Tiny Buddha

 

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)

 

Frog song

Suns and Moons

 

Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk

 

Falling Into You, Mae

Stone Angel

Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk

Sami Puts the Sun Back Up

Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk
The Reindeer People

Proof that a Woman is a Bird

 

Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk

 

 

 

Evening, my bedroom a boatshed above the bush;

a wasteland of wattles and eucalypts, the grey gums

named by their smells, by their dead-man shreddy skins.

 

My bedroom, an aerial hiding-place.

Waves of belated aloneness drag up onto the sand,

the rotted footings of my listing room awash

in the clean green amnion of the waves;

the purple sands imploded from underneath;

the shore flushed, oedematous with the incoming tide.

 

The wind, onshore, buffets the silvered planks

of this solitary shed. Alone, unequivocal, on clean linen,

I discover the surety, the security, of my boatshed.

What valkyrie shrieks those wild and wanton cries? In the air! 

 

It’s in the air! It’s even in the air- that crystal gleam; the harsh

and unforgiving light; the green of the horizon cold and sour;

the bitter tang; a pallid evening star, downcast.

 

(Today I passed a woman by the yacht club point

who knelt before a man;  I couldn’t help but stare

as I drew closer and saw her splaying

and carefully dismembering a gull.  He looked on,

horrified. And I drove by.)

 

In the rough palings, the timbers of this shed, a curdled  stain

with eyes where once the branches forked.

They, alone, watch at night- those wooden Rorschach eyes.

 

And the slump-backed tides return, and the chundering tides

retreat, sometimes leaving a stinking flathead flapping drearily.

Other times, dropping a sandpapered Venus

at spurred and calloused feet.

 

 

 

I don't want to be a nun...

Miserere by Allegri

Mercedes Sosa and Misa Criolla;

the wind outside frigid, blustery.

Pan-pipes bring the Andes into my

high-ceilinged bedroom.

The front door rattles.

Good Friday is roaming outside

my house.

 

Once, when young, the poultry farm shriekings

on Good Friday morning

were the howling ghosts rising up from their graves.

 

At my First Communion breakfast,

I vomited saveloy and raspberry fizz-

why wasn’t it the body and blood

of little Baby Jesus?

The hymn they sang made me sick inside,

it was  so beautiful,

and life so transitory,

the light on our mothers’ faces

supernatural- a chrism.

Though, now I understand,

it was ordinary motherlove,

not the Transubstantiation.

 

Misa Criolla fills me with the same fearful beauty-

reminds me of the six-inch spikes on the grille

that we saw my sister’s best friend behind

when she became a Carmelite.

 

Beauty and cruelty,

compassion and ugliness,

mixed together to create una mescla,

a misa criolla!

A savage orthodoxy.

 

 

Firebird

The story of the Firebird

 

Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk

In Slavic folklore, the Firebird (Russian: Жар-пти́ца, Zhar-ptitsa; Ukrainian: Жар-пти́ця, Zhar-ptica; Serbian: Жар-птица or Žar-ptica; Croatian: Žar ptica; Bulgarian: Жар-птица, Zhar-ptitsa; Macedonian: Жар-птица, Žar-ptica; Polish: Żar-ptak; Czech: Pták Ohnivák; Slovak: Vták Ohnivák; Slovene: Rajska/zlata-ptica) is a magical glowing bird from a faraway land, which is both a blessing and a bringer of doom to its captor. Some believe it can see the future.
The Firebird is described as a large bird with majestic plumage that glows brightly emitting red, orange, and yellow light, like a bonfire that is just past the turbulent flame. The feathers do not cease glowing if removed, and one feather can light a large room if not concealed. In later iconography, the form of the Firebird is usually that of a smallish fire-colored peacock, complete with a crest on its head and tail feathers with glowing "eyes".