David Malouf, "Reading Horace Outside Sydney: 1970"

[the-grynne.livejournal.com]

READING HORACE OUTSIDE SYDNEY: 1970

The distance is deceptive. Sydney glitters invisible
in its holocaust of air just thirty miles away. In Rome,
two thousand years from here, a goosequill scrapes, two crack divisions
are hurled against a furclad barbarous northern people pushing

south into history, small throats are cut at committee-tables,
a marriage dies in bed; bald officials like old pennies
worn smooth by time and trade were once my copper-keen school-fellows
who studied Cicero and shook their heads over the fall

of virtue in high places - now on pills, twelve stories high
in air, they shake their heads and fall and rise and walk again.
Somewhere across a border shabby barefoot warriors
stumble into grass, an empire mourns, in small wars seeking

boundaries against death. Over the traffic, over the harbour, lions
roar, schoolboys scramble out of nightmares, mineral stocks
fall with a noiseless crash, the sigh of millions. Cicadas
are heard, shrill under stones, in the long suspension of our breath.

Out here wheat breathes and surges, poplars flare. On the highway, lorries
throb toward city squares. Off in the blue a Cessna bi-plane,
crop-dusting lucerne, turns to catch the sun. The brilliant granule
climbs on out of sight. Its shadows dance in my palm.


DAVID MALOUF