Forestry

Music and the Heart run hand in hand
Naked over the shining sand,

In the summit song of youth
A quiet quick catch of the breath.

Seraph my soul’s content
More longed than desert well

Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
   While daisies spy you?

‘All things are flux: there’s nothing fast,’
Said Heraclitus, ages past,

Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

My little son, whose face I never saw,
Who could not wait to bless your father ’s eyes

Part of me for ever is the January morning
Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight

Above the great ship’s lifting bow
I watch the Pole Star nightly stand,

Sweet solitude, my supple slave,
Delicious concubine

Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
The muffling guilt of night,

My nine-hours son, so wrinkle-faced
Wry concentration of distaste
To find your Person so displaced,

The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons

You are late coming home
To the house we share
An audible silence
Chills the air

My love, I watch you thread your way, and turn
with a small timeless smile, and trail your trolley
unhurried through the gate of no return.

My dearest love, at seventy-nine
You’re not, and never have been, mine.

My dearest love, where’er you are,
just through that door, beyond that star,

Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,

… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,

Down arches of the years I hear your voice
explaining serials of our late departures,

Six years since your last birthday in our midst
seems yesterday, in this same so-loved house,

For ever is the promise. I will trust
To share with you the same light and same dust.

Wrapped in my gown of self-regard sublime
I heard your voice arrive from outer space.

Knowing the time was short
Yours was the instant thought
‘Let’s go up to the Rocks!’

Ten years since that incalculable day
When from all worlds we know you slipped away

Not vile, body, nor foe, flesh,
Your joys deluding, triumphs trash,
Fit to be foiled your every wish.

Out of the cloud my Lord the Sun,
Out of the earth my Lady Spring,

Spring held her fire
So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
Would there be ever an end

Twelve foot’s the rise and fall
Of barometric Man

This mountain means discovery, since the day
I climbed it first in boyhood and alone,

Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
The muffling guilt of night,

From this rock spine, not three feet wide,
Rivers of a continent divide

The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons

Stentorian mountain, resonant as your name,
I greet you with joy, I greet you, I give you thanks

The rousing sun’s sea-dance and dazzle
Burnishes grassy cape and cliff,

You hold the timeless in your brief green boughs
The cardboard angels, home-made crib, the straw,
The new-born baby older than Abraham

When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
You wept of course, but did the same again

The young magpie, as large as either parent,
Piteously pleads the pathos of his need.

The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

No dolphin it was, but a six-month suckling whale
gashed and shark-mauled, tribeless, motherless,

At first it seemed a trek of migrant ants
climbing the skyline of this great red rock

A garden gracious, serene and spacious at Lambeth –
This is the dream, the vision that shall be its crown

..Three kangaroos, grey eminences, rose
staring, paws crossed, with worried faces fixed,

I heard a man of science tell:
The sun is ringing like a bell,

Come down from that Crest! It’s Australia Day, Emu –
We just want to say, mate, how much we esteem you.

… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,

He lies unblinking, black and corpulent,
first lizard from his hibernation sleep