David Malouf - Earth Hour

of fallow under ice has overtones

of clover and poppy,

and the sound for, the colour

of these, makes of the still earth’s airy

stillness a slow dance; and of

its silence, as the rustling

of silk in a darkened room makes the deepest dark

chromatic, a blind man’s music.

II

Not a leaf, not a stitch

of our own. How stark we are,

how needy.

But a pencil line

on a blank page will conjure

space, volume, prospective

horizons to make for.

Kids’ stuff but a beginning.

Between our fingers

and the stars all the room

in the world. And needy

is good, and bafflement.

On all fours then upright

— unsteady we set out.

What we meet

on the way, before

we get there, is the story.

And we never do

get there. Needless to say.

III

for Jaya Savige

At hazard, whether or not

we know it and wherever

we go. Without it no

surprise, no enchantment.

There is law enough all about us

in almanack and season, anniversary

days come round, the round earth’s carnivale

of chimes and recessionals.

Good to be included

there. Good also what is not

fixed or sure even,

the second breath of being

here when the May-bush

snows in mid-September, as giddy

happenstance leads us

this way into

a lost one’s arms, or that way

deeper into the maze.

IV

This side and the other

of silence: white

noise. The snowy

infinite beyond

Happens and Becomes where nothing is

to be counted on,

and nothing

is accounted as loss.

V

That this is our element:

a world of nine-day

wonders and other gaudies;

of road-show

rowdies in passage

from Here to Nowhere; a cortège

of all that is of flesh

and air permitted its fol-

derol and brief grandezza.

To swank, prance, cartwheel

and flare before our eyes

a moment, before it dies.

VI

The Wager

In the air a flipped

coin (and so many

breaths suspended on it)

that never comes down.

VII

for Andrea Stretton (1952–2007)

Sprigs, outbreaks of bloom, the everywhere

greenness of grass,

as the dead come to air again

under fencewire that holds nothing

in.

On slopes in sunlight

cow-parsley, lad’s love,

speedwell, baby’s breath, weeds

of a planet that is all

abundance and consummate

waste and replenishment.

The riot and sweet rot

of what’s to come.

The life beyond corruption.

Earlier than the sun

and stronger, our need

for comfort in the dark.

Always on cue

with its doodle-do and smallgrass recitativo

we take the sun

as given, its shadow-play

of slats on a bed-sheet

(a hot thought

in a hot shade) semaphore

to the blood that knows nothing

of distinctions, dawn

from dusk, May from December.

Or in a deck-chair within sight of

the road,

and of rain-pool and melon-flower,

what sunlight

is to old bones.

Asides of self:

verb-trash and noun-mash,

heroic strut and banter, till the eyelids

come down, not in finale

but the weariness that follows

faint applause and truce.

All actors know it, the ill

fit at knee and elbow

of another’s skin. Choose silence, a sunlit

corner of afternoon,

till rabbits, tumbled from hats

that hang in the hall, resume, set on

by starshine, their antic

affray, their shadow

— play, out on the lawn.

An excitement in the grass, tiny noises,

cries from underground.

Nothing on a grand scale.

But as a likeness

caught, that makes of evening as it comes on

a personal arrival,

with something to it

of theatre, something of music.

In the beholder

a willing suspension.

The day like any other

day has no memorial but itself,

and needs none. But a star, the first

and only, wades in

as expected, out of the blue. To its kin,

the small-folk of the grass a tall night-walker.

In its wake

the satiny milk-white bridal

train of infinity. Or this dazzling

hand-fling and scruple

of it, the slow shower of the galaxies.

Swimming through space

this morning with the light of the Pacific

on three walls and a feathery

pink in the sky as of an angel

event. Time that can be

the devil on occasions,

in weather such as this seems bountiful, pure

gift with nothing to pay, one breath

then the next freely delivered — at least for now

and here. Elsewhere the world

kindles and quakes, women bear

on their heads a hodful of it

from one side to the other of the globe, children cram

their belly with its mud,

in a lakeside wood

anemones feel their way out of the dark

and the first four downward

notes of K.581 take a second breath and swing

companionably upward — sheer miracle

or happy accident, one, like us,

of many. With a quiet thankyou to the planet

for snow, hoop pines, Mozart,

and you of course, and you, I leave the room

to its play, sacred perhaps, with salt and sun-motes.

Content, now the little drummer has made his ado, and fax

and fiddle have had their say, to call it

a night, call it a day.

A man sits pen in hand, paper

before him. What is on his mind

he will set down now, the word not to be spoken

lightly. As if of all

his words this was the one that touched the heart

of things and made touch

the last sense of all as it was the first, and the word

that speaks it loaded

with all that came strongest, a planet’s-worth

of sunlight, cooling green, the close comfort

of kind. It is the world he must set down

now, also lightly, each thing

changed yet as it was: in so many fumblings traced back

to the print of his fingertips still warm upon it, the warmth

that came when he was touched.

The last, as he sets it down, no more than

a breath, though much

that is still to be grasped may turn upon it.

Darkly at anchor

in the roadstead, ships keep close

the secret of their journeys,

and the islands theirs.

History is made up

of nights such as this when little happens.

Lovers in their beds

whisper and touch, a new player

tumbles onto the scene.

Crickets strike up

a riff on the razzle-dazzle

of starlight, then stop.

The blissful friction and pointillist

throb of night music

is older, runs deeper

than speech. An electric

flicker the planet’s first

incidence of traffic.

Then heartbeat. Then thought.

We sit in the warm dark watching

container-ships ride

on blue-black moonlit glitters.

After long

journeying arrived at the high tide

of silence, after talk.

Poems from this collection have appeared in the following books and magazines, some of them as earlier versions: