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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                         #5/thyla5c THE POETRY OF BRUCE BEAVER Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Poet Bruce Beaver by photographer unknown, year unknown. "The one time you slept without dreaming. The many times you dreamt without sleeping." I THE VILLAGE - MANLY...Looking backwards and forwards won't find me the village; I ...One hundred years ago there were no ferries I ...And when the whites possessed the land, what then? I ...So several families farmed and lived on fish I ...Two generations later from the jetty I ...In turn the city lent its architects I ...On high, that is to say, on slope and hill ...Somebody must have thought to plant the pines I ...The pines, the pines, those seven storeyed trees - I ...A kangaroo in stone - A monument I ...A symbol of the country's native powers, I ...On Manly Wharf one autumn afternoon, I ...That broken column set beside the wharf I ...Seaways - your dark and bright rebuttals of I EVENING I YOURS I TO BRENDA I VESPERS I SOME THINGS REMEMBERED I OLD MOVIE IN AUTUMN THE VILLAGE - MANLY I Looking backwards and forwards won't find me the village; It is here and now that its being most concerns me. Not as a ruin for barbarous time to pillage, Nor that amalgam, conjecture and memory, But at present with its tenses overlapping, Its people rising and falling with breaths of years Over its pelt where it sprawls in the sun catnapping Between the ocean and harbour, between two shores. A summer place where youth goes privateering; Where treasure rises golden from the sands In scraps of floral censorship, uncaring So long as milk and honey flood the glands: A shell's flight from the city and its shocks - A village in the sunlight, on the rocks. II One hundred years ago there were no ferries And eighty before that there were no folk. No local brows to crease with mundane worries Of how the weekend host finds weekly work. There were no folk, that is, beyond the natives Of confident and manliest behaviour Whom Philip found benign if uncreative, Lending the spot a free and easy flavour. That was in Eighty-eight. By Eighteen Ten A change occurred, though hardly overnight, When surveyed land was leased to local men The confidence and manliness were white. The natives then, as every native should, Had left their country for their country's good. III And when the whites possessed the land, what then? How did they cope with being the first settlers? Or did they settle for what they were, white battlers? It was all a matter of liberties with land In the name of one's monarch, self and family - The giving a question of rent and words in kind To the Landlord behind the Crown on the seventh day. But the lugging of gear from the boats and the setting up shop Of family, the shaping of shelter into House into home - That last phase was the rub On the raw side of being here, not there. They knew The home in the mind was half a world to the west; The home in the soil belonged to the dispossessed. IV So several families farmed and lived on fish The children loving what their parents cursed: The sand, the rocks, the salt that cured the flesh, The sun that lashed it through the summer's waste, The sea birds fierce and shy along the shore, The small round crabs patrolling in the mud - The wilderness of the place that had no share In other than the present's fickle mood. Their schooling was in work and this was hard. The food they grew or caught their only pay, Apprenticed to each parent like a ward; In nightly sleep their only holiday. Yet on the harbour's shore and ocean's beach They learnt what the four elements could teach. V Two generations later from the jetty The ferries and their passengers were plying Between the village and the mother city Selling with one hand, with the other buying. Capitulated to the sand, the farms Strayed into streets, gave up the ghost of crops, Edged out the fisher-folk and came to terms With commerce in an avenue of shops, Napoleon who said the English are A nation of shopkeepers must have meant Prophetically the colonists afar; Specifically the Austral continent. Be that as it may the village sold Itself at weekends for the city's gold. VI In turn the city lent its architects To domicile the gainfully employed; To raise the roof on housing the elect Then raise their fees while suitably deployed. The cottages like siblings Siamesed; The bungalows of liver-coloured bricks; The flats like tombstones for a giant deceased; The residences of the nouveaux riche With towered and cupolaed wings, and roofed With oriental fantasies of tile, Or oranges and lemons warped and woofed, Or simple slate to set a sober style; With tiny stained glass circles high in walls To keep the sun from blotting inky halls. VII On high, that is to say, on slope and hill The institutions of establishment: The better school, the private hospital, The sounder church and manse, both free of rent. Not one of each, or two, but five or six In pecking order out of deference To new Democracy - Bricks piled on bricks Stood up for Queen and country, fence to fence. One citizen went so far as to build A mock medieval folly on his land Thus providing to the local masons' guild A man's home was a castle out of hand. If architecture crowns the arts of man It brained the village with its building plan. VIII Somebody must have thought to plant the pines And in the first place someone assuredly did Give more than a thought or two along civic lines; Did in fact make an aesthetic bid To further grace the already favoured shore Which entertained the harbour's farther side And had the South Pacific at its door. One citizen took time to plant, and pride To foster like an anxious parent, eight Plants from Norfolk Island. Then another Added a batch and finally a debate To stem the winds and hold the beach together Took hold upon the council by degrees And graced the beach with several hundred trees. IX The pines, the pines, those seven storeyed trees - Those rough brown barked and resin-gummy trunks With branchings of pyramidal degrees Wide spread at lowest, tapering in twin ranks To spires of green-tailed leafage raised above The beach-long promenade. One thousand yards Of high-falutin' timber perching dove And pigeon populations in their hordes; Providing shade and filtered light for those Who daily walked beneath them in the calm Of an arboreal cathedral's close, Or winter whipped, swaying like masts in storm. Yet these that in their hundreds touch the sky Were once no higher, sirs, than you and I. X A kangaroo in stone - A monument To Mother England eighty years ago. Sandstone segments layered with cement Placed by that backyard Michael Angelo Upon a vantage point between the Steynes; Blessing both North and South from steeple height Of rock that was the tide's true boundary line Before the patchwork carpet of the shore From swamp and sand to soil and metalled base Across an all but nonexistant floor. The little ineffectual paws are raised, Blessing or begging? Speculants are loathe To see a choice; something, perhaps, of both. XI A symbol of the country's native powers, Passive yet so fecundative, so full Of promised leaps and bounds toward future bowers Of super-fauna ripe for super-sell: Noble obedience in the doggy head, Humility in shoulder and fore-paw; The belly pouched, eternally in pod; At one with nature's fundamental law Of mass production - The bushranging creed, Stand and deliver - Then the idol's feet (Or giant hindpaws) roughly shaped and rude Yet for endurance made and not retreat. So much to eulogise without avail: A massive rodent perched upon its tail. XII On Manly Wharf one autumn afternoon, April or May, some fifty years ago Chris Brennan stood and watched the setting sun Perform, applauding in its afterglow. This was his mentor of the heavenly host; This often bilious, always brilliant one That boxed his burning ears and struck the lost Chord of the planets - Not that Lilith moon That glossed his nights and pointed through the deep Blue of his days a forefinger of bone. And so he turned his huge eyes to the west, And supplicating watched the god go down Into the dragon depths. The night was vast With scattered shoals of stars nibbling at sleep. XIII That broken column set beside the wharf Reminds the villagers of World War One, Truncated youth, decapitated life; The clichés tinted red with martyrdom. The Corso sports a large memorial, A marble pillar with a globe on top, For ceremonious displays with all The rhetoric of beer, ribbons of crépe. The smaller monument has dignity Though placed beside a pier that displays sharks In an aquarium for all to see How big feeds upon little; how war slakes The old communal thirst for sacrifice In universal terms, not once, but twice. XIV Seaways - your dark and bright rebuttals of Our tentative excursions and the land's End-game of crumbling cliffs are clear enough - No mystery in what the moon demands The tides of earth supply: an appetite Salt-spiked and unassuageable, a thirst That drains the continents and can't abate Or sweeten with the melting of those vast Floes of the polar caps. Hunger and love Set us in motion on the lapsing shore; Hunger and love that make us move, remove; Tides within tides within tides forevermore - Be witnessed and remotely recognised As something other than ourselves misprized. Published in Poets and Others (Brandl & Schlesinger, 1999). EVENING Too often the light fades without my feeling a proper reverence for it, no feel for the lapsing of the already fallen sun. I stand at the window and hum and ha about colours, the rose and the peach and the lapis lazuli backing. Nothing about a Götterdämmerung. Perhaps Götzen-Dämmerung, The Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche's title, would be truer. But I don't even think about that, I think about only the "orchestrated dust-motes" dancing on over the rim of the hill like the finale of Delius's exquisite violin concerto; over the hills and far away towards dawn. Published in Poets and Others (Brandl & Schlesinger, 1999). YOURS The demon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. C.G.Jung Every angel is terrible. R.M. Rilke I have an angel dictating verses straight out of Rilke, helped by Carl Jung. Where has it come from? God and the devil dictate its actions, I am the servant. Seasons, emotions, human and animal throng through my soul, verse caravanserai. Glory is in it all and something like almost damnation, but it all occurs on earth, that fallen heaven. Stay with me, angel; I see no twelve foot feathered monstrosity with webbed wings, features of fire, breath volcanic but in its place one frail lady anima incarnate, loving, living muse of my life and its outpourings: here where I live village repatriate, tonnage of food where once were shops of quality clothes, shoes and every household's usages. And by its wharf a lengthy promenade razed by the wrath of a harbour storm. Fore and aft beaches bright or darkling, summer and winter source of my makings pine-filtered sun, moon oceanic. Angel and daimon thrust me into verse for the one reader she or he who seeks the truth of my innate fabrications, truthful lies of my making just for you and just from me. TO BRENDA The way it feels to hold up a world's weight instead of my head. A world that crushes instead of uplifts. What did I expect if not this slowing down, this deceleration of desire and absence of wishes? To walk a patch through a still unworn carpet. Past furnishings so well-known they are almost forgotten as the faces of friends, well-loved ones mentioned only in childlike prayers interspersed with the classical Aves and Pater Nosters learnt as a child. Time ticks backwards in sleep. There is still the wish to continue avidly, not habitually and hump- backed with the burden of daylight, nightshade, time. I walk in my own footsteps beside one who is on another path I can't bear not to follow. I will follow and tread in those unfaltering footsteps. I know the way now by watching through closed lids the way to go. By feeling the way forward forever. VESPERS Birds bed down for the night in the old fig opposite. The last of sun on my face, the autumnal breeze with its trace of woodsmoke. Still awake are lorikeets who speak scratchily to me here on the balcony at the end of an April day upon the verge of May ready to move inside and let the birds abide. SOME THINGS REMEMBERED The feel of sun lovingly assumed Froth in a toilet bowl Pre-ejaculatory thought forms. After-taste of good food in an empty mouth. Well-settled on the verge of sleep. The one time you slept without dreaming. The many times you dreamt without sleeping. Something like good music imagined. Cold lock-in of a recurrent pain. Pillow-encased feather feel. Free-fall-feel of uncovered summer nights. An exceptionally good poem half-remembered. The 2000th time of composition. The first terrible verses. Meeting without realising a reunion. The sense of duty petering out locally. Renewal worn haphazardly but habitually. Nothing of one's past loves but a sense of conviction. Everything ultimately accounted for. OLD MOVIE IN AUTUMN for Nicolette Stasko In baggy pants I Chaplin-stroll the balcony. The birds are out for one more chirp before the roll- call that locks them in devout sleep in ruffled-out winter-wear of fluffy feathers. Sun stays still a longish while behind a square bank of sallow cloud, then chill freshets fibrillate the air and drive my hands into the full warm pockets of my baggy pair of trousers. I still walk the wall like Charlie but feel more in tune with Groucho and his underground wit while loping like a goon behind some fabulously round brunette. Then while the birdsong sun goes down and out in gasps of warmth I come inside and sit alone within the mellow lounge at length upon the friendly sofa's seat with one new protein self-replete, though fragmentary almost complete. About the Poet Bruce Beaver Bruce Beaver was born in Manly in NSW in 1928. He has been writing verse for over 50 years and worked at several jobs, including railway survey labourer (Chairman) described in the sequence of poems 'Chairman's Diary' published in Seawall & Shoreline (South Head Press, 1964). He also worked as a proof reader for the New Zealand Herald (1960-62). He has published 14 books of poetry, among the most notable being: Letters To Live Poets (South Head Press, 1969), As It Was (University of Queensland Press, 1979), Charmed Lives (University of Queensland Press, 1988), New and Selected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 1990), and Anima (University of Queensland Press, 1994). He lives with his wife Brenda.    [Above] Photo of Poet Bruce Beaver and Brenda by photographer unknown, year unknown. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.5 (March, 2002)