It is a purple house in the shape of a shell

or an ear, which is impossible, except this

is someone able to hear the brain’s music.

Her mountain home crouches where it can listen

to the valley: undercurrents of sadness, noble lies,

a hand finding a hand while asleep.

Three young women pass me on the steep path

and laugh, but not unkindly; they detect

the hardscrabble hope of her visitors.

She places my freesias on a 1920s piano,

key lid hinged by brass, that reminds her of Vienna,

of coffee and songs after medical lectures.

It needs tuning, a project for next winter she says,

when the birds will know this is not a competition.

There is no laughing Buddha here, no incense or bell,

but walking fern, bloodwood and scrub cherry,

and behind her house a mountainside

that is careless drunk with eucalypt musk.

We stand on the cliff and I know nothing can spoil this:

an osprey that has found a late thermal,

a red kite that strains on its string, the lost notes

of Mozart’s last mass in a trumpet flower.

Every dominion of the sun cooperates, moves closer.

It is all the best that I have seen in my life so far

and all that I will never see, which is the same thing.

This insight is first bitter, then sweet to the tongue.