Mark Tredinnick

1 Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping love’s abstract particulars, while football plays on the big screen; I listen like a thief in case the women know the score. But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child. 2 Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl, empty and unable to stop. You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen. The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down. 3 The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor I never could prise open. All I’m good for tonight is to let the night pass, while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully like a trout on god’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.

I Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end of the well-tempered and recursive wildness that conceived and suffered us, and that will be the end of us. We have just two billion years to thank her for our time here. Eternity has a use-by date II But it’ll be up long before that, and in the meantime, I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow on the moon like a horseblanket; in the meantime the moon reddens in the refraction of all our dawns and sunsets, in a kind of transfigured cosmic smog. An apocalypse that lasts three hours until it’s time to go to bed. III And in the meantime on the floor of my shed, blue planets sing in the hands of children as they once sang in war. Two small worlds forged to cry terribly down like creation unravelling upon one’s foes now make a peaceful clangour on my secular desk. One spins from its orbit and quakes and chips its cerulean shell on the floor of heaven. The tectonics of play. We are loved like this, and this is how it ends. IV I’m arguing a lot with death these days. And last night I found myself in court poised to clinch the case against the absurdity of life. Certainly, this was sleeping and certainly I was dreaming and I’d been losing the thread, but all at once I saw where my argument must run, and I was running it there when my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I’ll never know. V Spring now, and the river has drawn back her bow. The lark ascends from the cd-player, and black ducks sip brown ditchwater in the yard. Everything’s in bud or leaf, last of all the silver poplars and the Osage Orange, trees flaring even now in the backyard of the childhood of my friend, the poet, the poet’s son. The world happens twice. Draw the linen string taut and shoot. VI One lives in paradox. Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods who’ve lost control of their machines. In between one makes one’s life up. The sound is the price you pay for the sight that meets you every morning and half of what you paid for the house. The shed puts the perfect sky in her pocket, and possums rut in the roof. Eternity is in rehearsal, and this is its soundtrack. VII Brad mows an acre an hour. A general at ease on his machine, a banker in overalls, he’s rationalised our small republic on one tank of gas. And this now— cutgrass at four o’clock—is how hope smells. Some days I can see no way out: the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever. VIII Meantime the moon has made herself new again, and there has been rain. The Marulan hills, which had almost forgotten the taste of the word, are spelling green again this afternoon, and there’s water in a lake that’s been a paddock for a decade. Three black cockatoos, and then three more, fly over as I take the southwest road. And into all this panoply of hope, the new moon falls.

1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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 5 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 news from memory. 6 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. 7 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 8 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 fire spent, your face lined with secrets? 9 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 then a woman come with broken-down 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 10 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. 11 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. 12 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. 13 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 14 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. 15 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 16 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 it 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 17 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. 18 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? 19 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. 20 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. 21 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.