Winter Solstice, 1994

The moon is whole —
definitive inside a disc of haze
on starless indigo.
My lamp is its twin in the glass —
a halo of glued rice paper;
the globe of uncratered warmth
I write by… Down there,
a black swathe studded with
street lights, gold windows.
Eucalypts fork through them,
nest the sky:
horizons were made to be broken.
Night-gusts will sweep this city,
winnow what has been held in air,
(tingled on skin, in the eye's memory) —
cold darkness will erase
stories unfinished or untold
till they rise again
like steam from pavements,
unravel crippled determined roots,
press through grass and garbage.
Meanwhile the molten moon
drains and renews the world's waters,
rhythms of brain and blood.
Sun-fertilised, it is a cell
hooked to the wall of night.
I draw curtains but cannot
switch it off: the moon's
unanswerable,
dying and growing, light.