Dancing Queen
I was thinking that it’s impossible for time to stand still as we hope it will. It’s like a momentary hope on our part to want that, but in all honesty it’s never going to happen. No. Time (as we know it) is destined and determined to continue marching to it’s own drum beat and we, for our part must fall into step with it or alternatively opt out. But to where?
A while ago I took in an exhibition of Peter Lik’s work. Lik is an Australian Landscape Photographer. I loved his bold work with its bold colours. I loved the way he captures the red heart of the country, how he persuades the blueness of its eyes to twinkle in water views from a pier. I liked that his vision connected me to what he’s was seeing and enabled me then to see it as if at first hand. I like that it stirred a recognition inside me.
When I was growing up I enjoyed reading and listening to New Zealand poet Denis Glover. Way back then, he lived in Wellington where he could see the sea and ships. He liked to write at 5am, drink at 5pm and talk all the time in-between.
The thing I loved most about him was how he danced to his own tune. Beat and tune, they’re different somehow and one more than the other can at least feign an ‘opt out’ clause. Tune methinks but I’ve been known to be wrong.
I came upon the start of a poem I wrote 25 years ago last night. I can’t remember exactly why I never finished it, maybe I will one day. It started and stayed started like this, it was simply entitled “City Lights”
“ It faded finally, against the soft murmur
of city lights, knowing the play for time
was useless, unenduring and these nightly
jewels you held out to me would lose
their shine by morning” – Dec 12, 1981.
I remember who it was for and perhaps that’s why I never finished it. Some things, some people we have no wish to say goodbye to. Yet looking back, I have and I did. It’s more the start of a thought than poem. Fossilised by a landslide of past time that somehow caught it unawares, emerging all these years later from the dig-site like some half-eaten sentence with laryngitis. Hoarse and still unable to speak its mind.
I sometimes wonder what made me leave these words so alone all this time, maybe like Denis I was simply off dancing to my own tune! And being found again was their timely reminder to me that aloneness however we experience it does not stop time but merely move with it till such notions are found again. Found and understood perhaps.
It’s a funny ol’ day today. A day for funny ol’ thoughts, so there you have it. That could be what’s so disorientating about this day. Coming back to a tune can sometimes be rather disconcerting because it requires us becoming part of the chorus line again.
And sometimes I feel it’s not as easy as the first time I came back. The freedom I experienced in my time away has been too expansive, so much more. Still, I always thought I might feel this way! Turns out I was right this time. Oh well … dance anyone?
