A work in progress

I've been giving this blog a bit of a facelift, but it's taking some time. In the meantime ... it's a work in progress.

End of the world

With prophesies of rapture capturing the attention of many this weekend, I've resurrected "End of the world" from my archives. Inspired by an article in the West Australian, "End of the world" won the 1992 Tom Collins Poetry Prize and appeared in Shorelines: three poets. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995.

End of the world

Thousands of South Koreans spent yesterday preparing for the end of the world.

The West Australian, 29 October 1992

She was going to Heaven with her suitcase.

Before the scheduled departure,

she’d been to an abortion clinic.

The foetus had to go –

it had a potential for submitting to gravity.

She’d left a cluster of cells

in a bucket by the door

for the architects of flood and famine

to collect on credit for Christ.

Before midnight, she’d cleansed her skin

curled her hair, shaved down from her legs –

paying detail to the area around her ankles

from where Mercury’s wings would sprout –

ironed her halter-neck dress so her shoulder blades

would be bared for the promised explosion of feathers.

She bled still, wondered if rapture

excluded sanitary precautions.

Waited for midnight,

the pain in her pelvis dulling over time.

She’d left food out for the cat,

fed the dog for the final time,

left the last of the supper dishes

soaking in the sink.

Her strong-box brimmed with the word of God

but she’s seen the painstaking hands of time

overtake midnight twice,

checked her diary and the stages of the moon.

She’d got that part wrong once before

but does rhythm equate with rapture,

with the riot police outside her house,

with a foetus in a galvanised pail.

Beyond the kitchen window,

with its appliquéd café curtains

and wind chimes,

the horrors of the world

have overtaken ecstasy.

In Seoul, an angel is bleeding

over the soft blossom of singing pinions

budding from her ankles.

The Chook Poems

Recently, after a friend, Sarah (who has an amazing blog @ A Wine Dark Sea), experienced an attack on her flock of hens by several stray dogs, I promised her I would post my chook poems here. 

The chook poems were written a long time ago. Many of them appeared in my first published collection (with Michael Heald and Roland Leach) Shorelines: three poets Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995 (now out of print). Before Shorelines "Mangiare alfresco" (1992), "The Thursday Fox" (1993), and "On finding white feathers" (1994) were published in the Weekend Australian back in the days when Barry Oakley was the Literary Editor there. Barry gave me one of the nicest compliments I have ever received when he said: "I just can't resist your chook poems."

"Mangiare alfresco" recently received new life when it was selected for WritingWA's "22", and "On finding white feathers" was featured in the South Perth Poetry Park (Neil McDougal Park, South Perth).

The chook poems worked their way into my life at a time when my family and I lived in the Perth hills. My writing desk was located in front of a huge window that looked out onto our backyard, a bush block, with our flock of free-range hens (and the occasional wet rooster) parading by. During that period of time we nurtured several households of chooks, loving them, and grieving for them when sickness, old-age, or fox/dog-attack decimated our flock. Valuable lessons were learned. Along with the large doses of humor that arise from sharing your life with a hoard of feathered individuals, the simple, cruel tragedies of the backyard crept into those being enacted by the larger world around us. For example, in "The Thursday Fox", the story of Bobbie Cullen, a student at Curtin University and a victim of domestic violence who died when I was pursuing studies in creative writing there, seeps into a poem about a fox attack I've never forgotten: the dark, tortured night when I, with my son, Clifton – who was only about 10 years-old at the time and very, very brave – ran blindly around in the bush trying to save our hens ahead of the fox coven committed to beheading them a step ahead of us.

Woman at Desk with Writing Space

Her writing space is in her head, sleeping,

hiding between its cotton sheets, it goes

snug in the place behind her ears and eyes.

Sometimes it’s there when she’s away: sitting

on a bench at the lake, in a clearing

in the woods, on logs in the chicken run ­–

once – amidst a herd of cows. Would it run?

It wouldn’t jump-start! She suspects sleeping

was on its mind. More commonly, clearing

its throat loudly, it is in her car. Goes

skidding around corners, sighing, sitting

frozen at stop signs. Blue lights in her eyes.

It fires over dirty dishes, its eyes

running with onion’s scent, but daily runs

leave it puffed in the driveway or sitting

exhausted in her chair. When she’s sleeping,

hand in hand with dreams - no spare room - it goes

about dusting cobwebs, firebreak clearing, 

washing the floors for visitors, clearing

fog from the bathroom mirror. To its eyes,

her desk is a mess but it likes it. Goes

cursing to the landlord: its stockings run

catching on splinters from her page - sleeping

cat on cushion. Her writing space, sitting,

jumps when the phone rings, hides away, sitting

on the edge of the curtain rail, clearing

its line of sight to catch the deep-sleeping

trailer with its overflowing cat’s-eyes,

beer cans, bike tyres, junk, time for a dump run

with leaves. The rake that broke yesterday goes,

says her writing space. And as the sun goes

down, its rays highlight the paper sitting

on her desk with coffee rings. A dry run

to the chook yard with scraps, her mind clearing

ashtrays, dust from the keyboard. Her space eyes

the livestock’s feathers, ruffled from sleeping.

Out the window it goes, to the clearing,

hens sitting, scratching, blinking lidded eyes -–

writing space on the run: writer sleeping.

Boy

For Clifton

The boy in the paddock

down the road

has frost on his eyelashes.

His hen was paralysed, dying.

He’d placed her in the nesting box

near the morning’s eggs,

and closed her eyes

against the sunlight.

He cried on his way back through the trees –

‘Spider webs in my eyes.’

The boy is watching the henhouse –

breath, making mist, trails

through the railings of the gate.

Mangiare alfresco

He’s a featherbrain,

a feather duster. He’s been caught

feathering his own nest.

He’s a rooster stalking up

and down the chicken run.

Shut-in bird bedraggled by rain.

He’s stalking up and down

the fence. Black and white.

Not soft. Wet. Stringy.

Water bonds feathers to bone.

At the corner of the yard, he turns,

tail feathers, like bridal trains

behind him, duck and follow.

A parson’s nose. He’s a parson’s

nose in a baking dish

bubbling in his juices.

Crisp. Brown. Salty on the serving

dish. On the counter.

The parson’s nose. First to go.

Next, drumstick.

His huge legs stalking featherbed.

Feet, up and down in the mud, march.

Disappear. Appear. Turn.

His voice an angry buck, buck. No crow.

No breeze. Christmas kitchen dish.

The roast, the hot, hungry

trace of basting Buff Orpington.

He stalks, walks like a Sergeant Major,

round and round the chopping block,

around the axe.

On Finding White Feathers

In the corner of the shed,

my favourite: a small, white Silky hen -

found in a nest of wings and straw -

quite dead.

She was a good breeder.

I relied on her

to increase the flock,

now she’s decreased it - by one.

She’s the fourth this week.

I’ve lost an English Game Cock,

a Bantam and a Plymouth Rock

crossed with something else.

Some days there is a body,

sometimes none.

A hole under the fence

of the chicken yard

can mean one more in my garden,

I am making compost with feathers.

I’ve closed their door for the night,

a log, new-felled, pressed firmly against it.

I stack rocks around the wire

jamming my hand between them,

lose skin, bleed.

Loss pierces my swelling thumb –

it is sharp as the swift yellow beak

of a small, white hen hoarding eggs.

The Thursday Fox

for Bobbie Cullen

The rubbish truck’s late again. It’s Thursday.

A fox has breakfasted on the hens. Eggs

and laying pellets combined, a kind of

hybrid omelette on the floor of the coop.

And the garbage bags, Glad, on the road verge

are full of headless chickens, and I hate

the way the fence collects loose feathers, hate

hens for losing their heads on a Thursday.

Midday, and I wash dishes on the verge

of tears. Outside: cat, striped yolk-yellow egg-

white, with magpie carnivals from tree. Coop’s

so empty. Their shadows blend, a kind of

melting: the bird, the cat, the wire, and of

steam, dishwater, window rivulets. Hate

the way soapsuds dry my skin, my flesh cooped

up, this body-house. Rubbish, next Thursday,

will be dull compared to this – fertile eggs

and guillotined bodies wait on the verge,

and will I know what’s missing next Thursday?

Will I wake, alone, sense the absence of

rooster crow, my body between sheets – eggs

absent from pantry, and summon up hate

for fox? Whose hands held the axe on the verge?

Not mine, they’re dry, no evidence. The coop?

Lock up? Convert to vegetable patch? Coop

with cucumber, marigolds on the verge,

pumpkins like perfect golden suns. Thursday-

time: a battery-driven clock which speaks of

bed-making rituals, detergent, fox-hate

congealed on towels. No slow breakfast, no eggs

for cakes or child-delight. No scrambled eggs

on toast, no Sunday brunch, no walks to coop

with scraps – no clustering, dumb birds. I hate

the way soap-suds dry my skin - but verges

and cats crouch over their slack bundles of

feathers. It’s a white, black and white, Thursday.

No hens hoarding eggs. Silence verges on

the grasstrees, vacant coop. The silence of

the graveyard now, after the Thursday fox.

A Letter to my Chooks

Please don’t poop on the doormat.

When you wake at 4am –

and the moon floats

on a luminous cloud –

please don’t practise the lyrics

of your favourite songs.

My aspidistra was placed outside

for sunshine – not for you.

Your menu consists of laying pellets,

kitchen scraps and wheat.

The seat, my seat, situated outside

the front door, catches the first

of the morning’s rays. I enjoy

coffee and newspaper in that chair.

Please inform the rooster, the cocky one

with the crooked spur, not to perch there –

evidence is difficult to discover in the dark.

Yours faithfully seems a token gesture

when my fine new boots, and Levi’s , are wet

and pegged on the clothes line

in the moonlight.

I’ll mail this letter in the morning –

nail it, in fact – with recipes for à la King

and cacciatore, to the handle of the blunted,

rusted axe leaning against the woodshed door.

Golden Orb

Photograph by Shannon Brandt, Geraldton WA, 2010

Foreshores

Last night, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the image of the Japanese tsunami hitting the Sendai foreshore. I was at a gonging session, surrounded by mood music and lighting, gongs, drums, bowls, everything focused on relaxation and meditation, but I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing black water. Since Friday night, when I first heard the news, I have trawled the Internet, newspapers and television for updates on how this terrible situation has affected the Japanese people. I’ve saturated my psyche with images of those terrible waves. Coming after three months of natural disasters - the big freeze in the northern hemisphere, floods, cyclones, bushfires and the Christchurch earthquake - now there is another earthquake, tsunamis, volcanic eruption and nuclear power stations near melt-down. We don’t just get the news, it’s repeated over and over and over again until we, too, are overwhelmed, inundated, the waves coming in on us.

William Yeoman's article on Ross Bolleter and Piano Hill from The West Australian Tuesday 1 December 2009 is here:

Piano Hill

I’ve known Ross Bolleter for many years and I was delighted to be invited to launch his latest collection of poems Piano Hill, released this week by Fremantle Press. The launch took place at Caffissimo in Mt. Lawley last Friday 27 November. In addition to all the words present on the night, music was provided by Ross on one of his ruined accordians and the wonderful Sudanese group "Waza".


Ross is well known as a musician and composer. He is interested in many things, but summing them up briefly I’d say that his work demonstrates a preoccupation with the mysterious and with obsession.

Ross is concerned, like many poets, with the shape of words, lines, sounds, and images – and as a practitioner with a foot in both the worlds of music and poetry – his poems are evidence that language can do very different things to music.

In a recent conversation we had a delightful misunderstanding brought about by the sound of words. I have some hearing loss and the misunderstanding came about between what Ross said and what I heard. It was a lot like pressing a key on one of Ross’s ruined pianos or accordions and experiencing the difference between expectation and actuality. Ross quoted Ezra Pound to me. Pound said “Rhythm is form cut into time” but I heard “Rhythm is formed by the trapping of sound.”

When words go out into the world, who knows what the reader reads, the listener hears. It’s all part of the delicious mystery of reception and interpretation. I’m not a musician, but I am intrigued by the contrast between the concept of jazz as the ultimate in improvisation and the existence of a “jazz standard” that in essence remains unchanged. Like a jazz standard a poem in a book is no accident, no one-off rendition cum improvisation. Its patterns and structures are partly instinctual, part wrought by tradition and experience, and inscribed on our consciousness as much as they are upon the page.

The works in Piano Hill have been influenced by the traditions of haiku and its parent-form the ever-evolving form of Japanese poetry known as renga, their syllabic and line patterns varied and sometimes absorbed into larger structures. In the poems Galactic and At Cottesloe Beach, for example.

Piano Hill is populated by musical, meditative moments, and a few musical, rowdy ones as well! In music the measure is in the beat, in meditation it is the breath, and both these techniques are utilised in the structure of the poems in Piano Hill, regardless of content. In contrast to the deft manipulation of syllables, the breath - something which happens naturally, instinctually - only comes into consciousness when attention is focussed on it. The breath as a measure of line length endows these poems with a naturalness that is not easy to come by.

Ross has a gift for characterisation. From the moment I encountered the "arthritic angel" of Late Sonata - “hunched over the blue ravine”, her "hands / swallow diving into ivory" - I was hooked. Likewise, Adele the hairdresser At the Delly Barber who scavenges fresh flowers from the cemetery and lives in a haunted house.

The Bird Man whom the narrator encounters sitting in the sun opposite his run-down Northbridge house: “bricks / rubbed raw as a fresh graze, verandah posts / like split pegs, bullnose crusted with pigeons / that you fed each afternoon. Evenings, you heard / the scraping of their claws as they settled deeper / into your rusting roof.” The Bird Man, who for decades – according to rumour - has papered the rooms of his house with Real Estate agents’ offers, finally sells, is suddenly well-off, if not wealthy, only to be taken … suddenly! “You never knew what felled you, yet you barely fell - / just tilted stiffly forward still almost upright / amongst the startled pigeons.”

One mustn’t overlook the smiles in Piano Hill, and there are many, such as the gentle parody on imagery a’la William Carlos Williams in Spectacle “one white cereal bowl / on a green striped mat a red and white Saxa saltshaker / the margarine’s olive tub”.

Like imagery, sound works its way through all Ross’s poems, whether it is in their patterns, their structure or content. Cockatoos confabulate, “tattered palm fronds clatter” (At Cottesloe Beach), bees thump on windows, accordions leak, beds creak, girls shout, and always there are the pianos: “the chirrup of loosened strings” (Requitement), “the tiniest bing-plinking starlit note” (During the flood), thunder (Drought piano) the “clink clinank” of “jangling mysteries” (Morning rolls them in the foam). Equal emphasis is placed on silence “to make a spine of love” (At Cottesloe Beach) and “the raw plink of the stars” (Tonk).

The “old Zen teacher” of Those who only wait says “There’s no such thing as waiting – only a stretching of the heart towards / an embrace that’s not yet”.

In contrast to Piano Hill's focus on ruined pianos - instruments brought undone by age and exposure to the elements, and the spontaneous compositions wrought from their battered keyboards and strings - there is nothing improvised or ruined about Ross Bolleter’s poems. They are fine-tuned, highly crafted, demonstrating a refined, yet organic style.

Piano Hill is a new and exciting chapter in the life of a man dedicated to music and words. May it travel far.

Check out http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/newreleases/1122 for more information about Ross Bolleter and Piano Hill.