- Why
do I stand here, stare about me?
- Thirty
years are gone since last
- I
clung, clambered, crashed down sheer
- gorges'
walls, found this forest.
- Surely
not merely in memory have I
- come
here. The blue gums soar, naked
- smooth,
to where they over arch and,
- lost
in height, mingle in myriad tongues.
- How
have I got here? Why do I stand?
- long
looking, long desiring, a fallen
- trunk,
lichened, mossed, host to ochre
- red
fungi, falling into mould at my feet?
- I
sink in pungent mould. Blue-grey
- the
pipes soar to their arches that lull,
- linger,
leave off, then swell, hail,
- all
hail in hosannas, in hosannas.
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- Pure,
pure sustained, loud as any bird,
- the
cricket sings in the night, from under
- ground,
in trills, in tremulous, shaken out
- shrill
rounds, I've heard a bird wake
- in
the dark, alone, and sing as though
- to
reassure itself. But the cricket, he's
- the
assured singer of the underground.
-
- Right
now he's singing in quicksilver rounds,
- as
the dancer from the Etruscan tombs
- on
my wall: a young, sun brown man, a blue
- drapery,
gold embroidered, over his shoulders,
- his
naked body, dances to shrill pipes,
- past
bare branches, budding twigs that shall
- break,
burst into flames of leaves, flowers.
-
- The
Etruscans feasted in their underworld,
- sure,
pure, as the cricket sings, rings
- from
under the stone step outside my door.
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