Four Poems

Abstract

Four Poems David Malouf At The Ferry A light as of axe-handles swinging through fogbound scrub. Touch wood. "This is the last time you will see all this. This is the last thing you will see," the stranger at my side, no stranger, whispers. I come with empty pockets to the boatshed at the end of the ramp, the river's breath stilled to a slow cloud beneath me. And wait. And stand waiting. Close by, either behind or close ahead, damped in the dampened air, music. "This is the last thing you will hear," the stranger whispers. His last word. I stand and listen. Silence approaches. A silence approaching music. [End Page 121] Rain Poems I. Rooves Patter of rain on the roof, its variable touch in the same house on tiles on tin, as if what stretched over our head more than another roof was another sky. In childhood our verandah sleepout. Beyond its lattice, leaf -tap, a drip toccata on the elephant ears and staghorns of a pocket rainforest. Later the slop of English skies on a "sunny attic" in Putney. We lie down in the one dark, in sleep unbounded. Discontinuous music, of days that move on, nights that do not; the authentic note, once struck, endlessly sounded. II. Watertanks Squat corrugated-iron clouds lashed down with ropes of Morning Glory, galvanised angels filled with the sky's outpourings. When we washed our hair in last month's downpipe music it sparked with the electric thump of horizons. When we turned a brass tap-spanner galaxies dripped from our fingertips, our mouths were enlightened. We stumbled barefoot back to bed, our sleep a sky-annex busting to break away [End Page 122] up there, out there, dream-walking the boom towns, the waterless kingdoms. Rain-maker, bull-roarer, invader brimming with tall tales, hunkered down on its stumps, translating back to breath and bloodbeat in us sheer paean, magnificat: the amplified ostinato measures of earthed sky-music. Raptors I. Owl The owl's eye, midnight, total eclipse for the fieldmouse stopped dead where its shadow flares on stubble. Thin bones under the impact of the sky's falling crack. The nightbird hungers for what it holds, all that is not sky—groundwork, gleanings. Since even owls do not end in air, what they hope to take in is what these small lives know of the afterlife, sunlight ascending a straw, the earth in close-up: shock, then slow aftershock collapsing the horizons of a skull. [End Page 123] II. Kites Elite black killer angels, claws a confederate close sect, high rollers of swoop and harry. A miracle unique to mealtimes, the groundling's blood-dream of flying come true in their maw. All else in the long view waste, mere decoration of lightpole and rooftile, fast food heedless at play. A hotline from brain to hooded eye sorts out the jigsaw components of a landscape, what's fixed, what merely stilled. Baffled wingtips convert the brunt of air to muscle power, all wrestle and pause, then suddenness, breath passing from mouth to mouth, quick snatches of song, the imperative dark consecration of bane and being to what comes once in a lifetime: death, the flesh made flesh. [End Page 124] Poetry Makes Nothing Happen Silvery spellbound trunks. Bark curled and crisped like dry pork-crackling. Scooped shadows in glazed snowdrifts. And these deer knocking their antler-buds on wood, where do they come in? The snowy spaces of a page are their habitat, call up trees and this nomad herd will find them. Eye-pulp turned liquid in a camera flash, they startle. Trunks vibrate to percussive thuds. The woods are barely visible now in the clouds they make, the pack of their bodies, the meaty hot smoke of their blood. In our veins, slow-spreading thunder. Unrecorded the lightning-stroke. David Malouf was born in 1934 and is a poet, novelist, and writer of librettos and occasional essays. His most celebrated novel is Remembering Babylon (Vintage, 1993). His...