the road,
and of rain-pool and melon-flower,
what sunlight
is to old bones.
Shadow Play
Asides of self:
verb-trash and noun-mash,
heroic strut and banter, till the eyelids
come down, not in finale
but the weariness that follows
faint applause and truce.
All actors know it, the ill
fit at knee and elbow
of another’s skin. Choose silence, a sunlit
corner of afternoon,
till rabbits, tumbled from hats
that hang in the hall, resume, set on
by starshine, their antic
affray, their shadow
— play, out on the lawn.
Australia Day at Pennyroyal
for Mandy Martin and Guy Fitzhardinge
An excitement in the grass, tiny noises,
cries from underground.
Nothing on a grand scale.
But as a likeness
caught, that makes of evening as it comes on
a personal arrival,
with something to it
of theatre, something of music.
In the beholder
a willing suspension.
The day like any other
day has no memorial but itself,
and needs none. But a star, the first
and only, wades in
as expected, out of the blue. To its kin,
the small-folk of the grass a tall night-walker.
In its wake
the satiny milk-white bridal
train of infinity. Or this dazzling
hand-fling and scruple
of it, the slow shower of the galaxies.
Aquarius II
Swimming through space
this morning with the light of the Pacific
on three walls and a feathery
pink in the sky as of an angel
event. Time that can be
the devil on occasions,
in weather such as this seems bountiful, pure
gift with nothing to pay, one breath
then the next freely delivered — at least for now
and here. Elsewhere the world
kindles and quakes, women bear
on their heads a hodful of it
from one side to the other of the globe, children cram
their belly with its mud,
in a lakeside wood
anemones feel their way out of the dark
and the first four downward
notes of K.581 take a second breath and swing
companionably upward — sheer miracle
or happy accident, one, like us,
of many. With a quiet thankyou to the planet
for snow, hoop pines, Mozart,
and you of course, and you, I leave the room
to its play, sacred perhaps, with salt and sun-motes.
Content, now the little drummer has made his ado, and fax
and fiddle have had their say, to call it
a night, call it a day.
Toccata II
A man sits pen in hand, paper
before him. What is on his mind
he will set down now, the word not to be spoken
lightly. As if of all
his words this was the one that touched the heart
of things and made touch
the last sense of all as it was the first, and the word
that speaks it loaded
with all that came strongest, a planet’s-worth
of sunlight, cooling green, the close comfort
of kind. It is the world he must set down
now, also lightly, each thing
changed yet as it was: in so many fumblings traced back
to the print of his fingertips still warm upon it, the warmth
that came when he was touched.
The last, as he sets it down, no more than
a breath, though much
that is still to be grasped may turn upon it.
At Lerici
for Carlo Olivieri
Darkly at anchor
in the roadstead, ships keep close
the secret of their journeys,
and the islands theirs.
History is made up
of nights such as this when little happens.
Lovers in their beds
whisper and touch, a new player
tumbles onto the scene.
Crickets strike up
a riff on the razzle-dazzle
of starlight, then stop.
The blissful friction and pointillist
throb of night music
is older, runs deeper
than speech. An electric
flicker the planet’s first
incidence of traffic.
Then heartbeat. Then thought.
We sit in the warm dark watching
container-ships ride
on blue-black moonlit glitters.
After long
journeying arrived at the high tide
of silence, after talk.
Acknowledgments
Poems from this collection have appeared in the following books and magazines, some of them as earlier versions:
Sky News (Rare Object 88, Vagabond Press, 2013) ‘At Lerici’, ‘Entreaty’, ‘Rondeau’, ‘A Parting Word’, ‘Shadow Play’, ‘Sky News’, ‘Persimmons: Campagnatico’, ‘Seven Faces of the Die’, ‘Ghost Town’, ‘Australia Day at Pennyroyal’, ‘Night Poem’.
The Monthly (December 2010) ‘A Touch of the Sun’.
Poems 1959–89 (UQP, 1992) ‘At Laterina’, ‘Haystacks’.
The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc., 2013) ‘At Lerici’, ‘Earth Hour’.
My thanks also to the Scottish Arts Council for the Muriel Spark International Fellowship 2008, and a month-long residence in Edinburgh and at Stromness, Orkney.