Jeff Klooger


Seeing And Making
           For Judith Wright

The self is not a prism, or like a prism,
seeing, neither reflection nor refraction
of whole light’s whiteness into its rainbow
components. The self sees with the whole
of the mind (and the body that mind
is planted in). It sees with its hopes
and wishes, with its illusions, making pictures
not found in the object or its relations,
an inner world, separate and different
from unchanged, unseen being.

A self sees with its entire history,
a makeshift structure of trusses and beams,
flawed from roof to cellar, strewn
with the flotsam and jetsam of a lifetime’s building.
The self sees with what it wants
and what it fears, sees with a frosted lens strung
from the tip of its highest hopes
to the depths of its darkest nightmares.

The eye that sees clearly, sees with the careful
discipline of the studied mind, not native
but learnt through a lifetime’s practise.
Such objectivity grows in the mud
of a real life’s desires, trailing its roots
in the dirt of a mother’s kindness
or a father’s courage, the trials
of a hard-fought adolescence
and a hard-won maturity.

Each seeing eye brings with it its I;
spoken or unspoken, the two cannot be parted.
That I sinks deep, touching places
we can neither know nor own,
joining us to something almost out of reach
from which spills wonders
we then call our own creations.
We are not masters, then, of what we make
but we are makers.



Jeff Klooger’s poetry has been published in Australian and international online and print journals. Recently his work has appeared in The Liberal, Harvest, dotdotdash, The Argotist Online and Pure Francis. His other interests are music and philosophy. His book on the ideas of the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis was published in 2009.

 
 
 
 
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