The Good in Moonlight

The painter
a part-time carpenter and builder

—O would that he had one life
like the trimmed nature of an excellent brush—

But he does not
and that is good, too.

The other truth is that
he drives sweetly between the trees
spotting the good timber.

At each vista he loves 
the shadows and timbered shoulders 
as easily as the kids climb onto his.

Who would cut them down?
Who wants more than to see kids grow?
The shifting, limited hues of paintings ensure their becoming.

Here is a lovely turn in the road.
You have to pause as you curve to ascend
the bare shape with hardly a fence.

It’s there to be what it is in moonlight.
The bend of a road with an open face—
drained of colour, presenting as virtue. 

A Gift of Sorts

Here you are on the flat peak of the old mountain.
Its lava cooled aeons before you were born
the mound now so understated a man can fail
to notice he was driving around it. The vista

is a strange given. Its middle distance is misting.
The dun-coloured paddocks and leaning trees
are a time-burnt offering, a presentation
a kind construction (by the carpenter-painter)—

a gift, of sorts, that you can’t help accepting 
deserved or not.
You do your level best to receive its news.
After all, you’ve just been weeping, having been 
all of a sudden struck by the emergency message

of that wry, grinning Swedish kid who said, 
at the end of a deft arrangement of colours:
‘I’ll see you on the streets’, defiance licking that watermelon mouth.
Of course there’s no connection between these events.

The vista wants you to calm so you do
having glimpsed it for what it is—its time-worn relics 
implacable, enduring offerings under an egg-shell sky 
its quietness a gift beyond belief wherever we meet. 

What shall we paint to head off grief?
The boulders are in the foreground, they seem to disappear
in the far distance. Do we have the wherewithall 
to render a rock? How dry the grass must be over there.

Dark Wood

Look—here is the way into the forest.
You head straight in then veer left
or is it south, where the light thins
and moss cold on the boulders.

You can’t see the moss, or softness.
Assume that it’s there, the way a dad
assumes the story he tells the children
will turn out well, or more or less.

That boulder on the right, dear loved ones
we should all avoid that. See how
light on its top suggests a flat ledge
yet it’s the same light tucked darkly underneath.

Everything except one thing is dark up ahead.
There is something almost wooden about it—like mum and dad locked in dispute at bedtime.
A sapling has fallen across the way

and you can only rely on that
brittle or burnt though it maybe.
Something or someone shines his or her
torch along it, ending mid-air

in the middle of the picture 
we carry of ourselves alone.
After a long day’s work in olive greens
vistas are closing down as we peer. 

Undeserved

The ‘mount’ keeps rising to mind
spreading itself as naked as a hand.

The ‘mount’ had been there all along—
well before the land was cleared

and its peoples thinned 
like new trees into safe and distant hedges

and demure pastures
like wet pastry on a scrubbed bench

or something as wickedly domestic
as full forgetfulness for what we once 

so brazenly did. Look at it now. 
Every line so perfect, tones so just

we could arrest the new vision at a glance,
make a sculpture of it

show it in a gallery, put money down
take it home under the arm.

It slays me, this serenity. 
Near the top, lichened uncarved blocks

cooled after the lava flows.
And the nougat road I take is still there.