Ardea cinerea is the scientific name of the Grey Heron found in Europe. In Human Touch (2004) a heron alights for a moment on a stone basin in the garden – an Australian species no doubt but when I observed the haunting effect to which it was put I thought of my childhood familiar. After thinking I would speak on this theme, I came in half-way through a screening of Paul’s film about Nijinsky: there, again, was the heron, taking off, sailing behind the tracery of bare trees. In the spirit of the director’s gift of association, Ardea was improvised over a period of two-and-a-half hours, roughly the length of a feature film.
Improvisation for Paul Cox
1
Snapped at the horizon of vision
thoughtfully tenanting Egyptian waters,
your role in the periscope of remembered
time is protected by the agency of
Orpheus: with that weight of association
to bear no wonder you drape a grey raincoat
over hunched shoulders and refuse to attend
rehearsals, – as if one whose brush had drawn
up shadows from death’s bowl writing with them
mortal maps needed further direction.
But I see you under other lights when
without regard for Fiction’s plot you dropped
in to the set, perching on Medean rooftops
or idly lifting off from sunken regions
we had overlooked you pulled the straining wires
of your craft, Phaedrus-like, towards the sun –
startled, I always thought, by a psycho-
logical indiscretion or the rowdy
obsession with surface detail likely to
obscure the immortal creases in the water’s face.
Then, pulling off the monkey face that answered
you, jabbing with futile endeavour the beak
that probed the underbelly of the shallows
for life, you were not so smart, but ungloved of
your double’s worship, stood about like any
evidence of nature’s perversity: shags,
gannets, mergansers and other notorieties
of northern avifauna easily out-hauled
the treasures of the deep, putting food on
the table of science and the everyday,
while you with your flamingo pretensions
stalked up and down in solitary, unpicking
an Ego not yet dreamt of in my Eden.
2
Always it has been like this, we say, expecting
a tearing of the veil that will reveal behind
the film the existence of a might have been
trajectory, you know, spreading southwards
as the heron heavily climbs towards
the threshold of whatever emancipation
of the spirit – O look down below (panning with
the camera’s eye of memory reclining
on association’s lulling cushions):
a girl, her skirt rolled up above her knees
with red hair, green eyes and the century
in her hands; O look, the funeral bier
and over there the alienated family
come together with the deceased’s ashes,
reading futures in the glitter of the fishmeal
urnage turned out in mother’s favourite waters –
you funeral fowl, ardent in defence of
ashes, you doctor who takes over when
this-worldly doctors wind back across the field –
Death having put an end to artful deferral,
veilings and the other feathered artifices
society uses to capitalise the flesh –
when you could have been useful you rose
with just the smallest effort, the baby-bringing
stork in reverse (and shot in grey),
and listlessly doubling the point settled
to new work, new littorals a bay away.
Sad, I thought, that at the end one who
had specialised in shores (and knew his Keats)
could not be recruited for this last scene.
3
I wouldn’t have taken you for a dancer –
a swimming attendant or other fin-de-
siècle servitor caressing rebellion
behind solicitude for his master’s ease,
dancing on the fingers of the age’s
puppeteer perhaps – but these wild fanfares
of wings, these alightings that always seem
lunar in their lack of gravitation to the earth,
suggest a stick figure of skin and bone,
a fantasy of Wilbur Wright. As for style –
beside the quill clipped over the ear
and the Hapsburg hunch, you are, if
pivotal, the Janus operator from a time
when light had not been sprocketed with sound
but glanced as easily as the tide withdrawing
ribbons round the ankle – and the girl who then
stood astride vocations, like the opening of a film,
is married and wears her hat of woe to bed.
Transposed, the traded feather is the clue
to what is going on: from coveted ear covert to
pennant plume caught in a woman’s hat as
the door opens onto a parterre with pond,
it migrates, metamorphosing into the motive
itself, Time’s arrow, call it Eros, that holds –
and holds apart – the consecutive acts
of passion’s eagle-snake struggle with death.
Love, the picturesque dialect of liquids,
curtains, drugs, divans, goes on down below
but you are drawing out the line above
like a 1950s bomber invisible but for
the aged arcing eyebrow of the trail,
you, breastless, a creaking scaffolding
of bone and woe, little more than a curve
on wings, a needle pricking out the stars,
are always departing from the visual realm
the keeper of the out of sight that underwrites
these fragile felicities of the camera’s gaze.
4
Why did you come back that day, scrambling for
a foothold on the sloping roof, astride the ship
wreck of my life when, unmoored by half a world
from what my mother would have called home,
and my wife in the mirror of her dying also
withdrawing into the underworld of hope
abandoned, why did you take on the role of
vagrant or rare visitor to that place
where already the soul of her had lifted off?
Was it to bring news of her right ascension,
with your needle beak to stitch my flight path
into the hems of her abiding canopy?
Or was it a torch of fire, a blackened branch scored on
your brow, expression of a finger raised in
solemn condemnation of my act, you sought
to balance, like Fame’s malicious messenger?
Monitor of the entertainments we devise
to curtain off the very real, you act out
the uncoordinated passages of the soul
which the bushfire of our art drives to madness:
the evidence of your empire is
the aftermath of ashes. I wish I could
withdraw you from the dead campfires
of our collectivity’s acquired regret,
cross you with the pelican, kingfisher
or gavotting egret or any other more genial fowl
but born of Dawn and Dusk, the critic of
our daytime plays and artificial fires,
you refuse intimacy as suffocation -
as Olympian in your rag-and-bone way
as Plato who thought plays a double tragedy
from the point of view of right geometry,
angular yourself, I should have recognised
in you divinity’s dishevelled cope.
5
To and from a tidal district you passed over
our tents, our huddled streets, our half-built square
as one might survey another’s troops,
torn between calculation and care, amazed
perhaps the precious regions you made for
remained unknown to the director here
whose bright new world of crowds and convergent
destinies lay protected from the ebb and flow
of time – that hoary context of the primary pose
and sufficient phrase that would secure
the life-likeness of the writer’s script. So,
day by day, whatever the state of the weather,
you marked the stages of our uncommercial
pageant with your patient economy
of eels on lucky days, maintaining an indifference
unduly calming as the sequel proved.
Male or female we could never prove – in-
distinguishable to the outward eye,
unsexed as the Phoenix is when the ardent
nest of flames dies down, we enjoyed you,
if at all, as some aerial artist, cyclist
or heraldic parody of American power,
appropriate for symbolic grafting on
to the retina of an audience unused to
intimations of the invisible. Until, some
parallax effect of life on art occurred –
a mother died, a marriage began unravelling
against the backdrop of ongoing war –
and you noticed for the first time the human hand,
clenched and unclenched when the bird took off,
saw where previously there had been the usual
effects of cloud, a woman’s lips and imperious brow,
nothing like the ones whose dreams you had cropped
on a hundred different beds (over the years)
and you knew that its persistent passage back and forth
mapped the crossroads of a life lived back to front
and that you had before you saw it passed into
post-production when cut into a thousand ribbons
a life joined up is composed of endings – and She
was rowing into the backlit sky a twig borne
crosswise in her beak, and nothing you could do
to stay the creation of next year’s nest.
6
Then it turned ugly with the fire of endings,
waste tumbling out, promontories collapsing
as if eschatology had become
a fashionable aesthetic and the best
nooses narrative could devise to stay
the flood produced instead an empty deafening
roar. No matter that the essential theme,
the solitary stalker on the shore, had
come into sharp relief, the sand was slipping
from underfoot, and even the actors had
shot through, gone under, or embalmed in
their last images sought anonymity.
Just then, convinced departures had caught up
with you, the master of valedictions, it rained
and stepping out, although it hurt to exercise,
you saw reflected in the archipelago of shallow
waters underfoot the craggy impression – thought
at first the Stork of childhood but battered, cinereous,
pointedly accelerating away – a figure whose head
shrouded underneath a mac could have been any
artist of the Cold but was instead Ardea
cinerea, walking as fast as you could go,
splashing wordlessly, a dea, a dieux, and you,
although you could not hold up the action
to ask it to pronounce more clearly ashes to ashes
or any of the standard phrases actors know,
were happy that the cinema underfoot
had brought you back a brother to your vision
a goddess of the flooded plains whence you came,
a totem of the incidental but for which
the incidents of a life could not take wing.
*
The clouds are nuclear this Sunday – hard
to say whether they are films or screens. I thought
with regret of leaving them behind,
moored thoughtfully off chimney tops
or caught like plastic bags in the powerlines,
of the aperture closing to this aloneness
at the end – except that this aloneness witnessed
as the archipelago aloft, call it
regional, an inclination, these
accumulating hypotheses of
possible endings that will never be,
no, a continent of connected thought –
who could not love your muffled outpourings,
lowering rumbles and general detachment
from the earthquakes scoring agony across
the wrapped up surfaces of the world below –
embryos of, if not a universal,
a film realisation of the whole –
who could bear to tear themselves apart
from this interim investigation of the Real.
So every illumination of the loss,
though mortal immortalises parting
and these passages of the final film
though unforthcoming about the final cut
connect the islands of our apartness –
look, conquistadors come bounding down
from the sky, bridging horizons, O you
are mine, heavenly, deformed creatures,
you drifters foreshadow as decisively
as time allows the shape of things
to come, the wisdom accumulated in
these ephemeral citadels! the collapsing
artifices of faith! O you vocations for
the inexpressible, greet here below one
who raising wings steered up among you,
the best and glorious best of what any could do.