Walking Back from the Dam

Walking Back from the Dam

Walking Back from the Dam

It leaves in my eyes the image of a
pearl-grey lake fleshed with blue, rain-clearing clouds,
the awakening scent of rain-wet grass, sharpness of
amber light through a clump of swamp-gums;
brighter than an hour back, it’s dusk after
a day of steady, soaking falls (“no-one
can complain,” the guy in the store tells me
earlier on.)  Good weather floating through,
front after front, from the west.
                    In this pause,
swallows, scissoring fifty feet above,
skirt across the neighbour’s paddocks.  They’re like
sheepdogs rounding up an invisible,
panicking flock - insect-sheep which never
form a mob or head to the gate.  So the swallows
fly round and round, swerving, turning in air
which is still and lucid.  They vanish, crossing
like space-probes before the sun, flickering, zipping,
in their backwards and forwards tennis-match;
while under the swamp-gums, that amber glow
settles ochre puddles across bare ground.
Then they’re back again, working the area,
but now it’s like they’re picking threads from off a cloth.  
It’s that dense, this thick, this feeling of time -
this feeling of walking back alone under
the trees.  As if somehow, the whole world’s in
another tense.  Or as if you could still be young,
striding back, shadow-flinging, across the grass
in light sharp as a knife-blade, pools of it.

I’ve neighbours never moved away from here.  
They’re what’s left, when a place is just enough:
a family, a house, the sister moves in too -
with a first child after the husband’s baled out.
They’re one side.  Down the road, an ex-muso
and his wife - both out of work though perhaps
they live on savings anyhow.  Sometimes I hear
them shouting at their dogs.  Otherwise, there
are these moments, never quite catchable,
which could trick you into thinking “This
is how it is, this is the way things always look.”
Like a swirl in a flooded creek, the braid
of things is plaited tight, floating, moving,
never repeating the same glitter, the
same hillock of twisting water. Nothing, in short,
which would not be particular - and tricksy,
addictive, not to be too much believed.  For that’s
the killer: there is so much already gone through -
‘so many star-shows since the 70s’ -
making it possible to read back the stages
of anybody’s life, here, today.  So much
life, too much of it: detritus, memory, phrases.
(I live, I’d say, in the age of biography.)

Holed up by a day of rain now that long dry spell’s
ended at last, I’ve been reading Ian Hamilton’s
engaged “period-study” of Robert Lowell -
American, private-incomed - who made his work
bigger than life, his own life monstrous with
its breakdowns, after winter, every year:
manic depression, lithium, mornings started up
with vodka and milk, students, protest-readings,
Harvard, Italy, London, chain-smoking
and partying, carrying that mix  
of aggression and weakness so attractive
to women.  It hooks in.  It brings nostalgia
for an older generation I knew back then -
who wanted their everyday life to perform
a universal act, a freedom out of politics.
It seems another world, a rich world gone today.
No-one stopped drinking, working only
on vacation (six months) whether in Maine or Suffolk.
Back in New York, you could die in taxis.
Fame, too, was serious, personal, mythic:
an image captioned in the heart of things.
As if you lived, hovering, in the sun’s eye.  And
when it was sunset, there was Rome and cocktails.
Everyone met everyone - stuck, anxious,
suicidal - dreaming themselves, frantically, to death.