Afternoon

Shoalhaven River, Afternoon II

Martin Harrison 

 

A final thought might be

how

after sex with you

I want the light to be permanent

 

some utterly sun-drowned afternoon

where intense, golden drifts

freeze across the ranges

 

“utterly” because

of what is open, airy, so exposed

 

with a long drift of time and distance

starting in the gap

 

every gesture’s a response to light

every thought speaks to its change

with a sense of what happens

when dreaming, perhaps inland along a river:

 

the ripple of

a single moment

dissolving a broad hill slope

 

which just as it

melts in water

stays still enough,

trance-like,

to engage us

in our love

 

*

 

Yet if you look back

again –

            just once –

                               it seems

 

as if I’ve spent a lifetime

staring at the same thing

again and again –

some Mont St-Victoire,

some cracked white kitchen jug –

hoping this way to understand

the way we see

or, perhaps, to see beyond

the what and how of sight,

 

so the still shape of breast

and ridge, of

scrub-marked slope, of

threaded white branches

poking through the mix –

all this

shimmers with untouched

untouchable

sun-glare -

 

and the first thing

which comes to me

is loveliness

and the next’s

 

an everywhere mirrored

stillness:

a bush-covered incline

held just as it does its eternal act

of arriving, moving through

 

to make us be

immortal watchers

 

older than centuries

who unearth hill-sides from sky,

spear-heads from air,

and rock-ledged fringes of deep water

 

from our own minds’

movement

 

 

Martin Harrison (UK/NSW) started publishing poems in London in the mid-70s. His work has been published in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Great Britain and has recently appeared in Chinese translation.

Afternoon was written by Martin Harrison in response to Arthur Boyd’s Shoalhaven River afternoon (the four times of day: afternoon: version II) 1983 in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery collection.