Five Bells

 Time that is moved by little fidget wheels 
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
 
Between the double and the single bell 
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells 
From the dark warship riding there below, 
I have lived many lives, and this one life 
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
 

Deep and dissolving verticals of light 
Ferry the falls of moonshine down.
 Five bells 
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice.
 Night and water 
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats 
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve 
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought 
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, 
Gone even from the meaning of a name; 
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips 
And hits and cries against the ports of space, 
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face 
In agonies of speech on speechless panes? 
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name! 

But I hear nothing, nothing.
.
.
only bells, 
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
 
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life, 
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait - 
Nothing except the memory of some bones 
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; 
And unimportant things you might have done, 
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, 
And all have now forgotten - looks and words 
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off, 
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales 
Of Irish kings and English perfidy, 
And dirtier perfidy of publicans 
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
 
Five bells.
 

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder 
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain 
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, 
So dark you bore no body, had no face, 
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air 
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass), 
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, 
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, 
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, 
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls 
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls 
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
 
But all I heard was words that didn't join 
So Milton became melons, melons girls, 
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night, 
And in each tree an Ear was bending down, 
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass, 
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought, 
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, 
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
 
There's not so many with so poor a purse 
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, 
Five miles in darkness on a country track, 
But when you do, that's what you think.
 
Five bells.
 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, 
Your angers too; they had been leeched away 
By the soft archery of summer rains 
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp 
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind, 
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage, 
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
 
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink, 
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind 
With other things you left, all without use, 
All without meaning now, except a sign 
That someone had been living who now was dead: 
"At Labassa.
 Room 6 x 8 
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark 
And cold in winter.
 Everything has been stowed 
Into this room - 500 books all shapes 
And colours, dealt across the floor 
And over sills and on the laps of chairs; 
Guns, photoes of many differant things 
And differant curioes that I obtained.
.
.
" 

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare 
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper, 
We argued about blowing up the world, 
But you were living backward, so each night 
You crept a moment closer to the breast, 
And they were living, all of them, those frames 
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth, 
And most your father, the old man gone blind, 
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck, 
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments 
And tablets cut with dreams of piety 
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men 
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment 
At cargoes they had never thought to bear, 
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
 

Where have you gone? The tide is over you, 
The turn of midnight water's over you, 
As Time is over you, and mystery, 
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
 
You have no suburb, like those easier dead 
In private berths of dissolution laid - 
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you 
And let their shadows down like shining hair, 
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend 
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed; 
And you are only part of an Idea.
 
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, 
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, 
And the short agony, the longer dream, 
The Nothing that was neither long nor short; 
But I was bound, and could not go that way, 
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
 
If I could find an answer, could only find 
Your meaning, or could say why you were here 
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath 
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice? 

I looked out my window in the dark 
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light 
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand 
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze, 
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys 
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each, 
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard 
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal 
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells, 
Five bells.
 Five bells coldly ringing out.
 
Five bells.

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