David Malouf - Earth Hour

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.

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 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.

‘Sit like an apple’, the Master grumps, and holds her

with an eye like God. She settles

in the green glade of her flesh. Gives up all thought

of her wet boots, or of hot drinks or handsprings, the animal

heat of her rain-damp skirt.

Considers herself anew as one of the crisp Calvados apples she can smell

in their dish on the dresser shelf. Lets the light-rimmed sunlit

roundness take her weight

and contain her. An isolate small

planet. Remote, green. Belonging neither

to the orchard bough it sprang from, the blossom it was,

nor to autumn or any other season. Simply

there in its ample still-life self-containment like an apple in a blue

dish on a dresser shelf in a room high up in

the twelfth arrondissement, under the eye

of the Lord God who will one day perhaps make an honest woman

of her. Not quite meaning to snatch his soul,

but making herself

in her stilled, eternal presence, real as an apple

to him, as his hand

moves through the quickened air towards our common

and garden-green beginnings. The taut round

of a belly. The swelling soft round of a thigh.

When roads become mirrors, who knows

where they lead? Destinations lie

on the far side of clouds and keep moving.

Turmoil: a universe

turned upside down and backwards, below

above, above and far-off under

foot. Waders, thigh-deep

in cirrus, practise a new mode of flying.

Slower. Without wings.

Begrimed, soaked, dripping,

angels take on

a second job as porters: two

with a sofa, one, arms raised, bears on his head a rare

four-legged domestic beast, a bentwood

side table; another, an old lady in a nightgown but not

perhaps in her perfect mind, who, rough-handled

with tough love, giggles to find herself

airborne and on the move — without weight and with the sky,

which is also moving, and fast,

beneath her — through a lightscape of the fallen,

or risen or still rising.

An antique

scene brought close. Inverted. Antipodean.

A world in panic flight

but casual. Half-comic. Out of whack.

Downhome and classic.

Unreal.

First paint me daylight

crystals of air

out of which an iceberg

builds. Add

in touches the arctic blue

of an eye, the fixed stare

of the ice-sheet across which

five trained snow-bound explorers

stagger, then the precise

degree of nothingness

where each one comes

to a standstill and drops.

You call this abstract?

What of the hand,

its blood-warmth as it grasps

the concept ‘absolute cold’?

What of the mind

that shapes what is still

air but on a snowflake’s

lacy geometry raises

a cliff tall as a sky

— scraper? What of the fear

— lessness of making Nothing

so actual that white

on white as we approach it,

our hearts are stopped

mid-sentence to marble?

At a stroke, on a breath.

I

That nothing is mere or only.

That not even white, seen

rightly, is without

its heat zones, gradations

of red, yellow, green,

or snow without its blue

occasions when birds fly

over, or skies change their thoughts,

to say nothing

of mind, its happy knack

of changing as it changes things

or warms to the matter.

Finding in breath

and sound-stuff much

that is more, not mere, and many,

not only. As a stretch