Luke Davies

In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You came into my life really fast and I liked it. When we let go the basket of the good-luck birds the sky erupted open in the hail of its libation; there was a gap and we entered it gladly. Indeed the birds may have broken the sky and we, soaked, squelched in the mud of our joy, braided with wet-thighed surrender. In the yellow time of pollen near the blue time of lilacs there was a gap in things. And here we are. The sparrows flew away so fast a camera could not catch them. The monkey swung between our arms and said I am, hooray, the monkey of all events, the great gibbon of convergences. We were falling towards each other already and the utter abandon to orbits was delicious. The falcon rested on the little man’s arm and falconry was the High Path of the World. Whole minutes passed. We were falling and the jungle fell with us. She said I came, I came to my senses really fast and you liked it. I was surrounded by the fluttering of wings, nothing but a whirring in my ears, and the whole earth tilted and I lost my reason. For a time falconry was the high path of the world. At night the sky was filled with animals. Ganesh loomed large among those points of light. He said Change! and we said Lord we are ready to bend. Thou art the high exalted most flexible. He said Then I will enter into your very dreams. And the yellow-tailed black cockatoo, ablaze in his own musculature, soared all night above the sunlit fields of whisky grass that stretched inside me to a river’s edge. The great bird cawed its majesty, a sonic boom; and even I was barely welcome there. There was a gap in things; and all the lilacs bloomed. Words split in our grasp. We were licking the cream from the universal ice. Words foundered and cracked. How the bonnet was warm on your bottom! And the metal continued tick-ticking though the engine was off. And the evening shuddered, since everything is connected. I was licking the cream from the universal saucer. I was all of Cheshire and points between. You saw the great sky turn blacker, you saw the spray of stars and your hair got tangled in the windscreen wiper. At the hot ponds we stripped as night closed in. I secretly admired your underwear, your long elusive legs. In the spring where we lay side by side we held hands. Up above the steam the sky. I said That one is called Sirius or Dog Star, but only here on Earth. And when since the stories foretold it we parted, those birds were all released again. Such buoyancy. They go on forever like that. How else to say thank you in a foreign place? We are ever in the arms of our exile, forever going one way and the other though sometimes of course on a sphere that is not so bad. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act. We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin. In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze we were very near bewildered by beauty. The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed with that thunder. It was both for the prick and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over.

And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path the tracing of a sphere: I will give myself over and over. I have migrated through Carpathians of sorrow to myself heaped happy in the corner there. Nothing seemed strange in the world, you’ll understand— nothing ever more would. Monkey Boy came to me saying Look—the moon of the moon. The little one circled the big one. He crouched in the palm of my hand, tiny, sincere, pointing at the sky. There was something sad about him. The python was nothing, nothing at all, nothing but strength shed to suppleness, nothing but will encased in itself. The python was a muscle of thought. Coiled and mute, in a place where nothing but rain fell, the python thought: this is the beginning or end of the world. The python was everywhere, everywhere at once, aware only too much of that ageless agony: its existence. I am tired, it said; and the stream burbled by. I am waiting for the recoil, the uncoil, coil of night, coil of stars, coil of the coldness of the water. The python said Who are these people? The whole city sweated, moved like a limb. The air fitted like a glove two sizes too small and too many singers sang the banal. The bars roared all night. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. In the yellow time of pollen there’s a certain slant of light that devours the afternoon, and you would wait forever at the Gare de l’Est, if time stood still, if she would come. She is the leopard then, its silvery speed; where will you wrestle her, and in what shadows, and on what crumpled sheets? And all those sheets were pampas and savannas, the soft expanses of all that would be absent forever, all that was past, and future, and not here. And in a white rose there were not to be found any secrets, since in its unfolding there was no centre, nor in its decay. Only the random petals fallen. In the yellow time of poppies when the fields were ablaze those invisible pollens rained around us. The days held us lightlocked in golden surrender and all night long the night shot stars. When my chest unconstricted at last, did yours? The real issue, of course, was this: atomically, energetically, everything was wave function. And a wave continues forever into space, the wavelength never alters, only the intensity lessens, so in the worst cosmic way everything is connected by vibrations. And this, as even a dog would know, is no consolation. Ah but the dogs will save us all in the end & even the planet. Not the superdogs but the household friendlies, always eager to please, hysterically fond, incessant, carrying in the very wagging of their tales an unbounded love not even therapists could imagine; their forgiveness unhinges us. We were reduced to this: this day and night, primary gold and indigo, the binary profusion of distances guessed at, heat and cold, colours logged in the retina and lodged in the spine; we were dogs who knew the infinite is now, that celandine was buttercup, that buttercup was marigold. The dog star marked the dog days and the wild rose was dog rose. The crow’s-foot was wild hyacinth. By day the correspondences were clear. I walked across the whin land. Speedwell bluer than sky. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, deep space wherein the mind collects itself. Words foundered and cracked.Nearly never bulled the cow. A shining isomorphousness rang out. The roussignol sang all night. All colours were shuffled endlessly but never lost. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, the secret blackness of the snow come flooding in. On summer’s lawns the ice-melt sprayed its figure-eights from sprinklers. And everything stopped working, second time around, as if it had never happened before. Fans moved the corpses of fireflies through the rooms, supplicant, pathetic, pleading in brittle postures. Everything was magnified by their bug-eyed deaths. We became solemn in that profusion of dying. Cane toads fattened the asphalt in the mist and the rain; our headlights caught them tensed as if listening: they were waiting, mute, for the imbecility of eternity. The clocks merely pulsed, or rather the days. Like shotgun spray on the weatherboard, sleep scattered itself through the blurred heat and secreted itself in the nooks of delirium. Sometimes the magpies would wake us, or the phone, mid-afternoon. And we needed nothing, not even hope, being no different from the dragonflies, or the cows in their despair. It appeared we lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. You blossomed so from not ever reading the newspapers. Things came and went—the years and all the airports. I was a shade scattering my shade seed liberally to the winds and weathervanes. There was not enough absence to go round. I heard voices,stabat mater, in the whine of jets and in air vents and headphones a stream trilling over rocks. On tarmacs and in transit I saw your lips, your nakedness, the trees, that dappled light. I dreamt of orchards. The preciseness of the world came flooding in.

Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness, there came a moment of perfect happiness, faces nestled in the vinyl, sleep coming on, surrounded by metal that in upcoming decades would oxidise to flakes. Asleep at last, last of the valium, we came to know a car too is a flower and pollen its decay. In the dry air at dawn the cicadas kept still. The space that mass sat in decided how mass was to move. We dreamed of valleys of olive trees, silver side out. The lions preened. We shivered with need. A mechanic showed me once how the spark-paths from spark-plugs looked, if you looked close enough, like mountain ravines from the air. The deeper the groove the faster the current. We shivered, this our habit, this flowing. It takes the breath away. There are gum trees crackling from it two decades later. I slept so still beneath that mass of dreams like sediment compressed beneath a lake. I woke and the tributes and glory were gone and the crops all withered and money was merely the index of anxiety. When we realised this our hearts swelled in exultation. Even time would forget there was reason for fear: that decay seemed to will itself upon us. I was off the air, delirious with substance. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. I was off the air, light-headed with voracity. The theme just kept repeating itself, year in year out, same demon different bodies. A nurse said When you stay, when you leave those wet imprints in our airspace, these sheets smell like formaldehyde, like death. We had merely reached early, down the end of the river, the leprosarium of feeling, and all things stood for every other thing, creepers, vines, tendrils, anacondas, inert surrender, such listlessness, and yes the very rage with which we chased the very forms of it, the lineaments of nothingness, the powders of the comatose, the bliss. This was the state of the world. Heading backwards we learned the flea-fish was the smallest animal before the insect kingdom began. Forwards, there were only the sudden deaths of galaxies. And yet when we practised love there seemed on certain days an awful lot of space; and so much sky. Never had I lain then at Kangaroo Valley so comfortable in my own body. A virtual flatness and that centrifuge in the stomach stilled and my spine a spirit-level. The smell of coffee drifting in brought back to me that lily-white girl and that sad hour of need. How brittle every bone was then. How could one not be completely bedraggled by time or compulsion or duplicity? I was all those things and am. I was so tired with the not-being-here inside of it all that fatigue was like oxygen, given of all the givens, sensurround of the gods. But I was gulping and heaving by then. And that is all so long ago. Though when you forget the last time: most likely it is not the last time. And when dreams don’t come, when mastodons and minotaurs curdle in the night-reaches and the bulls lie fallow in dawn-sweats: sleep some more. Wait. Sleep on. And swim.

Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar. — Roberto Calasso Accommodate the action in your life to wrest the deep perspective of the real from cubic content realms of atmosphere at play beyond the bank and shoal of time. Then resonance begins, and all vibrates. The syntax of position no more sculpts this world of interpenetrative forms than syntaxes of motion render grace. Yet syntax is the caul on all our births; and mothers claw the membrane from our eyes to fret us into life, in losing theirs. From there, each choice engraves a different choice. The decades pass. One needle for one groove. The canticles flare chaos from the spin. The gyre to crackly zero stays the same. (You’ve got to love the Hindus more than most.) We saw grand sweeps of swells from tiny arcs. We sliced the wave face, tumbling into light. My mother hugged me good-bye at seventy-three, knowing, just then, her strength may outlive mine. Accommodate the action in your life, she said, to aeronautical exhausts of every plane and cab I ever caught (my own arcs more elaborate than most). Accommodate the action of your life, she seemed to say: make past and future fuse. I felt her fingers dig into my back: That strength I had is yours. Things die. Not love.

For Daniel Morden Athena, coming onto me (verbatim transcription): Every step you take will be the right one. Women encouraged me like that: Avoiding void, no one goes nameless in this world. Power? I was the son of a king: Hacking the armor from the limbs of the dying. In the path of the blade of the plough I met God my foe: Oh blight his voyage with trial and calamity. All he needed was a taste of his own medicine: The water was white with the blades of our oars. Long-limbed Circe, the troubled, could only bring trouble: Sure enough that month became a year. Then Demodocus struck his lyre, and sang for me: In that soft song I led one hundred lives. I was young, singing such distance, when I set out: The meters were my cloak, my map, my axe. Declensions of the beasts defined my travels: I made the lions purr; the lions licked my hands. When gulls cry over rough water, home is close: I remembered Charybdis the Swallower, in her magnificence. Horizon-soaked, I sat and sobbed. Sunset. Shoulders shaking. This was the liver’s dying, the world’s waking.