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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                         #2/thyla2c THE POETRY OF ALAN GOULD Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Portrait of Alan Gould by Jenni Mitchell (oil on canvas 1989 30" x 36") "They've arrived. That's all I am allowed to know" I A Change Of Season I Bangkok Crocodile Farm I Two Sea Eagles I King Parrots I The Dolphins I A Limb Of God: 1938 I Albratosses: September 1939 I Tightrope Walker I Trapeze Artists I Fire Eater I The Freedom Of The Seas I Letter To Jenna Mead I February 23rd 1987 I Proem From The Great Circle I Four Emotions/1.Snake Forest I Mermaid I Under Privet I The White Handed Gibbon At Western Plains Zoo I Anne's Cats I Crowspeak Beside Brisbane Grammar School Oval I A Change Of Season (After a newsreel of a Himalayan Spring ritual) As sleepless I catch the ancient footage there are sirens ullulant somewhere,   there's a tyre-squeal of joyriders. and the long grass in my small orchard is twittery with reptile movement. With her following that now includes me the virgin arrives to place the sweetmeats. She's a child, and more intensely focal    than she could ever want as promptly from the rock there issue eleven yards of liquid obsidian a head puffed and big as the moon. Last year, we're told, her sister died here who trembled short of the required magic, her neck encompassed by these jaws,    trachea pierced, stifling a terror you might have heard in Tibet or this room.                    Now they sway, and each is the other's hypnotist. a minute, a lifetime, she fixes on the gimlet-eye of death till she swims with the cobra's body, and, solemn as a bride, inclines to kiss and kiss and kiss that prim mouth. Fifty years cannot untwist the trance her nerve has conjured here. Were the harvests good that year? Has she lived to have grandchildren? I take her people's deadly logic deep into my own dream magic and wake amazed by the slow daybreak that reddens in my small orchard, and slants across the luminous harvests, in all those lands beyond my sleep so calm with belief or unbelief. Published in Icelandic Solitaries (University of Queensland Press, 1978). Bangkok Crocodile Farm You might believe they do without verbs, immobile, a sculptor's reject-bin, they have the warted concrete sameness of the basins they lie in. In dreams we might walk on them nimbly, as if upon the bony granite of a headland. Their languor, their amber eyes invite just this.                            But look how they sleep with eyes open, jaws agape just there beneath these slender walkways. Look how the inside of each mouth is a flower's cream-yellow heart, how the gums and teeth are stained tobacco brown so like a grin glimpsed once in a bar.                                      O yes, evolution's debris, we say, our athletes and ballerinas in mind, a botch-up job so long ago the planets had scarcely found their spin. Yet flick-knives, shrapnel, the reptile flicker within the prima donna's eye     also point toward the chain of being, the common basin. Their stillness, their inert digestion      absorb us more and more. These walkways seem to hang on air.      Our coins rebound off stone,      and we would be more daring,      a prod perhaps, or more!              a pas-de-deux                         across those scaly breathing necks. Published in Icelandic Solitaries (University of Queensland Press, 1978). Two Sea Eagles (Northwest Island, Capricornia Group) I You take this stare-eyed monarch on her tree; below her whimbrells strut on gawky legs and damsels poise like lightning in lagoons. You know how nothing's dark beneath this moon of tissue except her round imperial eye, nor will the sea's mutations modify her gimlet-claws, the sharp Tzarina's brow, this frown that's cocked against the scrabbling panic. The male is smaller and more sudden, glides, a scimitar dividing gravity at scarce pisonia height, the head downthrust, flexing left and right above the sea's lean populations. Self-possession has its archetype in this, the finger feathers playing the currents like a pianist, requiring no extension of themselves to monitor each tremor on these hundred turquoise islands. Throughout each minute, each millennium the same imperatives hatch, the threats wear no disguise. The hunger resolves. You've read in Pliny how in the end they starve, the mandible that curls and locks the beak forever, plumage whitening, their bones bleach with the viscera on the eyrie-stone (imperial irony that ought to move the super-powers).  Their map is round, they're thrust by thermals high above the chains of food, the island's swivelling apex, black and white, whose wingspans fall as shadow from that height, a thunderhead across the Queensland coast. II And you've been in their power, like the skink remarking a mote of ash the instant that its world turns upside down and darkness bursts in seas upon its tiny house - eyefirst pushed into a nestling's mouth and sunk through black intestine, muscle, bone and back to that perfect hovering balance. Appetites? Who will distinguish them? Metaphors are air, are volatile. The bird soars into emblem, perches on a stick, to become one of history's dark exhilarations. Blink an eye and Poland reels, the Slavs go under. Blink - the sullen Pictish tribes melt before Agricola. Time grabs this effigy that hangs above the nations, that brings grief's sulphur, streaming black and gold, a totem launched across the Rhine, the Tiber, embattled on the Beresina's ice, toppled at Buchenwald. Mere energies, mere emblems? Neither will stand reconciled against the placid, fluctuating galaxies. Bone, meteor, memory, they all become the bio-mass, continually disarrange. that which the mind will turn into the strange. How many voices gone without trace down the tunnel of that obscure need? Bronze-age traumata distil to popular myth as Neanderthal blurs into frost-giant on the Jutland Plain, while on the Fertile Crescent farmers swear to marvels - from mirage, a stampede of men with four hooves, bringing mutilations. The hawk-crowned eagle on Yggdrasil, the bird on Jupiter's shoulder overlook these hypotheses that tremble like music at the edge of imagining. This pair remains, astride the blood-red trail of the millennia, claw and snow-white garter clutching silence, while a tropic storm manoeuvres between the industries of Gladstone and Rockhampton, and the tide is turning on a flawless sea. Published in Astral Sea (Angus & Robertson, 1981). King Parrots They've arrived. That's all I am allowed to know. Four, no, six, they have materialised trembling on the Mexican Hawthorn as though the tree had just devised them, six startling orchids, or six jocund rascals, outrageous in their green or crimson balaclavas and crimson pantaloons, tucking away their conifer wings, eating with greedy disdain like babies, or comic strip bandidos. My lawn is rubbished with half-eaten crimson berries. Vandals. Solferino angels; how can my eye stray while they remain in creaturely candelabra on a sky of nursery blue. It's like a siege. One cocks its head as though to say, "Don't worry. We are too brilliant to be real," then goes on eating from my tree. They're gone. The branch skitters into stillness. And I could spend a year behind this glass longing for their return. Published in The Pausing of the Hours (Angus & Robertson, 1984). The Dolphins West of Grenada were azure sailing days, our daylight moon a lean sailmaker's needle, our labours living in the trance of play. And dawn on dawn I heard the watchman sing, They're back, the snubnose gang, a score at least, which brought the fellows crowing from their cots. They were the dolphins with their secret smiles, each flaring satin torso trailing gowns of silver foil beneath our whisker boom. Why does their frolic take us from ourselves? The gaping blowhole on each forehead shocks. I've heard they butcher hundreds off Nagoya, and days ago that boy, and those who urged him, his crude harpoon to jab these gamesome creatures, the blood, the cheers, they put me in a fury. Ribaldry's become the whole of manners. I snapped his little stick across his shoulders and had him clean latrines for seven mornings; he's grown more shy. Not so the niggard spirit hungry for results. It eats at wonder, spawns bitterness where justice was at ease, it kills off manhood. Corrosive rancour, this. I'll watch instead these skilful clowning mammals that shipped a Roman schoolboy to his lessons and brought a man ashore off Matapan who'd sung in his distress a shrilling hymn. They're lured by music and create their own, snoring at night, their blowholes just awash, they cobblestone the seas of Trinidad; when beached or hurt their shrill is human. They are the ocean's par for Plato's friendship, are known to die from grief, as once at Iasos, where Hermias the dolphin's friend was drowned. And two that I remember, tidepool stranded, flicking water on each other's bodies till fishermen returned them to the sea. They'll drown in nets. If breathless, they become an instant, rocket fifty fathoms, leap a crossjack. I have talked to men who've seen it. Some say they were hyenas, mittened forepaws, their hindlegs now two nubs of bone. Perhaps. I equally believe the Maori tale about a man sewn up in dolphin skin for some impiety, condemned forever to greet the ships that ply Hauraki Gulf. (Some ribald gentlemen I'd serve less kindly.) No, they are not human. They might have been - their sucklings never lack for foster milk. And no, we are not dolphins, though we wandered once on an ampler earth. We have no leeway; sequence is our grievous playmate, thieving among all matter, this my ancient craft. Published in The Pausing of the Hours (Angus & Robertson, 1984). A Limb Of God: 1938 Yes, were I God, I'd butcher sharks regardless, mako- thresher- sand- or hammerhead, my thought a stupor tracking purity. In what lies their good character? In this; let blue be blue, let all the rest be eaten because the stomach's bigger than the oceans. Slipstream profile mouth and eye have marred, they butt the single instant of self-doubt and gnaw a human pelvis down to hash. Yes anywhere they'll home from anywhere. Toss a matchbox from the rail, it's seized, its tremor calling them from twenty miles. Cast a shark-hook tipped with pork, it's seized, or nuzzled first by pilot fish, then seized, and boys are hauling at the thrashing line of frenzy that a million centuries have left unchanged. Yes yes, the innocence, say cat-sharks when they mate - the male a bracelet round the female's middle, dizzy-eyed, enraptured. Yes, they will conceive like humans. Richer study sawing through their bellies - once the head and forelegs of a dog, the lead was still around its neck. Mere beasts? They're more. They are a limb of God that we can sever or become; they nag the rip we've opened in decorum. I watch the fellows tossing the scraps of all they cannot use from this morning's shark. It's seized by sharks snapping in the muddied sea ten feet below us. We are that close. Stomachs that will house the indigestible already house our futures. I watch, and trust what I am told that they can never sleep and will outlast us. Published in The Pausing of the Hours (Angus & Robertson, 1984). Albatrosses; September 1939 A steamer throws umbilicals of smoke into the ashen vastness east of Hobart - and there, an albatross at its employment. Japanese eyebrow and Antarctic breast soaring in that upward bath of air one hundred feet or more, its wings cloud-still, now tipping like a drowsy gymnast over, slipping seaward, is the merest nib writing on a skyline. This was ours. And this, where, gooning off Tristan da Cunha hovering for galley scraps at close to stalling speed - ah flump - and down on deck she's crarking, retching stomach oils, as boys dance round her shouting Bugger off, fool-bird, before your lousy aeronautics turn you into supper. Snapping that machete beak, she nearly suppered on my hand before we tossed her leeward, happily. And now? Albatross, Toroa, Bakadori, daily among the idle, in books not mine, I read your every shift is years at sea, that you will ring the globe on sixty south with scarce a wingbeat, augur fogs or gales, become a shipmate drowned for fifteen years. Your flights are latitudes of work, your time, not time like ours now is, endurance, waste; it is a trance of watchful moments where the cuttlefish, the scraps confetti-blown, are mere seizures in your spare economy of motions. Now? The library is hushed and rain is dulling what the newsboys shout. Gamesome bird, you're indexed in nostalgia for the masts are everywhere unstepped and our next employment will be bitter. Published in The Pausing of the Hours (Angus & Robertson, 1984). Tightrope Walker He climbs the vertical on all four hands, discards the third dimension, dances off as though he were a stick-man drawn on paper. His mystery? It's simple. Dream a floor, then walk or climb on it, for space is strung with rafters of theory. Hah, what might he prove for physics, this hare-brained fellow with his pole, this baggy-trousered monocycling spirit. Perhaps one night he'll amble to the moon along his wire, umbrella on his shoulder, or stretch a line between the now and then to cycle there and back, his silver girl astride his narrow shoulders. His family includes all sparrows perched on telegraph wires, all pirouettists, and the earth that walks on its invisible rail around the sun. But now, perhaps because the plains of mind cause him to yawn, he lies on his one-strand bed and goes to sleep with one foot dangling in space, space-shuttler, hung above the slow continents, the sapphire oceans rolling under his rest, while from below come cheers which, ah, he should, with one limp hand-wave, presently acknowledge. Published in The Twofold Place (Angus & Robertson, 1986). Trapeze Artists He twists the rope around his leg then drops so she can slow-slip down him, knotting her feet around his waist. He's now her moonlit branch: she pythons him, untwines him to entwine him in restive silver loops. She is all verb, is here, is now; she cannot be more so. Then what does she make of us, our mouths open like seashells, our craning heads, our staring eyes like stars reflected in some secret lake toward which she now droops and grows and hovers, perhaps to drink beneath the many moons? Simply by thinking they've slipped behind our      physics. What's gravity? A word that means free-play. For now she takes his hand; they're lovers, blissed in space like moon and planet. What next? What      next? They've turned themselves into a chandelier, into a tortile pendant on a throat. We melt with adoration. Yes, we cry, Bravo! Dance anywhere. Who needs a floor? It is the world that's upside down. Besides what is the world but dance that's breaking out from matter into metaphor? Free-play. And there are acrobats that fly like comets across the tents of memory - but this is not here or now. Our two unknot themselves, slip to the floor and stand before our cheers, their arms outstretched, stiffly, like candlesticks. Published in The Twofold Place (Angus & Robertson, 1986). Fire Eater My breath the tiger, my breath the anaconda, is first and last my love. I give it freely. The stage I lounge on is as vast as dawn. I am your glitzy starlet who might behave. But beware my tantrums. As should this doting boy. He adores me from his chair. I eye him. What, dear heart, were I to tilt my curls and gulp an orange seed? It is an instant pine tree has scorched your lap. It is a flock of parrots that scatter into blueness round your ears. This does not help his conversation. I smile. Darling, I say, I'm dangerous to know. I leave my lovers eyebrowless and bald. My mother was a notorious gypsy-comet: she shawled me in her orange tail, then vanished. My daddy, I am told, was a big volcano. He gave me his orange mane, his wicked temper. I woke to find a sparkling heirloom placed against my tongue. So, while I've tongue and time, I'll play with fire and those who play with fire. My metaphors will burn the paint from manners, my breath discover all the shapes of language. Meanwhile this boy fatigues me with his gaze. I'll eat my orange word, then breathe a love to send him yelping from his chair. And then? Perhaps I'll flirt with you and you and you, tickling your ears with my sudden torrid speeches. Published in The Twofold Place (Angus & Robertson, 1986). The Freedom Of The Seas I watch for strangeness as I watch the self and voyage further down my lineage. The scales and herringbone of ancestors are there, and neighbourhoods of blue-lit pressures. I move through worlds that hang from mercury, I trail the planet's oceans like my hair, and knot old sea-routes round the hemispheres. So instantly I vanish down my thought, beyond my knowing know that I was there stalking a blur that walked upon my sky of glass-green shift, am now elsewhere, say south or deep or anywhere horizons move impelling idyll, rest in unrest, here watching strangeness as I watch myself. Published in The Twofold Place (Angus & Robertson, 1986). Letter To Jenna Mead Like it or not, in neighbourhood with cats most of us live. Their world makes free with ours as form makes free with space. Though Jenna, you, who once were feeding more cats than you owned, would grant we can never treat their lives of scowl and languor with the same hauteur they show to ours. What recognition do they excite? Clearly more to do with the cat in us than fellow-feeling with any human in them. Think how a cat adopts a human knee. Well-suppered, it will leap into its lien, ensconce itself between your thigh and book as on an outcrop sovereign since the Sphinx, there to nap as the world shimmers in prospect. How unlike the cows, whose sloven jaws chew on a wish to be left in peace forever; how unlike the dog which, glad of the favour, dozes at our feet, or zealously lopes beside our lives panting, I am faithful. Admit me please into your inner space. Even the moggiest of cats can strike the tiger's profile, that svelte self-possession. Though would you warm, I wonder, to Agapanthus, our slug. Marsupial-shaped and black as a hearse, rescued from a Social Security cat trap, taught personal hygiene by a dog, this beast can occupy a double-bed such that no human sleep is possible. Sad, not fierce, is the whinge with which it guards its dinner from poaching neighbours. These are chiefly two, a grey so sleek it can hide behind sunlight and a fiery black with hidalgo head and back so supple it flows like a mountain creek. How easy in imagination to pass through the varied sultanates of cats like Marco Polo passing through Eurasia, noting here, a burly, fist-faced machismo oblivious of borders, or here, a realm shrunk to a patch around a dinner-plate. And when on nights the suburb's cats are wailing like police cars, consider, Jen, the pickings for sociology, a saga-world of border feuds conducted like games of chess where personal threats and war-cries are allowed. Think also of their prehistory, the day someone kneeling in Egyptian dust fed Felis Lybica the first scraps from human hand; or earlier, its larger cousins trekking across the Panama landbridge, jaguar, ocelot, with their anaconda markings, yellowing the greens of Amazon. Be it Tabby, or the cats we cage in television, it seems their forty million years have changed them very little. Unlikely as they are to evolve a correspondence with their friends, they seem from the first and unlike us, to have landed on their feet. In this their felicity. Published in The Twofold Place (Angus & Robertson, 1986). February 23rd 1987     Today, each day, and in the everyday the furthest epochs infiltrate my life, as when a dragonfly arrives like a nerve-impulse     from the palaeozoic to sun itself     in a spring-loaded immobility for some minutes on the lichened stone at my feet.     Around me willows glisten like wet oil paint, the rocks absorb the heat like umber loaves, the river uncreases like silver parachute silk settling.     Beneath its surface tiny gambusia fish     dart-poise in their Jurassic landscape of algae-furred weed and the tumbled scummed floodwrack.     My dragonfly is thin as a hairclip; I note across its black thorax the tattoos of sulphur yellow, and yellow hyphens that highlight its abdomen. I muse     how infinitely fine that stylus must have been     which first black-penned their wings' scribble of nervures, nervules, those doodles in a page's margin,     started idly, then grown suddenly fascinating and schematic, how steady the hand that set in place the thousand facets of their eye.     I remark too, how easily my thought     once more pre-empts a pre-Darwinian God, as though I were myself that watchful village cleric,     a pinned specimen mirrored in my lunettes, taking fastidious notes in the creamy-parlour light of a 1780's vicarage, each minute detail     building toward the deity's rational face.     So the eras curl down in the mind and shift their highlights; so I live in transcendence.     But here! the rock warm through my shirt; some hills away a farm-dog barks persistently, my scent having carried upriver through scrub for miles.     The dragonfly tenses, launches; back and forth     it shifts across the lagoon like the nib of a seismograph, spanking the surface here and here,     creating tiny roundels of disturbance, which I do not understand until, far faster than my eye can follow, it scoops some wriggling thing     and vanishes downstream devouring its prey     on the wing. Yes, here! I cannot be more so! Tomorrow I'll research the species odonata,     learn how they fly hundreds of miles in search of habitats, how horses shy from their flight paths. I'll read, and later still observe, how they pair     veering inseparably down the summer zephyrs,     in copulatory semi-breves, the male climping the female's head in tiny pincers, and she     doubled over to take his sperm smear, their wings in furious shimmer, erotic usages from carboniferous times that won't be lost on me.     But now my dragonfly returns, vanishes,     returns, as though flying in and out of a landscape painting, in and out of this, my life's time. Published in Years Found In Likeness (Angus and Roberston, 1988). Proem From The Great Circle Words for Graham Hair's Bicentennial Choral Symphony And daily we unearth the earth in consciousness        and in memory Pangaia, Laurasia, Gondwanaland, those early        continents are dispersing like cloud while fossil, bone, and flint utensil, like schools of        fish, assemble in their eras. For the years are the roof of a vast and slow        factory. The oceanic plates rend and renew themselves        from the       sutures of the earth as magma foams and tries, shoves up vermilion       gloves, cools       along the sutures of the earth; it is such soft, such discreet violence, this        pressure outward and outward, this crumbling and incinerating of silicates at the        roots of continents, this millennial regeneration. So the Americas slip westward, uncurl like ferns,        touch across their isthmus. And India flows into Asia; the Himalayas soar        softly like an immense cumulo-nimbus. New Zealand swims north toward the hook of        Maui; it hoards and modifies its freight of        species. Australia swims north through its climates toward       the latitude of your first landfall. Such soft, such discreet violence, as the durable        tools machine our horizons, wind that prises granule from granule, frost that        injects and cracks the fissures, tricklewater        dissolving the salts. And the soils arrange and disarrange their maps        across the plains, in the culverts and eddies of        terrain. Such movement of creatures, such flow of habitats        where the pasture leads, through mountain        passes, through ice-free corridors south, such movement of families, watchful above the        bison and caribou valleys, by the glade where        kangaroo, where moa feed. All this we bring to mind now, this wide, this deep        unearthing of our earth, because we cannot help it, because it is our        distance from creation and our distance within it; because it is our human difference, so prior, so        early, this consciousness and memory, consciousness in time and across time, impelling        from this earth our world. Published in Years Found In Likeness (Angus and Roberston, 1988). Four Emotions 1. Snake Forest Snake forest. Your uncanny arrival. Beware sleek glittering ribbons of water. Beware also bark that inclines toward you, flowertongues, twigs are not to be trusted. What hatches within this log what yawn of jaws? The puffed head, coil on coil tightening its intent on your vulnerable neck and the grass so long! Beautiful as hair. The wet soil so lithe, so elusive underfoot! Will nothing expel these images? (now her eyes have abandoned you, have become mineral that were wise and costly). Mud river warm river, the reeds receive you, surround you with lunging fangs, ingot eyes. Wake! Your terror requires you conscious; - now                                                     a dead snake on the track black and gold. Furled like a flower. Like a question mark. Published in Icelandic Solitaries (University of Queesland Press, 1978). Mermaid Keren dived. I dived,     trailing her orange flippers        down the reef sill as the sea's           turquoise deepened to curacoa,              and the facets of sunlight                 shoaled - ah lovely -                    across her black and orange                       wetsuit. Our talk had become                           all interior. Hey Pete!                              her thought was saying, these                                are the Xanadu streets. Check                                  your very own Ordovician                                     cousins, lover boy, paradigms                                        of the streetwise. For I                                      was space-walking where                                   the parrot fish iridesced like                                 oil on pools; where the manta rays                              towed their quadrahedral shadows                            through my person, making                         seaward in echelon; I saw                      a million damsel fish flake off me,                   each unsheathing its stilletto glitter,                I saw a single trumpet fish pause              centre-screen on my goggles, so             immobile I reached as though          to take it from its jeweller's shelf,       vanished. I saw creatures, and     the throng of stained glass saints        browsing within critical distance,           each in its cutout of miraculous              light. And I answered Keren,                 saying, Honey, I am at home                    here, where movement tricks                       on movement  everywhere - do                          they call that love? Libido                              she smiled, swimming out                                 of reach. But I was spellbound,                                     and saw, as lovers do, my own                                        self's flickering cinema, alcoves                                         of Byzantine politics rising tier                                       on tier. I fingered the staghorn's                                   sea-gauntlets, its sea-antlers, locked                                 in the fabulous creature-wars.                               From some exaltation in my                            person I was weep-laughing,                         Hey, Machiavelli, here are your                      princelings, these poisoned claws                   hinged inside their artistic cones,                 here, brother, is the bubble-rush               of realpolitick. And I was also shouting                Look Plato! We feast on the actual                  here, amidst such lace-flutter of gills,                    the sea-moss like emerald                      maidenhair, the velveteen rims                        of giant clams closing on dew-wet                              Verona gardens, such luminous                               sex. And I called out to all                                   the dangerous loves of the                                  world that I would free my era                                from its nursery, as I rose                              with my outraged lungs, glimpsing                            in the instant I broke the surface                          Keren with her camera far below,                        unharmed amid the great sharks                           the orange flash on her wetsuit                               moving to the same slow                                   ballet of the creatures. Published in Mermaid (Heinemann, 1996). Under Privet Slinks now a black      slender mother-cat         that flow-eddies            in its fur-slack                duet of bodies,              the inner cat           silhouettishly              seeping between                 silvery slat                    and ivy green                       followed coyly                     slowly, coolly,                  by outer cat,                     impelled back                         into inner cat                            as a pressed sac                               of jet black gel                                   recoils to fill                                       a natural whole. Published in Mermaid (Heinemann, 1996). The White Handed Gibbon at Western Plains Zoo Has power shoulders, swingingly is a ms at her workout. Gung-ho she knows her one rope's slope, this cable-twist of biceps. Her leaps are stressed in brisk, non-risk, iambic arcs, her jaunt all flaunt, all blissful reflex, About her body's interface with surfaces, she's serious, Lawrentian, vitalist, so post-modernist, in her russet tracksuit's satin sheen, our high-achiever belle cousine, and has been since the Eocene, working the air's universal joints arm over arm in taut s-bends, airy double clefs and ampersands. With her talcum face and small white hands one looks for the handbag flying behind this aerobic ms, now in her snappy brown blouse as she vaults the shoppers to catch her bus, with scarcely a glance for shuffling us, and arrives, as though for her seminar, to sit composed on the edge of a chair, hands on knees and elbows in, body-work over, biros poised to begin. This life of the mind, eh girls. Ho hum, shall I kick off? Cogito ergo sum. Published in Mermaid (Heinmann, 1996). Anne's Cats My darling keeps three slender cats, a brother, a sister and a daughter cat. Brother-cat has a ripple of coat which sleeks like the sheen of grey sea-ice. "I think it worked for the secret police," observes my honey, eyeing its temper. "Beautiful creature, ugly nature," observes my truelove, eyeing its features, its baleful, grudge-filled, yellow eyes, and the tuft where the ghost of its balls might nip each time it eases through the cat-flap. Sister-cat is mobile, black as the blackness under the river rocks. It's away with the ham from the cutting board before a person can shout "Hoy, Lilith!" "Wicked, but beautiful," says my tousled girl, and strokes its fur till it sleeps like oil in the crook of her other arm. But daughter-cat is the pampered cat with its cappucino colours and its little face. It licks its paw to wash behind its ears and it lies all night where my ambition lies, staring at the morning with startled blue eyes like a favourite courtier caught in some opulent bed-of-sin as the secret police barge in. Published in Dalliance and Scorn (Indigo, 1999). Crowspeak Beside Brisbane Grammar Oval Drone talk, crone talk, this mawk will underscore all the dreary lessons with its gaga furore of hidden clause and cause for cutting budgets to     the core. It's a poor whore's lamentation that the times are      chaste and raw. Dark talk, dork talk, vowels from the craw, torque-wrench talk, or angle-grind, or tyros      squawking war, the crows have tensioned our attention with their      tired scorn, their stopwork growls of Up yours, sport! their      seminars of garn! As fellows tumble round a field with oi! oi! eeyah! and coaches blast the slowcoaches with 'Avyagotitinya?' the crows discourse and comment all according to      their tempers with argh! and bah! and farkh! as they ruffle their      black jumpers. So why do crows not gossip, not chortle, but must chaw, must augur all their sterile news from dustbin dawn     till four, then flap away ungainly, black plastic on the air, disconsolate, yes, but too self-righteous for despair? About the Poet Alan Gould Alan Gould was born in London in 1949 of English-Icelandic parents, and lived on armed forces camps in England, Northern Ireland, Germany and Singapore before coming to Australia in 1966. He has an arts degree from The Australian National University, a Diploma Of Education From The Canberra College Of Advanced Education. Since 1973 he has written poetry and fiction as full-time as resources have allowed, augmenting his income with literary journalism and relief teaching. In 1981 he won the NSW Premiers Prize for Poetry, 1981, for Astral Sea. Other Awards include; Foundation of Australian Literary Studies Medal for the Best Book of the Year, 1985, for The Man Who Stayed Below, National Book Council 'Banjo' Award for Fiction 1992 for To The Burning City, The Phillip Hodgins Memorial Medal For Literature, 1999 and The Royal Blind Society Audio Book Of The Year (for The Tazyrik Year,) 1999. He has held several fellowships from The Australia Council. A Fold in the Light is due out with Indigo.    [Above] Photo of Poet by Photographer, Year. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.2 (September, 2000)