and where. In the place where grief
began and the wrong was done. When the dead
are as many as his griefs and the books are balanced he too
will be done.
The book, like the gun, is as warmly secret
in him as hoarded sweets. Along with the rough plan sometime soon
to light out to the Territory, and once
gone send back no message.
Ghost Town
A bunch of five
tombstones. Toppled clouds, pillars of salt.
No footsteps lead
away. Only passers-by on the highway.
A habitation
made to be abandoned,
like a wardrobe, lopsided
on open ground and empty.
Pegged to the breeze a tee-shirt
swells with body heat.
The intruder
goes ghostly, steps through himself
and the midday glare off mica
to instant eternity.
Writers’ Retreat: Maclaren Vale, 2010
for Rose Wight
I
The lake too has retreated, but the waterbirds plane in
and settle for what’s there. A sky’s glass ceiling
to break through. Liquid enough to make a splash.
II
Grey geese in a Quaker squad, having no word
of French, having never heard in their plump assurance of foie
gras, look neither left nor right as they wheel en masse across the road.
III
At dusk the cockatoos. Sulphur-crested riotous punk angels,
dropped from a clear blue sky and screaming blue
murder as they havoc the eucalypts.
IV
Under wings of sunlit spray from twitchy sprinklers
a currawong struts the lawn. All mine. All this is
mine. I’m the kingpin here. The cock, the peacock.
Persimmons: Campagnatico
Approaching February
like any other
armed camp, with
caution, one eye open
in the dark. Boughs vacant,
black, budded with ice.
Tufa-block walls
glisten with the track
of creatures of no substance.
Sluggish, damp
invisible sky-wrack.
We dig in,
prepared should things go bad
to dig ourselves out,
and might, given
the glare off so much whiteness,
go spare, save for the saving
grace, on bare
branches down there
in the mist, of luscious
red-orange, ripe-in-their-thin-skin
persimmons, pulpy
— transparent with frost.
Improbably festive
balloons — some
thirty, no thirty-one
winter suns. The air
throbs, glows bronze and sensual.
We count them, the days
of March. Considering April.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
Windows
The carpenter has arrived bringing windows.
He unpacks them from the dark
of a van, carries them in,
stacks them slant against a wall.
They are blank and do not brighten
with dawn. No stars
pinpoint at nightfall
their squared-off polished depths.
I go at different hours
to consult them
for the view that might show in which direction
the house looks, or what
season is coming
to us over the hills.
The darkness of the tradesman’s
van refuses to lift. He has made windows
to a place I do not want
to go and will be back
on Friday to fit them.
I ordered and paid for this.
Nightsong, Nightlong
Below in a garden
thicket, out
of sight under moonstruck leaves, a scrap of dark
that sings. But no more dark,
because it is unseen and the night
so wide that surrounds it,
than the heart, which is just its size
in the body’s dark, and hidden.
Small miracles, both. Hour
on hour without cease,
assured, lightly insistent,
they beat against stillness.
I’m here. I’m still here.
Still now and listen.
Eternal Moment at Poggio Madonna
Miss Mischa in her cool
reclusion curls on the mat.
Has a feel for
creaturely comforts and has sniffed out
this spot, though nothing
in nature or that the eye
can see marks it as special.
The sort of animal
warmth that a cat
is drawn to in a cold house; as if
the sun, centuries back,
in a burst of candescence,
had danced there, and the glow of
its presence can still be felt,
or a young god happening by had stopped
a moment to shake
a pebble from his shoe, and found
his soul struck by a mortal
dweller of the place, and the bewilderment
of instant attraction, eternal
loss, still draws him back.
Miss M. has found it out. Basks
in the sun’s warmth even
at midnight; dreams of a cat
that sleeps inside the sleep
of one who, without waking,
from his tall cloud leans godlike
down and lovingly strokes her.
Towards Midnight
for Joan Tesei (1934–2005)
The Cup
In the one cup
darkness, espresso black
night, its distances,
its brief proximities,
and the arrayment
of sunlight on a sill.
I drink at the open window
heady mouthfuls
of breath, as the body,
guardian angel
of the ordinary
and of this world, reassembles
what sleep for a time
has scattered; all
the parts and occasions
of a singular story
on the instant
recalled as if new given.
An intimation of the Eternal
Return, or bitter-
sweet in the same cup, this draught
of absolute dark that shadow
— like we carry in us. Sometimes
lightly. Sometimes not.
Towards Midnight
Always at the margin
of a room, among the shreds
and shadows there, a stranger.
Upstart angel
of unease or mute disruption,
visitant lurker
with a knife for us, the killing
word we dare not speak.
Or blear-eyed, wayworn, waif-like,
the guest we have set
a place for, arriving
late for the feast.
The Rapture
The being seized
and taken.
The being
swept off your feet
by your own
breath;
the moment
and all
time no longer
on your hands.
A lightening. As if
in the nest of your palm,
an egg, its shell
as fragile and pale
blue as the sky
overhead, suddenly trembled
and cracked
open as your self
— containment might,
and you
staggered under the advent
of wings.
The loss of
gravity, the weight
— lessness of being
swept up and
taken,
less
a breaking than a breaking