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IV. The Fireflies I have climbed blind the way down through the trees (How faint the phosphorescence of the stones) On nights when not a light showed on the bay And nothing marked the line of sky and sea— Only the beating of the heart defined A space of being in the faceless dark, The foot that found and won the path from blindness, The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark. The soundless revolution of the stars Brings back the fireflies and each constellation, And we are here half-shielded from that height Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far Incandescence where the single star Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time. Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme With consonances unforeseen, and, gone, Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun. We wait now on the absence of our dead, Sharing the middle world of moving lights Where fireflies taking torches to the rose Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches, Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go. The adagio of lights is gathering Across the sway and counter-lines as bay And sky, contrary in motion, swerve Against each other's patternings, while these Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both, Trusting to neither empty space nor seas The burden of their weightless circlings. We, Knowing no more of death than other men Who make the last submission and return, Savour the good wine of a summer's night Fronting the islands and the harbour bar, Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it, Equal, in their arrivals and their goings, With the order and the beauty of star on star.

Again we meet—a flashing glance, And then, to scabbard, goes the lance, While thoughts troop on in cavalcade Adown the wide aisles time has made. Back in the glow of yesterday, With tender troth you rode away, The sheen of rainbows in our eyes, That swept the rim of other skies. And now a writhing worm am I, Beneath a doomed love’s lensing eye, Let me but stagger, far from sight, To hide my anguish, in the night.

Mondays Began with one plait loose, a pip in your teeth and late for Geography, lined and blank, facts to the right, tall stories left. To sail the heat in a weatherboard classroom boat with banana and vegemite colouring the air sargasso green. To ship ten thousand things on cursive seas to the edge of the known page —coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. To import small desires and grown-up needs in little packets of time for show and tell. To carve your name on the prow. To wait for the bell. In the Parlour only the French clock answered back. They sat cross-legged on the Persian carpet; destinations flashed by the smell of Marveer, lavender, dusty velvet. They opened their eyes in the olden times to fossick under the coffin flaps of the jarrah window seat for proper advice from disheveled magazines: nose straighteners, recipes, posture improvers, the runt who smoked and the chap who rowed. They didn’t see foresight’s guarded smile, they didn’t hear hindsight howl like a dog; the riddles were wordy, the clues were dumb: lopped head of a doll, silk wedding sleeve, gilt volumes, silverfish, and in the glass case, untouchable figurines locked away as grown-ups always seemed to be: shepherd and shepherdess on their marks, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Limoges? The real thing? Almond Trees cover Willunga Plains: like the misty breath of winter children, the blossom hovers. Dearth, says the black bark, splits to let scent through with open questions where when why what who? As for that earliest aroma fear, she’d  smell it, taste it, anywhere, one part in a million, pungent as coffee or smoke, already there in her mother’s milk. Against its grey unbeing she caught at talismans – black stones on a white plate, concrete nouns clattering out of thought. Marking time down the dead-end street to morning. Why was it always dark in the quiet hall? Through a memory crack of light an edge squeezed round the door: regret to inform stop missing in stop the air elliptic with tracer fire, familiar eyes glancing away, prismatic as flies’. Voices crept and huddled,where’s Daddy’s girl? He did come back, but who? They could not tell. Collections began. The tang of foreign coins lent her a lingo and currency for the unknown; Brother stuck down squares of expedited love with serrated edges. And they were invited to a fancy-dress ball with games of us and them. Father could not come for he was lame and Mother had to watch and wait not play so they learned dolls and trains and night and day and Snakes and Ladders and Hide and Seek. Knight’s gambit. Castle your king. Check. And when the black door opened and they knew threshold was famished, Brother stepped through. Now fear had her ID and her address. Best send an invitation. Tell her guest the lightest thing she served would ward off harm – a stick, a stone, a cloud of white perfume, thought itself, needing a go-between to say ‘this fragrance is like newborn skin, these quickening trees, like Mary’s aging cousin conceiving all baptism out of season’. She Collected Dictionaries as other women take up men and shelve them: manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh, like a passion for clothes that would hang unworn in the dark, for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls in a shut case, nouns declined. Each unknown word shone with delicious fire and the alien phrases silked her skin with their genders and connotations. She might have been the end house on the waterfront of Macau welcoming every sailor in. But the longing for many tongues to part her lips – si, igen, ja, ah oui, yes, yes – was departure’s smile, a leaning to the wind that sweeps a glitter of light across the sea and sets a silvery chill at the neck. Quick, to those books guarding the mantelpiece, ISBNs snug as a span of days; to bread and fruit and sparkling wine. She had been given a cyclamen with scent, some new trick that married violet and rose, as if a flower should yearn to sing and the pink timbre tremble into quietest words. She touched her flesh and knew that it would fade as speech did and did not. And yet it was not language that she sought, nor the music of any meaning. An old allegiance drew her on beyond the first ground of thought and the idea even of silence to the fifth season which must at last return with its weather of recognition and its lost ends.

As the retreating Bructeri began to burn their own possessions, to deny to the Romans every sustenance but ashes, a flying column sent by Germanicus commanded by Lucius Stertinius routed them; and there, discovered amid plunder and the dead, was the Eagle of the nineteenth legion, lost with Varus. * The Romans now brought to the land of the Bructeri,—to whatever lay between the river Ems and the river Lippe, to the very edge of their territory,— devastation; until they reached at last the Teutoburgian Wood, in whose darkness Varus and the remains of his fifteen thousand men, it was said, lay unburied. * Germanicus then conceived a desire to honor with obsequies these unburied warriors whose massacre once filled Augustus himself with rage and shame,— with hope or fear every corner of the Empire,— while the least foot soldier, facing alien terrain, was overcome with pity when he thought of family, friends, the sudden reversals of battle, and shared human fate. * First Caecina and his men entered,— ordered to reconnoitre the dismal treacherous passes, to attempt to build bridges and causeways across the uneven, sodden marshland,— then the rest of the army, witness to scenes rending to sight and memory of sight. * Varus’ first camp, with its wide sweep and deployment of ordered space in confident dimension, testified to the calm labors of three legions;— then a ruined half-wall and shallow ditch showed where a desperate remnant had been driven to take cover;— on the open ground between them were whitening bones, free from putrefaction,— scattered where men had been struck down fleeing, heaped up where they had stood their ground before slaughter. Fragments of spears and horses’ limbs lay intertwined, while human skulls were nailed like insults to the tree-trunks. Nearby groves held the altars on which the savage Germans sacrificed the tribunes and chief centurions. * Survivors of the catastrophe slowly began, at last, to speak,— the handful who had escaped death or slavery told their fellow soldiers where the generals fell, how the Eagles and standards were seized;— one showed where Varus received his first wound, and another, where he died by his own melancholy hand;— those thrown into crude pits saw gibbets above them, as well as the platform from which Arminius as if in delirium harangued his own victorious troops,— fury and rancor so joined to his joy, the imprisoned men thought they would soon be butchered,— until desecration of the Eagles at last satisfied or exhausted his arrogance. * And so, six years after the slaughter, a living Roman army had returned to bury the dead men’s bones of three whole legions,— no man knew whether the remains that he had gathered, touched perhaps in consigning to the earth, were those of a stranger or a friend:— all thought of all as comrades and bloodbrothers; each, in common rising fury against the enemy, mourned at once and hated. * When these events were reported to Rome Cynics whispered that thus the cunning State enslaves us to its failures and its fate.— Epicureans saw in the ghostly mire an emblem of the nature of Desire.— Stoics replied that life is War, ILLUSION the source, the goal, the end of human action. * At the dedication of the funeral mound, Germanicus laid the first earth,— thereby honoring the dead, and choosing to demonstrate in his own person his heartfelt share in the general grief. He thereby earned the disapproval of Tiberius,— perhaps because the Emperor interpreted every action of Germanicus unfavorably; or he may have felt the spectacle of the unburied dead must give the army less alacrity for battle and more respect for the enemy— while a commander belonging to the antique priesthood of the Augurs pollutes himself by handling objects belonging to the dead. * on the open ground whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down fleeing heaped up where they stood their ground Varus’ first camp with its wide sweep across the open ground the ruined half-wall and shallow ditch on the open ground between them whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down fleeing heaped up where they stood their ground

Today in Rome, heading down Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps, under an unchanging moon, I held on to the balustrade, grateful for his giving me a hand. All for love, I stumbled over the past as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties, I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber, I made up Cubist Shakespearean games. (In writing, even in those days, I cannot say it was popular to have “subjects” any more than painters used sitters. But I did.) I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience: my self, embroiled with personae from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur! They were for a time my foul-weather friends— as once I played with soldiers on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket. 2002

When I open the door and reach to the light switch the world opens as it did each time. The garlic jar on the ledge, the ceramic cup holding cheese cutters and paring knives. Outside a branch from the ash tree worries the window. It was a place where I knew the drawer pulls, the feel of steps to the basement, the smell of cool cement. If I open the middle cabinet, the linen is there as you left it, well-ordered, none of it fine.

When Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s defeat over national radio, his divinity was broken, fell away and settled in fine gold dust at his feet. His people understood the gravity of the occasion—a god does not speak over the airwaves with a human voice, ordinary and flecked with static. A god does not speak in the common voice of the earthbound, thick with shame. At the station, my mother, a schoolgirl, looked on as men in uniform lurched from the platform into the path of incoming trains, their slack bodies landing on the tracks without sound.

Sombre the night is: And, though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lurks there. Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know This poison-blasted track opens on our camp— On a little safe sleep. But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy. Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks: Music showering on our upturned listening faces. Death could drop from the dark As easily as song— But song only dropped, Like a blind man's dreams on the sand By dangerous tides; Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead. It has my photograph in its soft pocket. It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind. I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.