A breeze fills up the manna gum’s huge lung,
That hologram of bronchioles. It sways there
Tethered and shifting like a hot-air balloon
Preparing for some fresh and doomed attempt
To circle the great globe. Heaped at its base
The litter of shed bark and collapsed boughs,
So much dumped ballast. Across an expanse of lawn -
The cat’s savanna - a drowsing figure slouched
In an easy chair inhabits ‘Summertime’,
Living by emptying this gap of day:
A straw hat on her face like a cartoon peon,
Her right arm limply draped over the side,
Jehovah’s index finger pointing down
To where, half lost in the long grass, Daniel
Deronda’s lying in Daniel Deronda,
His pages palping at the air, as though
Blindly taking in what it all is like.

It is hard to imagine. The shallow bay
Offers up to the light the illusory depths
Of a table buffed and polished to a lustre,
Except where an inlet-wide, flung net of wind
Hauls at the panicked shoals of chop and dazzle.
High up the sky is pale as faded denim
Worn through in a few frayed clouds, but where it comes
To earth, a cyan heavier than air
And not to breathe. And sometimes in the evening
The whole space thinks again, and sky and sea
Lie in each other’s mirror, robed in gold
And self-absorbed against the envious land
They leach away, but for some failing islet
Or bluff that barely makes its presence felt.

Look, on her hand’s back are the clues to grief,
Whatever she may think - those patches like
The remnants of a suntan, veins as blue
As any sky could wish, swollen through skin
As beautiful as birch bark, and as frail -
The emblems of a loss that will see out
The ending of the world.

Persisting in some region of obtuse
Sublimity, and full of an inhuman,
Distant pity, he’ll contemplate her, baffled,
Then turn away perhaps like Beatrice
With her doubt-tainted smile. But he’ll be there.

The heat is a dimension now, like time,
And as improbable. The cottage floats,
Not quite convinced it’s happening, with its flies
And cracked linoleum, its shelves of books
Unaltered since the war, its bush-rat droppings,
The clocklike clicking of the roof - all tethered
To the least twitching of her dreaming fingers,
Her shallow breath. Later, before her friends
Descend, she’ll wander barefoot through the rooms
In something easy with an ice-filled glass
And put some music on and watch the sea.





You can’t see it from here,
But caught up in its business to begem
Some ripple-silvered bay or the crests of trees,
Or just a golf course with its dewed veneer,
Ante meridiem
The day unfolds its golden auguries
On a charmed sky. A secular congregation
Is out already to revere
The lit east with a helpless expectation.

It’s like a Hopper painting:
A row of figures sitting mute in the sun,
Which by a plantlike, heliotropic action
Their faces and their thoughts are orienting
Towards, almost as one.
And, gazing on that source of benefaction,
They contemplate and inwardly affirm
What lies in store for their acquainting
At the expiration of a certain term.

And even as they stare,
Appraising what the morning rays appoint,
The light that photocopies her crow’s-feet,
The grey encroachments in his thinning hair,
That stiffening hip joint,
Has swept past as though history were complete.
Back in the bedrooms of this white hotel
Their things, wiser than they, declare
No contest in these fancies. Where it fell

An empty shirtsleeve throws
A purely formal gesture of despair
Across a bed, while nothing will arouse
From lank indifference the pantihose
Haunting a sidelong chair,
The disembodied presence of slip and blouse.
Those traveller’s cheques, laid out in a fat wad,
Half signed away, only propose
Their outlays for the briefest period.

The day’s lucid ascent
Has charmed its way in here, it’s true, but lacks
Suspension of disbelief that those outside
Contribute, their frank willingness to invent.
On their reclining backs
They count up the instalments, smile squint-eyed
Into a rushing solar past their sight
Will never stay, far too intent
On what’s to come to see it for the light.





On a hot listless Sunday afternoon
Of adolescence, on the parapet
Of cooler brick on our front porch, propped up

Against the pillar, I look lazily
Across the park that’s faded less by summer,
It seems, than from the day’s inert aversion

To the principle of colour, as when you stare
Directly at the sun, then turn away,
And everything is washed out, overexposed -

Like oriental art, less form than space.
From somewhere indeterminate nearby
A radio, suffering the same effect

In synaesthetic, sallow murmurings,
Emits the emptied inklings of a tune
That hangs there with the heat, shifting a bit,

Like a curtain, but not going anywhere.
My mother perhaps has brought a folding chair
To sit out for a while and interrupt

Her artful chores. The front door is wide open
And the flywire screen is trying to tempt in
Such enervated airs as circulate

Pretences of refreshment. The TV
Is on, or has been on: some resurrection
From the fifties—Gina Lollobrigida?

The day’s on hold. Nothing can happen here.
Far out across the park’s threadbare expanse
Are figures poised inside the motivations

They came here for. My mother goes indoors
For that incomprehensible cup of tea,
Or at any rate is gone. The music loiters.

What are they calling by the cricket nets?

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