out.
At Laterina
for Jeffrey Smart (1921–2013)
This waiting is no sweat. Centuries pass
unnoticed here; it’s days that are tedious:
worn flagstones rubbed by skirt-hems, cart-wheels, clouds
of starlings, the boys with talent picked off
in gang-wars, gone in mobs to colour a wall
for some grim Generalissimo Lord Toad
of the Marshes, or further still to paint a prairie
hamlet in Iowa etruscan red.
The tiglio is in flower — it must be June
come round. In every street down from the station
in every village in Tuscany your journey,
this month, ends with the same sweet loaded breath,
a bee-note in the head that busies on
to a known tune, some workshop where the world
is one with our five senses. Was it always
like this? Did native sons high on a scaffold
in Piedmont, streaked with smuts in a smoky canefield
near Innisfail, North Queensland, feel the planet
shrink in their memory of it, the streets, the decades
one as each June makes them when we catch
on a gust of heated air, as at a key-change,
its green, original fragrance? — an ecstatic climbing
down and coming to earth, in their fist this dirt
a province, thick in their heads a local tongue.
Drive slowly, Jeff, take care. I’m settled, back
to a limestone wall, in the dense light of tiglio.
Whole centuries pass, the arras swings, gilt tassels
puff and trumpet dust; the oracles
of life and death, arrayed in the same shirt-sleeves,
lean down. Betrayed by audible soft collisions
of air with air, their cool mouths bring us silence.
We miss the words, old friend, but catch the sense.
All Souls
Shadow of leaves on a blind.
Ghostly, backlit,
stirred by a breath. Earth
lovers come back to bed,
to their own kind
drawn, the living, the dead
sharers of occasions.
Reclaimed the ecstatic
minute. Mouth, warm belly
within touch, reach
again. As if with a swing
summer was back, the long dark
done with, and nothing
lost or come too late.
Earth Hour
It is on our hands, it is in our mouths at every breath, how not
remember? Called back
to nights when we were wildlife, before kindling
or kine, we sit behind moonlit
glass in our McMansions, cool
millions at rehearsal
here for our rendezvous each with his own
earth hour.
We are feral
at heart, unhouseled creatures. Mind
is the maker, mad for light, for enlightenment, this late admission
of darkness the cost, and the silence
on our tongue as we count the hour down — the coin we bring,
long hoarded just for this — the extended cry of our first coming
to this ambulant, airy
Schatzkammer and midden, our green accommodating tomb.
A Green Miscellany
Good Friday, Flying West
This knot the breeze unpicks. Our jet-stream flaps
and ripples, lays a trail
of thunder over the earth. Stars
dissolve, the pluck and flow of the planet takes us
back, half a day
or centuries; driftways
descend from Mt Ararat. Unrisen
ahead the dazzling dinning bee-hive cities.
Museums not yet open. Artefacts
in the minds of town-dwellers
waiting to take shape
at dawn: the pitcher swelling
in shadow on a shelf, the bowl
of wheatgrains on its altar still unbroken
Eocene clay, undreamed of in the earth.
The Far View
Clearly at this height the earth unravels
its secrets: cloudstuff melting, smoke
from the tripod’s mouth, a fume of laurel leaves
and the long glimpses forward
to a boar’s-tusk rough-rock landscape
utterly transmuted. Oakwoods
level out, the gods
go underground as hot tracks in the mind
are criss-criss-crossed with glittering plough-furrows
this morning, a doomsday map
of one-street villages
laid out under the crops,
lanes that deepen as lives go on in separation
to bone-park, cattle-market. They are there
still, unseen from highways at eye level,
a future shaped by Land Acts
not yet formulated, rippling the brow
of labourers at dawn who wade through cinquefoil stars towards it.
Cider bubbles climb
from blossom centuries off, a blade makes passage
for nuances of green. Field
after field cuts back
the dark in the mind of hungry generations. Enlightenment!
Bread in the mouth, a sharp stone in the fist.
Haystacks
The whole field stalk on stalk, scythed, gathered, stacked
in conical, low-pitched ricks, loose monuments
to use and frugal plenty. A platoon of pup-tents
on hard ground, and those whose last sleep rocked
them clean out of their skins, whom midnight drank
through straws or whistled tunes on, gone through the needle’s
eye these haycocks hid. They make arrangements,
with red, with mauve, with green; approach such colour
as a spyglass finds when sun with dry thatch meddles,
or acid with blood, implausible hot pink,
the tin-sheet breath that sheds throw off combusting
at noon. Bundles of antique spills imagine
a life in the field again, pitched bale, heaped barrow.
Each straw sounds with its own voice, re-enlisting
in the loud ruck of things. Bent scarlet backs
unhump and ease off indigo. In row
on row, blond shock-heads dazzle, a world at dawn.
The one side sleet, the other sun-burst yellow.
Blenheim Park
This green park might be nature as
we dream it: a stand
of shade-trees, level grass, cattle grazing
peacefully as shadows
enter the slow mouths
of centuries this still untroubled forenoon.
In fact a battle plan
is laid out here. Thousands
of dead under the topsoil
in High Germany
stand upright still in lines as in the rising
groundfog of dawn,
the entire battle-order as it formed
in the Duke’s head plainly visible
but still at this distance;
the first musket not yet smoking, the breath
of whole battalions held
in a green pause as the Commander’s raised hand
freezes. No one
squeezes an index finger, no one falls. Cattle tow
their shadows through the lines, birds
dip in and out, flies tumble. The dead, dismissed
from history, go over
to nature, striding tall over the lawn.
Cuisine
What magic’s here? Unique
ephemeral abracadabra
of whipped-up light-as-air
— on-the-tongue unstable Nature
reorganised, translated;
matter for mouths that is not speech.
On our lips the syllables
reshape themselves to cherry,
avocado, apple;
in the sweet flesh-fact of
a hand to mouth existence
grow round on their consonants.
A spell reversed. The garden
dissolves, goes back to breath.