Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk
THE FROGS SANG ME BACK
Today I let the music in, and
remembered
how it softens the cicada-husk of
you,
the way sleep does;
how it quiets the circling animal
within
the way rutting does;
how music makes the borders around
things clear
as though, suddenly, the clumsy hand
that colours your life in
learns to stay inside the lines.
Music nectars your half-lit bedroom
until it seems full of an amber
chicle.
I recall the first mad months after
he left-
my baby daughter would ever so
carefully
make up my bed, while I lathered and
slathered in lavender.
She would plump hand-stitched
pillows and arrange
a sprig of wild fuchsia or a wattle
switch, fuzzed with wool,
and when she had put me dumbly to
bed,
she would twitch the frog-music on.
My sister had sent it from Rum
Jungle,
and to me, it was the tropics,
it was that dry-cleaner steaminess,
and it was those big glycerine drops
that slide
off the greasy leaves of rubber
trees.
The music was the sound of the
little myopic frogs,
like tender jade buddhas, whistling
in the dark;
it was the heady come-hither stink
of mosquito coils,
and the white fluff left behind in
your bed by geckos
that curled up like sardine-can lids
from the timber ribs
of a donga built like an umbrella.
Every night, I fell asleep to the
mystic drugging of the frogs,
until my daughters could stand the
zombie droning no longer.
In that soporific sound, there were
the leafy depths of the big wet-
a cyclone-sodden benignity;
the spiraling of a bamboo flute
touched with spit;
the dark echoings of a thousand
amphibians trapped in the gloom.
Now, released at last from that coma
of grief,
I fall asleep to the worry-bead
shuffling of the hot-water-heater
and the distant tinkling of tiny
temperate frogs,
brown and sober in the sedges.
Now, the night is no longer a
subterranean narcolepsy
that fills me with terror.
I no longer wake with dream-tears
on my sleep-branded cheek.
A scrubbed, fresh-painted light
washes my room
with godliness.
These days, I sometimes sleep alone
in an empty house
and oh!
how it rings with the lusty singing
of dignity.
(Hecate)
