David Malouf - Earth Hour

Trees have their own lives, simple

if seasonally haunted;

in their branches the sky

— adventures of passing gods.

They make up the wood

we cannot see, and one

looks so much like the next that we

wonder what sense they have

of being what we would be

when nomad thoughts possess us, standing

in one place only with nowhere to go

but upwards or deeper.

They wear our rough hearts linked;

mute journals of what we felt,

avowals made

before rock and cloud as witness, X loves Y

forever. A promise kept

here and here only,

in their lives not ours, though the wound

still aches, in all weathers.

As long as

the stock keeps turning

over as long

as spring keeps knocking

on wood and willows bud

as long as

Jane and Jed and Lou are still rocking

on and have got

my number as long as

a wet weekend in bed

with you in chill November

just the two

of us and maybe Sting

as long

as long as a piece of string

Odes I, xxvii

I’m over it, the floral

tributes, fancy speeches.

Thank you but

the roses in that bouquet, so pretty

pink, will be ash-grey

by nightfall.

From now on

I’ll take life straight, no fuss,

no faddle. So fill

the wine-cup, boy, and stand

close by in the vine-leaves’ fretwork

sunset while I drink.

Odes II, ii

It’s the coin in use, the blade

in action that means business.

Stacked in a vault, locked up

in rifts in the Sierra,

all minerals are dross.

It’s the world’s big-time big spenders

who hog the news. Big bucks

stop nowhere. Endow a college, cast

a pearl, say La Peregrina,

to a call-girl or an ex.

Fortunes are hard to manage.

Far easier to rule

the Russias, take a bowl

of tea with a fat-cat Chairman,

bring Cuba to heel.

Greed is like dropsy;

the body bloats

then parches, feeds on itself,

hoards its toxic

water in hundredweights.

Is Nixon back? Do millions

flatter him and chatter

of History’s favourite son?

Well we dissent, and wish

that wise men would use better

terms. True honours rest,

the laurel, the diadem,

on the head that is not turned

by the flash-bulbs’ pop when Jackie

O descends on the room.

I’m like the king of a rain-soaked Low Country, young,

rich, effete, grown old before his time,

and bored, bored to extinction by his kennel

of fawning grey preceptors, his dogs, his roe-deer,

his falcon, all his beasts, and the people howling

for bread at his forecourt gate. Even Sir Fool,

his shadow once and bawdy dwarf familiar,

now stales, a peevish sad-sack. The great bed

where he’s laid, with its fleur-de-lys, has become his tomb,

and the ladies who surround it, for whom a prince

is Bold always, or Fair, as they toy with a tie-string

here, an eyelet there, raise in this death’s head

no spark of the old quick leap to concupiscence,

nor can alchemists, as they fossick and assay

his stools, sniff out the prime cause of corruption

in him, or bloodbaths, in the high Roman style

passed down by senile tyrants, revive in organ

and nerve dulled to stupor a warmth past all

rekindling, manly vigours now long spent.

Not blood swells these writhen veins but the green putrescent

slime that clogs the slow tide of Lethe.

After Charles Baudelaire, ‘Spleen’

All’s dashed in me, all’s dished and done,

bold schemes, fond hopes, my long dispute

with a sick world, one man’s concern

for his own and others’ troubles. Death

is the next big thing. It’s all I’ve got

to live for now. To live with.

E finita la commedia, last lines,

then curtains! The public, my loyal fans,

with a yawn troop home to supper. A chorus

or two, a pint or two — ‘The ladies,

bless ’em!’ — a few good laughs. It’s not

so dumb to love life. He got it pat,

that hero that Homer praised. ‘The puniest

live petit-bourgeois dormouse

in Dudsville SA is in better shape

than I am, Great Achilles. First

in rank of the resident zombies. Top

dog in this dog-house, Hades.’

After Heinrich Heine, ‘Der Scheidende’

The likeness so close between them: both

youthful, both manly fair; only one

is paler — more strict I’d say, more aloof,

more lordly. When the first drew near, how sweet

his smile, his gaze how gentle. The wreath

he wore when his brow touched mine gave off

a musky odour — poppies, but not

for long, alas, drove out the pain

I’m racked with. To be well again, quite well,

the other more stern unsmiling twin

must come and with lowered torch light up

the path that leads underground. To sleep

is good. Death’s better. Best of all

were never to have been born.

After Heinrich Heine, ‘Morphine’

The Book of Grievances has its roots

in singular griefs. A man keeps his list,

his hit list. Writes down times

and places where the knife went in, was twisted. Writes

it down in the ample folder of

his heart as we call it, to be underlined

in red and revisited. The gun he keeps

oiled is also there in the heart’s darkness.

He takes it up and aims. Somebody falls, only he knows who

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.

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.

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.

Approaching February