#slessor

Kenneth Slessor 

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels  Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.  Between the double and the single bell  Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells  From the dark warship riding there below,  I have lived many lives, and this one life  Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells. 

Deep and dissolving verticals of light  Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells  Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water  Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats  In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water. 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve  These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought  Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,  Gone even from the meaning of a name;  Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips  And hits and cries against the ports of space,  Beating their sides to make its fury heard. 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face  In agonies of speech on speechless panes?  Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name! 

But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells,  Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.  Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,  There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -  Nothing except the memory of some bones  Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;  And unimportant things you might have done,  Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,  And all have now forgotten - looks and words  And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,  Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales  Of Irish kings and English perfidy,  And dirtier perfidy of publicans  Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.  Five bells. 

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder  Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain  The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,  So dark you bore no body, had no face,  But a sheer voice that rattled out of air  (As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),  A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,  Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,  Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,  And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls  Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls  Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.  But all I heard was words that didn't join  So Milton became melons, melons girls,  And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,  And in each tree an Ear was bending down,  Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,  When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,  The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,  Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.  There's not so many with so poor a purse  Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,  Five miles in darkness on a country track,  But when you do, that's what you think.  Five bells. 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,  Your angers too; they had been leeched away  By the soft archery of summer rains  And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp  That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,  And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,  The sodden ectasies of rectitude.  I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,  Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind  With other things you left, all without use,  All without meaning now, except a sign  That someone had been living who now was dead:  "At Labassa. Room 6 x 8  On top of the tower; because of this, very dark  And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed  Into this room - 500 books all shapes  And colours, dealt across the floor  And over sills and on the laps of chairs;  Guns, photoes of many differant things  And differant curioes that I obtained..." 

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare  Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,  We argued about blowing up the world,  But you were living backward, so each night  You crept a moment closer to the breast,  And they were living, all of them, those frames  And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,  And most your father, the old man gone blind,  With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,  That graveyard mason whose fair monuments  And tablets cut with dreams of piety  Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men  Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment  At cargoes they had never thought to bear,  These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone. 

Where have you gone? The tide is over you,  The turn of midnight water's over you,  As Time is over you, and mystery,  And memory, the flood that does not flow.  You have no suburb, like those easier dead  In private berths of dissolution laid -  The tide goes over, the waves ride over you  And let their shadows down like shining hair,  But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend  Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;  And you are only part of an Idea.  I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,  The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,  And the short agony, the longer dream,  The Nothing that was neither long nor short;  But I was bound, and could not go that way,  But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.  If I could find an answer, could only find  Your meaning, or could say why you were here  Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath  Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?