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Nam Song – Thailand

 

for Sheila Wild

 

Water Lily – Wat Na Luang *

…a water-lily is a water-lily is a water-lily…**

Under the gaze of Claude Monet and katsushikati Hokusai

this lily kowtows, and appeals to Wilde on a rule of exception;

the sub-tropical setting: forest, temple, mountain,

a thousand feet above the trail of human suffering,

summer’s early morning light glittering in scenes

of love and kindness on the water (a poet’s dream),

in reams of gold a water-hovering haze of precipitation

forming a circle around the palette of green leaves,

the nature of supplication in the flower, the pink hands

of the lake as ‘here and now’ as the powder in blue sky

and a novice’s gift of poetry for dharma Luangphor Thornbai,

a walking meditation of faith and wisdom awakening,

a glimmer of non-suffering in the jungle of mind.

 

* Wat Na Luang is a Buddhist monastery in northwest Thailand,

** quote by Oscar Wilde

 

In The Dark

When the bookshelves

came off the walls at 4am

I screamed. It was primal.

No book I’d read

conceived an interface

between the collected works

of German Romanticism

and a B&Q sale of

Black & Deckers

Lobotomy

an escape route

                              via

                                       the isles of langerhorn,

 the break-away intact

                                      across the brow

and half-way

                     down

the temple

 where the patter of feet

                                          is stopped  

point-blank

by men-in-white

                            staked-out

as patiently as cotton;

a freedom as sweet

as the distance between

                                          high cheek bone

and permanent lockdown

 in a joint called temporandibular

is short.

 

Tham Jang

I remember the cave for its chandeliers

and butterflies, moonmilk and totem poles,

I remember the cave for its fried eggs

and bacon, broomsticks and popcorn pearls,

I remember the cave for the cave-words.

Hanging Rock, Victoria

It could have been Le Jardin Luxembourg

or a postcard scene: village life in France,

two men marking out a circle of play,

two women talking and laughing mid-game,

un, la femme boheme, becs le cochonnet,

and more groupings of twos, sixes and fours

limbering up, wine in hand, in dappled shade;

I had come down from Hanging Rock

unharmed…yet…disorientated…dazed

to find myself walking through a boule-fest!?

I was never so relieved seeing boule

played the French way on the Bush-dry plains

surrounding Mount Macedon.

On Relaxing in Adelaide’s Botanical Gardens

I loaf as Walt Whitman loafed,

laying down, on a bench, barefooted;

I wear a hat like Whitman’s, too,

but nothing as broad-rimmed

or well-fitted;

my face is only three weeks old

so I cannot match a sage’s beard

but I am a poet, nevertheless,

but only in the sense of

I am starting out

and there’s only one Walt Whitman.

I know he would be singing

the beauty of these trees:

the old bay figs

and the tall red cedars

and the big hoop pines

and uttering words profound, like

the trees are of death, also,

and have the same rights

as any man amongst you

I strain to see the trees

or utter the profound

in Walt’s way,

stuck at the point of the trade

where I tell

even when poets drum into me –

show show show

the tale of these trees

who I am and where I am,

a leaf of grass in a foreign land

and the love I have for Walt Whitman.

Stones

Fifty summers gone and you return

to walk through a field in Ireland

and claim the land as your own,

the farmhouse rubble and thatch now

but you return to greener days

of childhood play, the languid boy

swinging under the apple tree

quick to jump and chasing birds

and rabbits on fun-days like these,

only the ratchety clunk of a gun

casts a line of shadow pointing

to darker days, the butt-end

of [‘some Uncle’]’s waging grief;

that’s you – hopping barefoot to school

like a sparrow, Gaelic-speaking

boy speaking marvellous Gaelic;

that’s you, aged five and two, marking

the loss of your Ma & your Pa

respectively; you, aged thirteen,

at the grave of your beloved

Auntie Mary (‘the woman I called

“Mother Mary”‘) embarking weeks

later a  boat from Dublin to Liverpool,

 the journey ending in – – – Halifax.

Twenty years on and I have made

a pilgrimage, you still alive

carrying a cancer returned as secondary;

                                                                                   via

Belfast and Sligo I arrive

in Galway caught up in deepening

imaginings of your returning.

I do not reach the farm. I walk

and walk and walk and watch as your

Milltown-Clashaganny-Tuam

merge into a vanishng point,

my dreamed of green land you called home

as far-fetched as roots of a tree

our family name de Anjelos.

At the B&B in Galway Town

my surname spreads like heaven

on the lips of my silver-haired

host, his sifting voice golden clouds

if they could sing: we share the name

Costello

a sense of [someone else’s] home 

as I take the boat to the limestone

crags of Inis Mor, discovering

what every Irishman knows,

every Irishman is alone,

Irishmen and Ireland alone,

before and after the splitting

of the stone.

Padang Bai

{side on]    the praying mantis – a motorcyclist

clad in lime green – hunkered down on Ben’s

finger as if it were a Harley Davidson,

[Full on]   in portrait mode, the praying mantis

as curious of the camera

as the camera is curious,

like a Gremlin in a Spielberg movie

or E.T. (extra terrestial)

assessing the balance of positive-

negative prey;

later, at the centre of a Gecko-

pincer movement on the white-washed walls

of the Lemon House, the uninvited guest

made a definitive exit move, less

a flight and more [close up to infinity]

a long jumper jumping into the night

leaving the opposition as perplexed

as turds.

The slide-show played the following day

like the end credits to Hangover,

Nico, birthday boy, beaming in pink shirt,

Toby puffing on his first cigar,

Daniel on the art of blowing smoke rings

under water, Jean-Phillipe in twilight

mood and leaving the party early,

Sago downing the Arac, and me

sole paparazzo to the whole event,

the praying mantis in more lurid frames

than I dare admit (Clare joking our friend

was spellbound or blinded by the red

carpet light.

In truth, I preferred the quiet moments

before the party segued seamlessly

into the German top pop 100

in technicolor; I was first to see

the mantis stick out a probing leg

between balcony and banana leaf;

could I not have tipped the thing over

and into the safety of the surrounding darkness,

like that moment before a movie begins

and you close your eyes momentarily,

and wonder if the person sitting

next to you is more than just a friend.

* For Ben and Clare at the Lemon House, Padang Bai

Another Three Poems from Schrodinger’s Cat and other out of this world poems

Gaia Hypothesis

neither chalk nor egg

neither hare nor rhyme

neither cheese nor chicken

neither tortoise nor reason

neither peace nor nurture

neither white nor religion

nether war nor nature

neither black nor science

neither sugar nor yin

neither true nor hate

neither spice nor yang

neither false nor love

Dark Matter

The hammered iron makes light of the hidden,

a fantail of sparks on the face of the forge,

weightless stars, glimmering

show of

Dark

Universal Gravity

It seems a long time ago

since we climbed to the spiralling top

of Switzerland’s Geneva camanile,

the name of the church I forget

(do you remember), I remember

the intervale between the rocketing

Jet d’eau in the quiet lakes water,

the wind-gap of the concrete vault

below our feet; I never told you

(and it has been lost since)

that I wrote a poem about you

that could only be expressed

in magnificent death-resulting leaps

(how Romantic!); there were no steps

from towers, just a slow moving

in different ways to one another,

your Pisa to my Suurhusen,

until the space between reached

the extreme of square law, inversed;

but did you know there are towers

seperately leaning together (Bologna)?

I know it is too late (isn’t it?)

but tilting from similar ground

I could whisper over the drop between us

words in my best Italian for building bridges.

* Universal Gravitation was published in Poetry Review (winter issue 101) under the title ‘Mutual Attraction’

Schrodinger’s Cat and other out of this World poems – Anthony Costello

Schrodinger’s Cat and other out of this World poems is now available for ordering.

Many Thanks,

Anthony