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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #2/thyla2k-br AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 2 The Poetry of Brendan Ryan Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Brendan Ryan by Alison Girvan, 2000. I In The Company of Farmers I The Boxing Day Test I Milk Fever I Return To The Western District I In the Company of Farmers Talking of cows they agreed it was stinking mongrel country, where fertilizer is the difference between knee-length rye grass and walking out into a paddock to say a decade for rain. With seven paddocks shut up for hay and the vat being filled each day they could afford to rest their hands behind their heads, stick their chests out. In the company of farmers women create their own fun watching videos of Irish pop stars, booking bus tours for a day out shopping. My grandmother used to wait outside the pub then drive my grandfather home to a lace bedspread. he would be snoring by the time she untied his boots and went to help her daughters milk a herd by hand. One morning after a Grand Final, my mother cleared a kitchen full of drunk farmers. Her voice sent them scurrying like kittens. And for weeks nobody spoke to her after Mass. Talking of rain they agreed an inch would cover the smell of the possum in the tank. They handed back their cups which like the cattle troughs were dutifully filled the way sandwiches always appeared at Cabaret Balls. The Boxing Day Test A grandstand roars from a battered trannie slung around the father's neck. With cowshit steaming down his apron, he follows the orders from a frowning son with a grin focused somewhere between the justice of another English wicket and the pleasure of getting a difficult job done. In the holding yard twelve heifers are cornered by shouts of slam the bolt, grab its nose, twist the head! A roan heifer charging one of the sons slams a cyclone gate against its hinges. Nearby the bulls are rubbing their shoulders in the dirt moaning as they are pulled toward the smell of yearling heifers yarded at midday. As one son struggles with the nose clamp the other brings the handles of the dehorners together with a crack. Blood needles across their faces as they work around the roaring, yanking the head into position catching the horn with the fly blown bag. Like short words they've grown used to a working silence. The younger brother knows he's not trusted in tight situations. He keeps looking back to the swiveling eye, the marrow pulsing in the head. The father, smiling across the bony ridge of a trapped heifer watches the latest additions to his herd stagger up the track with blood trickling over their eyebrows. In a couple of days their stumps will have dried and all their bellowing in circles will be lost to the routine of cows nosing up to the logic of a fence, like two brothers who can eat a meal without uttering a sound. Published in Why I Am Not a Farmer (Five Islands Press, 2000). Milk Fever Ibis' picking in the mud heifers crowding around to sniff my jeans A fence post being banged in paddocks away beneath the pine trees, a dead cow her stomach torn apart by dogs and foxes wind arguing with a eucalypt plantation my father whistling from the check-out to collect ten kids in Target he feeds the springers pellets before they calve last year six cows were lost to milk fever cypress shadows stretching over paddocks cut for hay a cow decaying amongst mossy rocks a dog's instinct for killing snakes Mt Warrnambool caught in the drizzle shopping on a Wednesday with 20 cents my nerves shot by the hum of an electric fence the isolation of the back river flats dark water stroked by reeds the white plank fence that sagged around the house barbed wire fences bowed by falling trees wood from the wheelbarrow outside the back door mum pregnant, on her knees, mopping the floor dead crows and sheep skins draped over the chook shed walls dust clouds pulling eyes to the car coming down the road wind rising from the hole in the floor beside my bed where the machinery shed was, where the diesel tank was walking along the bush track I was on edge between boundary fences stumbling through hoof prints, reassured by shotgun cartridges my first drink in a hotel was a raspberry on a high stool beside my father I saw neighbours grinning out of the dark shadows approaching the frosted glass the views of paddocks and Occupation Lane are the same, it's where I'm looking from that's changed. Published in Why I Am Not a Farmer (Five Islands Press, 2000). Return To The Western District Driving through the Stony Rises at night you enter a purple light which sits above the paddocks pulls you into swamps, slanted pig sheds, ferns rising out of dumped windscreens. The only things that seem to move are rocks slipping from dry-stone fences. These are paddocks haunted by their ordering where the massacre years pass with Bunyips into myth, With each sweeping bend or five mile stretch the Western District darkness opens up secrets, histories you don't hear about. The paddocks close in. Every farmhouse throws a familiar shadow. Car lights coming down a side road fail to reassure me against these vast, unwritten plains. and all the things like Aborigines my parents wouldn't talk about at the kitchen table suddenly seem irrelevant in the overtaking lane. This is the road Nanna traveled to see a daughter dying of TB. Too poor to catch a train she hitched rides with trucks, then six weeks later caught a ride back with the hearse her daughter keeping quiet behind her. To fill in the silences on long trips my parents would say a decade of the rosary. Dad, in his monotone mantra ran words into each other- hailmaryfullagraceLordiswthee. We were a family resigning to their rhythm and Mum interjecting-pray up, I can't hear you! -our holiday treat from kneeling on lino tiles. I sank into my window seat mumbling responses to the weeds, spaces between fence posts. Passing the de-restriction signs outside Terang is passing into the grainy light of an unfinished dream. faces, paddocks, voices out of focus and for a moment I'm driving underwater. There is the paddock where the Drive-in was here are the two chimneys left from a bushfire. Down to Yaloak Creek bridge up past Johnny Ryans, Meades. These are the names a city can't supply. These are the histories I'm stuck with. A small town's gift to the world may be a card night that stops people from sitting around and staring at themselves. Like footy streamers tied to white posts my parents keep themselves busy avoiding doctors looking up from ad breaks to photos on the wall. Here, where legends are invented each weekend free beer on Christmas morning brings a farming community together- teenage mothers and red-cheeked bachelors, dope smokers and relief milkers jostle for position with wobbly farmers, the nick-names of last year's Premiership side decorate the bar. Each time I return certain objects are caught: green algae in a water trough, a cattle track rising out of river flats. So much slips from that first glance I can't pick up everything that falls. In the quiet paddocks that have been shut up for hay all I can hear are sirens, Punt Rd traffic. I shake a loose fence post and the earth squelches. Published in Why I Am Not a Farmer (Five Islands Press, 2000). About the Poet Brendan Ryan Brendan Ryan grew up on a dairy farm at Panmure in western Victoria, and currently lives in Melbourne. He has had poems published in a number of journals including Otis Rush, Meanjin, Ulitarra and Southerly. He has poems forthcoming in Westerly, Heat, The Age, and Going Down Swinging. In December 2000, a critical essay on Philip Hodgins will be published in Antipodes. Brendan is studying for his Dip. Ed, and hopes, idealistically, to give students an education in poetry that he didn't receive. Brendan Ryan's first book of poetry is Why I Am Not a Farmer published by Five Islands Press in 2000.    [Above] Photo of Brendan Ryan by Alison Girvan, 2000. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.2 (September, 2000)