaret,
as I make my way, script
unfolding line by line,
to wherever it is I am going.
Beyond Blue
When the blue-rung ladder appeared
outside his door, stretching upwards,
compelling as a giant beanstalk,
he did not need to survey his blue
heart to know he would climb,
that the time was right
to leave the blue-green bulb
of his world, the blue cave
of his life, discard the ghostly blue
shadows of the already departed,
each blue-smudged afterthought,
and rise, neither as blue-winged
bird
or as blue wraith ascending,
but bodily, step by step, gnarled
blue
veins on hands and arms
protruding with effort,
clambering through blue clouds
of forgotten dreams,
the suck of thinning blue
air
into his lungs, each blue breath
more laboured than the
last,
up and up, all the way
into a waiting blaze
of white light.
David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. He won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMBjlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N.
He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.
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