Evening Alone At Bunyah

1

My father, widowed, fifty-six years old,

sits washing his feet.

The innocent sly charm

is back in his eye of late years, and tonight

he’s going dancing.

I wouldn’t go tonight, he says to me

by way of apology. You sure you won’t come?

What for? I ask. You know I only dance

on bits of paper. He nods and says, Well, if

any ghosts come calling, don’t let ‘em eat my cake.

I bring him a towel and study his feet afresh:

they make my own feel coarse. They are so small,

so delicate he can scarcely bear to walk

barefoot to his room to find his dancing shoes

and yet all day he works in hobnailed boots

out in the forest, clearing New South Wales.

No ghosts will come, Dad. I know you dote on cake.

I know how some women who bake it dote on you.

It gets them nowhere.

You are married still.

2

Home again from the cities of the world.

Cool night, and the valley relaxes after heat,

the earth contracts, the planks of the old house creak,

making one more adjustment, joist to nail,

nail to roof, roof to the touch of dew.

Smoke stains, rafters, whitewash rubbed off planks ...

yet this is one house that Jerry built to last:

when windstorms came, and other houses lost

roofs and verandahs, this gave just enough

and went unscathed, for all the little rain

that sifted through cracks, the lamps puffed out by wind

sucked over the wallplate, and the occasional bat

silly with fear at having misplaced the dark.

When I was a child, my father was ashamed

of this shabby house. It signified for him

hard work and unjust poverty. There would come

a day when he’d tear it down and build afresh.

The day never came. But that’s another poem.

No shame I felt in those days was my own.

It can be enough to read books and camp in a house.

Enough, at fourteen, to watch your father sit

at the breakfast table nursing his twelve-gauge

shotgun, awaiting the doubtful reappearance

of a snake’s head at a crack in the cement

of the skillion fireplace floor.

The blood’s been sluiced

away, and the long wrecked body of the snake

dug out and gone to ash these thirteen years,

but the crack’s still there,

and the scores the buckshot ripped beside the stove.

3

There is a glow in the kitchen window now

that was not there in the old days. They have set

three streetlights up along the Gloucester road

for cows to stray by, and night birds to shun,

for the road itself’s not paved, and there’s no town

in the valley yet at all.

It is hoped there will be.

Today, out walking, I considered stones.

It used to be said that I must know each one

on the road by its first name, I was such a dawdler,

such a head-down starer.

I picked up

a chunk of milk-seamed quartz, thumbed off the clay,

let the dry light pervade it and collect,

eliciting shifting gleams, revealing how

the specific strength of a stone fits utterly

into its form and yet reflects the grain

and tendency of the mother-lode, the mass

of a vanished rock-sill tipping one small stone

slightly askew as it weighs upon your palm,

and then I threw it back towards the sun

to thump down on a knoll

where it may move a foot in a thousand years.

Today, having come back, summer was all mirror

tormenting me. I fled down cattle tracks

chest-deep in the earth, and pushed in under twigs

to sit by cool water speeding over rims

of blackened basalt, the tall light reaching me.

Since those moth-grimed streetlamps came,

my dark is threatened.

4

I stand, and turn, and wander through the house,

avoiding those floorboards that I know would creak,

to the other verandah. Here is where I slept,

and here is where, one staring day, I felt

a presence at my back, and whirled in fright

to face my father’s suit, hung out to air.

This country is my mind. I lift my face

and count my hills, and linger over one:

Deer’s, steep, bare-topped, where eagles nest below

the summit in scrub oaks, and where I take

my city friends to tempt them with my past.

Across the creek and the paddocks of the moon

four perfect firs stand dark beside a field

lost long ago, which holds a map of rooms.

This was the plot from which we transplants sprang.

The trees grew straight. We burgeoned and spread far.

I think of doors and rooms beneath the ground,

deep rabbit rooms, thin candlelight of days ...

and, turning quickly, walk back through the house.

5

Night, and I watch the moonrise through the door.

Sitting alone’s a habit of mind with me ...

for which I’ll pay in full. That has begun.

But meanwhile I will sit and watch the moon.

My father will be there now, at a hall

in the dark of the country, shining at the waltz,

spry and stately, twirling at formal speeds

on a roaring waxed-plank floor.

The petrol lamps

sizzle and glare now the clapping has died down.

They announce some modern dance. He steps outside

to where cigarettes glow sparsely in the dark,

joins some old friends and yarns about his son.

Beneath this moon, an ancient radiance comes

back from far hillsides where the tall pale trunks

of ringbarked trees haphazardly define

the edge of dark country I could not afford

to walk in at night alone

lest I should hear

the barking of dogs from a clearing where no house

has ever stood, and, walking down a road

in the wilderness, meet a man who waited there

beside a creek to tell me what I sought.

Father, come home soon.

Come home alive.

~Les Murray