David Malouf - Earth Hour

David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. Since ‘Interiors’ in Four Poets , 1962, he has published poetry, novels and short stories, essays, opera librettos and a play, and has been widely translated. In 2000 he was the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His last volume of new poetry was Typewriter Music (UQP, 2007) and his selected poems, Revolving Days, was published in 2008. He lives in Sydney.

One of those sovereign days that might seem never

intended for the dark: the sea’s breath deepens

from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,

heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,

we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll

enchanted through its moods as if we shared

its gift and were immortal, till something in us

snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness

than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror’s lens,

we’re struck by the prospect of a counterworld

to so much stir, such colour; loved animal

forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to

when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward

children of a green original anti

— Eden from which we’ve never been expelled.

Not all come to it

but some do, and serenely.

No saying

what party they are of

or what totem

animal walks with them.

Tobias the street-smart

teen has his screwball dog.

For some it is stillness,

or within the orders

of humdrum

the nudge, not so gentle,

of circumstance. For some

the fall across their path

at noon of a shadow

where none should be,

for some their own

shadow seen as not.

For some a wound, some

a gift; and for some

the wound is the gift.

When they

too become one

of the Grateful Dead, it is

the silence they leave,

in a bowl, in a book,

that speaks and may join us;

its presence,

waist high at our side,

a commotion, a companionable

cloud with the shape and smell of

an unknown familiar, call it

an angel. At his nod,

the weather we move in

shifts, the wind changes.

Catching

the mutinous struck infant

in us on the off-chance

smiling.

A day at the end of winter. Two young men,

hooded against the silvery thin rain

that lights the forest boughs, are making towards

a town that at this distance never gets closer.

One of them, not me, as he turns, impatient

for the other to catch up, wears even now when I meet his face

in dreams, the look of one already gone, already gone

too far into the forest; as when, last night

in sleep, I looked behind me out of the queue for an old movie and you

were there, hood thrown back, your stack

of dirty-blond hair misted with sky-wrack, and when

my heart leapt to greet you, No, your glance

in the old conspiratorial way insisted,

Don’t speak, don’t recognise me. So I did not

turn again but followed down the track,

to where, all those years back, you turned

and waited; and we went on

together at the bare end of winter, breath from our mouths

still clouding the damp air, our footsteps loud

on the rainlit cobbled street, down into Sèvres.

Out of such and such and so much bric-a-brac.

Cut-glass atomisers, An Evening in Paris

stain, circa ’53, on taffeta.

Four napkin-rings, initialled. Playing cards, one pack

with views of Venice, the other the Greek key pattern

that unlocked the attic door our house

in strict truth did not run to. A wrist

arched above early Chopin: bridge across water

to a lawn where finch and cricket take what’s given

as gospel, and even the domino I lost

in the long grass by the passion-vine

fits white to white, four voices in close canon.

Where in all this are the small, hot, free

— associating selves, a constellation

of shoes, sweat, teacups, charms, magnetic debris?

In the ghost of a fingerprint all

that touched us, all that we touched, still glowing actual.

Before I had words

at hand to call the world up

in happenings on a page, there were the dots, a buckshot scatter

of stars, black in a white sky. Behind them, teasingly hidden,

the company of creatures.

What I’d set

my heart on, spellbound, snowbound

in a wood, was a unicorn, shyly invisible but yearning, even

at the risk of being taken,

to be seen and recognised.

What I got

was the dwarfs, Grumpy and Doc;

Spitfires, tanks, a drunken jalopy. I’m still waiting, as star-dots click

and connect, to look up and find myself, with nothing I need say

or do, in its magic presence,

as from the far

far off of our separate realms, two rare

imaginary beasts approach and meet. On the breath that streams from

our mouths, a wordless out-of-the-body singing. On the same

note. From the same sheet.

After the Age of Innocence, golden brawlers

in the arms of demigods,

we arrive at the Age of Reason, credulous poor

monsters led by a dream-team

in a mad dance down loud streets into quicksand.

After that it’s the Age

of the Seven Pills daily. Small mercies

restore us. Bayside air

salt-sweet in our mouths again, we set out for

the corner shop, and by some happy chance

it is still there, the same old woman keeps it.

When the doorbell shakes her

from sleep, through wisps of grey

smoke from her asthma-papers, ‘What’s it to be, what’s your poison

this time, love?’ she wheezes.

Is it a riddle? If it is

I’m lost. The ancient

grins, abides the answer. I clench my fist on the hot penny

I’ve brought; only now, a lifetime

later, find my tongue:

If luck is with me

today, on my long walk home, may no

black cat cross my path, no sweet-talking stranger,

no thief, no mischief-maker,

no trafficker in last words waylay me.

Seeking a mind in the machine, and in constellations, however

distant, a waft of breath. Re-reading space

shrapnel as chromosome bee-swarms, hauling infinity

in so that its silence, a stately contre-dance to numbers,

hums, and flashy glow-stones bare of wild-flower

or shrub, scent, bird-song, hoof-print, heartbeat,

or bones (ah, bones!) are no longer alien or lonely

out there in the airless cold as we prepare

to lie out beneath them. Even as children we know

what cold is, and aloneness, absence of touch. We seed

the night sky with stories like our own: snub-breasted

blond topless Lolitas laying out samples

of their charms beside dimpled ponds, barefoot un-bearded

striplings ready with bow and badinage, pursued

and lost and grieved over by inconsolable immortals

and set eternally adrift, a slow cascade

of luminary dust above the earth, with the companionable