Bunyip and Thylacine

I mentioned William Buckley the other day, escaped convict, friend o’ aboriginals and frequenter of Indented Head (and speaking of odd Australian place names, I’ve since discovered some others: Middle Intercourse Island, Chinaman’s Knob and, drum-roll please, Tittybong). One aspect of his memoir that gets people’s porkie-detector twitching is his account of going on a bunyip hunt. Reader, the bunyip does not exist. It is a mythical lake monster with flippers and tusks, much beloved of cryptozoologist types, of which there are many down under. It has been suggested that, rather than an outright hoax, the bunyip could be a folk memory among aboriginals of extinct Australian species. (The same benefit of the doubt might be extended to the multiple ‘crypto’ sightings of the thylacine or Tassie tiger, officially extinct since 1936, but whose alleged lingering presence in the bush offers the nostalgic a symbolic mandate for the ‘otherness’ of Tasmania.)

(One problem with sightings of the thylacine, by the way, not to mention the bunyip, is their frustrating tendency never to be accompanied by any scat, which is to say scat of the non-Cleo Laine variety. I mention this since a thread on the Poets on Fire discussion board the other day about odd book titles turned up a handy book about animal dung called What Shat That?)

Anyway, I was skimming through the poems of Weldon Kees in search of a poem about birds, for an anthological whim of mine, and found, not a bird but a bunyip poem. The bunyip was ‘feathered and gray’, WK says, and possessed an ‘emu’s head’ covered in fur. ‘From its back //a plume of water sprouts’, to general consternation. And more:

It crosses oceans into inland waters,

Crying sometimes, after dark, that it is not
Extinct, imaginary, or a myth –
Its feathers ruffled, and its voice

Not like a thousand drums at all,
But muffled, dwindling, hard to hear these nights
Like far-off foghorns that the wind throws back.

{Ends}

I think we have the effects on the young Kees of the Nebraskan bush to thank for this one.

And speaking of the thylacine, here it is, the very last one.

Hobart from Andrew Sant's House

I Ain't Much

Harper’s magazine is always good value for a long-haul flight, and a piece about the Daniel Boone National Forest in the latest issue cheered up my passage over Afghanistan, Chechnya or wherever no end the other week, and in particular this audacious bid for the post of constable in McCreary county, Kentucky:

‘So Bill Roberts was running for constable and Harry Vanover was his opponent, and Bill got to speak first. He said, “Ya’ll know me. You know I ain’t much. You know I ain’t never been much. You know I don’t ever want to be much. And if you don’t want much for constable, vote for me. If you want less, vote for Harry.”’

The Work of the Abscess

There is a kind of writing corresponding with acts of fraud & debauchery on the part of the writing-shed. The moan I have more and more to make with mine is there – that it is nearly all frigged up, in terram, faute d’orifice, heat of friction, and not the spontaneous combustion of the spirit to compensate the pus & the pain that threaten its economy, fraudulent manoeuvre to make the cavity do what it can’t do – the work of the abscess.

That’s Beckett writing to MacGreevy in 1932, as quoted in an article on ‘Beckett, MacGreevy and the Stink of Joyce’ by Seán Lawlor’ in the feature on Beckett’s poetry in the new Fulcrum. In the same issue is the (uncollected) text of Beckett’s Ceiling, Christopher Ricks on Ceiling and Human Wishes, Mark Nixon on the uncollected late poetry in English, Marjorie Perloff on ‘Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn’, Octavio Paz remembering the Anthology of Mexican Poetry, and much more.

The issue also features a section on poetry and myth edited by my two old muckers David Kennedy and Cliff Forshaw. Have your postbox surgically enhanced (the thing is 730 pages long) and buy a copy today.

Moonlight on Sewage

New from Carol Rumens: Blind Spots (Seren). On a cursory first dip (though I’ve seen many of its poems before), I think this is something new and very striking for CR to have written. I am especially taken with the long opening sequence, ‘Thinking About Montale by the River Hull’. Montale, readers of Larkin’s letters may remember, was the ‘Eyetie’ whose good fortune in the Stockholm lottery drove Larkin to splutters of indignation, but the arranged marriage between the two (the poems consist of versions and responses to Montale, with occasional ghostings and flittings from Larkin) makes for a combustible mix. These obscure earth-bound flashes are certainly not the fizzles of a wet match, to paraphrase ‘Piccolo Testamento’. From the sequence’s concluding poem, ‘Word Flashes: A Montale Lexicon’:

Girasole (Sunflower)

Great stars, beheld, not seen, scentless, seedless –

Mosca, too, with her strained, frayed retina,
has fields planted with your whirling gold

Cortile (Courtyard)

It was always important not to enter because
It was always important not to shut the gate

I Fantasmi (Ghosts)

Song, moonlight on sewage, louse of history, who,
deafened by the manic shelling, whimpers
again, begins to sing you, my no-longer song?

Goodbye to the stain that was the customs house, goodbye
to foundry, fish-scales, waves: the opera-singer
prepares the sails of his voice for a different cosmos.

The students have never heard, nor heard of, Gigli.
The tall wheat of the octave is not yet sown.

{Ends}

On another note, I find it thrilling to see Montale’s Ligurian landscapes, which were such a part of his appeal to me when I first read him as a teenager, transplanted to the so seemingly different estuarine sludge of the river Hull, which has become such a sacred site to me in recent years.

I recommend this book warmly.

And on another note again, blogger seems to have cancelled the option for right-justifying paragraphs of prose. Pah!

Sparkles

Melbourne Evening

King of Hearts

Nightfishing

Harold Lloyd

Arse End of Nowhere

Power's Lookout, Victoria

Stricken Ned, Glenrowan

Quoll

Orange-Bellied Parrot, Healesville

An estimated mere three hundred of these endangered Australian parrots remain, half in captivity and half in the wild.

Goodnight, Ronnie!

Dreamtime

Gallery Crowd

Armpit Hair

Toys

A Summer Birthday

August again, my month, and I watch a fat brown turd
fall from the arse of time into the filthy trough
between last year’s dimwit and next year’s retard.

I Wouldn't Give a Flying Fox For Anything Else

Roos

Temple Monkey, Hua Hin

Rainbow Lorikeets

When Mr Men Go Bad

Hobart from Mount Wellington

Hobart Harbour

Junior

Rufous Night Heron (?)

Great Ocean Road

Luna Park, Melbourne

St Kilda Beachfront

Black-Crowned Night Heron (?)

Junior the Gang-Gang

Laughing Kookaburra, Perth

Nullarbor

I was dreamt by no white man’s god.
I sat bone-dry through Noah’s flood.
Here your Christ could rise from the dead
to only buzzards above his head
and an afterlife he’d quickly trade
for a waterhole by a tree in the shade.
Inside my mirage of heat
I do not speak: I hallucinate
inside your skull. For I am mute.
My heart is stone. I bleed stone blood.

Letter to America

Saw a wedge-tailed eagle in the wild the other day. It started by circling another one on the ground, then dive-bombed it a couple of times before sitting sulking very high up in a branch, waiting for its rival to depart, which it duly did.

Which reminds me to mention Helen Macdonald’s book Shaler’s Fish, which it took this trip to Australia for me to discover, at Kris Hemensley’s incomparable Collected Works bookshop on Swanston Street here in Melbourne. Macdonald’s book has to be one of the best published by an English poet in the last fifteen years, let me opine, confidently sidestepping any hyperbole. Here are the beautiful last three stanzas of ‘letter to america’:

& you were scraping the ice from the leading edge a.m.
printing an image of the mansions of the dead a.m.
looking for a small world in the uninhabited air
trying to extinguish some deeper desire for fire

with something as cold and as hard and as temporary as flight
& what you were hoping is that the air would recolonise you
recognize you and welcome you into the sunlight
and all would be forgiven. ink in the thick air would curl

into glyphs of desire & the lightly starred heel
would dip into the sea at dawn as it spoils
into a blaze of mute objects
in the pure suburban heavens

Letters to the Tremulous Hand

One of the fine Australian poets I’ve been reading over here is Elizabeth Campbell, author of Letters to the Tremulous Hand (John Leonard Press). The Tremulous Hand of her title refers to an anonymous thirteenth-century scribe working at Worcestershire Cathedral and known only by the distinctive tremor in his handwriting. Her sequence on him is a marvellous piece of textual ghosting between the lines of history, of harmonics, feints, palimpsests and silhouettes. Here’s an extract from section five, ‘gewyrdelic (historical)’ which uses found text from the scribe glosses:

Gaelsa, ‘lust’, glossed once
As fabula, ‘story’. Fracod, ‘infamy’
Rendered as versions of fragilitas.
The poem torn and gummed to stuff
The cover of a parish register.
Hraew, ‘corpse’, never glossed correctly.
The tremor misdiagnosed
As age: the left hand,
Wynstra, he mistranslated
As dextra, the right.

And from the end of the previous section, ‘address to the hand as a fellow scholar’:

Do you tremble? Good. Better
to write by: the hand moving without end, griefwheel

milling the past. Glossing
heolstor hiding-place, your mark the ghost

of living thought, Time thought’s winding-sheet.
No-one at court loves our language.

Schools sold, teachers punished, scholars shamed:
I am all your subject: you are mine –

life and works and time – each the others’
elegy and grave and afterlife.

Bettongs and Potoroos

William Buckley, transported convict, escaped and lived in the bush among the Wathaurung people of Western Victoria (Australia) for thirty-two years. On re-entering white society at the splendidly named Indented Head he overcame by now severe difficulties with the English language to dictate an account of his adventures to a missionary, George Langthorne. Read more here.

From the notes to The Life and Adventures of William Buckley:
1. Probably pigface (Mesembryanthemum).
2. Probably the call of the yellow-bellied glider, a kind of possum which possesses one of the loudest calls of any marsupial.
3. The name literally means ‘returned from the dead’.
4. In fact, witchetty grubs are delicious at any time.
5. Bettongs and potoroos.
6. This is a rather garbled account of the koala.
7. Termites.
8. The identity of this red-spotted double-headed serpent remains a mystery.
9. Langhorne’s writing is indecipherable here.
10. This account confuses the echidna and the wombat.

More Pricks Than Kicks

Of the porcupine: ‘If under threat, it will attack by suddenly sprinting backwards’ (David Attenborough).

Big Ned, Glenrowan

For the Irish in Australia

Greetings comrades, Michael Collins writes in 1922 to the memorabilia collection on the wall of a pub in modern-day Perth; I have seen the letter myself. Its tone is warm and relaxed. He speaks of hard-won freedoms and of the struggles to come. His views, however, on Australian marsupials, on the welfare of the bilby and the pademelon go unrecorded, as though these creatures did not have to struggle too, in their way! The oversight is not to his credit. Where are the rallying cries for the ghost bat and the laughing kookaburra, the death or glory vows for the Spinifex hopping mouse?

It was the year of Collins’ death. Fifteen years later the constitution of the Irish Free State was born with not a mention of the war waged daily by Australian wildlife for the simplest dignity and self-respect. Irishmen and women, is their cause not ours too? The shame of it burns red on my brow, the same ochre-red of the sunset over our Perth suburb, the deep red of the Australian earth in which we burrow and raise our young, and whence we lift a quizzical head, thinking of Ireland, only of Ireland, when the rains pass, the all-too-brief and restorative rains.

Blister Pack

An excellent Australian poet: David McCooey. His Blister Pack from Salt is well worth a read:

Their green desires
rose between them

until one day a maze
appeared so thick

and tall neither one
of them could see or hear the other.

{Ends}

I would write more, but this post finds me in the goddamn launderette and my socks are nearly done.

Galahs

Galas
of gallous
galahs.

Trailer Park Ghost

Brad Mehldau, you were
born a week after me

and have spent a lifetime
overcompensating.

Your albums come in so fast
that buying the new one

I often get the unrecorded
one after that by mistake,

and am grateful. You name-check
Derrida in your sleeve notes

though he never once mentions you
on the back of his books.

Is it time to bid farewell
forever again to the past with

another suavely whispering standard?
Goodbye storyteller, sings

a wispy line four octaves up,
meaning, once more

round the contraflow,
my rakish chromatic uncle:

a remembered condom of fluff
on a needle, an umbrella hat

permanently expecting rain.
A trailer park ghost

dodges bass-lines in 7/8 time.
I’ve heard some rueful whistling

in strange hotels, but only you
have chased leaves round the porch

in all the places I’ve never been.
This venue not on the T-shirt.

There is no T-shirt.
Against what modulations,

what untold fallings away
should I steel myself,

remembered as they happen,
heard through arpeggio drizzle

and tipped from a lazy weekend’s
shopping, the door key passed

greedily over the shrink wrap ?
Too late the left hand sees

the turn off the freeway:
no bridge passage now

till New Jersey and no one but me
in the car to sing along.

Penguins, St Kilda

My angry brethren of the darkening ecliptic! Quaint little birds, fairy penguins would not seem to bear comparison with their sturdy Antarctic cousins. They are a backyard curiosity, a mere toy of a thing. They are excellent divers, let it be said in their defence. And better, as they come splashing among the rocks in the breakwind this mild winter evening, back from the sea and posing for photographs yards from the end-of-the-pier café, they prove themselves masters of an environment the emperor penguin would find sheer torture; in the same way that nipping across town to the supermarket in a sensible family car may be so far beneath the skill of your average sports car driver as to be almost beyond it. The comparison is hardly exact, but can stand. I say it can stand. The penguins did not stay long, and the evening turned cold. Still shivering, I found the Riesling in the café sweet to the point of sickening, and yet I drank it, grimacing, gladly.

Only Connect

One of the great things about this country is how Aussie Rules football seems to be on a rolling schedule, with games on all the time. This makes it technically impossible to walk into a bar or turn the television on without seeing someone punch someone else, live, as presumably enshrined in the Australian constitution.

Only connect, as Larkin said to someone at a particularly slow boxing match.

Rendezvous

tomorrow
I can’t do

but I see
yesterday’s free

Finches, Melbourne

finches at the
bakery window

above the dumpsters
and Adult Store
rear entrance

on stony ground yet
not one fallen seed
has been lost

On Rottnest Island

Given
the existence
of a quoiquoiquoi-

corker
of a vintage
marsupial

untimorous beastie
placidest quaker
and but for this

offshore quag a
dead-cert
croaker

its snout scenting
you twitching
quaquaqua-

quicker
and the biscuit-dry
whip of its tail

(a real cracker)
serve only
to underscore

the queer care
this small town
in Greenland

featherless
quacker
self-addressed

pouch post
must put into being
a quokkquokkquokk-

quokka.