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Take the Jervois Bridge west to the coast. Take it east to Port Adelaide, where at dawn I sit riverside with a composer.

His silence differs from mine; the stillness ripe. Hums and murmurs play at the rim of the void. Always the seeds of a theme – in the sun’s horizontal ray, in a red-glazed hull, in the gull’s croak and a bluing sky.

My hands are cold. I stuff them into my coat pockets and attempt to conceive how for my friend colour is not only colour, it is pitch. Form is rhythm, and contour melody. I would ask him again about Hesse, Mann, and Woolf; about Oskar Matzerath (albeit I suspect he has yet to make young Oskar’s acquaintance); about the nine circles, and the white whale. His rapture, though, is too precious. So I think back to our once taking tea and cake, the unplayed piano and the blank score near; a child’s crayon abstraction; slanting books like a line of toppling dominoes frozen; commingled accounts of history and the blurred present; of serialist phrasings and if on a winter’s night a traveller...

Over a bass still fleshless, still grumbling five fathoms deep: a warm, held note. Viola? Clarinet? Or just an angled streak of orange, across this firmament clinging to its indigo stain. How many octaves must be scaled before a fitting complement is met? And where between them does the lean melody weave? Into which clouds will it plummet? Through what echoing grottos will it creep?

Now the all too perceivable din of a broken, dissonant chord; all the spacious vault filled with clamour; a rainbow come unknit, seven score stripes dyed black and sent clanking off the walls of a great glass cube. Overcome, I quake at the uproar, even as it somehow morphs into a human voice, harsh yet elegant, issuing from a strangely dressed man – a foreigner, if that word spoke more of era than place. He has joined us on the bench. When and by what surreptitious means did he arrive?

“Greetings, gentlemen. How crisp the air of this newborn day! Admirably quiet, the two of you, for now, at least; save, that is, for a tune rippling; a landless, time-unmoored anthem. I remember it...yes; though I must call on some daybreak plucked from the millennium before last, when it pulsed across the arcade, swooping the arches and circling the fountain’s crystalline jet. True, for a moment even that rank stench emanating from the rose garden was quelled!”

Succeeding the foreigner’s address, there comes a lilting, mellifluous line, seemingly blown in on the gust that shakes free the yellowed leaves. They sprinkle the ground about us. I am lost (for how long?) in this honeyed strain, until turning again to the mysterious newcomer, for I wish to ask him whether he knows, too, this sweeter phrase, this euphony bringing all into balance. The composer remains, eyes closed and faraway, navigating a jungle of tones, intervals, and cadences; but there is no one else.

So on this the fifteenth morning of autumn’s closing moon, I leave my friend to his work, and take the Jervois Bridge west.

At the height of its gentle arc I pause. That same, alien accent...it should not be audible from such a range. Looking back, I see the composer unmoved on the bench, the stranger beside him again.

“...Yes, a most regrettable injustice, some thought it. He even healed the Procurator’s hemicrania, I believe. Anyhow, you know all this, I’m sure! Let me keep you no longer, for I am not one to badger the invisibly occupied. Lest mischief unbridled sweep the land, lest centuries be razed and noonday skies turned crimson, one’s paws must be kept busy, no?”

Michael Hocking
Winter, 2020

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