difficulties, lived in his feelings too much, exploded. But when I spoke to him he stood and opened his hands with ease and acceptance, slouched a little into the storytelling mode of the country as I struggled to say what his writing meant to me. I started reciting âDeep Wellâ, lines where the spirit trees writhed in cool white limbs and budgerigar, and it fell away into a mumble, I got the words wrongâbut did it matter? As I spoke my praise he opened like a desert flower and uncrinkled a thousand curious petals.
âHer dejection was so deep it became a style of wit, as when
she saw a beautiful tree as a living ghost of death â¦â
L YING AWAKE at night she heard the whistle of a train travelling north. It was wartime and the trains were shrouded, loaded with guns. Through a dream of orchards they made a disturbing animal cry.
She listened as the black frost closed in, the walls creaked, the fire making the only warmth. Outside there was southern weather blowing the trees all one way to her. The hard inquiring wind struck to the bone and whined division.
Except how hardy trees were in Australia, how suited to what was spiritually strange, how beautiful in their hidden statements! Low trees, blue-leaved and olive, on outcropping granite; a clean, lean, hungry country.
She came from a wealthy landowning family. Their holdings spread through two states with boundaries superimposed on a country of ghosts. The song was gone, the dance was secret with the dead dancers, the hunters were gone, the painted bodies a dream. That was how she saw it, passing through on horseback. Her grandfather had surprised a painted warrior standing at the edge of a forest. Just as far back was oldDan spinning stories into a blanket against the winter.
The road beneath the giant original trees swept on and would not wait.
When she saw a First War soldierâs farm a cruel blessing met her eyes. The soldier asked for nothing but the luck to live. But every attempt to cultivate was a silent scream. The ploughland vapoured with the dust of dreams.
That man was a dreamer and the land was poor. His eyes let the whole gold day pass in a stare, walking the turning furrow. The love she saw in him affected her, though. It was between a man with searching eyes and a woman whose body answered to his arms. It was between the passing light and the enduring earth.
She was half spirit already, but rooted in obdurate reality. A brand of failure and a brand of ecstasy shaped her alphabet. Standing in the night, she said, we are like a treeâevery leaf a star.
When the dreaming soldier and his wife were gone the trees were still there. They held their arms up to the light.
Her pessimism was the humility of the seed. Beauty gilded her dismay. âCome back to the kind flesh, to love and simple sight. Let us forget awhile that we create the night.â Soon enough we would turn to minerals, crumble to ash. It was a dour thought expressed at a time of birth and new life.
Her dejection was so deep it became a style of wit, as when she saw a beautiful tree as a living ghost of death.
I remember how she walked in old age. Not very far, riddled with too much knowledge of what she would find when she got there, yet stolidly hopefulâas if there was lightremaining below the horizon, and if she could get a little closer she could bring it up once more with a disparaging sigh.
âWhereâs home, Ulysses? Cuckolded by lewd time he never found again the girl he sailed from, but at his fireside met the islands waiting, and died there, twice a stranger.â
After the war she was hauled back from those big statements, back to the cell, the protein, the biochemical chain of which she was part. God walked through all her ages, but here she was a young woman again, passionate and afraid. A child grew from the seed she held in her. She was the earth, the root, the stem, the link.
Life began in darkness; eternity beckoned with
âHer dejection was so deep it became a style of wit, as when
she saw a beautiful tree as a living ghost of death â¦â
L YING AWAKE at night she heard the whistle of a train travelling north. It was wartime and the trains were shrouded, loaded with guns. Through a dream of orchards they made a disturbing animal cry.
She listened as the black frost closed in, the walls creaked, the fire making the only warmth. Outside there was southern weather blowing the trees all one way to her. The hard inquiring wind struck to the bone and whined division.
Except how hardy trees were in Australia, how suited to what was spiritually strange, how beautiful in their hidden statements! Low trees, blue-leaved and olive, on outcropping granite; a clean, lean, hungry country.
She came from a wealthy landowning family. Their holdings spread through two states with boundaries superimposed on a country of ghosts. The song was gone, the dance was secret with the dead dancers, the hunters were gone, the painted bodies a dream. That was how she saw it, passing through on horseback. Her grandfather had surprised a painted warrior standing at the edge of a forest. Just as far back was oldDan spinning stories into a blanket against the winter.
The road beneath the giant original trees swept on and would not wait.
When she saw a First War soldierâs farm a cruel blessing met her eyes. The soldier asked for nothing but the luck to live. But every attempt to cultivate was a silent scream. The ploughland vapoured with the dust of dreams.
That man was a dreamer and the land was poor. His eyes let the whole gold day pass in a stare, walking the turning furrow. The love she saw in him affected her, though. It was between a man with searching eyes and a woman whose body answered to his arms. It was between the passing light and the enduring earth.
She was half spirit already, but rooted in obdurate reality. A brand of failure and a brand of ecstasy shaped her alphabet. Standing in the night, she said, we are like a treeâevery leaf a star.
When the dreaming soldier and his wife were gone the trees were still there. They held their arms up to the light.
Her pessimism was the humility of the seed. Beauty gilded her dismay. âCome back to the kind flesh, to love and simple sight. Let us forget awhile that we create the night.â Soon enough we would turn to minerals, crumble to ash. It was a dour thought expressed at a time of birth and new life.
Her dejection was so deep it became a style of wit, as when she saw a beautiful tree as a living ghost of death.
I remember how she walked in old age. Not very far, riddled with too much knowledge of what she would find when she got there, yet stolidly hopefulâas if there was lightremaining below the horizon, and if she could get a little closer she could bring it up once more with a disparaging sigh.
âWhereâs home, Ulysses? Cuckolded by lewd time he never found again the girl he sailed from, but at his fireside met the islands waiting, and died there, twice a stranger.â
After the war she was hauled back from those big statements, back to the cell, the protein, the biochemical chain of which she was part. God walked through all her ages, but here she was a young woman again, passionate and afraid. A child grew from the seed she held in her. She was the earth, the root, the stem, the link.
Life began in darkness; eternity beckoned with
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