Taste is the name
of things in a new language. Plain
fare, though we sit
down as to a feast.
At Skara Brae
Whistled up out of the dark,
and braw and bonny,
the old ones young
as they were again, clod
— clumsy in wellingtons,
but light as they go,
in homespun shirt and pinny,
vaulting the windrows;
at thump in the shining
gap between tomorrow
and yesterday, calling
wet seed to furrow
and blossom to bough.
The big wheel tilts, one moment
in sunshine, the next
in darkness six feet under
a field where grass-heads whisper
together under the scythe.
The chill air wraithed
with the heat of their bodies’
breath, as braw and bonny
they change, change partners,
in a slow dance with earth.
A Green Miscellany
Our Earthly Paradise: orchard blossom out of Asia
melts on the tongue as flakes of cherry strudel; the New World crams
our mouths with kartoffelsalat. No, not nature but a green
miscellany, our years-in-the-making masterpiece, as grain
on grainfield, line by line of a mute Georgics, leaf by leaf
— plane, willow, almond, palm — we labour to leave the centuries
a new and nearer version of pastoral, the diaspora
repealed in which even plants fled to the four ends of the earth,
and Eden recreated. It is making still. Even New South Wales
is one of its scattered seedbeds ploughed anew for its floreat.
Macquarie’s five towns find, after twenty decades, the Home Counties
their names are homesick for. On Windsor Common, St Matthew’s sun-parched
colonial parterre, in Richmond’s water-meadows fringed
with poplars of Lombardy, the past awaits us. The law translated
more than human riffraff. Smart newly-weds who grub out all
the old-world garden shrubs and their sick fables, Olympian lust
or sin, to make a wilderness hard won from trim suburban
perches, lie down nightly in a forest, feel the ice-sheet
clink under their chin. Another garden is unlocked
in this and trusted to us. Small plots are watered in the shadow
of blackened chimney-stacks by men in shirtsleeves between shifts.
Sunken Garden
A day already
downstream of the sun
and a country of its moment
of measure. Out of slack and straggle brought
into line, into curve and square
as pleasance, and let go.
Grey slab fence-post
and rail, sagged and split. In swamp water
bristleheads of straw.
And these half-dozen
flags that raise their blue out of the mould?
Of a sunken garden
remainders. Of the blue skirts of girls
as they sweep towards occasions,
or from them, reminders.
Barefoot
on grass, children at leapfrog, or practising
the breathlessness of statues
here, when there were lawns.
The Bird-cages in Angel Place
The bird-cages in Angel Place
are empty of angels, as they are
of parakeet and songbird, their flight
into silence recorded,
Golden Warbler, Regent Honeyeater,
Superb Fairy-wren,
in grave plaques, buffed granite,
in the pavement underfoot.
Should we assume
a habitat forever
lost where once they were
our common and garden
companions, or as eternity
puzzles itself out,
a time still to come when all
the cage doors will fly open and a dazzling
emptiness break loose,
a philharmonic
consort of tumblers
in air, with viol and panpipe
and heartbeat and clamorous
wingbeat reclaiming
the currency of daylight
traffic. In blazon
and flash, the clarion
colours restored
of empery and dominion.
Dog Park
Trees of a dozen shades, all of them native,
none from the same
habitat or region, though the breezes visit them equally,
and the bees. Free access
also to civil beasts, the preened
and petted that when they heel
and prance are ghost-dancers on the feet of sleeping wolves.
The scent trail across country blurs and is lost
at a boundary fence. Communication
is minimal, the greeting
codes more intimate-curious among
the creatures, who know
no shame and are free to follow
their noses into places better not named
or noticed. We have all come a long way
to get here, the memory
of meadow-shine a green
reminder of what we were, what they
were, how we have lived and learned from
each other, and who it was that emerged
as the namers and keepers. Long-sighted stargazers, herders
of space into viable chunks, moody diviners
of closeness and the degrees
of melancholy distance, with all
that ensued as entailment:
dog-tag, poop-scoop,
dog-whistle; the angel gate
of exile. Beginning with our own.
The Worm’s-eye View
Of what close up is freaked and freckled, riven
from the fresh thumbprint concordance
of what might make it perfect. The vandal’s
mark. In random speck and swell a worm’s-eye
deckle-edged revision. Mayhem. Maul.
From far off all
looks soulful, the monastic
hush and classic calm
of a vast library sleeping, leaf on leaf.
One style of beauty.
This other’s of a more fretful sort. Unfixed from
its law, the green shoot withers. Small mouths take
in, pour out sticky web and spitball.
Unmaking, or with saw and riddle making
their own thwart commentary on the sacred text.
Night Poem
The night poem writes itself
in the long middle watch; turns up on a notepad on the night table, site
of happy collisions,
stones at a cracking pace that skip skip skip to take
the shine off glassy mornings. A shot at
the sorrowful exactitudes, where if and if only
are shifts in a plot, some of them real
disasters. The night
poem, like the night, has a habit
of slipping away, of creeping back under
a stone in the boneyard, into a mouth
whose silence is a black joke, a deadpan
tale told among drifters on the high plains of sleep.
A leaf, a leaflet blown in
at dawn out of border country.
Shy Gifts
Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not
even know we’re here. Windfalls, scantlings.
Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a row
of puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hiding
among newsprint that has other news to tell.
In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catch
the eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,
unblinking. It looks right through me, recognising
what? Wisely mistrustful but unwisely
impulsive as we are, we take these givings
as ours and meant for us — why else so leap
to receive them? — and go home lighter
of step to the table set, the bed turned down, the book
laid open under the desk-lamp, pages astream
with light like angels’ wings, arched for take-off.