In ancient days Men in my job prepared for endless travel Across the sea of stars, where Pharaoh sailed To immortality, but now we know This is no journey. A long, aching pause Is all the voyage there will ever be. Already it is not like life. I shan’t Caress the hetaerae of Naukrates, Only their images: paint on a wall, Not vivid like a bowl of porphyry, But pale, chipped, always fading. Here forgive me When you come kindly visiting, as both Our daughters do, for you three built the start Of this tomb when you helped me weed my books And then arrange the ones left, walls of color The sunlight will titrate from spring to autumn. Rich shelves of them, these lustrous codices, Are the first walls I see now in the morning After the trek downstairs, though when I walk On further, painfully, I see much more— Boats in the windows, treasures on the terrace, As if I weren’t just Pharaoh’s tomb designer But the living god in the departure lounge Surrounded by his glistering aftermath— Yet everything began in these few thousand Pages of print and plates. Books are the anchors Left by the ships that rot away. The mud The anchors lie in is one’s recollection Of what life was, and never, late or soon, Will be again.

Plugged into YouTube’s vast cosmopolis, We are in Sweden, and Bill Evans plays “ ’Round Midnight,” Monk’s most elemental thing: Most beautiful and most bewildering Because it builds a framework out of freedom. At the Cambridge Union once, I watched Monk play That song in his sharp hat and limp goatee As if the fact that he himself composed it Back in the day Merely insured he would forget it slowly, Instead of straightaway, like where he was. His eyeballs like hot coals, he jabbed and growled, At one stage failing to locate the keyboard Completely. But I walked to the Blue Boar Beside Tom Weiskel to pay awestruck homage. Monk thought we were the cops. He disappeared. Only a few years later, Weiskel, too, Went missing. Back in the States, majestic In his tenure, he was skating with his daughter On a frozen lake. She went through the thin ice And he died diving for her. So now I Am the only one of those three men alive. Let’s call it four. George Russell loved that number. He heard the sparseness in the classic tones, Though his idea of swing was Hindemith. My future wife and I would bring him disks That he had never heard, and he for us Would spin the classic stuff we ought to hear. So much of receptivity is instinct, A lust for finding form in the unknown, The pathway around midnight, searched by touch When you are lost.

In Vienna once, the Princess Antoinette Hohenlohe, most commonly called Nettie, Showed me her family’s fabulous collection Of Degas pastels. In a chest of drawers They were arranged in sheaves. The ballerinas I had first seen in my Skira book in Sydney Were all there, the colors sumptuous Past anything that I could have imagined. The state will get them all eventually. A good thing, but at least they’ve been looked after, Like the Klimts and Schieles in the Belvedere. Bombarded by the photons pouring upward, Eventually I had to plead exhaustion. My eyes were weary from the burning colors, Especially the blue I never found Again until the year I filmed in Cairo And saw it as an inlay in pure gold— The skylit death mask of Tutankhamun.

This is the way my memories connect Now that they have no pattern. All I can do is make the pictures click As I go sailing on the stream of thought Feeding the lake across which the sun strikes To fill my sail, and every riverbank Or beach between the dunes and the sandbar Leads to another place that I once knew, And now, at night, can see again In sharper outline, shadows in the shadows: Veils, sheets, and tents of coruscation Peeling and coalescing as I travel, As if, instead of walking by the river, I were whispering across the Nullarbor In the cockpit of the car whose silver shell Was made of photo cells. The Sun Racer? The Sun Voyager. Gliding is what I do, Here at the finish, in the final hour. It will be this way between the star clusters, In the gulf between the galaxies.

In sunken cities of the memory Mud-brick, dissolved in time, Leaves nothing but the carved, cut stones And scraps of the ceramics. Time, it is thereby proven, is the sea Whose artifacts are joined by separateness.

Oasis of Siwa, I call you back Through the gilded wood of Osiris With his inlaid eyes. Time passes and turns black But only in between the gold, the jewels: Where nothing of its decoration lingers The wood is a dark night.

Sky gods appear as falcons: Horus, the divine, is one of them. After Rembrandt lost his wealth He could still paint the frothed and combed Delicacy of light on gold, The texture of gathering darkness Made manifest by the gleam That it contains and somehow seems to flaunt While dialling down. An understated festival, His energy came back to him through memory As mine does here and now, as if lent power By the force of its own fading.

The slick smooth sandstone of the water stair Lifted through space from Clifton Gardens In Sydney where I picnicked with my mother With all the other widows and war orphans To the delta of the Nile Echoes a fresco’s surface, petrified. That figure with its finger in its mouth Is meant to be a child

Even when dancing in the caves Of the Kimberleys All painted adults seem serene— The Dreamtime Dancers. Only the children suck their fingers As they look toward you Waiting for their turn At life, the long plunge into doubt

On TV at night, direct from Rio, Olympic divers are hydraulic drills When they go in and flatten out To lie above the bottom of the pool On palettes of specific bubbles

At Rio, Ren Qian, plaiting her silk thread Of falling and revolving light Through thirty feet of air, Goes in without a ripple. Seen from inside the pool, her impact Is a shout rewritten as a whisper, A bomb exploding inward

At Ramsgate Baths on Botany Bay I waited half an hour For the girl in the blue Speedo To do her simple dive From a mere three metres The dive was one step up From a peanut roll

But Ren Qian now Spearing through my screen Like a goddess reaching Earth Is only a touch more beautiful Than what I can remember Of a human girl whose face I have spent my life forgetting. If you want to see a better joke Than young desire Just look at an old man First gambling without chips And then without a single steady picture Of the silver ball

Roulette wheels in Las Vegas, The B24’s propellers Churning sunlight on Okinawa For the flight meant to bring My father home Are like collars of the priests Heads threaded through the sun’s disk Or that tambourine the moon

At the destruction horizon The last wall of the temple Crashes into the water And, pulled apart, a fresco turns to dust: A cup of coffee gone back to the bag Of beans by the long route, An aeon reassigned To form the towpath now Of the river of my memory

This is a river song, Linking the vivid foci Where once my mind was formed That now must fall apart: A global network blasted To ruins by the pressure Of its lust to grow, which proves now At long last, after all this time, To be its urge to die.

But this was in the future. In the past The Naos of the Decades From the Nile’s eastern delta Journeyed slowly to the west, Shattering all the way. Two thousand years later The pieces join up again As now my soul does Lying here so ill, my memories— Which, you will have noticed, Are stoked with countless deaths— Could fuel a nebula

For my nets of recollection shine Like the treetops of Kokoda Late at night The phosphorescent outlines Assemble, interpenetrate Where our fathers and our uncles Looked up into the ceiling Of silver gods— Imagine Michelangelo Confined to chrome and diamonds— And wondered where the enemy Lay cradling his guns In the darkness of the jungle floor

On the far side of the world Above that sea of lights Translated into flak And burning blast-points The Aussie Mosquito fliers Went in silhouette Across the Ruhr And when the war was over There was one of them I saw Bowl fast balls at the SCG Against the greatest team The West Indians ever sent. When I tell Australians now That I saw Keith Miller play They realize how old I am: Like being there for Troy, Like having seen The flare-path for great Hector Guiding him home And the whirlpools Of the Merlins in the English dark.

And in Adelaide I met That other blessed flier, Kym Bonython himself, The squatter who had everything— The galleries of paintings, The properties the size Of Luxembourg, the wives Out of a classic fable—the only Connoisseur at his exalted level To have driven in a demolition derby.

When Eurilla, his great house, burned to the ground The flames took paintings by Arthur Boyd, By Nolan, Olsen, Lloyd Rees, and Brett Whiteley, Five thousand jazz disks, many of them signed (Duke Ellington was his house guest several times), And all his books. It must have seemed the wrath Of God, yet Kym came back As full of joy as always. There was a lesson there And I still don’t know what it is. You have to be that way And, above all, stick to your real speed, Which was, for him, the way the Perspex windscreen Of the Mossie ate the miles. It was the tempo of his life, Visible again in how he decked The grille tray of his Bristol 403 With a set of bullock horns.

My Americans in Cambridge Had names from comic books— Star Lawrence, Mike Smith, Pete Mazan, Steve Greenblatt, and Tom Weiskel

The skis were long in those days And Mike Smith’s, made of steel, Would clatter on the moguls Of Zurs am Alberg As he straight-lined a whole hill. None of them liked the war But you couldn’t see them losing

Back teaching in the States, Weiskel, to save his daughter, Didn’t stop to take his skates off Before he went in to find her And they both died in the cold

He’d understand, if ever I should see him In the halls of Dis, I just about put up with the idea Of his death, but not hers. But he won’t need telling that, Today, in this long winter When I shout at my two daughters That I cannot see them in the dark (For Christ’s sake wear your armbands) I threaten them with my own death Through fear, and not with theirs Of which they have such small conception They still dress, after nightfall, Like commandos from a rubber boat On a secret mission To murder me with guilt

But even while he moaned and groaned Monk couldn’t blur The structure of a tune carved out of fog Because it is a blur already, Like a mist by Turner full of different Thicknesses of rain. Back in the fifties I used to play the Monk Blue Note LPs To my future wife. She still Has them on her shelves today Along with all the dirt-cheap Turnabouts Of Brendel’s first, best cycle Of the Beethoven sonatas And the Supremes albums Star Lawrence gave us: Baby, Baby Where did our love go? Ira shaimase I go and I come back

We have been married now so long Vinyl is back in fashion. As if burning cakes of peat Were once again the chic Way of making fire

If my ashes end up in an hourglass I can go on working. Patterns of gravity Will look like writing. Remember me, sings Dido,

Wind shapes the dunes Above which swallows stream To Europe, with a pit stop at Gibraltar Reminding them that Africa was soft With sliding surfaces of singing sand. The whole world, if you wait long enough, Is full of falling.