Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
From Heaven Back, poems by Mark Tredinnick.
From Heaven Back
One day last year they took down
one hundred years of poplars along
the railway line in town.
This May, one morning in calm
bright weather—a High run aground
overheard and the Southern
Ocean streaming quietly in
along the isobars—I stand
where the trees had till last year
stood, and I look across
the new car park and the old tracks
at the thin amber palisade abandoned
there. The poplars, a skeleton staff,
have put out a deeper yellow this year
(to stand in, I guess, for all the yellow
that will not ever constellate
the eastern flank again), and I am
a thousand phantom cyan limbs.
Lombardy poplars thin, I notice,
from the top down, and when my time
comes, may I, too, leave so well,
falling down from heaven
back to earth. Each day,
less time, more space. More light,
Less shade. Each night, more sky.
From one hour to the next,
less here about me, and more there,
and only small good
sunlit phrases left to say.
Each syllable one more dying star.
Notwithstanding
Meantime, though, life is the same
miraculous gift it always was.
The Lenten air is in, and the last
two mornings have been cold.
I love it like this: the humidity
almost spent, the days wider open
than summer windows, the nights
a meadow of broken-down stars,
each dawn, a down, a life you feel
now just about worthy to claim.
And …
… autumn, in the morning,
had put up a city of light,
and now the one grey cottage
that had thought itself out of the woods
was a buckle in the mortgage
belt, an outer suburb
ringed by amber roads,
the morning a high urgency
of tone. Through which I drove
early, to buy you, I recall,
a tie from the school shop
to replace the one your brother,
that prodigal, had bartered
or burgled or lost,
and the suddenness of the season,
waking up by falling fast
toward its close, seemed
a passing comment on these middle
moments of one’s days.
And then, as I took the bend
at Osborne, there was
the currawong
who flew upside down
across my sightline
and hung by the tips
of the fingers of a peppermint
limb (the one green note
in all the yellowness of things),
and I guess it sipped
there on scarlet blooms a second,
while I pulled over
to get some of this down, or else
just showered brightly
in the light blue
rain that had deigned
at last to fall. Love always
was our best idea, I think—
and always just a bit too big
for us. But still the (spinning)
world goes on
showing us, if we’re lucky,
how love’s done.
Hunger
For Phil Harmer
Standing on the stilts
of her other
life, as if she meant to
extenuate the depth
of the darkness
that saturates the shallows
she divines,
the blue heron bunches
her blue shoulders and bundles her slender
daylight form inside the soft carapace
of her night-time self.
Her hunger is the stillness
of a sleepwalking stream.
And waking is a wrinkle
in the fabric of the tide, above where a brown
bass on the gravel bed has no idea
he’s making ready
to become breakfast.
Pinoak Days
After Christmas, the days lose their shape;
The numbers fall from the calendar.
One year’s almost as good as the next,
And this particular year, Tuesday
Morning—if, as it claims, it’s Tuesday—
Grows bulky and true as the pinoak,
Which leafs out where, for two lives at least
Of women and men, generations
Of hours, it’s held its form and waited.
© Mark Tredinnick
Mark Tredinnick, the author of twenty-five celebrated works of poetry and prose, is the author, most recently, of House of Thieves, One Hundred Poems. His books on the writing craft have touched the lives and works of many. He runs What the Light Tells, an online poetry masterclass, and teaches at the University of Sydney. His edited collection of essays for Robert Gray, Bright Crockery Days, is just out from 5 Islands Press, whose managing editor he is. Mark lives and works southwest of Sydney on Gundungurra Country.