PAUL CROUCHER
            
FALLING MOUNTAIN


Dolerite columns collapse,
detach themselves
like hapless climbers, from the side
of Falling Mountain.

In the now dim footlights
the conifer prostrate.

But for it the promise
of another year.

*

Browns and yellows are fundamental.
Green is the passing colour here.

Borers eating out the heart
of huon pine, of deciduous beech.

Here, in this place.

The bed of a great Cambrian ocean.

*

And in my dreams the outline
of the mountain above us
is suddenly a wave
about to break over us.

Over the fireplace, where we sit
combustible, just praying
for that certain spark to give us
seed-potential.

Before the flood.




A PICNIC

(for Kris Hemensley)


To form words in the bird-calls
of their perfect order

and to sing

not for the plaudits
but the breeze-borne spring, which
eases the spirit
and sets things right

at the common table
of accessible delight.




MAHAMUDRA

“I am ambitious for a motley coat.”   Jacques, As You Like It


There isn’t much to do in Lhasa
so the monks invest
the grey landscape
with ecstasy.

A tantric jam.

Those long horns blaring
over the valley.

Prayer flags clapping
in the wind to the beat
of a sky-burial rhapsody.

Brass sections and drums
and rainbows of wild colour

painted over the actual rags
of the yak herders.

*

What kind of madness is it?
Bent over texts and ceremonies.

A Zen master chopped off a finger
he saw pointed at the moon.

A desert father said:
“Of God I will not speak.”

*

I lean towards China, or Judea.
That reticence.

Wanting to grow old in an old coat.
To love the earth.

To throw myself
into its stony silence.

Like a madman
bent on sanity.

A sick man
bent on health.




MINIMUS, TO HERSELF


That the poem be something memorable
lines must accord

with the pneuma of the poet
who, in the luminous night

in the quiet
of her loneliness

comes up with words
to stir herself

as with a faint breeze
in the breathing

of what she is.




THE NAMES OF BIRDS


Walking in wild
south-westerly

to the lighthouse
at Sandy Cape

she’s blown away
by the names of birds:

shearwater, cormorant,
storm petrel …

All of whatever she is
transported

to an emptiness
that knows itself

only in the wind-flow
of a poem.




LANDING


Looking down through the mist
on the city streets

from the sixteenth floor
delivery suite

I feel as if I’ve been
on a long trip

and am finally coming in
to land.

*

Mother and child
curtained off, like gods
in a Hindu shrine.

Pictures and flowers -
the cacophony
of visiting hours.

*

And the land
rises up

like Kali
to swallow me

at last
with the wildness

of progeny.




“ARCHAIC …”


Archaic assurances:
digging in lupins

as if
in the stead

of heaven.




“HOME / FROM THE PUB …”


Home
from the pub

on the
last night

of summer
I’m

stretched
out

in long
grass

playing
billiards

with the
stars.