from Green Sonnets

They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.
……………………………………. – Jorge Luis Borges

For my sister, Lisa,
painter, drawer, visual artist,
after lengthy conversations about the colour green.

1.

Words are impossible. They should not happen.
Stones and plants are mystery enough; creatures
finned, winged and walking, more than enough.
But creatures talking? Inventing alphabets, books,
mirrors? Matter is enough, let alone antimatter.
Stars are enough, let alone red giants, white dwarves,
black holes. I wake dizzy, am spun, go to sleep dizzy.
I couldn’t, sans blindfold, pin the tail on a paper

donkey; I can’t pin down a reason for anything.
What a donkey I am! What an ass!
Put me out to pasture in a green octet;
leave the gate to the adjoining sestet open.
I will neigh and bray and stamp out a
volta:
at the furthest fence grow the tastiest flowers.

4.

The greening of the garage took years.
Before The Big Bang, a mustard seed;
before The Greening, a tendril of creeper …
Tonnes unknown of root, branch, leaf and flower
tangled skyward a dozen feet to tower
on a roof of holes, rust and tin. A sprawling
ecosystem triumphant in ownership,
a tabernacle teeming deep with wings,
a whistling, warbling, cooing arbour
closing come evening, opening come dawn
to offer yet again its cool embrace.
What did I have better to do than sit
and watch a pair of loved-up turtledoves,
countless honeyeaters and finches,

marauding crows, magpies and mynahs,
and listen to songs of nesting, hatching,
living, leaving and dying, songs of love?
I dreamed myself in there as wings upon
a poem, an eye blinking open in
an egg, an insect about to be eaten.
Some gardening was in the rental contract,
but we never touched that high manor;
secateurs moved at garden-level only,
and with regret … Rental? It’s all rental.
We live with the impossibility
of our shimmering existence. O how
awful and how joyful is the mystery!
A tendril of creeper and a mustard seed!

6.

In all those years exploring the rolling
bush-covered dunes, we only found it twice.
Spider Valley. It seemed to just appear.
Long-legged Golden Orbs spinning overnight
one jewelled and glistening web composed of
thousands of webs, with a phobia at
the centre of each. The rules were simple:

Crawl under the webs, into the heart of the maze
Now stand and try and get out without screaming

Between my birth and my death, a valley.
I stand surrounded by infinite webs
subsumed by one web spun by the sun,
a golden orb. The rules are still simple,
the spiders harmless. The rest is in my head.

8.

under the concrete, under the bitumen
under the highway, under the freeway
under the supermarket, under the carpark
under the airport, under the railway station

under the school, under the university
under the factory, under the warehouse
under the chemical plant, under the oil refinery
under the army base, under the missile silo

under each of these, under all of this,
under the foundation of the house in
which, disconnected, you sleep, the formless
colourless Logos blooms from a green stem

(you glimpse it briefly in a dream and wake,
not knowing who or where or why you are)

9.

The pathologist discovered a bright
green blade of grass impossibly lodged in
the ventricles of his heart. No other
abnormality, cause of death natural

or unnatural, could be found. It became
a celebrated case (between other
celebrated cases) and answers were
loudly demanded by people with no

right to questions … Then he was forgotten,
the man who toppled over one fine day
while laughing at a joke he told himself.

The blade of grass was removed from his heart;
his heart was removed for further study.
We buried his smile under countless blades of grass.

12.

Some waves break onshore like an endless line
of Buddhist monks peacefully chanting Om
to Green Tara. I arrived here on an
ill-mannered wave. It broke like a crew of
sailors tumbling from a green barracks while
tugging on their whites and cursing a rude
awakening. Called to attention, they fell
down in the sand, fighting … Though divided

between what I saw when my eyes were closed,
and what my eyes saw upon opening,
I have survived my life. It is time for
prostration at the feet of the Goddess
― Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha ―
for the Sea is but the hem of Her garment.

14.

I like animals more than people
my sister wrote on her wooden ruler
while in class in Catholic primary school.
The teacher told on the child, the Headmistress
called our parents ― ‘people’ got involved.

I like Charles Darwin more than Jesus,
and Don’t take the Bible literally,
and Give me a horse and not a jackass,
all these she may as well have written.

Imagine the child sleepless in bed that night,
not knowing that what is wrong is wrong with
adults, not with her … This while the horses
she rides, grazing quietly on the green grass,
whinny softly to each other in the darkness.

 ———————————-

Mal McKimmie is the author of 3 poetry collections, the most recent being At the Foot of the Mountain (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021). His second book, The Brokenness Sonnets I-III & Other Poems (Five Islands Press, 2011), won the 2012 Age Poetry Book of the Year award. Poems from his first book, Poetileptic (Five Islands, 2005), were featured in a dedicated broadcast on ‘Poetica’, on ABC Radio National. His fourth poetry collection, The Diwan of Nawid, will be published by Puncher & Wattmann in the first half of 2024. McKimmie’s poetry has been published in many literary journals and anthologies, and he has worked as a poetry tutor, mentor, editor, and event coordinator, and has lobbied in numerous ways for equality, inclusion and representation in Australian poetry. He was born in Perth, Western Australia, on unceded land traditionally owned by the Whadjuk Nyoongar people, and currently lives and writes in Gisborne, Victoria, on unceded land traditionally owned by the Wurundjeri people.