Thou perceivest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours;
And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,
Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands Its ever-during doors . . .
BLAKE, Milton (fo. 31, II. 47—50)
The flower begins in the dark
where life is not.
Death has a word to speak
and the flower begins.
How small, how closely bound
in nothing’s net
the word waits in the ground
for the cloak earth spins.
The root goes down in the night
and from the night’s mud
the unmade, the inchoate
starts to take shape and rise.
The blind, the upward hand
clenches its bud.
What message does death send
from the grave where he lies?
Open, green hand, and give
the dark gift you hold.
Oh wild mysterious gold!
Oh act of passionate love!
You who were the snake hidden under my house,
the breath of the bushfire—
are you come to take me again like a storm in the night,
oh storm of my desire?
Are you come to take me like a knife in the breast
after this silent century?
You will find me this time lying alone.
It has been a long time you have left me with the rose-tree,
the wandering mist and the stone.
Lay down your fire beside my frost again,
against my stone your blade.
I have been too long alone in the drought and the rain—
it is all true as you said.
Come now and take me—
dig with the blade of your heart into the grave and wake me,
and this time you will find me lying alone.
I have been here too long with the white rose-tree,
the wandering mist and the stone.
Are you one of the old dead, whisperer under my feet?
I stamp on your shallow earth
like a red bird, my song is the last message of love,
which is the news of death.
Now I shall eat even your white roses, and eat
the dry moss on your stone.
Neither love nor death come to the dead, nor does flesh
grow on the bared bone.
But look, I am beautiful, I dance on your grave
like a lover’s ghost.
I dance with your tree of roses, I whirl my blade
till they fall into black dust.
And though I am not your lover and am not love
I shall set before I am gone
a kiss on the rose-root to travel down to your breast;
the last message of love, the fire’s black stain
to wear like a badge over your white breastbone.
Cruel was the steel in the hand that split my sleep
and branded me with pain.
Why did I not lie for ever out of time’s way,
cold, quiet and deep?
Now I am delivered to the fire again
and set naked in the track of merciless day
for the years to fret me, those instruments of love
that will eat my stone away.
You, the poor nakedness that lies beneath—
the bone that love left bare—
I hear you call on him, the terrible one,
the eater even of death.
If I were hidden in earth, I should lie quiet there
and forget the summoning cry of the wild sun,
and forget the fire that would lay open my heart
for love to tear.
Why can you not lie quiet as the knife
that rots beside your bone?
It is because the stone that life has once possessed
is ever starved for life.
And that is why I am afraid of the stab of the sun
and the rain’s hands beating my breast.
Fire, do not open my heart. I do not wish to wake
to the cruel day of love. Leave me my rest.
The dried body of winter is hard to kill.
Frost crumbles the dead bracken, greys the old grass,
and the great hemisphere of air goes flying
barren and cold from desert or polar seas
tattering fern and leaf. By the sunken pool
the sullen sodom-apple grips his scarlet fruit.
Spring, returner, knocker at the iron gates,
why should you return? None wish to live again.
Locked in our mourning, in our sluggish age,
we stand and think of past springs, of deceits not yet forgotten.
Then we answered you in youth and joy; we threw
open our strongholds and hung our walls with flowers.
Do not ask us to answer again as then we answered.
For it is anguish to be reborn and reborn:
at every return of the overmastering season
to shed our lives in pain, to waken into the cold,
to become naked, while with unbearable effort
we make way for the new sap that burns along old channels—
while out of our life’s substance, the inmost of our being,
form those brief flowers, those sacrifices, soon falling,
which spring the returner demands, and demands for ever.
Easier, far easier, to stand with downturned eyes
and hands hanging, to let age and mourning cover us
with their dark rest, heavy like death, like the ground
from which we issued and towards which we crumble.
Easier to be one with the impotent body of winter,
and let our old leaves rattle on the wind’s currents—
to stand like the rung trees whose boughs no longer murmur
their foolish answers to spring; whose blossoms now are
the only lasting flowers, the creeping lichens of death.
Spring, impatient, thunderer at the doors of iron,
we have no songs left. Let our boughs be silent.
Hold back your fires that would sear us into flower again,
and your insistent bees, the messengers of generation.
Our bodies are old as winter and would remain in winter.
So the old trees plead, clinging to the edge of darkness.
But round their roots the mintbush makes its buds ready,
and the snake in hiding feels the sunlight’s finger.
The snake, the fang of summer, beauty’s double meaning,
shifts his slow coils and feels his springtime hunger.
Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
I looked and saw under the moon’s cold sheet
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;
and the small trees on their uncoloured slope
like poetry moved, articulate and sharp
and purposeful under the great dry flight of air,
under the crosswise currents of wind and star.
Clench down your strength, box-tree and ironbark.
Break with your violent root the virgin rock.
Draw from the flying dark its breath of dew
till the unliving come to life in you.
Be over the blind rock a skin of sense,
under the barren height a slender dance . . .
I woke and saw the dark small trees that burn
suddenly into flowers more lovely than the white moon.
The witch has changed the Prince into a toad.
That slender girl, so thistledown, so fair,
that subtle face that stole him from his home,
that voice, that dance that brightened all the air—
how could they turn to darkness and a snare?
His feet are bound and cannot find his road.
He is held fast where help may never come.
The wizard chains the Princess in a swan.
Oh cruel snow, cold as your thousand years,
where only her sad eyes are golden still!
He holds a crystal jar to catch her tears;
her wings may beat the air, but no wind hears.
Now love will never trace where she is gone
or find the castle on the guarded hill.
The Prince remembers nothing but his pain:
how all the woven knowledge he had won
fell down like the quenched flame of a tall fire
into this tiny space—all life undone.
A toad hiding in crannies from the sun
with agony and a jewel for a brain
he has forgotten pity and desire.
The Princess thinks of nothing but her grief;
how she must crouch within that alien bone,
all wit and will subdued into a bird,
all memory, all hope and beauty gone.
She thrusts her beak into the lake alone
whose courtiers called her lips a scarlet leaf;
and she would mourn, if she but knew the word.
Only his kiss might strip her dark away.
Only her love might tear away his night.
Bird-eye and toad-eye blinded with thick tears
like rain on window-panes, forget their sight.
Prince, she is here, the beautiful, the bright—
Princess, your lover here is locked away.
Oh, do not weep alone your thousand years!
A god has chosen to be shaped in flesh.
He has put on the garment of the world.
A blind and sucking fish, a huddled worm,
he crouches here until his time shall come,
all the dimensions of his glory furled
into the blood and clay of the night’s womb.
Eternity is locked in time and form.
Within those mole-dark corridors of earth
how can his love be born and how unfold?
Eternal knowledge in an atom’s span
is bound by its own strength with its own chain.
The nerve is dull, the eyes are stopped with mould,
the flesh is slave of accident or pain.
Sunk in his brittle prison-cell of mud
the god who once chose to become a man
is now a man who must become a god.
Now all the years his bargain bought are gone.
Midnight is near, and soon the clock will strike,
the devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
What have his famous art and knowledge done
who feels within him rise the fiery lake?
He and the prince of hell are left alone.
Destruction eats the edges of his rage;
and soon the door will open on the night
his soul is bound to. Hear the angels first.
They step from light and darkness to the stage
to stand upon his left hand and his right.
What words shall he record on their last page?
But he’s for neither angel, being both.
They hold their quarrel only in his mind.
The clock will strike in him; it is his blood
that streams in heaven, his voice that speaks in wrath.
He is the door and that which waits behind.
In him divides the hell-and-heavenward path.
All this his magic taught him year by year,
until the contract seemed an antique dream
and he alone stood builder of his world.
But now the Time he made draws in too near
and whirls him from that world into its stream
that leads to midnight’s fall, and his old fear.
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me!
But they are weightless figures in a play.
He and his soul alone stand face to face,
and in all art there is no mystery
will change the stroke of midnight into day
or hold the door against the turning key.
Helen’s the picture of a girl who died,
the world he ruled, less than a cardboard scene—
and he, his instrument and victim both.
What is it triumphs, then, and what’s denied?
Darkness and light alone remain. Between
the trapped rat turns his head from side to side.
Is nothing left to say that might be worth
the breaking of his pride, that brittle sword?
The Lucifer whom he created makes
his knowledge useless and usurps his earth;
and he is snared between death’s final word
and the more difficult agony of rebirth.
He was the man they chose to fly alone
to search at the end of the sea for the Blessed Isles.
Often enough reported, still unknown,
they had survived untouched, forgotten, so late,
because of a lost chart and a million miles;
but now they must come under the care of the State.
It was he, the single-minded airman, whom they chose
to place on the maps again the land of the lost rose.
The mission was secret, but at the aerodrome
a great official waited among his guard,
gave him his orders and messages from home,
spoke of the honour to him of such a choice,
and hinted at promotion and reward.
Then from the amplifiers rang out the Voice—
the eternal indisputable Voice that everywhere
follows the farmer, the citizen, the man of the air—
The Voice that knows the mind of everyone,
and through the clustered trumpets in street and square
is daily magnified, cold and busy as a machine-gun
with bulletin, prophecy, threat, denunciation—
“Here is a special message. One of our men of the air
is setting out today to an unmapped destination
to further the State’s plans. The people of the State will now
join their thoughts to wish him all that the fates allow.”
There were a million miles of sea and cloud.
The dials moved calmly, the polished instruments
followed instructions, the Voice in his ear was loud.
He hung on the Voice, a foetus hung on its cord.
Its level stream was rippled with incidents—
the presentation of a medal, a civil award,
a flash from a traitor’s trial, the sudden familiar noise
of a firing-party’s rifles, and again the Voice.
But up from the cloud-floor a forest began to grow—
branched and wonderful trees climbed dazzling in light,
thrusting him upwards. The plane scaled peaks of snow
so high that ice began to weight his wings
and he dived again into blinding moving white.
And now in that country of nothings shaped like things
the Voice faltered, fading to silence in his ear
and leaving him suddenly alone with fear.
O Lord of the terrors of silence, open your hand:
O Voice, return and fill my emptiness!
He dropped through mist treacherous as quicksand
where the voices of nothing wove their silent song.
He fought with the radio, trembling in distress,
but nothing was wrong, he could find nothing wrong.
Then from the floors of cloud he fell, and below
lay the lovely immaculate archipelago.
On the great breast-like curve of eternity
those islands hung like pearl. Their hills and shores
were shining shadows answered in a still sea.
Then he looked up before the plane, and found
the edge of the air—the cliff where time and cause
at eternity’s edge disputed their last ground.
He would turn back, but frightened and without a guide
his desperate hands were slow. The plane fell from the cliffside.
How appalling is the terror and the weight of love!
In the explosion of that instant’s revelation
the body is lost that washes under the wave
and all is lost but the knowledge of that death.
The islands of the saints stir not from contemplation.
Above their hills light blazes, and beneath
the angel clouds whose image fills the sea
the bones of the dead hold their vision of eternity.
These hills my father’s father stripped,
and beggars to the winter wind
they crouch like shoulders naked and whipped—
humble, abandoned, out of mind.
Of their scant creeks I drank once
and ate sour cherries from old trees
found in their gullies fruiting by chance.
Neither fruit nor water gave my mind ease.
I dream of hills bandaged in snow,
their eyelids clenched to keep out fear.
When the last leaf and bird go
let my thoughts stand like trees here.
Where now outside the weary house the pepperina,
that great broken tree, gropes with its blind hands
and sings a moment in the magpie’s voice, there he stood once,
that redhaired man my great-great-grandfather,
his long face amiable as an animal’s,
and thought of vines and horses.
He moved in that mindless country like a red ant,
running tireless in the summer heat among the trees—
the nameless trees, the sleeping soil, the original river—
and said that the eastern slope would do for a vineyard.
In the camp by the river they made up songs about him,
songs about the waggons, songs about the cattle,
songs about the horses and the children and the woman.
These were a dream, something strayed out of a dream.
They would vanish down the river, but the river would flow on,
under the river-oaks the river would flow on,
winter and summer would burn the grass white
or red like the red of the pale man’s hair.
In the camp by the river they made up those songs
and my great-great-grandfather heard them with one part of his mind.
And in those days
there was one of him and a thousand of them,
and in these days none are left—
neither a pale man with kangaroo-grass hair
nor a camp of dark singers mocking by the river.
And the trees and the creatures, all of them are gone.
But the sad river, the silted river,
under its dark banks the river flows on,
the wind still blows and the river still flows.
And the great broken tree, the dying pepperina,
clutches in its hands the fragments of a song.
That time of drought the embered air
Burned to the roots of timber and grass.
The crackling lime-scrub would not bear
the Mooni Creek was sand that year.
The dingoes’ cry was strange to hear.
I heard the dingoes cry
in the whipstick scrub on the Thirty-mile Dry.
I saw the wagtail take his fill
perching in the seething skull.
I saw the eel wither where he curled
in the last blood-drop of a spent world.
I heard the bone whisper in the hide
of the big red horse that lay where he died.
Prop that horse up, make him stand,
hoofs turned down in the bitter sand—
make him stand at the gate of the Thirty-mile Dry.
Turn this way and you will die—
and strange and loud was the dingoes’ cry.
Walking up the driftwood beach at day’s end
I saw it, thrust up out of a hillock of sand—
a frail bleached clench of fingers dried by wind—
the dead child’s hand.
And they are mourning there still, though I forget,
the year of flood, the scoured ruined land,
the herds gone down the current, the farms drowned,
and the child never found.
When I was there the thick hurling waters
had gone back to the river, the farms were almost drained.
Banished half-dead cattle searched the dunes; it rained;
river and sea met with a wild sound.
Oh with a wild sound water flung into air
where sea met river; all the country round
no heart was quiet. I walked on the driftwood sand
and saw the pale crab crouched, and came to a stand
thinking, A child’s hand. The child’s hand.
Before the coming of that arrogant and ancient kingdom
something is waiting to be done, something should be said.
The very old man has lost the clues that led
into the country of his mind, its people are all dead.
He stumbles through the days of bright and sorrowful winter.
The stubble of the corn is raked together and burning
with a sweet smoke that brings a memory to his mind.
He stands on the ploughed earth’s edge where the smoke lifts on the wind,
red flame on red earth beckons, but his eyes are blind;
and rocketing up the high wind, magpies are singing.
There is something to be said yet, a word that might be spoken
before the flames blacken and the field is sown again.
Blade and weed will grow over it after the spring rain,
weed and worm will riot in the country of the brain,
but now in the wind on the bared field a word crouches in the open.
Catching at the turns of smoke where the breeze wanders
he leans on the fence, the old old man gone queer,
waiting for the word or his death to come near.
If he can catch either of them, his eyes will suddenly clear—
but the figureless smoke moves on like mist over windows.
Put up the hare, good dog, in a fury of yelling.
Let the red field and the red flame open to watch you run
violent in your intent to the smoky winter sun.
Put up the hare, good dog; catch him before he is gone—
The last hare on the place, perhaps, there’s no telling.
But the winter wind brings ice to fill the sky with winter,
and the hare crouches and eludes and the smoke turns aside.
The old man coughs in the eddies, forgetful and red-eyed;
there is no clue to his mind now and all his friends have died.
He must wait for the coming of that arrogant and ancient kingdom.
Under the miraculous baptism of fire
that bows the poinciana tree, the old man drab as a grub
burrows with his spade. Alas, one’s whole life long
to be haunted by these visions of fulfilled desire.
“Alas,” he cries, leaning alone on the wet bar of the pub,
“to find them flourishing, clambering, gesturing in the mind—
the sweet white flesh of lilies, the clutching lips of the vine,
the naked flame-trees, their dark limbs curved and strong.
“Oh terrible garden to which my small grey life is food—
oh innocent passionate stare recurring year after year.
Great purple clematis, cassias draped in their golden hair,
they root in the soil of my days, they are drunk with my heart’s blood.
“Tear out of your hearts the dreadful beauty of flowers.
Walk your dark streets alone but without fear.
Go back to your death in life not caring to live or die,
and forget the crazy glance of the flowers out of a time gone by.”
The dead man hangs on a crag of the sea,
caught in a coral shade.
Its creatures eat his flesh away
and make my flesh afraid.
Light like honey dwells in the wave—
the wind is furred as a bee.
From the wave and the wind no rope can save.
I am afraid of the sea.
White in the teeth of the reef-water
lies my shore of bone.
On every tide the dead men cry
—Death, leave me alone.
Wild sea, leave me alone.
Out of the clutch of your hand
my bones will turn to an isle of palms,
a sailor’s dream of land.
Out of the forest of winter
the young girl is crying:
—The love is not born yet
that must make ready for dying.
The world is not yet mine
I must prepare to lose
and the door scarcely opens
that now must close.
Up the long stair
I climbed from my tyrant Death
to find him waiting here
and all the jewel day is darkened with his breath.
My darling, that you should die so,
and I not near you!
Only trespass and hate
bent down to hear you.
And over a black field
hatred like winter blows
to freeze the bud in the root
and kill the climbing rose.
Cold is the stair
my love and I descend
towards a death that nothing now will mend.
Pausing at night on my long road, I looked
and every star sprang to adorn my glance.
When I stand still and set my heart that way
I am the sun round whom those thousands dance.
Shall I go lonely then in the night—
I for whom every star throws off its veil of light?
When I stand still enough I am the star,
I am the wave of light, I am the word
spoken through me by earth to heaven. Fire
clothes me as close as feather clothes a bird.
How should my brilliant heart grow sad or die
that joins the double light of earth and sky?
Fire in the earth sprang upward through my bone;
fire in the sky leant downward to my pole.
World married heaven and their touch was I.
I felt the spark that sets alight the sky,
I knew the heat that keeps the living warm.
Crazy, withering, cold, alone
you think I stand. I am the universe’s soul.
I’ll sing to you, said the madman,
and you can sing to me.
I’ll sing you first of the red red bird
that dances in the tree.
That is not a red bid
dancing in the tree.
That is the fire of the world’s end
that burns for you and me.
I’ll rhyme to you, said the madman,
if you will rhyme again.
I’ll rhyme you now of the blue storm
above the silver rain.
That is not a blue storm
but the smoke of the world’s death,
and the rain below is an evil rain
dark upon the earth.
I’ll sing to you, said the madman,
and I would hear your song.
I’ll sing the love of those lovers there
who lie in sleep so long.
Never look at those lovers
if you your song would keep.
It is death that holds them still
and poisoned is their sleep.
I’ll sing you now, said the madman,
of the place where the song grows—
of the red blaze of the furnace
where the world as a coal glows—
of the heart, that can turn its cancer
into heaven’s rose.
Of the heart, that can turn the world’s rage
into heaven’s calm,
I shall sing till bird and lover wake
and time forget its harm.
Whatever the bird is, is perfect in the bird.
Weapon kestrel hard as a blade’s curve,
thrush round as a mother or a full drop of water
fruit-green parrot wise in his shrieking swerve—
all are what bird is and do not reach beyond bird.
Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do—
cruel kestrel dividing in his hunger the sky,
thrush in the trembling dew beginning to sing,
parrot clinging and quarrelling and veiling his queer eye—
all these are as birds are and good for birds to do.
But I am torn and beleaguered by my own people.
The blood that feeds my heart is the blood they gave me,
and my heart is the house where they gather and fight for dominion—
all different, all with a wish and a will to save me,
to turn me into the ways of other people.
If I could leave their battleground for the forest of the bird
I could melt the past, the present and the future in one
and find the words that lie behind all these languages.
Then I could fuse my passions into one clear stone
and be simple to myself as the bird is to the bird.
Lion, let your desert eyes
turn on me.
Look beyond my flesh and see
that in it which never dies;
that which neither sleeps nor wakes—
the pool of glass
where no wave rocks or breaks,
where no days or nights pass.
Your shining eyes like the sun will find
an image there
that will answer stare for stare
till with that gaze your gaze is blind.
Though you wear the face of the sun
in the mortal gold of your eyes,
yet till that Lord himself dies
this deeper image will live on.
It is the crystal glance of love
earth turns on sun as the two move.
It is the jewel I was given
in exchange for your heaven.
The orange-tree that roots in night
draws from that night his great gold fruit,
and the green bough that stands upright
to shelter the bird with the beating heart.
Out of that silent death and cold
the tree leaps up and makes a world
to reconcile the night and day,
to feed the bird and the shining fly—
a perfect single world of gold
no storm can undo nor death deny.
From the marble-dazzling beaches
or the tame hills where cattle pasture
the eye that ranges never reaches
the secret depth of that storm-cloud
the bitter and thorny moor
that sets its bar between
hill’s green and sea’s glitter.
No visiting traveller crosses
by the pale sandy tracks that vanish
under the banksias hung with mosses.
In yellow evenings when the sea sounds loud
night rises early here,
and when white morning sings
here clings the darkness longest.
Who walks this way, then? Only
the rebel children who fear nothing
and the silent walker who goes lonely,
silence his goal, out of the holiday crowd.
And these, if they go far,
will find the clustering moons and stars of white
that jealous night saves for her wanderers.
Out of the brackish sand
see the phaius orchid build
her intricate moonlight tower
that rusts away in flower.
For whose eyes—for whose eyes
does this blind being weave
sand’s poverty, water’s sour,
the white and black of the hour
into the image I hold
and cannot understand?
Is it for the ants, the bees,
the lizard outside his cave,
or is it to garland time—
eternity’s cold tool
that severs with its blade
the gift as soon as made?
Then I too am your fool.
What can I do but believe?
Here like the plant I weave
your dying garlands, time.
The wind from the desert over mountain and plain
gathered the loose unhappy dust
and set it running like a ghost from door to door again—
like the heart’s red ghost
it ran to accuse me of the murder of the heart.
O little voice of the dry dust at the windowpane,
I wept for you before I slept
till in the night came on the undreamed-of rain.
Out of the seed of night and the divided dust
and the clouds of rain
what thrones are made, and stand up there in the east
to hold the sun!
What pure and shining altars rise in the night—
altars set with the ritual of love—the first
god that broke out when night’s egg woke—
the blind and divine son of dust and night.
In the fierce rites of the flowers now, heart and heart’s murderer rest.
This is the grief of the heart—
that it can never be
closed in one flesh with its love,
like the fruit hung on Eve’s tree:
This is the lament of the flesh—
that it must always contain
the uncompleted heart,
greedy of love and pain.
—This is not what I desired—
the flesh in anguish cries;
—the gift that was made to me
in my lost Paradise,
where in predestined joy
and with a shock like death,
the two halves of my being
met to make one truth.
Yet where the circle was joined
the desperate chase began;
where love in love dissolved
sprang up the woman and man,
and locked in the pangs of life
sway those unwilling selves
till the circle join again
and love in love dissolves.
When under the rind we felt the pressure of the bud
then we forgot all, being caught beyond ourselves.
Grow in us now that we are left alone.
When in the morning light our flowers first blew open
we stood in the bright spray of the glory of our blood.
Shine in us now, left bare since our delight is gone.
When the flower fell we knew the growth of the fruit
and we devoted our desires to the fulfilment of time.
Set your eternity in us, now that our night comes on.
When autumn sweetened the sap, then we were crowned.
O lovely burdens breaking the branch, straining the root!
Hang on us stars, moons and the absolute light of the sun.
When the fruit fell we were more lonely than the cold
and childless rock that waits its far-off day.
Be now the knowledge of the root of our despair.
All we have made was made by what we do not know
and the worn tool is rusted and grows old.
Now that truth strips us naked to the winter’s blow
give us your depthless dark, your light brighter than the brightness of the air.
I saw our golden years on a black gale,
our time of love spilt in the furious dust.
“O we are winter-caught, and we must fail,”
said the dark dream, “and time is overcast.”
—And woke into the night; but you were there,
and small as seed in the wild dark we lay.
Small as a seed under the gulfs of air
is set the stubborn heart that waits for day.
I saw our love the root that holds the vine
in the enduring earth, that can reply,
“Nothing shall die unless for me it die.
Murder and hate and love alike are mine”;
and therefore fear no winter and no storm
while in the knot of earth that root lies warm.
Let me be most clear and most tender;
let no wind break my perfection.
Let the stream of my life run muted,
and a pure sleep unbar
my every depth and secret.
I wait for the rising of a star
whose spear of light shall transfix me—
of a far-off world whose silence
my very truth must answer.
That shaft shall pierce me through
till I cool its white-hot metal.
Let move no leaf nor moth;
sleep quietly, all my creatures.
I must be closed as the rose is
until that bright one rises.
Then down the fall of space
his kiss the shape of a star
shall wake the dark of my breast.
For this I am drawn from far—
For this I am gathered together.
Though made of time and of waters
that move even while I love
I shall draw from the living day
no hour as pure, as bright,
as this when across the night
he stoops with his steady ray
and his image burns on my breast.
All things conspire to hold me from you—
even my love,
since that would mask you and unname you
till merely woman and man we live.
All men wear arms against the rebel—
and they are wise,
since the sound world they know and stable
is eaten away by lovers’ eyes.
All things conspire to stand between us—
even you and I,
who still command us, still unjoin us,
and drive us forward till we die.
Not till those fiery ghosts are laid
shall we be one.
Till then, they whet our double blade
and use the turning world for stone.
Our love is so natural,
the wild animals move
gentle and light on
the shores of our love.
My eyes rest upon you,
to me your eyes turn,
as bee goes to honey,
as fire to fire will burn.
Bird and beast are at home,
and star lives in tree
when we are together
as we should be.
But so silent my heart falls
when you are away,
I can hear the world breathing
where he hides from our day.
My heart crouches under,
silent and still,
and the avalanche gathers
above the green hill.
Our love is so natural—
I cannot but fear.
I would reach out and touch you.
Why are you not here?
Who is it singing on the hill at morning,
and who runs naked down the beach at evening,
and who is ferried by the starless sea
to wake again upon the wave of morning?
O, said the girl, it is my love:
and the boy said, it is the secret that I seek:
and the man drawing nets, it is the sun:
and the child said, it is myself: and all
of them joined hands beneath the moon of Easter.
But, love, you are my secret and my sun.
It is for you I make my song of Easter.
How to live, I said, as the flame-tree lives?
—to know what the flame-tree knows; to be
prodigal of my life as that wild tree
and wear my passion so?
That lover’s knot of water and earth and sun,
that easy answer to the question of baffling reason,
branches out of my heart this sudden season.
I know what I would know.
How shall I thank you, who teach me how to wait
in quietness for the hour to ask or give:
to take and in taking bestow, in bestowing live:
in the loss of myself, to find?
This is the flame-tree; look how gloriously
that careless blossomer scatters, and more and more.
What the earth takes of her, it will restore.
These are the thanks of lovers who share one mind.
When cries aloud the bird of night
then I am quiet on your breast.
When storms of darkness quench the trees
I turn to you and am at rest:
and when the ancient terrors rise
and the feet halt and grow unsure,
for each of us the other’s eyes
restore the day, the sickness cure.
You, who with your insistent love
dissolved in me the evil stone
that was my shield against the world
and grew so close it seemed my own—
gave, easily as a tree might give
its fruit, its flower, its wild grey dove—
the very life by which I live;
the power to answer love with love.
From the front of this house a road runs
and I am already gone.
Across the miles of moons and suns
I am running already.
Down the hill to the bridge,
over the bridge to the town,
through the town to the plain,
up the range and down.
O back to my red mountain
and along the red road,
and at the green gate
I put down my load.
All I want is to see you.
Nothing matters at all;
not the buds on the peach-tree,
or the new leaf on the fern,
or the hyacinth if it is flowering,
or the spring green on the hill.
I have come so far; why have I come?
Only because you are my home.
The blacksmith’s boy went out with a rifle
and a black dog running behind.
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,
rivers hindered him,
thorn-branches caught at his eyes to make him blind
and the sky turned into an unlucky opal,
and he didn’t mind.
I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can stare out any spider I meet,
said he to his dog and his rifle.
The blacksmith’s boy went over the paddocks
with his old black hat on his head.
Mountains jumped in his way,
rocks rolled down on him,
and the old crow cried, “You’ll soon be dead.”
And the rain came down like mattocks.
But he only said
I can climb mountains, I can dodge rocks, I can shoot an old crow any day,
and he went on over the paddocks.
When he came to the end of the day the sun began falling.
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
Then the pigeon, the magpie and the dove began wailing
and the grass lay down to pillow him.
His rifle broke, his hat blew away and his dog was gone
and the sun was falling.
But in front of the night the rainbow stood on the mountain,
just as his heart foretold.
He ran like a hare,
he climbed like a fox;
he caught it in his hands, the colours and the cold—
like a bar of ice, like the column of a fountain,
like a ring of gold.
The pigeon, the magpie and the dove flew up to stare,
and the grass stood up again on the mountain.
The blacksmith’s boy hung the rainbow on his shoulder
instead of his broken gun.
Lizards ran out to see,
snakes made way for him,
and the rainbow shone as brightly as the sun.
All the world said, Nobody is braver, nobody is bolder,
nobody else has done
anything to equal it. He went home as bold as he could be
with the swinging rainbow on his shoulder.
You must begin by leaving home;
and that is not easy.
Home is so faithful, so calm,
a shelter from the cold wind
that calls to the frightened, the weak and the lazy,
“Come; you must come.”
The wind will blow you to the witch,
and the witch is your danger.
Remember the trick of the latch,
and be careful with questions.
When she gives you your answer, don’t wait any longer—
go, and keep watch.
The witch will send you to the wall,
and the wall is your barrier.
You will not see it at all
if you don’t walk boldly,
until with a grip like warm flesh it will seize you and bury you
before you can call.
If you hack at the flesh with your sword
it will weep like your mother.
Like a snake it will spring, like a cord
it will choke you to silence.
You never will cross it—one fold will give way to another—
till you find the right word.
The wall is the way to the wood,
and the wood is your death.
You must go by the darkest road
where the voices whisper.
They will steal from you your sight and your speech and breath—
you will drown in a night like a flood.
It will cover you deeper in cold
than your heart can measure.
You will lose the sword that you hold
and all that you own.
And after that you will find your heart’s true treasure,
your love and your gold.
On yellow days in summer when the early heat
presses like hands hardening the sown earth
into stillness, when after sunrise birds fall quiet
and streams sink in their beds and in silence meet,
then underground the blind nymphs waken and move.
They must begin at last to struggle towards love.
For a whole life they have crouched alone and dumb
in patient ugliness enduring the humble dark.
Nothing has shaken that world below the world
except the far-off thunder, the strain of roots in storm.
Sunk in an airless night they neither slept nor woke
but hanging on the tree’s blood dreamed vaguely the dreams of the tree,
and put on wavering leaves, wing-veined, too delicate to see.
But now in terror overhead their day of dying breaks.
The trumpet of the rising sun bursts into sound
and the implacable unborn stir and reply.
In the hard shell an unmade body wakes
and fights to break from its motherly-enclosing ground.
These dead must dig their upward grave in fear
to cast the living into the naked air.
Terrible is the pressure of light into the heart.
The womb is withered and cracked, the birth is begun,
and shuddering and groaning to break that iron grasp
the new is delivered as the old is torn apart.
Love whose unmerciful blade has pierced us through,
we struggle naked from our death in search of you.
This is the wild light that our dreams foretold
while unaware we prepared these eyes and wings—
while in our sleep we learned the song the world sings.
Sing now, my brothers; climb to that intolerable gold.
When I first saw a woman after childbirth
the room was full of your glance who had just gone away.
And when the mare was bearing her foal
you were with her but I did not see your face.
When in fear I became a woman
I first felt your hand.
When the shadow of the future first fell across me
it was your shadow, my grave and hooded attendant.
It is all one whether I deny or affirm you;
It is not my mind you are concerned with.
It is no matter whether I submit or rebel;
the event will still happen.
You neither know nor care for the truth of my heart;
but the truth of my body has all to do with you.
You have no need of my thoughts or my hopes,
living in the realm of the absolute event.
Then why is it that when I at last see your face
under that hood of slate-blue, so calm and dark,
so worn with the burden of an inexpressible knowledge—
why is it that I begin to worship you with tears?
I lived in a wind of ghosts; a storm of hands
beat at my flesh. The Lazarus at my gate
demanding life, redoubled his demands—
I being rich beyond reason, warm in my coat of time
for which the dead weep and the unborn wait.
Now, beggar and ghost, child in the shell of night,
fasten on my warm blood and drink your fate.
You were the promised one time told me I must choose,
who lay until now buried under my blood’s tree.
And you have been the dream each night renews—
the runner on lonely roads, whose face is turned away;
the footprint vanishing under the twilight sea.
Pursuer and pursued, we meet in one.
I draw you out of my dream into the sun.
Child, beggar, ghost, inherit life of me.
When I went out in early summer
the creeks were full
and the grass growing;
the bat’s-wing coral-tree stood in flower
and the lake of my heart
was clear and peaceful.
I began to make a song
to sing you some day.
It was a still song,
green and quiet,
like the new grass growing,
the full creek flowing,
the heron in the pool
and the tree in flower.
Flow in silence
clear river,
flower in hope
my flowering tree.
Work on in me
past and future,
the race of man
and the world to be.
This song I made
in early summer
while the creeks sang
and the wind blew.
My heart made it,
my blood bore it,
my tongue spoke it,
the song of the child yet to be born.
The creek washed it,
the sun blessed it,
the dove sang it,
the song of the child yet to be born.
Some wore fear like a wound,
some wore hope like a flower.
Some waited for the touch of joy
and some for the summons of terror;
But I would have her remembered,
the girl with the red hair.
She wore fear like a flower
and carried death like a child.
All the other women
overmastered by life
contained besides their terror
that terror’s gentle answer;
she was the ace of spades,
she knew the future early—
the girl who sang and smiled
and carried a black secret.
Ageless face of stone
beaten by senseless air,
no birds come any longer
to nest in your hollows.
The sun that rises on you
cannot undo your night.
Face of grey stone
I have turned you into a mountain
to oppose in me for ever
the world of pleasure and grievance,
the world of winning and losing.
Lie quiet in the silence of my heart.
I watching thee am turned into a cloud;
I guarding thee am spread upon the air.
Lie quietly; be covered by my love.
I will be rain to fall upon your earth;
I will be shade to hold the sun from you.
I am the garden beyond the burning wind,
I am the river among the blowing sand;
I am the song you hear before you sleep.
In being these, I lose myself in these.
I am the woman-statue of the fountain
out of whose metal breasts continually
starts a living water; I am a vase
shaped only for my hour of holding you.
This drought is but to turn me to a cloud.
This heat but casts my shadow cooler on you.
Turn to my breast your fever, and be still.
There’s a hare in the moon tonight,
crouching alone in the bright
buttercup field of the moon;
and all the dogs in the world
howl at the hare in the moon.
“I chased that hare to the sky,”
the hungry dogs all cry.
“The hare jumped into the moon
and left me here in the cold.
I chased that hare to the moon.”
“Come down again, mad hare,
we can see you there,”
the dogs all howl to the moon.
“Come down again to the world,
you mad black hare in the moon,
“or we will grow wings and fly
up to the star-grassed sky
to hunt you out of the moon,”
the hungry dogs of the world
howl at the hare in the moon.
When I was a child I saw
a burning bird in a tree.
I see became I am,
I am became I see.
In winter dawns of frost
the lamp swung in my hand.
The battered moon on the slope
lay like a dune of sand;
and in the trap at my feet
the rabbit leapt and prayed,
weeping blood, and crouched
when the light shone on the blade.
The sudden sun lit up
the webs from wire to wire;
the white webs, the white dew,
blazed with a holy fire.
Flame of light in the dew,
flame of blood on the bush
answered the whirling sun
and the voice of the early thrush.
I think of this for you.
I would not have you believe
the world is empty of truth
or that men must grieve,
but hear the song of the martyrs
out of a bush of fire—
“All is consumed with love;
all is renewed with desire.”
Bombs ripen on the leafless tree
under which the children play.
And there my darling all alone
dances in the spying day.
I gave her nerves to feel her pain,
I put her mortal beauty on.
I taught her love, that hate might find
its black work the easier done.
I sent her out alone to play;
and I must watch, and I must hear,
how underneath the leafless tree
the children dance and sing with Fear.
Lighted by the rage of time
where the blind and dying weep,
in my shadow take your sleep,
though wakeful I.
Sleep unhearing while I pray—
Should the red tent of the sky
fall to fold your time away,
wake to weep before you die.
Die believing all is true
that love your maker said to you.
Still believe
that had you lived you would have found
love, world, sight, sound,
sorrow, beauty—all true.
Grieve for death your moment—grieve.
The world, the lover you must take,
is the murderer you will meet.
But if you die before you wake
never think death sweet.
The summer solstice come and gone,
now the dark of the moon comes on.
The raging sun in his pale sky
has drunk the sap of the world dry.
Across the plains the dustwhirls run
and dust has choked the shrivelling tree.
This is my world that dies with me,
cries the curlew in the night.
I have forgotten how the white
birdfooted water in the creek
used in spring to call and speak.
All is fallen under the sun
and the world dies that once I made.
The strength that brandished my green blade,
the force uncoiling from the cell,
drains like water from a wrecked well,
says the dried corn out of the earth.
The seed I cherished finds no birth.
Now the dark of the world comes on.
No rain yet, and the creek drying, and no rain coming;
and I remember the old man, part of my childhood,
who knew all about cattle and horses. In the big drought,
he said, the mares knew when their milk gave out,
and I’ve seen a mare over the dead foal
with tears coming out of her eyes. She kept on standing;
she wouldn’t go near water or look for grass,
and when the rain came she stayed where the foal died,
though we dragged it away and burned it.
Old man, go easy with me.
The truth I am trying to tell is a kind of waterhole
never dried in any drought. You can understand that;
you lived by a water not like the cattle drank,
but the water you knew of is dried up now. All dried,
and the drought goes raging on. Your own sons and daughters
have forgotten what it is to live by a water
that never dries up. But I know of another creek.
You will not understand my words when I tell of it.
You do not understand me; yet you are part of me.
You understand the cattle and the horses
and knew the country you travelled in, and believed
what everyone believed when you were a child.
And I believed in you, and otherwise in nothing,
since the drought was coming, that dried up your waterholes;
and I still believe in you, though you will not understand me.
For the country I travelled through was not your kind of country;
and when I grew I lost the sound of your stories
and heard only at night in my dreams the sound of dogs
and cattle and galloping horses. I am not you,
but you are part of me. Go easy with me, old man;
I am helping to clear a track to unknown water.
The country where he lives is the country of no sight,
and no-man’s-field is the black earth turned by his blade.
Men stand like trees asleep, a shade in a shade;
their fruit ripens and falls in the hot sun of the night
for him to find and eat.
The sea he swims in is the sea where other men drown;
the shore he walks is the white sand of their bones.
The forest is full of monsters and mad ferns,
and no man comes there but those who die, who mourn,
or who desire to be born.
Walker in darkness, the sun has gone out in my mind.
You carry your heart like a star, like a lamp in your hand.
But where shall I look for my light, and how shall I find
my heart in your dark land?
That stream ran through the sunny grass so clear—
more polished than dew is, all one lilt of light.
We found our way up to the source, where stand
the fern-trees locked in endless age
under the smothering vine and the tree’s night.
Their slow roots spread in mud and stone,
and in each notched trunk shaggy as an ape
crouches the ancestor, the dark bent foetus,
unopened eyes, face fixed in unexperienced sorrow,
and body contorted in the fern-tree’s shape.
That sad, pre-history, unexpectant face—
I hear the answering sound of my blood, I know
these primitive fathers waiting for rebirth,
these children not yet born—the womb holds so
the moss-grown patience of the skull,
the old ape-knowledge of the embryo.
Their silent sleep is gathered round the spring
that feeds the living, thousand-lighted stream
up which we toiled into this timeless dream.
When the path we followed began to tend downward—
how it came about we hardly now remember—
we followed still, but we did not expect this,
the loss of self: the darkness and the forest.
Turning to each other in fear and question,
we saw in place of the column of the human body
the bole of tree overgrown, eaten by fern and lichen,
and heard instead of answer the wind in far-off leaves.
And when night fell the dark was scarcely closer.
We were afraid, straining in the bond of earth,
the nightmare weight, while round us lay that silence,
in which water somewhere fell with its own rhythm;
in which wind somewhere thrust against the height of leaves.
Familiar yet in terror; and the snake uncoiling
his venom out of our hollow hearts, and the bird
springing suddenly unseen from the upper branches singing—
all familiar as though remembered before birth
or expected dumbly after death.
Yet when the path led downwards we did not think of this.
And if we had not been afraid—if terror had not
taken over our minds and cruelty our hearts—
would we have found perhaps in the bewildering dark
not the death we thought of at first and almost hoped to find,
but the birth we never expected or desired?
Darkness of water falling in its own rhythm,
and underfoot the quiet corpse and seed
each strive to their own invisible consummation.
To reach the pool you must go through the rain-forest—
through the bewildering midsummer of darkness
lit with ancient fern,
laced with poison and thorn.
You must go by the way he went—the way of the bleeding
hands and feet, the blood on the stones like flowers,
under the hooded flowers
that fall on the stones like blood.
To reach the pool you must go by the black valley
among the crowding columns made of silence,
under the hanging clouds
of leaves and voiceless birds.
To go by the way he went to the voice of the water,
where the priest stinging-tree waits with his whips and fevers
under the hooded flowers
that fall from the trees like blood,
you must forget the song of the gold bird dancing
over tossed light; you must remember nothing
except the drag of darkness
that draws your weakness under.
To go by the way he went you must find beneath you
that last and faceless pool, and fall. And falling
find between breath and death
the sun by which you live.
When I came to the strength of my youth
I set out on my journey;
and on the far side of the ford
the angel waited.
His voice—himself invisible—
rang through my carefree thought—
“I am the first of your tasks.
Learn now your own strength.”
And his hand on my shoulder
was like an awakening—
the challenge of his touch lit up
delight on delight in me.
How long it was that we wrestled
I hardly know—time waited
while through defeat on defeat
I reached my triumph.
Full-tested, the pride of my youth,
strained to each farthest limit,
found its strength made greater,
its courage tried and proved;
and all that fight was joy.
Shall I ever know joy fiercer?—
feeling the subtle angel
shift from one trial to another.
Marvellously and matched like lovers
we fought there by the ford,
till, every truth elicited,
I, unsurpassably weary,
felt with that weariness
darkness increase on my sight,
and felt the angel failing
in his glorious strength.
Altering, dissolving, vanishing,
he slipped through my fingers,
till when I groped for the death-blow,
I groped and could not find him.
But his voice on the air
pierced the depths of my heart.
“I was your strength; our battle
leaves you doubly strong.
“Now the way is open
and you must rise and find it—
the way to the next ford
where waits the second angel.”
But weak with loss and fear
I lie still by the ford.
Now that the angel is gone
I am a man, and weary.
Return, angel, return.
I fear the journey.
Through the gateway of the dead
(the traveller is speaking)
I kept my pride.
Stepping between those awful pillars
I knew that I myself
had imagined, acted,
and foreseen everything as it was here.
In the land of oblivion
among black-mouthed ghosts,
I knew my Self
the sole reality.
But this was not permitted;
the way went farther.
Stepping down
by the shadows of the river,
even that river
(soundless, invisible)
vanished; and the path dissolved,
and I, upon it.
Self, my justification,
sole lover, sole companion,
slipped from my side.
To say that I recall that time,
that country,
would be a lie; time was not,
and I nowhere.
Yet two things remain—
one was the last surrender,
and the other the last peace.
In the depth of nothing
I met my home.
All ended there;
yet all began.
All sank in dissolution
and rose renewed.
And the bright smoke
out of the pit of chaos
is the flowing and furious world.
And the mind’s nightmare
is the world’s sweet wellspring
(the traveller said).