That obstinate thoughtless proud
intelligent gay young man
read in his tent by night
from Leichhardt’s Journal, and said
“I shall lead these tatterdemalion
convicts and rogues of mine
even through hell outright,
like this proud contrary German.
My heartbeat tells me I can.”
Strata of ranges and rivers
stood between him and his vow;
and dark insulted spearmen
hid brooding their hate like lovers,
painted with clay and vermilion;
while the cartwheels dragged too slow
and the rain still fell. But Kennedy,
that stubborn dogmatic proud
gay attractive young man,
held service every Sunday,
saw the right Lesson was read,
and wrote up his Journal carefully.
O see what it is to be born
sixth child of a regular Major
(“of fine record”) —and to learn
the disciplined trade of surveyor.
See what it is to be British,
poor, self-confident, gay,
with a name to be made, and a way
to find, and an admiration
for a rather impractical Leader.
Now, Edmund, Edmund Kennedy,
so sanguine, hopeful, vernal,
you travel to your infernal
and painfully humbling anguish
with a gentlemanly passion.
Revenge and slow starvation
have tattered your Expedition.
Your sextant lost, and your Journal,
you die in the rain, alone.
Or if not alone, then nearly.
Though commendable, your companion
was only a savage. Dearly
as he cradled your head on his shoulder
from the exquisite grip of your pain,
you remembered public opinion,
your duty, the Expedition,
gave one last gasping order,
and lifting your pencil to paper,
died of your own ambition,
never speaking again.
We see you still through a mist of sentiment,
Galmahra, Songman, born at a time so unlucky,
in your tribe’s last days, and you the last of their poets,
and doomed to be given the nickname Jacky Jacky.
No one recorded the time and place of your birth,
but the white men had your country when you were young
and called it Jerry’s Plains. For what you were worth,
they fed you scraps and taught you a humble tongue.
No one recorded the way you came to reach
Sydney Harbour from your country far on the Hunter,
nor how you came to be listed as thirteenth man
on the solemn Expedition across the water.
And what did you come to feel for Edmund Kennedy?
What was it looked from your eyes at your gay young leader—
your gentle bottomless eyes—as, grave and polite,
you found a road for that heavy preposterous cart,
growing more indispensable as the way grew harder?
Faithful, was the word the newspapers used,
and the officials, raking the rags left over
from their hopeful Expedition so gaily farewelled,
the few starved bones and bits of harness-leather.
Faithful—the way these wretched blacks should be;
but seldom are—a model for your people
who sit in their wurlies and mope, and are ungrateful
for our busy invasion, our civilised example.
They too should love and help us. So we gave you
a special medal to be worn for the rest of your days,
and fifty pounds in the Bank for approved expenses;
and we spoke of you with pleased uneasy surprise.
Yes, something, some faintly disgusted incredulity,
clouded our commendation. How odd of Kennedy
to die on so black a breast, in arms so alien.
It seemed somehow to betray a lack of dignity.
But you, Galmahra? I try to see into your eyes,
as frank and dark as the depths of your Hunter River.
You loved him, certainly; you wept as you buried him,
and you wept again, when your own escape was over.
But why? I imagine you slowly gaining hope—
hope that increased as the Expedition failed—
knowing yourself at last the trusted guide:
hope that somehow your life-pain would be healed,
that the smouldering flame in your heart might meet his eyes
and be quenched in their comforting blue; that you both might ride
through a nightmare country, mutually forgiven,
black logical as white, and side by side.
Surely he would give some word, some confirmation
that you were now his treasure, his Expedition,
since all the others were left behind, or dead?
He began to write—what message? —then dropped his head.
Over its burning weight you started to weep.
You scarcely looked at the grouped half-hearted spears,
while his heavy head burned in. Not all your tears
could put that pain out. It seared you terribly deep.
In Maitland Hospital, after, you felt it burning,
a red-hot weight; and cough as you might, it stayed
till the day, years after, when drunk as a paid-up drover
you fell in the campfire. Like an accepted lover
you clasped its logs in your arms and into your heart,
and died at last of your unacknowledged yearning.
Songmen may live their song, if they are lucky.
And you were Galmahra.
Or were you Jacky Jacky?
Coming with righteous fires to burn that afflicting carcass
diligently sought in the backyard thicket
for its awful momentous smell—
oh good God, what a disturbed squad
came rattling their elbowy armours
of pitch-black brandishing jaws and spectral elytra;
lean knights defending a rotting city’s wall,
their food and task. Now, neutral fire come save us.
Like the corpse’s, my lips snarled back from my teeth
at that apparent attack. Creations of nightmare,
I can look you up in a book: you have place and recognition.
Risers out of the pit skirted by restless sleep,
classifying Reason has pinned you; citizens of death,
you are of the Histeridae; knights of a black shore,
you are Hololepta sidnensis Mars.; the entomologist,
lips compressed with care, has put you in his collection.
Natural science has made us safe.
But how, how out of the world, though armed by day
with fire’s objective cautery and learned Latin,
am I to carry those weapons to the restless pit
your rattling scuffling jaws defend?
You, long-dead entomologist, like this bush rat,
have found the crumbling edge cave in.
Something of you at least was conceded, given
to the black army. The Histeridae came for you at the end.
Come, exorcising verse. Let’s turn away.
Come now; the angel leads.
All human lives betray,
all human love erodes
under time’s laser ray;
the innocent animals
within us and without
die in corrupted hells
made out of human thought.
Green places and pure springs
are poisoned and laid bare—
even the hawk’s high wings
ride on a fatal air.
But come; the angel calls.
Deep in the dreamer’s cave
the one pure source upwells
its single luminous wave;
and there, Recorder, Seer,
you wait within your cell.
I bring, in love and fear,
the world I know too well
into your hands. Receive
these fractured days I yield.
Renew the life we grieve
by day to know and hold.
Renew the central dream
in blazing purity,
and let my rags confirm
and robe eternity.
For still the angel leads.
Ruined yet pure we go
with all our days and deeds
into that flame, that snow.
Here still, the mountain that we climbed
when hand in hand my love and I
first looked through one another’s eyes
and found the world that does not die.
Wild fuchsia flowered white and red,
the mintbush opened to the bee.
Stars circled round us where we lay
and dawn came naked from the sea.
Its holy ordinary light
welled up and blessed us and was blessed.
Nothing more simple, nor more strange,
than earth itself was then our rest.
I face the steep unyielding rock,
I bleed against the cockspur’s thorn,
struggling the upward path again,
this time alone. This time alone,
I turn and set that world alight.
Unfurling from its hidden bud
it widens round me, past my sight,
filled with my breath, fed with my blood;
the sun that rises as I stand
comes up within me gold and young;
my hand is sheltered in your hand,
the bread of silence on my tongue.
I sighed for a world left desolate without you,
all certainty, passion and peace withdrawn;
men like furious ants without the ant’s humility,
their automatic days led in by mechanical dawn.
Voices all round me witnessed your unknown absence.
The stars clicked through their uncaring motions
because they imaged nothing. An unchecked cruelty
was born of winter and fear. Surgical lesions
hardened round hearts from which you had been removed.
Only museums remained. All difference was equated.
Columns of numbers and coins marched through the living flesh.
Relationship died away till all was separated.
You are gone, I said, and since through you I lived
I begin to die. Instruments have no song
except the living breath. You moved in the artery
that withers without blood. You are gone too long.
But as I sighed, I knew: incomprehensible energy
creates us and destroys, all words are made
in the long shadow of eternity.
Their meanings alter even as the thing is said.
And so, “Return,” I cried, and at the word
was silent, wondering what voice I heard.
(for J.P. McKinney)
Growing beyond your life into your vision,
at last you proved the circle and stepped clear.
I used to watch you with a kind of fear,
moving untaught and yet with such precision,
as though on bridgeways tested long before.
There was a sureness in your contemplation,
a purity in that closed look you wore,
as though a godwit, rising from its shore,
followed alone and on its first migration
its road of air across the tumbled sea,
containing its own angel of assurance
that far out there its promised home would be.
So certainly you went, so certainly
the path you trusted gave you travel-clearance.
I strained to follow as it drew you on;
you, tracing out a pattern to its core
through lovely logics of the octagon
and radials’ perfect plunging. Then you shone
like winter faces meeting spring once more
as the return of love they once had known.
Yes, I was jealous of your close companion,
your angel being brother to my own,
but you more rapt, more held, and less alone,
given more utterly to your communion
than I, who struggled with my own desire;
not strong enough to bear such invocation
nor pure enough to enter such a fire
I winced and envied. How to move entire
into the very core of concentration?
And now, as then, I would be where you are;
where eyes can close because no longer needed,
and heart be stilled around its inner star;
where all dimensions, neither near nor far,
open and crystalline and wholly-heeded,
dance to a music perfectly discerned.
The maze we travel has indeed its centre.
There is a source to which all time’s returned.
That was the single truth your learning learned;
and I must hold to that, who cannot enter,
who move uncertainly and now alone.
What I remember of you makes reply.
Your eyes, your look, remain, all said and done,
the guarantee of blessing, now you’re gone.
Time may be gaoler, set until we die;
but you were gaoled, and made your breakaway.
And left a truth, a triumph, as you went,
to prove the path. I touched you where you lay
(for it was not goodbye I had to say)
and made a kind of promise. What it meant
was: I am only I, as I was you;
but you were man, and man is more than man—
is central to the maze where all’s made new.
That was the end the path had led you to,
the turning search that ends where it began
yet grows beyond itself into the vision;
blinded, yet moving with a blind precision,
because the end is there, the answer’s true.
I knew this long ago, when we first loved;
but time went on so well, I had forgotten
what I saw then: how sudden it would be
when the path fell in,
when hand tore out of hand, and I went down
into this region of clay corridors
below the reach of song.
Now I can never hear you, nor you me.
Down these blind passages condemned to wander,
dreams plague me, and my heart
swings like a rocking-horse a child’s abandoned.
Singer, creator, come and pierce this clay
with one keen grief, with one redeeming call.
Earth would relent to hear it, if you sang.
As once I dreamed you came.
Some music-maker led me with your voice
upwards; I still remember
one summoning glance of incandescent light
blue as the days I knew.
I saw his laurel-wreath, his mourning mouth:
he had your very look.
And then I dreamed
the King’s long shout of triumph, and a voice
that cried “All’s lost”. And silence fell.
I grope my way through silences like clouds.
And still that phrase of music always murmurs,
but fainter, farther, like your eyes receding.
Your all-creating, all-redeeming song
fades, as the daylight fades.
No, I would not go back there if I could.
The fire, as I recall it, sprang too high,
was something out of reason, passing God.
It fused us to a single blasphemy.
After, I thought: what snatched us to its height
and chars us in our separation now,
was some foreseeing of a fiercer light
than these insipid candles dare allow—
some future not yet possible, some Name
no saint or hermit knows or can conceive . . .
An easier God’s virago, I grow tame
herding these simple nuns, who can believe
that flesh and spirit are not one, but two,
and one a slave to set the other free—
poor fools. We once had other work to do;
or so we thought. But who indeed were we?
It was as though all earth sent up a blaze
made of its very thought, to touch the sun,
and we that upward leap. No nights, no days
in that conjunction.
Heloise, have done!
The timid Sister knocking at your door
wakes you, she thinks, to give yourself to God.
Go pray and scold again, His virgin whore,
and swear, you’d not go back there, if you could.
When I say, Oh, my love
there’s none to hear the cry
but the opposing dark
that begs, but does not speak,
the rock that hides the spark.
I crowd against that rock
my act, affirm, oppose,
I forge myself as tool
that tempers under toil,
to file this night; to steel
with glitter its dull skin
that somewhere holds a fire
but hugs and hoards it deep.
I practise to make sharp
even my dreams in sleep.
A keen and useful tool
shows shining at its edge
of wear against the world.
The edge is me I wield;
it hones a stony field.
So the unanswering night
begs glitter from my tool.
I chisel, shape and strike
that some replying spark
may set the night alight.
Affirm, oppose and give
brighten and wear my edge.
I strike that there may live
one spark’s affirmative
to answer . . . oh, my love.
Here the Sage is setting out.
A simple garment, cloth of blue,
is gathered in his girdle. Bare
head, rope sandals; seven lines
circumscribe him; that will do.
Now the world stands round about:
a path, a tree, a peak in air,
one narrow bridge beneath the pines.
Here’s the Boy, three steps behind.
A cooking-pot, a sag-backed horse,
and his master’s steps to tread
with a bundle on his back,
a tuft of hair, a stick of course,
rounded face still undefined.
As the Sage goes on ahead
the horse’s rope takes up its slack.
Now the path begins to climb.
But the Sage still knows the Way,
sets his profile like a crag
or an eagle; meets the storm,
never waiting to survey
World in a moment’s breathing-time.
On go Boy and stolid Nag.
Tao knows neither cold nor warm.
Now the path goes down the hill.
Steadily the Sage descends;
Boy and Horse go patter-clop
past the charcoal-burner’s hut
where the crooked pine-tree stands.
On the Sage goes striding still.
Droops the Horse’s underlip?
Does Boy falter in his trot?
Now they skirt the mountain-brook.
Past the fishers with their rods,
past the children in their game,
past the village with its smoke
and the ploughman in his clods;
up again the path goes—look!
Boy is dragging, so is Moke,
but to Sage it’s all the same.
Up—and this time higher yet.
How, Boy wonders, be a Sage?
How ignore such aching feet
only thinking of the Way?
Wisdom seems to come with age—
if it’s wisdom to forget
Stomach’s groaning yawn for meat
and keep striding on all day.
Round and round the stairways wind.
Cloud and pine-tree, rock and snows,
surround the Sage’s sinewy lope.
Muscles strung to meet the steep,
how his one blue garment blows!
Boy is rather far behind;
Horse is leaning on his rope;
Even Sun sinks down to sleep.
Look! The rest-house, there at last.
Sage sits down to meditate,
Moon accosts the last of day.
Boy brings water, stumbling now;
sees his face there fluctuate—
not so round! More sternly cast!
Patience and the endless Way,
these refine us. That is Tao.
“To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.”
Afterwards it wasn’t so difficult.
First sentences had to go.
Next, phrases.
Now we stand looking
with some kind of
modesty, perhaps?
at the last
and trickiest
one.
Come on boys it’s easy.
Come on.
it’s
There’s a carefully neutral tone
you must obey;
there are certain things you must learn
never to say.
The city may totter around you,
the girders split;
but don’t take a prophetic stance,
you’ll be sorry for it.
The stars may disappear
in a poisonous cloud,
you may find your breath choked out.
Please, not so loud.
Your fingers and hands have turned
into hooks of steel?
Your mind’s gone electronic
and your heart can’t feel?
but listen, your teachers tell you,
it’s not to worry.
Don’t stamp or scream; take the Exit door
if you must; no hurry.
No panic, and no heroics,
the market’s steady.
No rocking the boat, we beg.
What—sunk already?
This was the dream that woke me
from nembutal sleep into the pains of grief.
I had no hemisphere, yet all four hemispheres
reeled in a number-neoned sky,
over the grieved and starving, over the wars,
over the counter-clicking business corporations.
And round the cliffs of one grey vertical
squares of uncurtained light
showed all the sad, the human ends of love—
not springtime fulltime love but one-night stands
paid for with juke-box coins. And Sarah Vaughan was singing:
“Mist,” she sang,
but it was chemical mist
mist from incinerators for the dead,
mist from the dollar-mints and automobiles,
mist from the cities grown
from crystallising chemicals.
To keep the crowds amused
they calmed them with the curves of lovely fireworks,
each arc exact, prefigured and agreed-on
by chemists and by weapon-builders.
Each in their planned and floodlit window-spaces
the poets stood and beckoned to the crowds.
“Language!” they cried with their wild human breath,
but in the squares beneath the crowds cried “Numbers!”
“Words,” cried the poets from their past, “Fires! Forests!”
the chemical greens of plastic leaves behind them.
“Rockets!” the crowds cried. “Wars!”
and every window opened, every poet
began to burn with napalm flames,
and fires detached and fell into the crowds,
fires of a human flesh.
Here a hand fell, opening like a flower,
a firework breast, a glowing genital.
In every mirror-surface of the windows
poets blazed self-reflected
until their hearts at last burned best of all.
But here no woman rescued hearts to carry home
in cherished caskets. Over the squares below
only the flower-children lifted faces
that called out “Pretty! Pretty!”
under the metronomed invisible stars.
You might have thought the flames that fell among them
would light the crowds and scar them to the bone,
but it was only language burning. Only
incinerated words. Few phrases
did more than hang above the crowds
an unaccepted holy ghost, a word
that no one dared to take and speak.
Then the squares darkened and the lifted faces
went grey with ash.
The show is over, cried the amplifiers.
Take home your souvenirs. Those burned-out sticks
are radio-active, ticking like geiger counters,
the spinal cords of poets, bright medullas
and clever cortexes. Hang them on your walls.
They’ll do to mark your time.
Midnight is closing-time.
The crowds went drifting
into the metro. Only a few
carried their midnight souvenirs, their burned-out rockets.
The metro doors all dosed.
Now under midnight’s sign
there’s nothing but the dark, the nembutal sleep,
the hemispheres are flattened by Mercator
projections; folded like fans.
The sweepers issue from their corners
and that show’s over.
The wounds of evening open:
day’s tongue falls silent.
Windows in factory walls
reflect the red of twilight.
Here, Mariano,
the moment’s seagull perches.
Here the world’s dying
is carried on in silence.
The voice of love forgetting
and unforgotten
your slow guitar takes up.
Here cries the seagull
blown in from its long beaches
to search for food
in refuse dumps, in garbage—
the scavenging seagull
whose voice opens our wounds;
whose white’s unsullied—
the gull from those long beaches
where love went walking.
It searches by the factories
for food, like your guitar.
“I am the seagull
who walks among the rubbish
of a land alien
to poets. I search for food
among the factory’s refuse.
That is my poem.”
Once again I’ve applied to the wrong place.
The more I walk round this city
(though I know it, you might say, like I know myself)
the less I like the look of it.
In other places, they say, the slums are going
or scheduled to go at least; but here
a street of deplorable humpies
populated by pensioners
is rotting under the City Hall’s very windows.
Look at the news from the other capitals;
Everywhere else it seems they’re voting money
for smog-abatement, tree-planting projects,
high-rise apartments, steam-cleaning of public buildings.
But here the air gets darker (I can’t stop coughing)
and the river smells like death.
The trees that remain are blighted, iron shanties
lean against civic centres
and the Government buildings are getting so black
I can’t tell where to apply for remission of rates
or a housing grant or a pension.
No doubt this explains why all my applications
seem to remain unanswered.
All I get from the man behind the grille
is the same old rhyme, “Your case isn’t covered by our regulations,
but we’ll consider your representations.”
Nothing comes in the post.
So I keep on walking, but the streets are unfamiliar.
What a lot of them end in the river!
Do you know that the art-gallery’s been burned down
and they’re building some kind of temple?
(They must have relaxed the restrictions on immigration.)
All night long the side-streets
ring with the queerest noises, they call it music;
people wear blankets and leather.
Lately I saw a march of Service Veterans
mis-hearing an order, right-turn straight into a wall.
The sodden petal-faces
of drugged or love-mad children look through me
and pigeons lie dead in the parks.
Last week I applied to another counter
for a passport and airline ticket.
I was frightened. It’s the pain I get just here
when I can’t stop coughing.
It was a building of ancient grace,
with carvings of wreaths and a fountain playing,
but so terribly dark inside
I couldn’t see who was behind the counter.
All I got was a burst of laughter,
a recording of birdsong, a smell of incense,
a strobe light turned in my eyes.
“You’re really so anxious to leave?
Our representative will call tomorrow
with the documents to be signed.”
He hasn’t come. But I don’t like to leave my room,
I’ve seen enough of this city.
And to think I used to have influence—influence—here!
“Sinister powers,” the ambassador said, “are moving
into our ricefields. We are a little people
and all we want is to live.”
But a chemical rain descending
has blackened the fields, and
we ate the buffalo because we were starving.
“Sinister powers,” he said;
and I look at the newsreel child
crying, crying quite silently, here in my house.
I can’t put out a hand to touch her,
that shadow printed on glass.
And if I could? I look at my hand.
This hand, this sinister power
and this one here on the right side
have blackened your ricefields,
my child, and killed your mother.
In the temple the great gold Buddha
smiles inward with half-closed eyes.
All is Maya, the dance, the veil,
Shiva’s violent dream.
Let me out of this dream, I cry.
I belong to a simple people
and all we want is to live.
“It is not right that we slay our kinsmen,”
Arjuna cried. And the answer?
“What is action, what is inaction?
By me alone are they doomed and slain.”
A hard answer
for those who are doomed and slain.
“All is fire,” said the Buddha, “all—
sight, sense, all forms.
They burn with the fires of lust,
anger, illusion.
“Wherefore the wise man . . .”
“Be a lamp to yourself. Be an island.”
Let me out of this dream, I cry,
but the great gold Buddha
smiles in the temple
under a napalm rain.
Then they retrieved the walking dead,
wiped his eyes clear of blood,
replaced his heart with a nylon one
and dry-cleaned his uniform.
Now, Son, we’ll send you home.
With your hair brushed over the crack in your head
you look as good as ever you did.
You’re the luckiest bloke was ever born.
Home he came and on the wharf
in her best bri-nylon stood his wife.
Darling you look well, she said;
only the children ran and hid.
He went out walking down the street.
Outside the pub his state-school mate
said, Christ, son, where you been?
Come and paint the old town red.
Things have changed since you been gone.
I turned my last-year’s Holden in.
You wasn’t here when the Cup was run.
You don’t say much. Cat got your tongue?
Mercy, pity, peace and love,
shop in our department-store,
the Muzak angels sang above.
A long way off was the napalm war.
Love, mercy, pity, peace,
pluck us from the jungle mud.
Give a nylon heart and a metal head—
it’s the newest gift for Christmas.
We speak with the voice
of your daughters, your sons,
We look through the eyes
of all innocent ones.
We are spring, which soon dies.
We are hope, and you kill us.
You will not forget.
We will haunt all your future
like regret—like regret.
We are love, which soon dies.
We are absence and loss.
All the years that you live
you may try to forget us—
no year will forgive.
We are man, who soon dies,
—as your children must die.
Let us live! Let us live!
No year will forgive you
that innocence dies.
Crossing this ravelled shore
fern-patterns of the tides
frayed like my branching nerves;
the last strung islands frayed.
And what is I? I said.
Rose-red a thousand miles
my country passed beneath.
Curved symmetry of dunes
echo my ribs and hands.
I am those worn red lands.
Stepped contours print my palms,
time’s sandstorms wear me down,
wind labours in my breast.
I lost my foreign words
and spoke in tongues like birds.
Then past this ravelled shore
I meet the blues of sea.
Sky’s nothing entered in,
erased and altered me
till I said, What is I?
A speck of moving flesh
I cross the bird-tracked air
and it’s no place for me.
What’s between sea and sky?
A travelling eye? A sigh?
This body knows its place,
and longs to stand on land
where bone, awhile upright,
walks on an earth it knows,
a droughty desert rose,
bearing the things it built;
difficult flower, tree, bird,
lizard and sandstone ridge.
I am what land has made
and land’s myself, I said.
And therefore, when land dies?
opened by whips of greed
these plains lie torn and scarred.
Then I erode; my blood
reddens the stream in flood.
I cross this ravelled shore
and sigh: there’s man no more.
Only a rage, a fear,
smokes up to darken air.
“Destroy the earth! Destroy.
There shall be no more joy.”
I circle still. You showed me love when time began;
and when this flesh had burned away, my bones
melted to nothing and eternity,
I cried to taste Time and your clay again.
I saw you veiled in air, impeccable Mary,
ageless Earth, clothed in old imagery.
There’d be no stone of you I would not kiss.
But I go blowing weightless in light’s ways—
a hollow wingless seed, a seed of death—
and my eternity has no nights or days.
I circle you forever, visible Earth
who separate dark from light. You, you alone,
fabricate diamonds in your sightless stone
and make the universe into a truth.
Had I heart, eyes—as I am charred and blind—
I’d watch forever your altering light and dark—
your circling seasons, your renewing meaning.
Those words I used! Do you know you focus there
all of this space, the dream of the dumb sleeper
who is the axis of the galaxies?
Because of you, for you alone
this terrible sun began his endless shining.
Give me your night. I burn.
The will to power destroys the power to will.
The weapon made, we cannot help but use it;
it drags us with its own momentum still.
The power to kill compounds the need to kill.
Grown out of hand, the heart cannot refuse it;
the will to power undoes the power to will.
Though as we strike we cry “I did not choose it”,
it drags us with its own momentum still.
In the one stroke we win the world and lose it.
The will to power destroys the power to will.
Those who have once admitted
within their pulse and blood
the chill of that most loving
that most despairing child
known what is never told—
the arctic anti-god,
the secret of the cold.
Those who have once expected
the pains of that dark birth
which takes but without giving
and ends in double loss—
they still reach hands across
to grave from flowering earth,
to shroud from living dress.
Alive, they should be dead
who cheated their own death,
and I have heard them cry
when all else was lying still
“O that I stand above
while you lie down beneath!”
Such women weep for love
of one who drew no breath
and in the night they lie
giving the breast to death.
Living long is containing
archaean levels,
buried yet living.
Greek urns, their lovely tranquillity
still and yet moving,
directing, surviving.
So driving homewards
full of my present
along the new freeway,
carved straight, rushing forward,
I see suddenly there still
that anachronism, the old wooden pub
stranded at the crossways.
Where you and I once
in an absolute present
drank laughing
in a day still living,
still laughing, still permanent.
Present crossed past
synchronised, at the junction.
The daylight of one day
was deepened, was darkened
by the light of another.
Three faces met.
Your vivid face in life,
your face of dead marble
touched mine simultaneously.
Holding the steering-wheel
my hands freeze. Out of my eyes
jump these undryable tears
from artesian pressures,
from the strata that cover you,
the silt-sift of time.
These gulping dry lines
are not my song for you.
That’s made already.
Come in, dead Emily.
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by time’s all-wearing wave?
A work of divinest anguish,
a Greek urn completed.
I grip the steering-wheel.
No other star has ever shone for me.
The pure poem rises
in lovely tranquillity,
as the Greek urn rises
from the soil of the past,
as the lost face rises
and the tears return.
I move through my present
gripping the steering-wheel,
repeating, repeating it.
The crossways fade; the freeway rushes forward.
“These days obscure but cannot do thee wrong.”
Between great coloured vanes the butterflies
drift to the sea with fixed bewildered eyes.
Once all their world was food; then sleep took over,
dressed them in cloaks and furs for some great lover—
some Juan, some Helen. Lifted by air and dream
they rose and circled into heaven’s slipstream
to seek each other over fields of blue.
Impassioned unions waited—can’t-come-true
images. Blown, a message or a kiss,
earth sent them to the sun’s tremendous Yes.
Once met and joined, they sank; complete and brief
their sign was fastened back upon the leaf;
empty of future now, the wind turned cold,
their rich furs worn, they thin to membraned gold.
Poor Rimbauds never able to return
out of the searing rainbows they put on,
their wings have trapped them. Staring helplessly
they blow beyond the headland, to the sea.
How write an honest letter
to you, my dearest?
We know each other well—
not well enough.
You, the dark baby hung
in a nurse’s arms,
seen through a mist—your eyes
still vague, a stranger’s eyes;
hung in a hospital world
of drugs and fevers.
You, too much wanted,
reared in betraying love.
Yes, love is dangerous.
The innocent beginner
can take for crystal-true
that rainbow surface;
surprise, surprise—
paddling the slime-dark bottom
the bull-rout’s sting and spine
stuns your soft foot.
Why try to give
what never can be given—
safety, a green world?
It’s mined, the trip-wire’s waiting.
Perhaps we should have trained you
in using weapons,
bequeathed you a straight eye,
a sure-shot trigger-finger,
or that most commonplace
of self-defences,
an eye to Number One,
shop-lifting skills,
a fibrous heart, a head
sharp with arithmetic
to figure out the chances?
You’d not have that on.
What then? Drop-out, dry-rot?
Wipe all the questions
into an easy haze,
a fix for everything?
Or split the mind apart—
an old solution—
shouting to mental-nurses
your coded secrets?
I promised you unborn
something better than that—
the chance of love; clarity,
charity, caritas—dearest,
don’t throw it in. Keep searching.
Dance even among these
poisoned swords; frightened only
of not being what you are—
of not expecting love
or hoping truth;
of sitting in lost corners
ill-willing time.
I promised what’s not given,
and should repent of that,
but do not. You are you,
finding your own way;
nothing to do with me,
though all I care for.
I blow a kiss on paper.
I send your letter.
It was you planted it;
and it grew high and put on crops of leaves,
extravagant fans; sheltered in it the spider weaves
and birds move through it.
For all it grew so well
it never bloomed, though we watched patiently,
having chosen its place where we could see
it from our window-sill.
Now, in its eighteenth spring,
suddenly, wholly, ceremoniously
it puts off every leaf and stands up nakedly,
calling and gathering,
every capacity in it, every power,
drawing up from the very roots of being
this pulse of total red that shocks my seeing
into an agony of flower.
It was you planted it;
and I lean on the sill to see it stand
in its dry shuffle of leaves, just as we planned,
these past years feeding it.
Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk,
dangerous till the last breath’s gone,
clawing and striking. Die
cursing your captor through a raging eye.
Die like the tigersnake
that hisses such pure hatred from its pain
as fills the killer’s dreams
with fear like suicide’s invading stain.
Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood
that gaps the dozer-blade.
I see your living soil ebb with the tree
to naked poverty.
Die like the soldier-ant
mindless and faithful to your million years.
Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind,
stay obstinate; stay blind.
For we are conquerors and self-poisoners
more than scorpion or snake
and dying of the venoms that we make
even while you die of us.
I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust,
the drying creek, the furious animal,
that they oppose us still;
that we are ruined by the thing we kill.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have returned
from our foray into the future.
Our report is appended.
The final peaks are impossibly steep.
It took us all our mathematics
to climb those exponential slopes.
We finally had to turn back
because we were starting too many avalanches.
We feared for your safety below.
Frankly we don’t think you’ll ever make the top.
Hidden by cloud (or smog) we were unable to see it;
there’s vertigo in those verticals.
So we identified a certain ceiling
beyond which we consider settlement will be impossible.
Indeed, even at that height
our instruments detected certain warning-signals,
a lack of breathable air, a scarcity
of organisms other than ourselves;
so far above the tree-line
only certain insects appear to survive.
Apart from that, we were saddened
by the loss of some members of the working-party.
Our zoologist apparently was unable
to adapt to the height we reached.
We regret that he cut the rope.
About the Advance Party’s fate we are uncertain.
It included, as you know, our economist,
the Chaplain, and the official representative
of the Government, Mr John Simple.
They were attempting to hack out a plateau
for the tents.
That incident started the avalanches.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are aware
our report must be a disappointment,
but we recommend you do not proceed.
Ladies and gentlemen . . .
Ladies and gentlemen!
My three-day friend met on the edge of dying,
I write these lines for you,
your line, they tell me, being disconnected.
I send this message though it won’t get through.
Three days and nights we talked out to each other
our separate pains, deeper than strangers do.
Your number’s disconnected now for ever,
but I talk on, though not to you.
Die as we must, we two were then related
in human honesty and suffering.
Only the buzz of silence meets me now,
I dial, but there’s no one answering.
Yet I must go on talking to you dying.
I need to argue how we’re held together,
how a connection brings a line alive
since we are all connected with each other.
“The heart is one” (sang Baez); it can get through.
Through the impersonal gabble of exchanges
lights suddenly flash on, the circuit pulses,
joins us together briefly, then estranges.
The line goes dead, but still the line is there,
for our reality is in relation.
The current bears the message, then stops flowing;
but it has proved there is communication.
I saw a tadpole once in a sheet of ice
(a freakish joke played by my country’s weather).
He hung at arrest, displayed as it were in glass,
an illustration of neither one thing nor the other.
His head was a frog’s, and his hinder legs had grown
ready to climb and jump to his promised land;
bur his bladed tail in the ice-pane weighed him down.
He seemed to accost my eye with his budding hand.
“I am neither one thing nor the other, not here nor there.
I saw great lights in the place where I would be,
but rose too soon, half made for water, half air,
and they have gripped and stilled and enchanted me.
“Is that world real, or a dream I cannot reach?
Beneath me the dark familiar waters flow
and my fellows huddle and nuzzle each to each,
while motionless here I stare where I cannot go.”
The comic O of his mouth, his gold-rimmed eyes,
looked in that lustrous glaze as though they’d ask
my vague divinity, looming in stooped surprise,
for death or rescue. But neither was my task.
Waking halfway from a dream one winter night
I remembered him as a poem I had to write.
Yes, we still can sing
who reach this barren shore.
But no note will sound
as it did before.
In selfless innocence
first the song began.
Then it rose and swelled
into the song of man.
Every tone and key,
every shade it learned
that its limits held
and its powers discerned:
love and history,
joy in earth and sun,
its small chords embraced,
joining all in one.
But no note can come
from the flesh’s pride
once the weapon’s lodged
in the bleeding side;
once the truth is known:
Law surpasses Art.
Not the heart directs
what happens to the heart.
Yet we still can sing,
this proviso made:
Do not take for truth
any word we said.
Let the song be bare
that was richly dressed.
Sing with one reserve:
Silence might be best.
I stood to watch the sun
slip over the world’s edge
its white-hot temples burning
where earth and vapour merge.
The shadow at my feet
rose upward silently;
announced that it was I;
entered to master me.
Yes, we exchange our dreams.
Possessed by day, intent
with haste and hammering time,
earth and her creatures went
imprisoned, separate
in isolating light.
Our enemy, our shadow,
is joined to us by night.
Joined by negating night
that counterpoints the day
and deepens into fear
of time that falls away,
of self that vanishes
till eyes stare outward blind
on one invading darkness
that brims from earth to mind.
Then came the after-image
burning behind the eye,
single and perilous
but more than memory.
When universe is lost
man on that centre stares
where from the abyss of power
world’s image grows and flares.
World’s image grows, and chaos
is mastered and lies still
in the resolving sentence
that’s spoken once for all.
Now I accept you, shadow,
I change you; we are one.
I must enclose a darkness
since I contain the Sun.