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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #7/thyla7k-ml AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 7 The Poetry of Martin Langford Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Martin Langford by Tim Langford, year unknown. I Herschel Grynspan I The Currawongs I Leaf I A Farewell I Tony I The Beach I Herschel Grynspan He is only a boy and he stares, appalled, at the press - as one who, all at one stroke, has uncovered his tale: where to think of your poor mother hiding, alone in the pantry - that close dark of sugar and brines - while cudgels and bones beat outside, at the doors, out of time ... you picture her spilling some flour, and it spreads up her arm ... is to take up the quiet, just weight of a gun, to play games with embassy guards, to point at the diplomat sentences only make deaf ... to press that word over and over, your love, your love ... to walk out in handcuffs where death's-heads with caps dance and crow: come and see what you've done - the streets beat with sticks out of time; the mad fires are shooshing and hissing the screamers asleep ... is to be seventeen and to know only hell will bloom now. Published in In the Cage of Love's Gradings (Island, 1997). The Currawongs No matter how fine-grained the present-             a clearing of brilliant, nibbed grasses: centreless, endless, a sea of blond etching,             stem-shadows rhyming with seedheads, tiny white stars nestling deep             in the creases and blacks- there are always the farewells of currawongs,             rising through neighbouring forest and wheeling away: Goodbye to the moment,             Goodbye to the sacrament, detail. One song, split up, amongst many;             carol of distances, echoing upwards and out, through the high, tattered bark:             Goodbye ungraspable, looping and veering, spiralling out through the trees…             Wherever, it seems, there's attention; where senses stand still in the gardens of forms:             through cold-shadowed cliffs, in the cities; through reaches in parks; through the back-streets-             Goodbye to the moment, goodbye ...             Goodbye to the Edens of presence… From sun doodling neon on water at Circular Quay;             from shops of worn sandstone; from luminous weed and warm steps;             diasporas-the part-song departures- never more potent than out through a silence:             the pause before rain starts; through blue-shaded cumulus,             pale-green and wind-harried skies- blown leaf scraps, keening and belling-             leaving you, always, behind, at your birthplace: the bare rock no art can redeem-             the sweet-moment-just-passed. Leaf It hardly leaves a ripple. It doesn't leave a ripple. It is a ripple itself. You think of all the heaviest, most incontrovertible things: the pyramids; the solid, manic fire at the core of the earth; the lime-abstracted trenches of the dead. Or all the blood-narratives: two brothers fighting in moonlight for rights to a woman; lovers, transformed by the logic of roads into pitiless, toothed genitalia… Of angles we try out to see this thing with- as if the right one might be proof, might be power ... and you know it won't matter how clearly we shape things, or whether, even, we're able to re-jig these parallel drifts to a danceable feat of thanksgiving: it will never be more than a moment of focus- rustling leaf sliding along on expanses of concrete: the city behind it, around it- vaguely hospitable, vaguely distinctive and real… A Farewell We chatter, but we are the animals. Their rigour trims us when speech bubbles bloat: frees us from the carnival of purposes, contraptions of identity… Desolate- as the world fills with words- the marginalization of beasts: who, once, we'd live with as equals, and not grow impatient, and not talk too much. Tony He shuffles to and fro as if the walls of his shop were some random conjunction of needs he cannot escape. Cigarettes, shelves of stale chocolate; mirrors of back-to-front fonts; skies where the palm-trees of smoke-ads recede into specks. Smart-arse, a kid, I once stirred him - insisted on jelly ice-cream - some shit, some doubt, in my head. And I thought he was dumb! Now I just think that he's dumb in the way we're all dumb ... limps off to get me my paper, sudden, deliberate, a pastiness gashed with wet red; spine twisted back by the slow weight of minutes; a manner of baffled despair - as if he had dreams of a pale visage, sleeping, deep in a sea of small change. The Beach Whitewater surges towards you, a hedgerow of small, liquid tongues. You dive through to hissing that sighs to a crochet of salt. Diving, again and again, you will come to an endless slight rocking. Here, light and water are one: brief-slope and half-bowl striations; light-tumblings, ruptures and pearls; non-human hectares of dream-jostling, skin-gentling slaps. When you turn round all you see's steady gold flooding spray-drifts and stately, broad shelves. Unheard, they crawl across farther and farther gold sea-plains, small, upper bodies where great rays fan out through the caves and suspensions of spray. Later, you climb deep-warmed stairs, walk in and out through the shadows that lean across bright, spongy grass, and pink paths. Sun has bathed more than just surface. It sets at the backs of your eyeballs, soaks into nerves in your scalp ... On, tired and slow, past dark, wide-open entrance halls, surfies, old couples with kids. Side-streets peel off into jigsaw: sky glimpses, leaf shadows, brick. Bone-happy. Slow. Without utterance. This is a gift from the sun and the planet. This is not something that humans and words have made up. About the Poet Martin Langford In 1996 Martin Langford edited Midday Horizon, the second of the Round Table "poet's choice" anthologies with Margaret Bradstock and Peter Boyle. In 2000, he published Be Straight With Me (Island), a book of poems about the lives of teenagers. He has been editor or joint editor of several collections of conference papers, including those for Rewording 87, Rewording 89 (in Poetry Australia) and The Whole Voice (1995; in Southerly). He has been variously involved with the Poets Union, being National Secretary in 1985-6, and President in 1991-2 and 1992-3. In 2001, he was director of Burning Lines, the Australian Poetry Festival, and is a member of the 2002 Festival committee. He is currently working on a collection of literary aphorisms and observations, and on a selection from the work of Philip Hammial.    [Above] Photo of Martin Langford by Tim Langford, year unknown. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.7 (March, 2003)