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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #4/thyla4k-as AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 4 The Poetry of Alex Skovron Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Alex Skovron by Jerry Galea, 2000. I DRINKING SONG OF THE INQUISITOR I ON THE THEOLOGY OF ANTS I LES MIZZ I AN ALCHEMY I DRINKING SONG OF THE INQUISITOR for Ian McBryde I shall devise a metaphysic            modelled precisely on the world it will create I shall eradicate nostalgia: longing will again become            pain, and the pain transmute into a state of grace I shall invent a nostalgia of the future I shall elevate history to the realms of myth - there are            certain continuities to be preserved I shall construct an empire of words, and label it            belief or night, or I shall not label it belief I shall make passion absolute, and bliss the one true moment            of necessity, punishable only by truth I shall enforce the wild dance of fluorescent skeletons,            teach the wretched to swallow their defiance,            and swallowing choke on it I shall be father to the orphans of faith - me            they will not betray, for they will believe in nothing            but me I shall preach hatred of all vanity, and hatred of all            the vain and all the humble, for they shall have quaffed            their pathetic portion known as time It is my turn now Published in the Melbourne Chronicle (Australia). ON THE THEOLOGY OF ANTS Picture an insect circling a lifetime in a covered jar. Secure the jar inside a canvas bag stuffed with faded clothing, rags and torn stockings. Enclose this in a suitcase full of books and old journals, sealed, strapped and slotted in the back of a rusting station wagon locked in a cluttered shed. Now imagine that the garage is appended to a cottage strung to a tree within a sprawling suburb whose proximity to the city is ambiguous. Elevate your vantage to locate the black towers puncturing clouds that suspend them in space. Go higher, higher, to incorporate the spill of a massed metropolis, and then its edges fringing the urban dusk and blending fast with fields and pastures, plains and rolling earth. A moment, and you stack the crisscrossed chiaroscuro geometric grid slanting, sliding north - and to the south, and west, and east into the sea. Then the horizon and the end of earth: receding, fading, darkening, unreal - perspectives vanish, and the thud of black. The imprisoned ant, still circling, nearly dead, has spent his life devising metaphysics. He has thought out the nature of the universe, the origins of matter, the designs of time. Serene and certain, he loves the calm of knowledge, prepares glowingly to confront his Maker: Whom most of his kind believe to be sixlegged but his own rarer perception, its divining spirit, already can sense more correctly ... Published in Sleeve Notes (Hale & Iremonger, 1992). LES MIZZ When it's all over, that fragile palindrome Of faith and duty, Javert and Valjean, Meet up in a lobby. 'I was always a bit puzzled,' V. can't resist this, 'that your mind was so muzzled. Why all the melodrama, your murky demise? - I'd have thought you'd have tried a bit harder to please A crowd so captive; we could have been friends.' 'Do you think I wanted to go?' J. demands; 'Just beginning to see through that thick Fog of my burden, just beginning to rue it …' 'Then why on earth did you do it?' J. turns for the exit. 'Don't ask me, ask Vic!' AN ALCHEMY Quite early on he had made his peace with the creatures, and the scrub of abandon wistfully rearing its nails along the slabs of the shack; the intermittent sunflower startling the green with a rust that should never have flowered, or the unexpected imperious grass-tree, its crazy fountain of hair. But who would have counted on spiders, suspending the rafters, the city of ants by the side of the stove, or the rodent his silver-haired toddler would coax like a diffident toy to jut from the arc at the back of the kitchen cupboard? With their second they decided to call it a generation, a wild-headed moppet with eyes like dark reflectors and fingers that probed among bees but never stung. The goannas licked at her toes, the blowflies came to rest on her palm, their vibrato heavy with death. The boy the while climbed in the mad-limbed fig-trees, his mother grew leaner, riddled with thin canals, and her hands grew expert at making and then assembling the barrows the father sold at the nearby town. One evening he stopped in the crook of a twisted signpost to catch a meandered ewe from a neighbouring gate. He never returned: the constable found the body at rest in a ditch used chiefly for irrigation and in the man's fingers, folded and horribly legible, a letter, a coin, a pair of sweets for the children. His eyes reflected a peace he had long understood, nobody knew the reason a life had ended - no signs on the skin, no bloodlines, liquor evident, no motive, cause, complaint or suspicious rumour. But round his neck a silver medallion glimmered and bounced the sun back on its own devices. TheY say the sergeant was blinded temporarily gazing into the face on that silvery trinket, which smiled and waited. The rain started to pummel and the eyes of the dead man closed and disappeared and the eyes of the disc seemed to waver, melt and vanish. The coin was reckoned quite old, but of no real value. Published in Sleeve Notes (Hale & Iremonger, 1992). About the Poet Alex Skovron Alex Skovron was born in Poland in 1948, emigrated to Israel with his parents in 1956, and thence in 1958 to Australia. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. Since the early 1970s he has worked as a book editor for various publishers in Sydney and Melbourne, and was general editor of The Concise Encyclopaedia of Australia ( Horwitz, 1979). Skovron’s poetry has been published widely and three collections have appeared to date: The Rearrangement (Melbourne University Press, 1988; Octave, 1996), which won the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards, and was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Awards; Sleeve Notes (Hale & Iremonger, 1992), shortlisted for the Barbara Ramsden Award; and Infinite City (Five Islands Press, 1999, 2000), his book of 100 ten-line “sonnetinas”, shortlisted in the Age Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier’s Awards. He was a recipient of an Australia Council writer’s grant for 1994, and has been a winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry (1983), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (1995), and the Manuel Gelman Memorial Prize for Literature (1997). Alex Skovron lives in Melbourne with his wife, their two teenagers, and a cat, and works as a freelance editor.    [Above] Photo of Alex Skovron by Jerry Galea, 2000. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.4 (September, 2001)