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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #5/thyla5k-jr AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 5 The Poetry of Judith Rodriguez Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Judith Rodriguez by Jenni Mitchell, 1998. BIN I LONGITUDES I THE MOVELESS SEA OF THE LLANOS I TRAVELLING TO THE DEAD CENTRE I TOURISTS IN THE PACIFIC I ANGRY WOMAN I BIN Keys, rags, plastic flowers, tickets, ash follow each other into the bin. Also gadgetry that gives no satisfaction. But there is no bin we are not in. Over the unvalued earth outside Tomsk, trailing a rating of 7, floats a reminder that becomes the future blight. A cloud, a little cloudy sky-bin cradling its message, which it is bursting to blab. LONGITUDES On the city horizon the cables of the great cranes are set swinging to wind out of the north. And the ruffs and hillocks and wave-tops of whole avenues go up and over, unsettled days now. Smaller phenomena take an airing: retina-scorch of a tilted window's rectangle turns out not to be Mayday in September, just a gap in clouds' coursing and curdling; the plane-tree's stripling yellow new twigs zig-zag and jostle and tower and thrash above the boughs' wallow; paired on drying tennis-courts, like navigators plotting on the run, in mid-ocean dark each day's wind-force - weeks of it - players see serves pitch short, their throws spray from vertical, a wild spring day. Published in Verso (Australia). THE MOVELESS SEA OF THE LLANOS translated by Judith Rodriguez from the Spanish of Oscar Echeverri Mejia (Colombian) You don't have to tell me it's the sea. That I knew from the herons dreaming of their sails. From the palm-grove islands lifting their tall masts. I sensed it from the horizon holding the sky up on arms of mist, from the sun sinking to die in the arms of the anguished sea of grass and the sun rising reborn, like a great sea-beacon. You don't have to tell me it's the sea. I felt it in the hot waves of pasture that invade the beaches like a crazed great vegetable tongue. In the wind's murmur tasting of salt. In the little streams that creep through the plain and pour out their waters. In the sea-gulf of the Meta. In the strange siren-songs - ships' sirens and sirens of flesh and bone - you hear there in the night. In the shipwreck of things living and not living, every sunset. I know it now, it is sea, I asked for no proofs seeing how the Meta drowns in its huge waves, how the plainsman steers among its endless currents and stays afloat, how the young bull - miraculous amphibian - nibbles stars in its crystalline grass, how the horse runs on through its ecstatic waves of green with his mane like a ship's rigging. Yes, it is sea, a sea not named on maps, alive with creatures made in its image and likeness. The sea where men and animals sink and where the sun and moon are born, each in its own way. I know beyond all doubt, it is sea and I too am inside its spell like the rider, like the young bull, like heron and parrot, like palm and snake and monkey, like the water coursing its grassy entrails. This is the sea and now I can never forget its lessons of sun and solitude, its daily toil, destroying and creating, its mighty surges of heat, of death and life, its green storms, its calm times and its vegetable dreaming, the calls - symphonies even - of its animals. Sea of the great Plain, I am coming back to you, because my fate as a sailor of the earth tells me that here I shall keep some day my tryst with water. Published in Phoenix Review (Australia). TRAVELLING TO THE DEAD CENTRE We notice the abundance of living things. Established cities hold cemeteries near their centre like prestigious suburbs. Green things are smaller. Even the stones crumble towards paths growing crowded, gregarious, winding about, making way for newcomers, bus-loads envying the view of planes, plane-loads craving the 'atmosphere'. Traveling through is a little like a visit to Disneyland, the Fairy Park at Anakie - Oh, she said unhelpfully, it's dead, but it's not dead centre. If you see what I mean. The dead can be remembered in bright eternal flowers, elaborate statuary. It is consoling that our tributaries to the dead can be so light, festive, fanciful - the supplementary tank on radial roads - solid geometry of The Heart! I used to walk from the university round the Melbourne cemetery, attractive as midnight to a child - she knows there is still a centre to be visited - I was amused by lines like 'Not dead, only sleeping' below the soak, above The Rock's hurrying ant-life. Now I see that you need more compromise and compassion. A neat expanse of green lawn? Alternate lines by Judith Rodriguez and Meredith Jelbart This and the following poem were written in poetry workshops. Working in pairs on prescribed topics, the poets alternately added a line without seeing what had been written before. They had to agree (again, without reading) when to finish. Only minimal adjustments were made later. Published in Mattoid (Australia). TOURISTS IN THE PACIFIC The bus scrunches its rims through coral grit. White people wander, wondering what it was like before, or if it was or why it wasn't, and wait to go home ... (the natives could never be black enough for the reverend) ... and when they leave the parts their ancestors installed, suddenly it is all uneasy and beautiful. The consul boasts, Yvonne got a sycamore to grow - but they took to it with machetes. Each culture is totally different and each place seems like the last. The bus is always too late to pick them up - it's the other reef they wanted - in the Pacific the gods have not yet left the earth - the visitors try to touch them. They fly the shells in, she says. The divers are spies - and did you see - they never get sunburnt! Pacific people are generous with their gods. Not forgetting tourists - connections - lines out - bicycles even - Spanish tourists looking for bulls in every cockfight - sea-island cotton shredding and the Gaugins here bad copies of something not now seen. Australians see the ghosts of their neighbours. The bookings are not correct, Mrs Wolfsohn, and you have not paid for the walk from the plantation. On the whole black Australians don't visit the Pacific. Alternate lines by Judith Rodriguez and William Henderson Published in Blast (Australia). ANGRY WOMAN An 84-year-old Japanese woman has let her hair grow more than three metres long after a fight with her husband 28 years ago. - Newspaper item HUSBAND All my wanderings ago, I started swimming towards you in the night. Now our grandson is a man. I pillowed my young head on your blackness. At the touch of tide I forgot beginnings and endings. Red dawn sprang, wrack and then rain till the end of the world. The runnels thickened, breakers mounted, the tempest of you wakened and spread. You swore I would never see daylight. Behind me is twice the life of a man and still I am swimming towards you in these grey waters. WIFE First joining is easiest. I remember our meeting, warm as night-wind off the river-lands - through vine-thickets, cabbage-palms, air of cedar and plantain, pineapple and chilimoya. Mornings were sultry, water swirled heavy with sand out from the river-mouth, the gem-pebbles sank in mud and shell-grit rolled by the salt swell. The sea glinted with fish-heads, sky closed torn with lightning - I am trapped in my promise to myself. It is late in the world and elements I mixed fling down plantations. Published in Verso (Australia). About the Poet Judith Rodriguez Judith Rodriguez was born in Perth and brought up in Brisbane. Nine collections of her poetry have been published. Judith has had a number of exhibitions of her linocuts in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Paris. In the early 1990s she was commissioned by the Australian Opera to write a libretto for Sydney composer Moya Henderson, on the subject of the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain and the trial of Lindy Chamberlain. This opera, Lindy, will be produced in 2002. A past Poetry Editor of Meanjin Quarterly, Judith was for eight years in the 1990s the Series Editor of modern Australian poetry at Penguin Books Australia. She has been awarded three Australia Council fellowships. She works on the Committees of the Australian Society of Authors and the Melbourne PEN Centre, and also as a literary judge and critic. She was awarded the F.A.W. Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry and the AM.    [Above] Photo of Judith Rodriguez by Jenni Mitchell, 1998. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.5 (March, 2002)