In Australia where I grew up, there were a lot of gum trees. These eucalyptuses have a fine membrane of gum inside the casing of their leaves. If you split the green casing and draw it apart, you get a half inch or so of eucalyptus film. When I was a kid, we used to use this to make a high-pitched whistling noise, similar to the shrilling of the cicadas that lived in the trees. This gum-whistling cicada song is like the sound Kundalini makes in the head, especially when the Throat Chakra opens and one experiences the distilled essence of time, Akasha.
The cicadas lived in the canopies of the gum trees, and sometimes we'd find the empty shells from which they'd hatched still clinging to the bark. These shells had eyes, claws, heads and abdomens, like lacquer molds, with a split up the back where the cicada had emerged. It seemed like an appropriate symbol for the two aspects of time — memory, and the All condensed in the present instant.
Time's gum, drawn from a split eucalyptus leaf
For a moment's ecstatic shrilling; I press the tip
Of my tongue to a disinfectant tang; blow
Hard, and a skirl of wet cicada's wing
Turns to ear-splitting Time
When memory's just a dry shell on a tree.
There are things and places stored in that bright shrilling
And invisible people panelbeating the light
Dead shell, the vacated claws, the stiff eye nodes
Of a memory carried — From where? — Left — By what?
On the inner, upright tree trunk of a man,
Gripping the bark as if it were nothingness.
They say there's a quick rewind at the moment of death
On a maniac wheel, so fast that One Great Still
Appears, no detail lost, no monkey's tail
Of celluloid scrabbling up the sudden dark;
Just Time's gum, shrill light, wet cicada wings
That stretch, that beat, that fly, and I am an ecstatic
Whistle looking down on a boy.
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| Australian Eucalyptus |
The cicadas lived in the canopies of the gum trees, and sometimes we'd find the empty shells from which they'd hatched still clinging to the bark. These shells had eyes, claws, heads and abdomens, like lacquer molds, with a split up the back where the cicada had emerged. It seemed like an appropriate symbol for the two aspects of time — memory, and the All condensed in the present instant.
Time's gum, drawn from a split eucalyptus leaf
For a moment's ecstatic shrilling; I press the tip
Of my tongue to a disinfectant tang; blow
Hard, and a skirl of wet cicada's wing
Turns to ear-splitting Time
When memory's just a dry shell on a tree.
There are things and places stored in that bright shrilling
And invisible people panelbeating the light
Dead shell, the vacated claws, the stiff eye nodes
Of a memory carried — From where? — Left — By what?
On the inner, upright tree trunk of a man,
Gripping the bark as if it were nothingness.
They say there's a quick rewind at the moment of death
On a maniac wheel, so fast that One Great Still
Appears, no detail lost, no monkey's tail
Of celluloid scrabbling up the sudden dark;
Just Time's gum, shrill light, wet cicada wings
That stretch, that beat, that fly, and I am an ecstatic
Whistle looking down on a boy.
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