Brisbane Summer Nights - Part I Poem by Roger K.A. Allen

I read two books on Stalingrad
This summer,
-By Craig and Beevor,
In French; my language-love,
-My wife says I am a slow reader-
But in secret,
While the house slept
I was transposed,
By the free-flight
And French-fast colours of my mind,
Always to the Clavier Bien-Temperé
And the Goldberg Variations;
Bach’s sonic-rainbow hues,
Scored in the present tense
By our hall clock,
That tall wooden pedant
With his measured baton-strike,
On the podium of my mind,
Each quarter hour,
And his metronome-come-pendulum,
Too dull for wily Bach,
And his multicoloured voices
Contrapuntal harmony,
Lyrical preludes
And interwoven fugues.

There I dissolved,
On the porch each night,
In the pale-yellow light
To semiquaver doublets
Of the same note
Played mezzo-staccato
By ghost-grey geckoes,
Feigning the cream
Of our stucco wall,
And the sometime-silence
Of a mouthful of a duped moth.

Each night,
I bathed in the rich solitude
Of the warm thick air
Of a Brisbane summer’s night,
And to the distant screech and squabble,
Of slow flapping foxes in the night sky,
And shadows steeling,
Night visits to that Moreton Bay fig,
That shameless flirt,
That harlot of fecundity and fruit,
A few backyards away,
To the rage and roar,
Of Stalingrad in 1942.