William Empson stands at the basin to shave.

His face in the small mirror becomes

a series of surmountable practical problems for the hand and eye.

Every visitor describes his digs as ‘squalid’

but in this imagined moment he stands in a rhombus of sunlight

steam rising from the water.

Scents of soap and an orange only beginning to mould.
William Empson, I want to write about a Lake.

I thought of you, who wrote “lack of conversation

makes it hard to write anything”.

I’m making this fictional visit to talk it over.
How do I write about a place that’s stolen

from the people who know it and live with it still

through cedar and whales cut and made away

cattle occupying land

the violent outrages

Mr Throsby, the 40th of Foot

his majesty’s blankets

the trawling and dairying

the spoiling of the water

sand dug up and stirred into concrete

children taken

pea picking race hate

acacia planted for a tannery

breakwaters the new suburb without a sewage system

slag poured into the saltmarsh?

The rubbish traps across the creeks catch plenty.
William Empson is only half-listening

as he stands in sunshine that suggests warmth, but doesn’t provide it

with the idea of a drink already lapping at his mind.

It’s only when he’s softened by the concentration needed to soap and scrape

fine bubbles of lather, the pleasure of hot water on a cold morning

that he decides to wait

for his walk to the lecture hall

to work out how to make the letter he’s writing to the TLS

funnier, less hurt, and attend to

my hovering presence, a ghost from the future.
William Empson meets my eye in the mirror while he pats dry his face

and quotes from his book, Some versions of Pastoral, written in 1935

the year before the Windang Bridge was built across the lake mouth.

       The pastoral is “felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor”.

       The pastoral is “any work about the people but not by or for them”.

       The pastoral is a process of “putting the complex into the simple”.
The pastoral, a gilty frame that leaves out labour, sex, milk, nest hollows, undergrowth, a shoulder smashed by musket fire,

dried fish, strips of calico, tobacco, overseers, avoiding the lobsters, drowning in sawdust, cockles, butter shipped to old gold

mountain, a woman growing grain, the incinerator on the island, banqueting, the cop’s pleasure boat, the man who needed

to get away, coal, a delegation to Macquarie Street, goats, absconders, miners, machinists, drivers, shopgirls; favouring

instead the poeting Bishop D’Arcy Irvine’s “white boats”, “purple hills”, a “flat sheet of water” and “the busy town” in

“mellow light”.
William Empson puts his spectacles back on.

The shaving water, grey and scummed, drains and runs through pipes into the River Soar.

William Empson’s soap and stubble will be – was – dispersed and digested

by the microscopic lives of the river, but he does not think of this as he swings on his coat

feels for tobacco in the pocket, picks up his papers and lets himself out.

William Empson has had enough of me. I can take what I need and leave what I don’t.
I’ll take his delight in ambiguity, fluid misquotation, I’ll take his naming of the lie of the beautiful relation and bring it to the

plaques and inscriptions, the paintings, poems and photographs, the stories repeated, the works performed, the plans and

programs, the lie, bright and sharp in some guises, in others, heavy scattered churning settling.