Russell Erwin: Two Poems

The Kathak Dancer, Mandawa. Holi 2002
(for Lyn)

One night in a lifetime: the elephant gate of the castle,

rugs on the dust, monkeys leaping in, through, out the upper windows,

their arms like festoons, and now, the sun cooled, the walls breathing heat

as music opens like exploring fingers of water and so, surely enveloping,

eases us out of ourselves.

Then suddenly, drama flowering like clouds building into their tumult,

there beneath the light of flares—myths in huge shadows thrown up

against the palace walls. Their truths more vivid than any image

I saw as a child, lighting up the night-sky at the Chullora drive-in.

 

This from the body of the Kathak dancer: her hands piercing the dark,

entreating it, then teasingly retreating and so,

like the forming of love, the subtle unfolding of our lives

in a story: light sliding like snakes over her body

reminding us of how limited are the days of our vitality,

the delight in being—the mounds of her breasts given

to all of us and to her lover, the dark.

 

We so near this mystery burn with the life just beyond the flares.

Through her body the story, so intimate, of the gods and their loves,

the arrow and the deer, the chase, the certainty of pain,

the smugness of evil, the frailty of good,  the phoenix of love.

And in its resolution, a drawing from us in the last release of our breaths

acknowledgement of what it is that lives there, what we have learned,

how we have been changed—yes, exalted, humbled, seeing our companions

as if their faces had been washed, and we now seeing with our hearts.

All this given in the flowing movement, the fluid moment—

fulfilled in the giving and lost as soon as we receive.

 

Already she has disappeared to again become one of us

just as the dance has entered the dark, where it lives

and although not understanding, we realize

how we live in the same world as the gods. In a dance.

Russell Erwin

A Memory of Anthracite

In bed I felt the moisture of my breath

mist the cold rock, and could not sleep.

In the dark a day was forming which had walls,

impervious as death and as black,

and as terrifying as the face of God.

With the first step of descent I knew

the safe, daily earth would open up

like treachery and reveal how the dark

is just beneath our feet, where light

is as precious as air, and how easily

it might be taken from us and there’d be

no return. I could not sleep.

And the word they’d told me—“Anthracite”

had the clinical menace of a silent planet

silted through its cold letters. It shone

in my head like water off hard planes of rock.

Then out of a bushland dripping with mist

in the school-grey dawn the stricken angularity

of rust-sad machinery, and as if pasted onto the side

of the mountain, like in the cartoons, a black, elliptical “O”.

Standing at the shaft’s mouth, light bitten clean as an apple,

I knew the hollow self.

Even the timber props were puny, cracks in them opening

into their own darkness, and from hairline fractures

water seeping in like quiet workers.

A different air swelled from beneath,

gutted of the spices of the flowering earth,

full of the dark and overpowering the breath

with all the bluster of an ancient god.

Only one hundred and fifty yards in, I turned,

and back there, that gaping “O”. Daylight

diminishing now like a previous life. Further in,

some men watched we visitors, were amused

or noting the lamp-white of fear, turned their backs

and resumed working. They could have been there forever,

coming in and out of the shadows, as if darkness

were clothes they lived in easily.

Later, released back to the smell of eucalypt,

the larruping of currawongs, I saw one of them

as he emerged from the shaft and from his glance

felt the thoroughness of his contempt—

as if everything above ground, even daylight

was anaemic, somehow effete, whereas his days

dwelt among timbers adjusting to a shifting mountain,

damp with the infiltration of water,

tuned to the uncertainty of rock, were worn

in a light which at any moment might leave him,

His days spent face-to-face before

those unforgiving, shining walls,

his body ingrained with its black

and in his eyes what he knew,

which we in our light-filled lives

would not, could never.

Russell Erwin