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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #1/thyla1k-jb
AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 1
The Poetry of Judith Beveridge
Selected by Coral Hull

[Above] Photo of Judith Beveridge by Patricia Roche, 1996.

I HOW TO LOVE BATS I MARSUPIAL I LAST WALK I THE LYREBIRDS I

HOW TO LOVE BATS

Begin in a cave.
Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects.
Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later,
you'll fly the narrow passages of those bones,
                                                        but for now -

open your mouth, out will fly names
like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,
listen for a frequency
lower than the seep of water, higher
than an ice planet hibernating
beyond a glacier of Time.

Visit op shops. Hide in their closets.
Breathe in the scales and dust
of clothes hanging. To the underwear
and to the crumpled black silks - well,
give them your imagination
and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind.

By now your fingers should have
touched petals open. You should have been dreaming
each night of anthers and of giving
to their furred beauty
your nectar-loving tongue. But also,
your tongue should have been practising the cold
of a slippery, frog-filled pond.

Go down on your elbows and knees.
You'll need a spieliologist's desire for rebirth
and a miner's paranoia of gases -
but try to find within yourself
the scent of a bat-loving flower.

Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl.
Its face is the biography of propaganda.
Never trust a hawk. See its solutions
in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets.

And have you considered the smoke
yet from a moving train? You can start
half an hour before sunset,
but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted
and that you never discover

the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles.

Spend time in the folds of curtains.
Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms.
Practise the gymnastics of wet umbrellas.

                                 Are you
floating yet, thought-light,
without a keel on your breastbone?
Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos,
on mastering the thermals
beyond the tremolo; reverberations
beyond the lexical.

                                            Become adept
at describing the spectacles of the echo
but don't watch dark clouds
passing across the moon. This may lead you
to fetishes and cults that worship false gods
by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb.

Practise echo-locating aerodromes,
stamens. Send out rippling octaves
into the fossils of dank caves -
then edit these soundtracks
with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats
and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering
about the evolution of your own mind.

But look, I must tell you - these instructions
are no manual. Months of practice
may still only win you appreciation
of the acoustical moth,
hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need

to observe further the floating black host
through the hills.

Published in Accidental Grace (UQP, 1996)

MARSUPIAL

I am happy to live with them, though they pre-date us;
the ones with bruised eyes and an outback look,
in their fur, grey dust and red rock,
in their teeth the stains of grasses,
in their stride the long legs of miles -
and to see in their barely weathered skulls, their ancestors
who crouched on the plains at dusk.

But sometimes looking at them, there is a feature
not accountable to time or habitat: a vague link
to a lost continent.
This country of old holes, graves, tree-stumps,
of tribal animals double-mothering their young;
seed-gatherers of equal work, free but naturally domestic,

not bondservants to the taste of blood or work of seasons;
of creatures who can live their simple culture in a soil
that can shut down for summers against the simplest root.
Beside them, I feel like a new animal unlicked at birth
scartching for fosterage in a place
transplanted like top-soil from Europe full
of service animals. Ground can shift

and leave species to start up again.
But the Earth evolves its creatures: whatever
its conditions we adapt, match our landscapes.
So I see them, sleepy and relaxed
in the eucalyptus dens of our continent,
or wandering the yellow bush at evening,
carrying young in the warn swags of their wombs,
loving the land; itinerant, but placed.

I envy them their hippie-lives, these marsupials,
the alternative-animals, doped on leaves,
happy to retire on the oldest landmass.
This queer evolution won, the long arbitration
with Nature in the courts of Gondwanaland.

Published in Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lightning Press, 1987)

LAST WALK

We climb down into the valley. I'm tired
my knees are shaking: shocked. Yet I love the bush
in winter and in wind. At sunset the wind
will blow to fire all the hazel of the bush.

Now, it's midday. The creek is the sound
of pirate-red parrots crowding pockets with silver.
I see benumbed trunks, all that paper
rolled into cold, tablet-hard wood.

I could spend days powdering that bark
in my fingers like the wind. But tomorrow moves on
and will soon chill like an accurate glass.
Birds move to their trees and I think of private talk

on the edge of winter, your voice soft, hurried
by the wind; swept-leaves in the bush-hut hours;
parrots like the sound of children sleeping out at dusk.
I imagine years from now, we will be walker

separating from the group to tell each other
how once we camped here alone, under
just the flier of a tent, how cattle lost years back
came to the campfire to eat and moan.

Now, I hear the creek: all that rush and trickle
through an uneven valley: the hard even breath
of a runner before a marathon: the creek
braiding its leg-muscle to the road. And I

keep wondering if we'll make it. Sometimes I see
the wind reduce the cliff-face one grain at a time.
The wind is always looking for what's lost
turning back everything like the poor

at rummage sales. The birds make me think
of rain, of ripples slipping from a bank, the rush
of a channel through a declivity. And I hear
that same sound for miles through the trees:

a thin tapered canoe down the hard-training
and trackless slopes. I stare into the distance
with a feeling that a little more
of the rock has been carried off as dust.

Published in Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lightning Press, 1987)

THE LYREBIRDS

Somewhere in the bush, hiding as long as they can,
domestic as soil, they scrape the hard earth
with their feet, making serious men-at-work sounds -
or pretending in their voices to be other than themselves.

These birds, from old-country Australia,
when everything was bush-fire charcoal, scrub.
Shy of their own language,
they exist still in their wingless rituals

amongst the bush-vowels of the parrots,
the mynas, the Dubbo-voiced galahs.
They can imitate any sky, any tree, bird by bird; make
a branch crack with fire in a whip-bird's throat.

Not much to see: tail like brown bracken and built
for miles and miles of the same scrub.
You can hear them call to each other
with a whole county's voice: pinehigh whispers,

water falling, a magpie's swagman whistle,
the downpour of wings, twitterings
from the long coops of grasses and they can steal
the wind's voice: a stock-whip at their throats; or repeat

note by industrial note the timber-mills, chain-saws.....
But I imagine them long ago, when all was bush -
at dusk, wandering in pairs
relaxed peacocks among the old gums;

they believed they were the feathered men
who danced the corroborees.
Now, scavengers of sound, like migrants
they've learned to live off foreign sounds in a new country,

to repeat another country's parrot culture,
to keep anonymous, alive.
But sometimes they forget and call to each other
in their own tongue, remembering a time

when ring after ring of men stopped,
got up, stomped the ground, danced, stomped again,
danced and sang their own voices back to them.

Published in Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lightning Press, 1987)

About the Poet Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge was born in London, England in 1956 and came to Australia in 1960 attending schools and University in Sydney. She has made poetry writing her principal occupation since 1978, working at numerous jobs to earn a living, including teaching, library work, research and typing. She is currently employed in the field of bush regeneration. She has published two books of poetry, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987) and Accidental Grace (1996), both of which have won major awards, and has co-edited an anthology, A Parachute of Blue. She is the poetry advisor for Kalimat, a journal promoting Australian and Arabic literature. Her work is widely anthologised and has been translated into numerous languages. Judith lives in Sydney, New South Wales.
   [Above] Photo of Judith Beveridge by Patricia Roche, 1996.

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Thylazine No.1 (March, 2000)

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