Returned To Australia, 1919
By now they are an amulet
Three letters rubbed with expectation
RTA a gangplank’s bounce
Home with no abbreviation
Hello Ida’s wild aroma
Remembered from the embarkation
Hello Collins Street at five
Farewell the shrapnel variations
The cowering from the big barrage
Hello to female conversation
The slow waltz of a Manly ferry
The smell of coal at Central Station
Or maybe you’re the kind who needs
To be out west beyond the crowds
You want the skies with no horizon
Complete with preference of clouds
A Single Sparrow
The present life of man, O king, seems to me like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged.
Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 731
I think a lot about that bird
flying through the mead-hall,
straight on through from door to door
and winter either end,
those givens of the rain and snow,
the fire-warmth and the alcohol,
the candlelight uneven,
a language quite unknown to sparrows.
The point is clear enough although
some questions trouble slightly.
Why a door at either end
open to the cold?
Why not stop to hop the floor
and check below the tables,
as is the way with sparrows?
What memories would a bird still carry
later in the snowy weather?
Reds and blacks, the smoke, the smells,
the women bringing roasted meats,
some snatches from a drinking song?
Or would it be that quieter part,
the thane with all his metaphysics,
the king with goblet nodding
at the passage of a sparrow?
Lines Written Upon Waking
Yes, Your Honour, we were making
love on someone else’s lawn,
semi-clothed, I must suppose.
And, yes, it’s true I still recall
the neighbours circled round us with
their shocked and disbelieving eyes
while we were getting dressed again
inside the garden’s glassed cupola,
conscious of the cooling liquids
we had so recently exchanged
and of those silent accusations —
and amateur legalities
I’m more than bashful to report.
And so it is, Your Honour, that
with all the wild asymmetry
of dreams we throw ourselves half-naked
on the mercy of your court.
Schultz
The times were vaguer then, I think,
or so it seemed when our Aunt Sybil
entered an Old Ladies Home
and took, to give her toes a nibble,
a dachshund we had known as Schultz
(we called them dashhounds way back then).
New guests could keep their cat or dog
but only till that moment when
it made its last trip to the vet.
After that there’d be no more.
Loneliness would then step in
and kindliness be shown the door.
Aunt Sybil wore our hardy genes
and Schultz would prove a healthy pet,
standard dashhound, black-and-tan,
who rarely left a nurse upset.
Sybil’s niece, the tireless Dot,
would drive her Austin out each week,
knowing Schultz kept Sybil young
but, too soon, heard his backbone creak,
a classic problem of the breed.
No one else had sensed it yet,
not even Shultz above the chatter.
Our Dorothy disdained the vet
since, very strangely, just next Sunday,
Schultz, with just a little stealth —
and some nursely inattention —
was perfectly restored to health.
Aunt Sybil’s brain remained A1;
her ‘twilight’ seemed to last for years.
She loved to jostle Schultz’s jowls
and give a rummage to his ears.
When Schultz once more began to falter
a second miracle occurred.
Shultz’s spirits rose again
and Sybil uttered … not a word.
Her darling Schultz and she lived on
as nurses met their every need.
Some even took old Schultz for walks
and wondered at his turn of speed.
In God’s good time, Aunt Sybil died
and Schultz, attentive to the end,
was set to guard the polished coffin
containing his eternal friend.
Dot, the week before, had thanked
the staff for their unflagging care.
Schultz sat calmly in the Austin,
clearly still with years to spare.
Blown or beaten
Blown or beaten, plucked or bowed,
all music is a sort of violence
and yet, surrounding it, we hear
an even wider reach of silence,
a stillness where we contemplate
the imprint of its subtle scars
whether they’re in one small room
or lightly stretched between the stars.
Verbatim
Last night I dreamt I saw Les Murray
back there in his forties where,
pruned of twenty kilos maybe,
he perched upon a runabout
which seemed somehow to frisk a little.
He greeted me with banter that
was rich with friendly condescension.
He used the long form of my name.
In his mouth, a huge havana
on which he puffed expansively
and waved to underscore his points.
I mumbled something re his lungs
at which the vehicle skittered colt-like
beneath its owner’s boyish smile:
“You mean you didn’t smoke when young?”
Again, the scooter seemed to shy.
And then it was the dream’s meniscus,
without the chance to say goodbye.
Cesár Vallejo
1892-1938
The sadness in a single poem
has kept me half-awake all night —
Cesár Vallejo’s To My Brother
Miguel, in memoriam.
For many years I offered it
to college students via translations,
rickety but adequate,
and every time it left them silent,
shocked amid their efflorescence.
Two little boys play hide-and-seek
up and down the house,
Cesár Vallejo and his brother,
their mama calling out to quiet them.
At times they make each other cry
by hiding irretrievably
in all those corridors and shadows.
Then one night, nor far from dawn,
Miguel hides away forever.
Your other heart of those dead
afternoons is tired of looking
and not finding you.
Perhaps it was the hugeness of
the poet’s understatement
that struck my students mute.
Oye, hermano, no tardes
en salir. Bueno? Puede inquietarse mamá
Twenty, thirty, forty years
ago it was, or more,
and still I’m sure each day they carry,
almost as a talisman,
Cesár Vallejo’s sadness with them.
The high illusions
The high illusions of bipolar
are never random or absurd.
They are the lives that should have been,
the lives its victims have retrieved
decked out with fresh achievements in
their fields of expertise
together with those children
never registered but real
who live in rich elaborations
complete with moment of conception
and playgrounds out of reach.
This is what they talk of when
by misadventure or a kind
of migratory design
they turn up at the ward again
in search of calm and readjustment
slanting down like Boeings
across a month or two
from heights of exaltation that
too much disrupt the peace.
Sometimes they are self-admitted;
more often they will be dropped off
with resignation or bemusement
by tolerant police.
Single women in their later
Single women in their later
seventies are not
uninterested in men.
They still recall the fonder moments
with those gone off with death, divorce
or personal assistants.
They have their adult kids, their grandkids;
they have their set of well-hugged friends
whose kindnesses and strangenesses
they’re long accustomed to.
However, it is also plain
they’d like some men along as well.
We make for variation and
the best of us still offer
stranger angles over coffee.
We turn up with a different humour
though must, of course, die sooner which
intensifies the problem.
What woman wants a tetchy man
across his last five years – or ten?
They find now that they’ve grown to relish
queen-sized beds with one adult.
Lonely, yes, at times, but simple
and no unsought distractions.
‘I’m not good at relationships,’
says one, and may well speak the truth.
‘You’re like a favourite brother,‘says
another with a grin.
‘I wouldn’t want,’ declares a third,
‘to be some sort of late replacement.’
And all this early in the piece
so there will be no raw
misunderstandings. A coffee or
a concert maybe — lunch
conceivably (not dinner).
Let’s not get ideas.
For us, their would-be suitors,
slowed with our few extra years,
their wisdom may be sad at first
but, over time, persuasive.
One by one, in king-size beds,
we find we stretch more easily
now that we’re alone at last,
having only to ensure
our weekly diaries still contain
sufficient caffe lattes.
And equally in turn we trust
that there will surely be for us
that sudden Ms Exceptional
who with her one decisive, not
to say flamboyant, gesture
will jettison good sense.