Sarah Tiffen: Motherlode

Motherlode

We drove along the highway, she sleeping, me thinking

and listening to radio talk, stories of war, stories of flood, and loving her,

and then she woke and we rattled on,

dodging the time before us, talking of people and gossip,

theories, and nothing, listened to music.

Trucks thundered past, and sandstone ravines, and then Sydney,

oiled and sinuous in afternoon light, full of memory and conspiracy.

Later, in our beachfront room

we peered through glass at the looming peerless moon who

spilled her milky essence on the dark sea, and above—

planes’ industrious ant lights scribbling the bitten rind of night sky.

“That will be you,” I said as we held hands and fitfully slept.

In the morning, nervous and bright, we walked the coast path up and down

amidst joggers and dog walkers, watching

sea swimmers and the shoals of surfers in wetsuits

out on the bombora below the headland.

We sought the shore, a moment of stillness amid the tide bearing us on—

“34 minutes to the airport, via Botany Road”

through dusty, immigrant parts of the old city to our last hour

before a separation longer than any since she left my body.

O the airport was all humanity—

people coming and departing from all the globe’s corners—

waiting and moving and watching in waves and throngs as the clock stole our minutes.

At the Departure Gate, I held her head to my chest,

and absorbed her presence just like many years before when she was three

and we rocked together on an old chair in the back winter garden,

her little curly head in the crook of my neck—

then and now.

“I love you. Love, Love, Love!”

The last photo, the last glance, the backward smile,

and love’s dark flower filled my chest—and deep in

my stomach, my solar plexus—as I let her go.

* * *

Soon, to the Tunnel and the Highway, heading south to the dark and cold.

As far and fast as I dared as the wind rose and I moved in stealth or in a dream

silent and baffling, to another place, another Universe where the sky fell in sheets of grey

upon undulating staccato land.

And at last came I to the Kingdom of Lake St George.

O mythical landscape of spirits carved from eons through which I must pass

to leave the body blow of parting behind me—and make it home alive.

The vast immutable knuckle of the hills,

a prone sleeping giant dismantling and folding the earth as a blanket—

clasped in the escarpment and presiding over the mist-ridden flats of the mythical lake.

Far off, red cows—Hereford—sleek as butter, grazing on the lake bed,

and further pebble pockets of sheep, clustered cloistered out amidst yellow foamy ground.

And the Grand Angus—their regal black sheen—seemed walking on water,

great beasts suspended on a lake surface there and not there.

Mysterious in fissures the greens and the greens away and the heavy brown

and the looming mist of rain and dark, dark, dark, in ancient memory.

Fences like stitches in the lake’s time, bent and bespoke at intervals, the mist.

The falling world felled upside down and gaunt

trees and rain like falling silver spears and spirits, and the Black Sky, and the

slants of preternatural gold sun relinquished from the cloudbank.

And further out again, fantastical mountains arraigned with the white marvel

of the Great Medieval Turbines turning silently against a pearl sky.

All this at once as I drove and the dark fell, and the snow, a heartbeat

from shaping out of the brooding rock and leaden closing night.

And She—She in the sky, soon in Finland, soon again in

London—back to the Mother Country on her Beautiful Pilgrimage.

A Goddess and a Child—Mine! Mine!—loved beyond word

and unleashed on the golden thronging world

to shape herself in the golden light of History

and Europe’s lavish incredulous monuments—its darkness and joys.

My heart—a crucible of keening Love—the motherlode of fear, unending Joy.

                                                                   Sarah Tiffen