And if the younger William Butler Yeats

were one of his regular drinking mates,

a few under the belt on Anzac Day

would square this difficult love away,

and Eve would open again her western gates
as in that hot and leaf-veined beer garden

things ill-defined once voiced, would harden

and every mythical hot-to-trot

would find a handy parking spot

outside the bar. In the light of what was spoken
there, over sodden coasters and glasses,

the valley would sing and shake her skirt of short grasses

and brambles. Broad-faced bouncers would fall away -

the angler and poet would at last hold sway

over all the mangled ritual that passes
for a day. But Yeats, he knows, got tired of tricks

and turned from gardens back to the bricks,

which piled upon each other make the world.

And the valley has her type like any other girl -

she likes a man with common sense, who kicks
against the entrophy of ordinary days,

a man you can count on to mean what he says.

Have a drink, she says, with that American, Robert Frost,

I understand his roads and walls; you won’t get lost

with him. And at that point, his mind ablaze
with love and hate like gold and silver apples,

hanging so low that he could no more grapple

with the image of the tree itself,

than with a single volume on his shelf,

he turned away from her, even as the dappled

light that plays across her pale summer breast

came burning back through his every thought.

Ern Malley III

Ern Malley III did not learn about his illustrious grandfather until he was well into his twenties. By this stage, he had already completed an apprenticeship, but had become disillusioned with the motor trade and was working as a dishwasher on the ‘Nepean Belle’ in Penrith NSW.

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