Eclogues

I

The first ten steps from the house to the shed, I break

two or three promises the night has strung

                                                            like spiders’ webs across my path.

The morning is sprung with secrets

the night’s been spinning all night and now they’re trapping daylight

between the oak and the mendicant poplars and snapping

II

Before me on the broken trail to my desk. In the cowshed

the spider hangs on the cross of herself

                                                            above the first stall door,

where, these seven days, she’s been dying,

and I bank a fire and shoo the children when they follow me in

and I sit to work. Winter’s come, and down on the river the kangaroos

III

Know it. I winter here all day, the poplars, wasted saints, laying on their hands,

and nine hours on there’s a shoal of cloud in a cold sky

                                                and a blue moon loose in it like a man overboard.

Why is it so hard to keep a fire burning

all day? You turn your back and it’s gone out

somewhere, and yet you sit here still, every thought broken,

                                                                                    your feet cold in your boots.

IV

Two nights later the moon rises nicotine-stained and peaceable

into the fingers of the silver trees,

                                                and the floodplain is a smokefilled basement.

Out of the blue sprawling mist the plover’s mad call:

why will a river not stay in the ground?

Out on the deck, I draw down deep on the evening and turn and walk

V

Its balm inside and search again briefly for the frequency of family life

and I find it in the bath, my girl

                                                and our three children, sleek as seals,

and in that moment a truck passes on the road

and snaps the powerline from the eaves. The house shudders and we fall

back in time to candles and stories by heart and reading the news from memory.

VI

The earth, it seems, has caught a fever, and where will she lie

to rest? When the men come                                            

                                                and plug us back in, I believe I hear her

groan. How will she begin

to forgive us, or is that what she’s been doing all along?

In the night the mist rolls away, and at dawn there’s a frost over everything.                  

VII

You’d call it a blessing if you hadn’t been woken four times

by minor deities, pyjamaed like children

                                                             and frantic in the dark with oracles.

Why do our children not know how to sleep?

Do they fear we’ve left our waking late? At first light they dawn

and have you rise and lead them out into the story

VIII

The river has told the grass again, a parable the day has forgotten by nine.

And by ten, at your desk, you’ve forgotten it, too.

                                                            A man so easily distracted 

by himself. But what are you here for

and what do they love, if not the way you leave each day to change the world’s

mind and return with the night, your feet cold, your face lined with secrets?

IX

One night, you arrive home late and tongue-tied and the child wakes choking.

For three hours you wait in emergency

                                                and the boy sleeps himself well against you,

while an old man and a woman come with broken hearts

and don’t leave. You drive home at three and you stand with the boy

in the cold outside and you look up and show him the perfect celestial circle

X

Ringing the imperfect moon, and you wish you could tell him what it means.

This is what silence looks like, you think later,

                                                            and a possum lands like ordnance

on the roof, and down in the paddock

a dozen souls are reborn in the bawling cattle and the fox plays the geese

like oboes with broken reeds. Night is the world in its other life.

XI

One’s own life is an absurd miracle, waning as long as it lasts,

in beauty or poverty, it makes no difference

                                                            in the end. One is nothing anymore.

Our works are our children. They carry us on.

They tell us, as though we meant something more than our mere being

here. Landscape is another way, a practice longer than love and death.  

XII

For instance, the brown horse alone in the paddock all day,

the canting of the black cockatoos,

                                                the grass parrots parsing the morning,

the grass trembling with afternoon, the paratactic catechism

of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the orange trees, the patience of the river.

Go the way the place goes; die beautifully to yourself.

XIII

Adopt the lively practice of the bluewrens in the hedge and the yoga of the hens.

Learn the rules,

                        and forget the rules,

like Basho in the naked birches on the river,

flaring now under blue cloud in the late light of winter. A small death. A second

coming. Drink tea and watch the landscape forget itself. Think of your life

XIV

In place, not time. Another time, you’re walking home beside the same river.

Evening is crimson

                                    along the horizon.

Look, you say to the child, pointing west.

It’s over there, too, he says, pointing east. The place has you almost surrounded.

And there’s a dragon, he says. (There’s always a dragon.) Wingecarribee zen.

XV

But it’s no good pretending; we are creation’s anchorites.

The places don’t sing,

                        GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you—

George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week,

a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it.

They don’t sing, GS; they just are. That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach

XVI

And what you taught me. Time, that bad idea, is passing anyway, like water.

If you’ve been sleeping, you once said,

                                                you’ve been missing nearly everything.

Meaning, the world wakes up at night; but what if one doesn’t wake again?

Another time you said, You’re either writing, or you’re not; so why aren’t you

writing? Well, I’m writing now. It’s either raining, or it’s not, and it’s raining now

XVII

Like a life sentence on the roof and the paddocks and horses and the roos,

and deep down below

                                    the syntax of the river and up a bit

my friend wakes from the anaesthetic

dark into the clinical noon of an American summer and wonders how the sun

got inside her and cast these shadows, and how much afternoon she’ll get to keep.

XVIII

Over east, beyond the ridge I can see from the desk and under the basalt hills

and the feet of the holsteins

                                                and the potato fields and brown-barrel gums

an aquifer runs where it always ran;

but they’re mining it now, and if they draw it all down, it’ll keep the city in water

a week. And how much rain and time will it take to make it rise again?

XIX

But seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory;

the future is someone else’s

                                                country to care for.

Landscape, though, has all the time in the world;

it’s we who are running out. Cars careen like idiots through the dusk, and in the roof

the possum calls it a day, and the rain keeps on. It won’t be enough, but it’ll do. 

XX

My friend in Virginia who’s singing her cancer down looks on cows with love,

and I think of her and it pleases me

                                    to work where cows came and stood each day and let men

drain them dry. This is still their concrete floor.

This is still their draught, coming off the edge of night and under the barn door.

Poems come like that, she told me once, on the wind to where we labour in wait.                                                                                                                         

XXI

But, listen: no one reads poems to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change

the future’s mind. You write it like rain;

                                                            you enter it like nightfall.

It isn’t for anything; a poem is country,

and it needs you to keep walking it, and I walk out into it now, carrying my friend

and smelling the paddocky wind and feeling the rain cold on my face.