Nostos |

Nostos

All through the flight you’ve had Cavafy

playing in your mind. Is it true that arriving here

is what you’re destined for? Call it homing

rather than homecoming, for once the airport

doors seal the vacuum of miles and time,

it’s as though you’ve never been gone.

An easterly blows from the night-washed hills,

the air is warm and soft as ironed cloth. You breathe

blue flames of eucalypt, till your body unlocks

its prodigal shape, and distance is cleansed

from your bones. Since you went away, your life

has lacked its tinder. You’ve tried to belong

elsewhere, gathered knowledge from scholars, bought

fine things. Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—you’ve carried them all

in your soul. But this place has burned in you

since birth, coloured your sleep with cochineal,

shrilled it cobalt blue, and your body won’t quit

trying to pull you back, searching for the heart

it buried in the dirt, a lodestone fired

in desert and sky, cooled in the Indian Ocean.

Blue flames breathe in you. Way beyond the rim

of the airport lights, you know there’s emptiness

as full as you’ve ever seen, where you become part

of the scansion of land, its accents of Spinifex

and schist. Gorges brim with a brazen edge.

A daytime moon spreads a scallop

of lace. Hills mount a ghost-hazed wave.

You wait as the bleach of afternoon light

darkens to the palette of dusk. Lilac. Plum.

Russet. Silver-sage. This land has archived

colour and time, when you press your palm

against the warmth of stone, you touch

the whole earth’s story. And if yours

were the only skin left behind to recite

from the chronicle of place? Embedded

in this dossier of rock, in ancient script,

are words which make sense of home.

But will you ever learn how to own

their shapes? Will this be your Ithaka?

Nostos (Cordite, 44, Gondwanaland, 2013)