David Malouf - Earth Hour

like any other

armed camp, with

caution, one eye open

in the dark. Boughs vacant,

black, budded with ice.

Tufa-block walls

glisten with the track

of creatures of no substance.

Sluggish, damp

invisible sky-wrack.

We dig in,

prepared should things go bad

to dig ourselves out,

and might, given

the glare off so much whiteness,

go spare, save for the saving

grace, on bare

branches down there

in the mist, of luscious

red-orange, ripe-in-their-thin-skin

persimmons, pulpy

— transparent with frost.

Improbably festive

balloons — some

thirty, no thirty-one

winter suns. The air

throbs, glows bronze and sensual.

We count them, the days

of March. Considering April.

The carpenter has arrived bringing windows.

He unpacks them from the dark

of a van, carries them in,

stacks them slant against a wall.

They are blank and do not brighten

with dawn. No stars

pinpoint at nightfall

their squared-off polished depths.

I go at different hours

to consult them

for the view that might show in which direction

the house looks, or what

season is coming

to us over the hills.

The darkness of the tradesman’s

van refuses to lift. He has made windows

to a place I do not want

to go and will be back

on Friday to fit them.

I ordered and paid for this.

Below in a garden

thicket, out

of sight under moonstruck leaves, a scrap of dark

that sings. But no more dark,

because it is unseen and the night

so wide that surrounds it,

than the heart, which is just its size

in the body’s dark, and hidden.

Small miracles, both. Hour

on hour without cease,

assured, lightly insistent,

they beat against stillness.

I’m here. I’m still here.

Still now and listen.

Miss Mischa in her cool

reclusion curls on the mat.

Has a feel for

creaturely comforts and has sniffed out

this spot, though nothing

in nature or that the eye

can see marks it as special.

The sort of animal

warmth that a cat

is drawn to in a cold house; as if

the sun, centuries back,

in a burst of candescence,

had danced there, and the glow of

its presence can still be felt,

or a young god happening by had stopped

a moment to shake

a pebble from his shoe, and found

his soul struck by a mortal

dweller of the place, and the bewilderment

of instant attraction, eternal

loss, still draws him back.

Miss M. has found it out. Basks

in the sun’s warmth even

at midnight; dreams of a cat

that sleeps inside the sleep

of one who, without waking,

from his tall cloud leans godlike

down and lovingly strokes her.

The Cup

In the one cup

darkness, espresso black

night, its distances,

its brief proximities,

and the arrayment

of sunlight on a sill.

I drink at the open window

heady mouthfuls

of breath, as the body,

guardian angel

of the ordinary

and of this world, reassembles

what sleep for a time

has scattered; all

the parts and occasions

of a singular story

on the instant

recalled as if new given.

An intimation of the Eternal

Return, or bitter-

sweet in the same cup, this draught

of absolute dark that shadow

— like we carry in us. Sometimes

lightly. Sometimes not.

Towards Midnight

Always at the margin

of a room, among the shreds

and shadows there, a stranger.

Upstart angel

of unease or mute disruption,

visitant lurker

with a knife for us, the killing

word we dare not speak.

Or blear-eyed, wayworn, waif-like,

the guest we have set

a place for, arriving

late for the feast.

The Rapture

The being seized

and taken.

The being

swept off your feet

by your own

breath;

the moment

and all

time no longer

on your hands.

A lightening. As if

in the nest of your palm,

an egg, its shell

as fragile and pale

blue as the sky

overhead, suddenly trembled

and cracked

open as your self

— containment might,

and you

staggered under the advent

of wings.

The loss of

gravity, the weight

— lessness of being

swept up and

taken,

less

a breaking than a breaking

out.

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.

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.

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