On an Evening in Late Summer

I want the bird with the key-maker's drill,
the chime-maker's hammer, the bird that sounds
as if a child with a piece of larchwood
hit icicles off a grille. And the man who comes

to sweep leaves from his gate, who feels
the shadows amass across his face the way
blowflies convene and scatter over the plums -
I want for him a sunshaft wide as a sombrero,

one he could nap under beside a stream
and a wild chyrsanthemum. I want to put
my fingertip in the eccentricities of a web
a spider has darned in the Christmas bush

and free a fly from its orbit. I want to be
taken where the sun puts the scarlet note of
poinsettias into the depth of a quince-coloured
sky, where the fringed wings of the thrips

and the ephemeral beetles of this February night
go on in the mind of a child who finds
in the honeysuckle and in the mayapple, a choir
loud enough to make her hum her desires.

I want to watch from the secularised regions
of the juniper a praying mantis step out
and tremble on anorexic legs as if it searched
for the chords of any diminishing number,

a psalmist trying to sustain a rhapsody
for Betelgeuse and the moon. What I want
is for the night to shake loose and whirr and dance
like a chanteuse of the treetops, like the bees

and the wasps drunk amongst the passion flowers
as if they were the ends of bows zipping
across strings in a concerto; then, over
the compost and the roses - in etudes about

life versus decrepitude. I want the wind
to rustle the buds of the lavender and birds
to tin-talk with the rain and the fall of summer
fruit. I want the wind to call like a Mexican

in his dreams the name esperance, esperance as
it blows across the uncut grass. And as I drag
my bench across the porch tiles this time of day,
weighty with the calls of cockatoos as it is

with the perfume of the gardenia, I want the fly
to turn the world on the turnstiles of its eyes,
I want a girl to turn plums in her hands,
each a magenta sun, and never need to wonder

how far anything is from a peer or a rival
while she hums her desires into the lobed leaves
and the scarlet bracts of the poinsettias, her finger
still sealed in the strings of an immaculate design.