There is a line missing from the poem in the anthology,
Here is a longer version of ‘Closer’:
Olney Poems Australia / England
Olney State Forest, Watagan Mountains, NSW
‘Oh! For a closer walk with God.’ William Cowper, Olney Hymns
Milton thought Adam had to work the garden but Adam’s
task is to guide guests through the bush. His wife, a recent
London arrival, stays away with severe snake-nerves.
Our first bushwalk is one of his last. The resort is closing.
I show him orchids, White-fingered Ladies and Nodding
Greenhoods, shiny translucent panels, curved veiled domes.
King Parrots blow piccolos among chiming Bellbirds
he sees for the first time through my glasses, startled,
raucous, frantically mobbing a Currawong robbing
a nest high in a Flooded Gum’s porcelain sheen.
Barbed rust sequesters old paddocks and shattered dams
on an ancient border between the Darkinjung and coastal
Awabakal, sacred sites still imprint Country with story.
Slanted sunlight severs knotted vines in a Stygian gully,
taps misty breath on a Yellow-throated Scrubwren, down
floats on her bill, feathers tremble as a male mounts,
wings urgently flailing in another antsy spring day.
Water has stopped motion in a winding rust-red channel,
a stick hoists an Azure Kingfisher coalescing colour
from a brochure for lazy days in the Maldives.
We sit waiting for wings in a clearing. A Brown Thornbill
scoots into a paperbark, wings stretched, skewed, splayed,
working flat out for a feed to continue her life’s work.
Adam is forever young, eager to learn and keeps an eye
on the dilated sky for the lucky dinosaurs mobilising
fluency and song. A flushed disc, flecked Arctic white
lands on a dead branch and turns his back on us,
perfect camouflage, the utter beauty and glory gone.
A shaft of light starts to finger the charcoal coverlets
and a flick of wings blooms velvet into a Rose Robin.
Adam offers us a two-way radio, warns us not to get lost
as we take off south following a dirt road into the forest
then a path horses take, flaying the ground of vegetation.
The mud has dried in lucky, or unlucky, horseshow patterns.
North by north-west, we will follow the sun. Trees are regrowth
logged here for over a hundred years. We glimpse scarlet rumps,
Red-browed Finches are dancing in the dry grasses among
the blue kit of a male Superb Fairy-wren. I fall asleep
curled in a child’s pose, all this fresh air . . . wake to an epiphany.
The Watagan Hills fall ahead of the horizon, a miniature field
of sundews hoisting single delicate flowers, slender stems
wearing tiny carnivorous clamshell earrings, hairy and sticky
to the curious touch. Back by the old stables, a languorous
Sea-Eagle in glide mode is mobbed by a gang of temporary allies,
Crows, Peewees and one Noisy Miner. Carnivores or herbivores
they are all mad angels, distant cousins we refuse to acknowledge,
yet their presence preserves our health. We light a fire
and toast marshmallows, the sky unravels its swag around
the silver full moon jumping through the silver gums.
Creation (can we leave it there?) converted when industry
escalated and songlines contracted. No longer sacred, earth
grounds the last miracles, life and death. Myth sings of little else.
Enkidu reported from a charnel house we live in darkness
and wear feathers like birds. Now, we’ve lost our fur too.
Belonging is being faithful to the present and its network,
walking like Thoreau alert to aperture and experience
without magic or commandments, secrets or lies.
I mention a Zen saying to Adam as we say goodbye,
‘We are sleep-walking in Eden and may awaken to it.’
Weston Underwood, Olney, Buckinghamshire
Months later, I’m sat where William Cowper wrote and worried.
The fields would have been smaller, ribbed by hedgerows
and figured with labour, windmills spun the old sky. The view slips
on a Lime tree avenue with gaps (felled for coffins in the Great War)
and into ‘Wilderness’, a thicket in the grounds of Weston Park
laid out by Capability Brown. A large collection of birds settled
in the fifties, ‘Flamingo Zoo’ focused on pelicans and vultures.
A dogwalker claims the summerhouse squirrels are squatting
was Cowper’s retreat, said I might catch a wallaby bouncing round.
Surely familiarity with the world diminishes contempt for creation?
‘All we behold is miracle; but, seen So duly, all is miracle in vain.’ William Cowper, The Winter Walk At Noon, The Task. (His response to Paradise Lost).
Cowper’s alcove
View from the alcove
