Earth Hour

by David Malouf

Overview

A breathtaking new volume of poetry from an Australian literary icon, David Malouf’s first full volume of poetry since Typewriter Music once again shows us why he is one of Australia’s most enduring and respected writers. Earth Hour comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of “silence, following talk” after its exploration of memory, imagination, and mortality. With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on “this patch/ of earth and its green things,” charting the resilience of beauty amid stubborn human grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780702252587
Publisher:	University of Queensland Press
Publication date:	07/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

David Malouf is a poet and writer who was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000. He is the author of Dream Stuff, The Great World, winner of the Miles Franklin Prize, Remembering Babylon, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and the poetry collections Revolving Days and Typewriter Music.

Read an Excerpt

Earth Hour

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By David Malouf

University of Queensland Press

Copyright © 2014 David Malouf
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5258-7

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CHAPTER 1

    Aquarius

    One of those sovereign days that might seem never
    intended for the dark: the sea's breath deepens
    from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,
    heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,
    we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
    enchanted through its moods as if we shared
    its gift and were immortal, till something in us
    snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
    than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror's lens,
    we're struck by the prospect of a counterworld
    to so much stir, such colour; loved animal
    forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
    when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
    children of a green original anti
    -Eden from which we've never been expelled.


    Radiance

    Not all come to it
    but some do, and serenely.

    No saying
    what party they are of

    or what totem
    animal walks with them.

    Tobias the street-smart
    teen has his screwball dog.

    For some it is stillness,
    or within the orders

    of humdrum
    the nudge, not so gentle,

    of circumstance. For some
    the fall across their path

    at noon of a shadow
    where none should be,

    for some their own
    shadow seen as not.

    For some a wound, some
    a gift; and for some

    the wound is the gift.
    When they

    too become one
    of the Grateful Dead, it is

    the silence they leave,
    in a bowl, in a book,

    that speaks and may join us;
    its presence,

    waist high at our side,
    a commotion, a companionable

    cloud with the shape and smell of
    an unknown familiar, call it

    an angel. At his nod,
    the weather we move in

    shifts, the wind changes.
    Catching

    the mutinous struck infant
    in us on the off-chance

    smiling.


    Retrospect

    A day at the end of winter. Two young men,
    hooded against the silvery thin rain

    that lights the forest boughs, are making towards
    a town that at this distance never gets closer.

    One of them, not me, as he turns, impatient
    for the other to catch up, wears even now when I meet his face

    in dreams, the look of one already gone, already gone
    too far into the forest; as when, last night

    in sleep, I looked behind me out of the queue for an old movie and you
    were there, hood thrown back, your stack

    of dirty-blond hair misted with sky-wrack, and when
    my heart leapt to greet you, No, your glance

    in the old conspiratorial way insisted,
    Don't speak, don't recognise me. So I did not

    turn again but followed down the track,
    to where, all those years back, you turned

    and waited; and we went on
    together at the bare end of winter, breath from our mouths

    still clouding the damp air, our footsteps loud
    on the rainlit cobbled street, down into Sèvres.


    Toccata

    Out of such and such and so much bric-a-brac.

    Cut-glass atomisers, An Evening in Paris
    stain, circa '53, on taffeta.
    Four napkin-rings, initialled. Playing cards, one pack
    with views of Venice, the other the Greek key pattern
    that unlocked the attic door our house
    in strict truth did not run to. A wrist
    arched above early Chopin: bridge across water
    to a lawn where finch and cricket take what's given
    as gospel, and even the domino I lost
    in the long grass by the passion-vine
    fits white to white, four voices in close canon.

    Where in all this are the small, hot, free
    -associating selves, a constellation
    of shoes, sweat, teacups, charms, magnetic debris?

    In the ghost of a fingerprint all
    that touched us, all that we touched, still glowing actual.


    Dot Poem, the Connections

    Before I had words
    at hand to call the world up
    in happenings on a page, there were the dots, a buckshot scatter
    of stars, black in a white sky. Behind them, teasingly hidden,
    the company of creatures.

    What I'd set
    my heart on, spellbound, snowbound
    in a wood, was a unicorn, shyly invisible but yearning, even
    at the risk of being taken,
    to be seen and recognised.

    What I got
    was the dwarfs, Grumpy and Doc;
    Spitfires, tanks, a drunken jalopy. I'm still waiting, as star-dots click
    and connect, to look up and find myself, with nothing I need say
    or do, in its magic presence,

    as from the far
    far off of our separate realms, two rare
    imaginary beasts approach and meet. On the breath that streams from
    our mouths, a wordless out-of-the-body singing. On the same
    note. From the same sheet.


    Entreaty

    After the Age of Innocence, golden brawlers
    in the arms of demigods,
    we arrive at the Age of Reason, credulous poor
    monsters led by a dream-team
    in a mad dance down loud streets into quicksand.

    After that it's the Age
    of the Seven Pills daily. Small mercies
    restore us. Bayside air
    salt-sweet in our mouths again, we set out for
    the corner shop, and by some happy chance
    it is still there, the same old woman keeps it.

    When the doorbell shakes her
    from sleep, through wisps of grey
    smoke from her asthma-papers, 'What's it to be, what's your poison
    this time, love?' she wheezes.

    Is it a riddle? If it is
    I'm lost. The ancient
    grins, abides the answer. I clench my fist on the hot penny
    I've brought; only now, a lifetime
    later, find my tongue:

    If luck is with me
    today, on my long walk home, may no
    black cat cross my path, no sweet-talking stranger,
    no thief, no mischief-maker,
    no trafficker in last words waylay me.


    Whistling in the Dark

    Seeking a mind in the machine, and in constellations, however
    distant, a waft of breath. Re-reading space

    shrapnel as chromosome bee-swarms, hauling infinity
    in so that its silence, a stately contre-dance to numbers,

    hums, and flashy glow-stones bare of wild-flower
    or shrub, scent, bird-song, hoof-print, heartbeat,

    or bones (ah, bones!) are no longer alien or lonely
    out there in the airless cold as we prepare

    to lie out beneath them. Even as children we know
    what cold is, and aloneness, absence of touch. We seed

    the night sky with stories like our own: snub-breasted
    blond topless Lolitas laying out samples

    of their charms beside dimpled ponds, barefoot un-bearded
    striplings ready with bow and badinage, pursued

    and lost and grieved over by inconsolable immortals
    and set eternally adrift, a slow cascade

    of luminary dust above the earth, with the companionable
    creatures, bear, lion, swan, who share with us the upland

    fells and meadow-flats of a rogue planet tossed
    into space and by wild haphazard or amazing

    grace sent spinning. Old consolations, only half
    believed in, though like children we hold them dear, as if their names

    on our tongue could bring them close and make,
    like theirs, the bitter sweet-stuff of our story

    to someone, somewhere out there,
    remembered, and fondly, when we are gone.


    Ladybird

    Childhood visitors,
    the surprise of
    their presence a kind of grace.

    Kindest of all the ladybird,
    neither lady
    (unless like so much else

    in those days disguised
    in a witch's spell) nor
    bird but an amber-beadlike

    jewel that pinned itself
    to our breast; a reward for
    some good deed we did not

    know we'd done, or earnest
    of a good world's good will
    towards us. Ladybird, ladybird,

    fly away home, we sang,
    our full hearts lifted
    by all that was best

    in us, pity for what
    like us was small (but why
    was her house on fire?), and sped her

    on her way with the same breath
    we used to snuff out birthdays
    on a cake, the break and flare

    of her wings the flame that leapt
    from the match, snug
    in its box, snug in our fist under the house

    that out of hand went sprinting
    up stairwells, and stamped and roared
    about us. Ladybird,

    mother, quick, fly
    home! The house, our hair, everything close
    and dear, even the air,

    is burning! In our hands
    (we had no warning
    of this) the world is alive and dangerous.


    Garden Poems

    Touching the Earth

    The season when all is scrabble,
    and surge and disintegration: worms
    in their black café a pinchgut Versailles rabble

    remaking the earth, processing tea-bags, vegetable scraps, and hot
    from the press news of the underworld, the fast lane,
    to slow food for the planet.

    Plum-blossom, briar rose,
    commingling. Overhead pure flow, a commodious blue fine-brushed
    with cirrus.
    In our part of the world we call this

    Spring. Elsewhere it happens other
    -wise and in other words, or with no words
    at all under fin-shaped palm-frond and fern in greenhouse weather.

    But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns,
    fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,
    to touching in the dark. And the old man's?

    To worms in their garden box; stepping aside
    a moment in a poem that will remember,
    fitfully, who made it and the discord

    and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath
    it sprang from. A bending down
    lightly to touch the earth.


    The Spell

    Needlepoints of light
    rain pick out a web and I am caught. The garden,
    its double iron-barred gate

    and the prunus pushing out
    on its own path under paving-stones, floats free
    and trembles. It might be gravity suspended,

    or an odd angle
    of time that a slight glance sideways
    catches so that the whole

    enterprise unsteadies, no longer instant
    underfoot. What centres it,
    when all has been riddled through

    and questioned, is the spider, dark
    death's head paramour and spell
    -binder. Ablaze
    in solar isolation,
    it dwindles at the end of its span, its spittle-thread
    of inner fire unravelled

    in a riot of marigolds, and the spell so light
    on the senses yet so strong,
    and still unbroken.


    After

    I bend to it willingly, this patch
    of earth and its green things, in their own world
    (though I hold the title to it) hungry for life

    and tenure. Here they are weeds to be uprooted:
    a limited easy task, the damp and crumble
    I've lived with since my first

    mouthful of it, the peck
    of dirt I'm still working through. All round, a suntrap,
    the garden-glitter of webs. Tree

    -spiders that like the weeds, our late-spring sunlight
    colluding, would choke
    the lot to keep their hold. Live and let live? Not yet, not

    here. Inside, the phone
    intrudes. Another world calls and I scurry
    in, struck by the coolness of a place that is all surface

    polish and appliance. Too late! The message,
    if there is one, hangs
    in the silence, in the air

    of abeyance that attends
    on hasty departure: the breathless hush, lightly expectant,
    of After.


    Inner City

    A picture-book street with pop-up gardens, asphalt
    bleached to take us down a degree or two

    when summer strips and swelters. All things green,
    wood sorrel, dandelion, in this urban village

    salad not weeds, and food for everyone, including
    rats and the phantom night-thieves who with barrow

    and spade tip-toe in under the windchimes to cart off virtual
    orchards of kaffir limes. Good citizens all

    of Chippendale and a planet sore of body
    and soul that needs saving, and by more

    than faith-healing or grace — good works and elbow
    grease, a back set to it, compost bins,

    the soy of human kindness. In the late splendour
    of early daylight saving, stars regroup

    for breakthrough, mynah and honey-eater tuck
    their head under a wing, ants at shiftwork

    in their gulag conurbations soldier on; and hunters, clean
    of hand and clear of conscience, down

    tools, troop home to pork-chop plastic packs, and gatherers
    gather for hugs and mugs of steaming chai.

    The planet, saved for another day, stokes up
    its slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarlet

    gash that take our breath away; a world at its interminable
    show of holy dying. And we go with it, the old

    gatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contribution
    is small, adding our handsel of warm clay.


    An Aside on the Sublime

    A Ground Thrush,
    the latest of many such
    occasional companions,

    is scribbling the dusk
    with its signature
    tune, a high five

    sol-fa-sol-fa-doh, at each
    da capo plainly astonished
    by its own sufficiency.

    I stand and listen,
    happy to yield
    the day, the scene, the privilege of being

    the one here who will embellish
    the hour with all it needs, beyond
    silence, of manifesto. Which

    the land, as it breathes out warm night
    odours and settles,
    takes as an usher's

    aside on the sublime.
    A footnote, Eine Kleine Background Music,
    to its blindfold, trancelike

    descent into the dark
    to bring back
    tomorrow.


    Sky News

    A listening post
    in an open field,
    a green message tower,

    each filament and pad precision
    -designed to pick up
    what the four

    winds and their attendant
    weathers pour in,
    on the senses, on the skin.

    We catch
    at a remove what passes
    between packed leaves and Heaven's

    breath as the big sky
    story blows through
    the gaps in conversations,

    caught without
    shelter like Poor Tom
    under the wet lick and whiplash

    of the metaphysical dark.
      Hunkered down
    in the raw, a-shiver between

    on the one side a mad
    king who weeps and blusters,
    on the other his Fool

    who wisecracks and mocks,
    he grits his teeth,
    hugs himself

    to keep warm, and privy to all,
    illustrious nosebleeds, the heigh-ho
    Dobbin and full cry

    of the great world's
    hiccups and fuck-ups, says
    nowt, sits out the storm.


    Trees

    Trees have their own lives, simple
    if seasonally haunted;
    in their branches the sky
    -adventures of passing gods.

    They make up the wood
    we cannot see, and one
    looks so much like the next that we
    wonder what sense they have

    of being what we would be
    when nomad thoughts possess us, standing
    in one place only with nowhere to go
    but upwards or deeper.

    They wear our rough hearts linked;
    mute journals of what we felt,
    avowals made
    before rock and cloud as witness, X loves Y

    forever. A promise kept
    here and here only,
    in their lives not ours, though the wound
    still aches, in all weathers.


    Rondeau

    As long as
    the stock keeps turning
    over as long
    as spring keeps knocking
    on wood and willows bud

    as long as
    Jane and Jed and Lou are still rocking
    on and have got
    my number as long as
    a wet weekend in bed

    with you in chill November
    just the two
    of us and maybe Sting
    as long
    as long as a piece of string


    Two Odes of Horace

    Odes I, xxvii

    I'm over it, the floral
    tributes, fancy speeches.
    Thank you but

    the roses in that bouquet, so pretty
    pink, will be ash-grey
    by nightfall.

    From now on
    I'll take life straight, no fuss,
    no faddle. So fill

    the wine-cup, boy, and stand
    close by in the vine-leaves' fretwork
    sunset while I drink.


    Odes II, ii

    It's the coin in use, the blade
    in action that means business.
    Stacked in a vault, locked up
    in rifts in the Sierra,
    all minerals are dross.

    It's the world's big-time big spenders
    who hog the news. Big bucks
    stop nowhere. Endow a college, cast
    a pearl, say La Peregrina,
    to a call-girl or an ex.

    Fortunes are hard to manage.
    Far easier to rule
    the Russias, take a bowl
    of tea with a fat-cat Chairman,
    bring Cuba to heel.

    Greed is like dropsy;
    the body bloats
    then parches, feeds on itself,
    hoards its toxic
    water in hundredweights.

    Is Nixon back? Do millions
    flatter him and chatter
    of History's favourite son?
    Well we dissent, and wish
    that wise men would use better

    terms. True honours rest,
    the laurel, the diadem,
    on the head that is not turned
    by the flash-bulbs' pop when Jackie
    O descends on the room.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Earth Hour by David Malouf. Copyright © 2014 David Malouf. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Aquarius,
Radiance,
Retrospect,
Toccata,
Dot Poem, the Connections,
Footloose, a Senior Moment,
Entreaty,
Whistling in the Dark,
Ladybird,
Garden Poems,
Inner City,
An Aside on the Sublime,
Sky News,
Trees,
Rondeau,
Two Odes of Horace,
Spleen,
A Parting Word,
The Brothers: Morphine & Death,
Long Story Short,
Ghost Town,
Writers' Retreat: Maclaren Vale, 2010,
Persimmons: Campagnatico,
A Recollection of Starlings: Rome '84,
Windows,
Nightsong, Nightlong,
Eternal Moment at Poggio Madonna,
Towards Midnight,
At Laterina,
All Souls,
Earth Hour,
A Green Miscellany,
Night Poem,
Shy Gifts,
Still Life,
The Deluge,
Abstract,
Seven Faces of the Die,
A Touch of the Sun,
Shadow Play,
Australia Day at Pennyroyal,
Aquarius II,
Toccata II,
At Lerici,
Acknowledgments,