David Malouf
Earth Hour
About the Author
David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. Since ‘Interiors’ in Four Poets, 1962, he has published poetry, novels and short stories, essays, opera librettos and a play, and has been widely translated. In 2000 he was the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His last volume of new poetry was Typewriter Music (UQP, 2007) and his selected poems, Revolving Days, was published in 2008. He lives in Sydney.
Aquarius
One of those sovereign days that might seem never
intended for the dark: the sea’s breath deepens
from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,
heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,
we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
enchanted through its moods as if we shared
its gift and were immortal, till something in us
snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror’s lens,
we’re struck by the prospect of a counterworld
to so much stir, such colour; loved animal
forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
children of a green original anti
— Eden from which we’ve never been expelled.
Radiance
Not all come to it
but some do, and serenely.
No saying
what party they are of
or what totem
animal walks with them.
Tobias the street-smart
teen has his screwball dog.
For some it is stillness,
or within the orders
of humdrum
the nudge, not so gentle,
of circumstance. For some
the fall across their path
at noon of a shadow
where none should be,
for some their own
shadow seen as not.
For some a wound, some
a gift; and for some
the wound is the gift.
When they
too become one
of the Grateful Dead, it is
the silence they leave,
in a bowl, in a book,
that speaks and may join us;
its presence,
waist high at our side,
a commotion, a companionable
cloud with the shape and smell of
an unknown familiar, call it
an angel. At his nod,
the weather we move in
shifts, the wind changes.
Catching
the mutinous struck infant
in us on the off-chance
smiling.
Retrospect
A day at the end of winter. Two young men,
hooded against the silvery thin rain
that lights the forest boughs, are making towards
a town that at this distance never gets closer.
One of them, not me, as he turns, impatient
for the other to catch up, wears even now when I meet his face
in dreams, the look of one already gone, already gone
too far into the forest; as when, last night
in sleep, I looked behind me out of the queue for an old movie and you
were there, hood thrown back, your stack
of dirty-blond hair misted with sky-wrack, and when
my heart leapt to greet you, No, your glance
in the old conspiratorial way insisted,
Don’t speak, don’t recognise me. So I did not
turn again but followed down the track,
to where, all those years back, you turned
and waited; and we went on
together at the bare end of winter, breath from our mouths
still clouding the damp air, our footsteps loud
on the rainlit cobbled street, down into Sèvres.
Toccata
Out of such and such and so much bric-a-brac.
Cut-glass atomisers, An Evening in Paris
stain, circa ’53, on taffeta.
Four napkin-rings, initialled. Playing cards, one pack
with views of Venice, the other the Greek key pattern
that unlocked the attic door our house
in strict truth did not run to. A wrist
arched above early Chopin: bridge across water
to a lawn where finch and cricket take what’s given
as gospel, and even the domino I lost
in the long grass by the passion-vine
fits white to white, four voices in close canon.
Where in all this are the small, hot, free
— associating selves, a constellation
of shoes, sweat, teacups, charms, magnetic debris?
In the ghost of a fingerprint all
that touched us, all that we touched, still glowing actual.
Dot Poem, the Connections
Before I had words
at hand to call the world up
in happenings on a page, there were the dots, a buckshot scatter
of stars, black in a white sky. Behind them, teasingly hidden,
the company of creatures.
What I’d set
my heart on, spellbound, snowbound
in a wood, was a unicorn, shyly invisible but yearning, even
at the risk of being taken,
to be seen and recognised.
What I got
was the dwarfs, Grumpy and Doc;
Spitfires, tanks, a drunken jalopy. I’m still waiting, as star-dots click
and connect, to look up and find myself, with nothing I need say
or do, in its magic presence,
as from the far
far off of our separate realms, two rare
imaginary beasts approach and meet. On the breath that streams from
our mouths, a wordless out-of-the-body singing. On the same
note. From the same sheet.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
Entreaty
After the Age of Innocence, golden brawlers
in the arms of demigods,
we arrive at the Age of Reason, credulous poor
monsters led by a dream-team
in a mad dance down loud streets into quicksand.
After that it’s the Age
of the Seven Pills daily. Small mercies
restore us. Bayside air
salt-sweet in our mouths again, we set out for
the corner shop, and by some happy chance
it is still there, the same old woman keeps it.
When the doorbell shakes her
from sleep, through wisps of grey
smoke from her asthma-papers, ‘What’s it to be, what’s your poison
this time, love?’ she wheezes.
Is it a riddle? If it is
I’m lost. The ancient
grins, abides the answer. I clench my fist on the hot penny
I’ve brought; only now, a lifetime
later, find my tongue:
If luck is with me
today, on my long walk home, may no
black cat cross my path, no sweet-talking stranger,
no thief, no mischief-maker,
no trafficker in last words waylay me.
Whistling in the Dark
Seeking a mind in the machine, and in constellations, however
distant, a waft of breath. Re-reading space
shrapnel as chromosome bee-swarms, hauling infinity
in so that its silence, a stately contre-dance to numbers,
hums, and flashy glow-stones bare of wild-flower
or shrub, scent, bird-song, hoof-print, heartbeat,
or bones (ah, bones!) are no longer alien or lonely
out there in the airless cold as we prepare