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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #7/thyla7k-cp AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 7 The Poetry of Craig Powell Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Craig Powell by Matthew JC. Powell, 2002. I TWO POEMS FOR JANET:I.SNOW/II. RESTAURANT I FOR INGE AT SIXTY-ONE I SOME EVENING LATER I TERRA NULLIUS I THE BOY IN MY FATHER'S STORY I UNCLES I TWO POEMS FOR JANET I. SNOW The woman has taken a lover. His kisses spill black seeds in her mouth. Her breast moans with bruised thumbprints. Some day she's certain to clutch her husband for help: "What am I coming to? I don't want to leave." Then again she may not. A night of cold moons baptizes her body. Her lover's stillness folds her in like snow. He is irresistible. II. RESTAURANT Late afternoon, quiet and long married, we take our meal by the harbour window. An allegro of gulls. You will die years before me, we both know. A tide moves in from Tierra del Fuego. I watch your face tilt gently to your soup. Helpless, helpless love. Published in Music and Women's Bodies (Five Islands Press, 2002). FOR INGE AT SIXTY-ONE I've not been back to that place with avenues of mangoes and summer fruit pouring such gold through the grass a woman called, "Leave the windfalls! Here are some I've just picked," and filled our arms from her bucket. I've never returned to that pool where I leaped from the ten metre platform, wild to impress you. When you clambered too and trembled, heart- squeezing loveliness, I yelled stupidly, "Jump!" You stepped off, you tore us to the white depths of the world, the body's greed and regret, but then our slow astoundment of friendship. Forty years and the eddies tug and stir. Published in Music and Women's Bodies (Five Islands Press, 2002). SOME EVENING LATER Who are these lovers, creeping back from bushland to his parents' house? They're hard to make out, like old movies, but we know somehow what's happened there. The bloodied scratches on the young man's shoulders make him happy. In the room where the girl's staying the night she flings her clothes off, clutches him, "Again! Let's do it again! Right here!" her beautiful hurt body shuddering. Is it lust or tears? But he cringes. Surely his parents would hear them. And scuttles away from her and sleeps alone. "You were my wild girl I was timid with. I couldn't hear you saying, 'Don't have me as your tumble in the scrub, but a woman you love in your own home.'"                                                      "Yes. I could never speak that plainly, though. I'd've jeered at that."                                        Much older voices in another house. Decades spent loving other people. Now you sip coffee on a kitchen stool. I rinse the dishes. Upstairs my wife is sleeping and the wind dies down, that hurls us through our lives. And you visiting, beloved in my home. Published in Music and Women's Bodies (Five Islands Press, 2002). TERRA NULLIUS for Lola Edwards You are telling me of a country where nothing happens. The police did not come for you when you were four. No rumours sidled from the dark. If you were taken down the vast songless gullies to the Home for Girls, who'd listen? only in the encampments, among old fires and old griefs. And if, years after, you learned your father and your mother trudged days, weeks, to beat on that door but were not allowed near you, shamed out of your life, you can only tell what you're told could not happen. Remember and tell. Published in Music and Women's Bodies (Five Islands Press, 2002). THE BOY IN MY FATHER'S STORY This day he's dawdling home by the blacksmith's forge. He loves the glow there, the spit of sparks and a high sweet belling of anvil and hammer. Bobbie Coggins from his school is working now, smoothly tucks his body in the body of a horse, drawing the hoof up across his knees, when both hooves smash out once, twice, and the horse panics around the small yard, shivers to a stop far from the still shape as the halter allows. The boy scrambles to Bobbie curved like a foetus, and feels the body's convulsions dwindle slowly away. Blood wells in Bobbie's mouth, the pupils veer up under the lids. Johnston the blacksmith shoves him aside. "Get out of here! Go home! Go home!" Cries of call the doctor. He knows it is too late for the doctor. A crowd gathers and the doctor comes, then in a little while they lift the body, wrapped in a blanket, to the Imperial Hotel over the wide main street of the town. The boy unhitches his pony and slowly leads it home by the bridle. He couldn't ride. His hands and feet are those of a dead child whose last shudders again and again pelt through him. Someone might be screaming. Wednesday crowds are milling round him, horse-drawn vehicles, the odd motor-car, the snake-man hawking cures from the back of a dray. Maybe. At home he turns the horse loose in the lower paddock and stares through cherry branches at the great sky. He sidles into the house without a word. His father at dinner: "The little Coggins boy was killed today. Kicked by a horse. Killed instantly, I believe." No, not instantly. Those dying tremors. "Poor Bill Johnston was terribly cut up." His mother's small cry, "Just a child . ."                                                 He bolts out of the room.                               "What's wrong with him?"                     "I think he knew Bobbie Coggins. He left school only a week ago." Dives into bed. He doesn't undress. Pulls blankets over his face. The tremors dwindle slowly and he sleeps now, wakens puzzled to be in his clothes. Little by little yesterday creeps back. Bobbie Coggins in the blue parlour of the Imperial Hotel, waiting for his coffin. He'll wait there till he's buried. Cogginses have only a ramshackle hut far in the hills. The boy goes about his farm chores greedily alive. The first morning of the earth, hens scratch and keen in the dusty sun. He breathes the barn's hay-smell, the tang of the stable, a fume of dung and urine, chaff and harness oil. A vast quiet in the world, the dead child who inhabits him forever. Tears in his half-closed eyes encircle a telling of rainbows.                                        And if the story comes now from an old man who invents the boy, and Bobbie Coggins, years after, for what need? If it matters that it happened just this way? Then it matters and let be. Let the human creature bless itself before death with stories. Published in Music and Women's Bodies (Five Islands Press, 2002). UNCLES Just lining up his putt, my uncle Don, and he toppled, quite dead suddenly, with the splash of an aneurysm. An almost old man, which wasn't the way Vincent came to death. Vincent, the uncle I was told about at three in the War years. Only that he'd been killed. Don had his own jungle patrol joke. He dived in a ditch when the Japs ambushed then, lulled by the stillness when the gunfire ceased, looked up. The ditch was a shallow puddle and all around him were Jap bayonets. Well, it was funny years afterwards. Nothing was seen of Vincent, no stories I know of. An unmarked ditch, or, long life and a putting green. Published in Music and Women's Bodies (Five Islands Press, 2002). About the Poet Craig Powell Craig Powell was born in Wollongong NSW. He graduated in medicine from Sydney University and later specialised in Psychiatry. 1972-82 he lived in Canada where he trained with the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. He now lives in Sydney where he is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a Visiting Medical Officer, Mental Health, at the Prince of Wales Hospital. He won the 1983 Mattara (Newcastle) Poetry Prize and was a co-winner of the 45th International Poetry Competition (1989), Quarterly Review of Literature, Princeton New Jersey. He has published eight books of poetry, the most recent being Music and Women's Bodies, (Five Islands Press, 2002).    [Above] Photo of Craig Powell by Matthew JC. Powell, 2002. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.7 (March, 2003)