David Malouf - Earth Hour

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.

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.

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,