Sapientia Lacrimae

The sound of the heat’s the cicadas’ note—
a drilling that forces sweat to the brow;
this impossible reach of the earth’s throat

vibrates in a clearing, while eucalypts grow
silvery shafts—those pistons with their steam
about them. And neither can you follow

that intensity, and throng—there’s no beam,
no mote, that’s undissolved in the light’s stare.
The forest ascends with a smoothness and gleam

that is oiled. It seems you’re caught by a flare,
stepping into day. Withdrawn to a shack,
just this pounding shrillness, intense as the blare

of the light. The rioting of that claque
is demand to mate. As though it were rain,
one is sodden. Or, seething spear-points attack,

with rattlings. Most of the day you have lain
suffering ineptness—a full-length poultice
for sickness of spirit. The flight to Cockaigne

a chance, by late afternoon. Day’s injustice
has all trees dazed as willows; but you make
the sea, in a light-struck car. It’s featureless

there; the edge of grey water’s laid, opaque
with light, sealed as the lip of an omelette,
on shore. Within it, like leaves under the rake,
being rolled, like heavy edging of a net,
sea-wrack: which is, by thousands, the cicada.
Vaguely opaline, fabrics of the sunset;

nearby, dead panes of a yacht; in leather,
the wings that flit; coils of brown smoke, as though
away across there a city were on fire;

and these insects, once green, shown in fiasco—
they’re stubbed-out, washed-up, become sodden brown.
A draggled hem. From frenzy, such overthrow;

how is a mystery. “Not even the sun
will overstep its mark,” said Heraclitus.
That each element makes recompense was known

to Anaximander; “for the injustice
they do, according to the ordinance
of Time.” Where the road of excess leads us

is this mess. (I have never sought guidance
of beefy, self-deluding William Blake.)
I see them abased with no exultance,

whose own complaints overstep the mark. I walk
on rippled sand, the fallen wing of the shore,
in eerie quiet. The water, engorged snake,

slugglishly winds. That sting like sweat’s no more
in my head, but harmless rustlings. And these
free lines, these loose streamers, which the waves draw,

make me recall runnels sluicing glass—the ease
of another season. Ploughed fields under rain,
and like Epicurus’ garden, the trees
rising quietly as mist, in me, in the pane,
from deep loam, at furrows’ end. In reverie
I see, too, how the shape of a human

is a hive for tears. Stiff or sinuously,
those roots of stumps, piled up, are warriors’
spokes, harness, ribands—all the stridency

of the mischievous and blood-coated creatures,
bogged, brought to grief. There is, if only we knew,
a land often kinder than ours, our failures’.