Tuesday Poem - The Landscape by Mary McCallum

 

 

The Landscape

 

My father serves lunch, lifts

the salad with servers, offers

a dish of olives,

the muted light stroking his

 

hands, head bent as if

in a pew, paler

than I think of him.

On the pergola

 

above, the leaves of the vines

are ecstatic and lime-bright,

a scribble of veins,

tendrils, shadows - a reminder how light

 

both clarifies and complicates -

how a simple landscape of skin, let's say,

can become a whole atlas.

Here the x-ray,

 

there the scan.

The chickens

pant in the hedge.

He chops bread

and chunks of cheese, lays

one on the other

passes it across the table

to my mother,

 

his hand a plate. She's feeling

the heat, longs to be cool

 inside with a book, is looking

up, grateful

for the vines, for the lean of the tree

beside us, its pollen rising rapidly like small fish

in a vertiginous sea.

The olive dish

is passed around again. My father

sweeps crumbs

onto the grass with his hand. (He asks

the surgeon now and then, 'When it comes

again how will I know?') All this

light and still the incomprehensible

scrabble of things,

dark scribbles

that dim

the bright falling. Above,

the sky's open palm,

supplicating leaves.

 

 

While I was in NZ, staying out at Eastbourne with Mary and her family, rejoicing in  the view of Makaro Island, she gave me a copy (number 59/100) of her amazing little book - The Tenderness Of Light. The first book out from her own Makaro Press. 

Oh well - it is just a little stunner. One of the poems - After Reading Auden - won the Caselberg Prize two years ago.. 

Bad luck for you, the book is all sold out. But I have a copy - number 59.

I chose The Landscape because of its tenderness, because of its light.

Details about the book: http://www.mary-mccallum.blogspot.co.nz/2012/03/tuesday-poem-tenderness-of-light-my-new.html

Youtube reading here: http://youtu.be/fYQmikKpT0I