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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                 #10/thyla10k-jg AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 10 The Poetry of Jeff Guess Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Jeff Guess by photographer unknown, 2001. I Road Kill I Death of a Tree I Grapevines in June I Gum Tree I Moths at Dawn I Ocean Park Seagulls I Willow Trees in Rain I Road Kill What was once a red kangaroo jumping at dawn into its own long chain of ancient selves has collided with the last. No longer anything now but a discarded roll of old carpet or a bag of worn clothes humped along the gutter and deep camber of the road. Further on a white horse on this sky-seared morning nuzzles the shade of wild olive a stinging mist-curtain of mosquito. Fenced in with the domesticity of its days and long agistment wanders between the water trough and tractor dumped hay. The Gomersol Road is pool after pool of hot shadow that drips from native cherry and brown thrip-bitten eucalypts to this late and dusty death. Already a trail-red industry of ants the maggot frenzy notice of jewel-green flies and astride the carcass in their gorge the sharp and monstrous language of the crows. Death of a Tree An historic 300-year-old tree from which an Aboriginal canoe was once carved at Currency Creek near Goolwa south of Adelaide, has been given little chance of survival after being ring barked. ‘ . . . and here the old tree stood for how many thousand years? that old gnome-tree some axe-new boy cut down.’                                                     Judith Wright The car’s flight shakes the old road into light; films the air with dust. A sole grasshopper climbs a blade of grass: will not shift. Always presage of a plague. Morning turns on the counterpoint of destruction and repair: but nothing will soften the hour to come for this. The latent axe that spun a rough cut circle into soft green bark: where life has slipped in the transpiration of three hundred unbroken seasons. Now sap has stopped and leaves- blue blush of tender growth will find their long relationship with the once kind sun a new and first adversary. Death stalks the hot and blunted hour sharp with the oil-wet volatility of fresh cut wood. For every tree there is this final reckoning: what is lost and gone falls out of balance with the grasp and force and push of life. The hands and blade are gone - stowed in the secret compartment of a moment that is almost impossible to rehearse and apprehend nor understand. All that is left behind - this cipher of ugly fingerprints that evidence and convict the eerie second that stretches into grey meaningless and profound silence. These scars of loathing and of carnage history has heard before. The numb ends of horror here the mute and spinning day can’t stop. Grapevines in June Half hinged between gold and green in grey ice of a mid June garden the leaves swarm upon the fences - bright patterns on the day caught in a cold early morning sun. These are moments between wind and rain: and inevitability of their split-second colour depends upon the instant accident of an eye. Dullness is in everything and everywhere. Held for the moment from the flutter to fall and garden rake. Tomorrow they will be an unkempt litter on the lawn. Now they are a bloom of lights in winter's bleak dark living room. Gum Tree It springs from the earth as a flare of phosphorus overexposed in silver moonlight and a negative of its northern counterpart in elm, ash and oak. The very model of a seasoned all rounder - roots deep in the extremities of ice and fire. Headstrong, in the hot blustery storm of dust; and mocking in the strange slight jigsaw and thin shade it throws for ants and flies. The uniform sameness of a trunk that leaps in a massive fountain of wood and drains an ancient complex thing into a wide blue ocean of the sky. Old gain sayer enduring season after season growing out of the disturbed elements of a strange milieu. A creature of fire and a tree after the land and the scorched earth that has been put to the flame, burnt and survived. Moths at Dawn Thousands of tiny white wings like the soft release of feather - down from the underbrush. Small fallen leaves twinned in a brief morning flight. Someone somewhere will know why - explanations pressed between vicissitudes of accident and design. But this morning they rise as an amorphous fluttering cloud. A myriad of meagre ghosts colliding in the confusion of light. Driven into mad spirals of desire dying against an overcast and copper sun. Ocean-Park Seagulls The seagull's eye is large on detail with a sharp point of view about lunch scraps and children's discarded chip packets. Their legs are the clockwork equivalent of the bag-men who haunt garbage bins for tins and bottles. Seagulls work the lawns - for a pittance (Council signs prohibit feeding) then white-lime cement and seats with their droppings. Their cries all wind and waves the language of the ocean where it falls beyond the funfair in little breakers. Strange squalid scavengers who bicker and bark at the edges of our domesticity; or frail floating marionettes hovering between two extremes. Caught between this mown and manicured garden they will never fully embrace; and granite cliffs and caves of the outer islands to which they can never return. Willow Trees in Rain Out from iron sheds, the only dry ground where sparrows sand-bath in soft sunless dirt. See how they mimic winter. Each tree a gold bead-curtain of falling leaves and yellow skirt of branches. They ring a dam filled up with mist and cold that gives each back a strange muted ghost of what lies in wait; an ending; a last winter somewhere down a muddy track marked ‘Summer Traffic Only’. Here underneath a globe heavy with snow and deciduous seasons, their moulting reminds us of brief lives and all our little deaths and what is left to hope for and what things are lost: to where small birds are squabbling in the dust. About the Poet Jeff Guess Jeff Guess teaches English in country and metropolitan secondary schools, the Adelaide Institute of TAFE, and tutors at the University of South Australia. His first book Leaving Maps, published in 1984. Samela Harris (The Advertiser) has written of his latest collection Winter Grace 'Methinks he is the finest living Australian poet.' He has had eight collections published. Jeff has written two textbooks on teaching poetry and edited eight poetry anthologies. His poetry has been published widely. He has written a textbook for tertiary students entitled Writing Poetry, published by the Adelaide Institute of TAFE. There are entries for him in the International Authors and Writers Who's Who, the Who's Who of Australian Writers and the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature; and an article by Geoff Page in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry (UQP 1995).    [Above] Photo of Jeff Guess by photographer unknown, 2001. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.10 (September, 2004)