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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                         #7/thyla7j THE POETRY OF PETER GOLDSWORTHY Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Peter Goldsworthy by photographer unknown, year unknown. "With any luck heaven will be much like here, now, on a good day: pleasant" I Ode to the Potato I Earthworms I My Last Rabbit I Razor I The Blue Room I Bushflies I Jokes A Statistician to His Love Mass for the Middle-Aged: 3. Libera Me I 4. In Paradisum I The Operation I A Brief Introduction to Philosophy: 1. Why Me? I 4. Is There A God? I Roy G. Biv: 2. Orange I 3. Yellow I What Little Boys Are Made Of I Eye of the Needle I The Dark Side of the Head I Bed I Evil Eye I Morbid Song I Ode to the Potato O practical potato, vegetable most like earth, among elegant asparagus, intellectual egg- plant you are unpretentiously spud. Tasting only of stone you have nothing to hide, are merely functional a most puritanical root. O wave your green flags democratic potato, you the equal of any other potato. Published in Readings to Ecclesiastes (Angus & Roberston, 1982). Earthworms When hands part the moist earth they crawl away underfoot: pale abandoned fingers wrapping themselves against steps that knock or the soft concussion of rain. Snug in their planet. Swallowing it slowly through. Published in Readings to Ecclesiastes (Angus & Roberston, 1982). My Last Rabbit My first rabbit was the hardest. Unscrewing the neck, flipping gut-things between my legs. Later I developed forehand, and the traps set themselves. And then my first two-legged corpse, my first day in dissection. There was cold pork for dinner, inevitably - but coming up hot later. I never ate meat again - till the next week. I should mention also a slaughterhouse downwind from memory. A place I might have visited, or might have not. It was all long ago. Because always this forgetting. This bringing kill home in butcher's paper, picked like fruit off a shelf, smothered with herbs and euphemisms till it could be anything. At times I seem almost to remember the sealed trucks arriving, the sheep hurrying to be meat. At times I count them at night, trying to stay awake. Published in Readings to Ecclesiastes (Angus & Roberston, 1982). Razor Carving this same face out of soap, each morning slightly less perfectly. Published in This Goes With This (ABC publishing, 1988). The Blue Room I sit on a warm stone step in a doorway to the Blue Room, the Morning Room. There is much bee-noise and the noise of birds: the acoustics are fine in the Blue Room. Usually it may have rained overnight in the Blue Room: this clear aquarium air. In the Blue Room there is always one dove - hidden here, hidden here - and many honeyeaters, up for hours, loony as tunes. Today the Blue Room is available. I sit among ants, between bees, amid designer vegetation: fine-detailed, non-repeating, in the Blue Room, the Morning Room, the wide Waiting Room. Published in This Goes With This (ABC publishing, 1988). Bushflies Somehow they fall through the sky much heavier than air machines, bumping into scenery like low-flying gravel. Eat me they glint loudly: glitter-blue, panel-beater green. They overshoot. They stall. They lob into mouths. They wedge down throats. They cover steaming mounds like sequins: unfit to survive by the billion. Published in This Goes With This (ABC publishing, 1988). Jokes Don't tell me jokes, I know about jokes. They think they are funny. They think they can get away with things. I don't know everything about them, just enough. I know this: that they refuse to be remembered, slipping the mind's fingers, a shoal of laughter, vanishing. And this: that they hide still inside, deeply. Delinquent poems, absconders from custody. Of course they think it a great lark, sneaking back again and again: the grenade of laughter, then silence. I prefer to find it tiresome. And a little sad. All that repetition! Don't pigeon-hole me: I appreciate a good joke. I said appreciate, not laugh at. For I will no longer laugh. I will not answer their ridiculous summons, I refuse to accept their subpoena. Never again will I eagerly rip open the scented envelope filled with strange plastic. There are only four jokes anyway: the custard pie, and the breaking of taboo, the game of words, and the thing we are each most afraid of. Published in This Goes With This (ABC publishing, 1988). A Statistician to His Love Men kill women in bedrooms, usually by hand, or gun. Women kill men, less often, in kitchens, with knives. Don't be alarmed, there is understanding to be sucked from all such hard and bony facts, or at least a sense of symmetry. Drowned men - an instance - float face down, women up. But women, ignited, burn more fiercely. The death camp pyres were therefore, sensibly, women and children first, an oily kind of kindling. The men were stacked in rows on top. Yes, there is always logic in this world. And neatness. And the comfort of fact. Did I mention that suicides outnumber homicides? Recent figures are reliable. So stay awhile yet with me: the person to avoid, alone, is mostly you yourself Published in This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970-1990 (Angus & Robertson, 1991). from Mass for the Middle-Aged 3. Libera Me Deliver me, Lord, from the threat of heaven, from becoming the angel who is not me, who smiles faintly, fondly before shrugging me off like some stiff, quaint pupal case: the battered leather jacket of the flesh, evidence of misspent youth. Grant me, Lord, this last request: to wear bikie colours in heaven, a grub among the butterflies. And this: to take all memories with me, all memories that are me, intact, seized first like snapshot albums from a burning house. Answer, Lord, these prayers, for I would rather be nothing than improved. Published in This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970-1990 (Angus & Robertson, 1991). 4. In Paradisum With any luck heaven will be much like here, now, on a good day: pleasant, but not too, its joys unsaturated, its lusts remaining, fractionally, lusts. I see a kind of Swiss Patent Office with time to think, and skylights. Somewhere music teases, distant as Latin, and the volumes on the shelves are always one page too slim. As promised, there will be no pain: each bare nerve-end rewired instead for tickle. At meal-times I will rise from my small exquisite portions, still hungry, just, and mildly restless, forever. Published in This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970-1990 (Angus & Robertson, 1991). The Operation Becoming the person you have always been inside cannot be rushed. For some the dressing up in secret clothes at home - batiks and silks, caftans, sarongs - is all they ever need. For others, food comes next: vaguely Asian takeaway in confidential brown paper bags. Only the brave come out in public: sitting in shopfront restaurants proudly becoming what they eat, stir-fry and rice, and more rice, in small civilised portions. Wherever, you must use only chopsticks, or the washed right hand alone, and rise always from the floor still hungry, feeling smaller already, and daintier, and more refined. Soon the hormone shots will darken the skin. Submit to these procedures first: the chest-waxing, the lid-narrowing. And the nose-job, of course: you are leaving Big-Nose Europe behind. There can be no turning back; you are ready now for The Operation. A foot of flesh, at least, must go: the whole high pulpit of European condescension. Of course not everything is height: you must learn again to look up, not down. Courses should be taken in History and Language, in Chief Exports and Rainfall and especially Climate: stirred by the wings of strange, bright butterflies the monsoons are moving closer; already the summers feel wetter, the winters hotter. There is pain, of course, but there is also peace: a happiness oddly free of itself, free of shag-haired Europe and its doggy emotions. Dogs are for eating now, with the careful, inscrutable manners of a cat. Suddenly the bandages are off, and everything can be seen. The world has gone as quiet as a Public Library. Meditate for a time in the open sun, safe from zinc and freckles, the last ice melting from your heart, the brooding indoor races of the north at last forgotten. Published in This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970-1990 (Angus & Robertson, 1991). from A Brief Introduction to Philosophy 1. Why Me? Waiter, there's a fly in my soup, or if not, there was, once, years ago: a flaw I can never forgive, a glimpse of the cockroach-heart of things, unwanted. I sense it still, even when struggling in the deep waters of happiness, far out of my depth: this faintest aftertaste, this hair on the tongue, this insect-leg scratching the lens, magnified, yet still too peripheral to brush away completely, especially here, now, sated in the crowded restaurant among those who taste only the good, as the greater miracle continues unabated all about: the multitude of loaves and fishes somehow crammed into the mouths of the few. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). 4. Is There A God? I needed to pray but felt embarrassed: what if Someone was listening? Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). 5. Is the Mind or the Body the Problem? Woken by thinking into hours too small to permit free association, I lie beneath the weight of night. Darkness crushes like a room with shrinking walls, cling-wrapping breath, impeding tears. Like a hired mourner, my skin weeps for me: night-sweats wrapping me in glycerine pyjamas, clammy as web. Within the bathroom dazzle an even smaller sanctuary: the cell of glass, the zap and scald of steamy water. Beam me up, hard rains, or down, or anywhere. Wash awareness from me, extinguish self, pressure the bony roof of think and feel, close my eyes with water fingers, hush my mouth with small hot bites, transport me from the booth till break of heart, or till I choose to turn love off. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). from Roy G. Biv 2. Orange Orange is also things: hazard-lamps that hang in citrus trees, still glowing when the world's gone grey. They guide our pale moth-hands through dusk: the torch of a valencia, a smaller-wattage tangerine, a navel like a big bed-lamp that hoards the light, and gives it back all night, or till we've peeled the last thick scab of orange hide, and sucked our juicy luminescent fingertips, and cleaned the whiter rind that's wedged beneath the nails. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). 3. Yellow High in the blue is a big Yellow Page advertising summer, a yolk-yellow sun, hotter than the moon but also made of cheese, or melted butter. It stings our upturned faces, rubs our skins with sulphur mustard till those tender body-bags hurt like hell. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). What Little Boys Are Made Of In the beginning God finished, wiped His Hands on a damp cloud, and breathed into Man. Man didn't breathe back. Worried, God checked the Instructions, found he'd left the tail inside the box. Hastily, recklessly, God glued it on the wrong side. Man was born. His tail wagged at the sight of Eve and God was already forgotten. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). Eye of the Needle I.M. Philip Hodgins, 1959-1995 1. In the earth there are doorways from this earth but they are narrow. 2. The weight of matter keeps it down to earth, as if the property called mass is store-security, a clip-on tag-alarm that stops us taking our garment when we leave the shop. 3. Thoughts are already things before they're set to ink. Their heaviness is hard to measure, but material, being stuff in the head. Weigh the brain before and after thinking, the difference is no laughing matter, too real to follow us through Exits. 4. Even light is far too heavy. It must be dark through there. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). The Dark Side of the Head I.M. Gwen Harwood, 1920-1995 Just around the corner of the eye, at every reach of its big screen, there is a magic which is neither black nor white, but only absent: the disappearance of all world. Even when the eyes are shut, and all the field is pink or dark, it still unhappens, at the rim - a sudden gradual nothing, beneath the notice, or beyond. I sometimes hope that if my head jerks leftwards, quick as warp, I might just catch the edge of right side visual field, as if there is no dark side of the head but one world only, seamless, like the small curved universes painted on the Grecian urns, or like a Mercator projection of the globe, that having mapped itself, bent weirdly at the polar ends, for flat-screen eyes, now unmaps in reverse, becoming whole again and full and round and as satisfactory as heaven. Published in If, Then (Angus & Robertson, 1996). Bed With age you learn to love it for itself and not the company it keeps. The hint of coffin in the clean cool sheets becomes a plus, the tugging up of quilt is suddenly a joky nailing down of lid. Even when the eyes slide shut, this too, becomes a wish: the little daily death of sleep beaming us forward in time, if not, this time, that far. Published in New Selected Poems (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, Leviathan, 2002). Evil Eye If we could talk to the animals we might ask how they escape from being bored, having few hobbies, and two, perhaps three, things to think. Some sleep for days between kill, the rest comfort binge in clover. Only the young have time for computer games, running simulations on their brains called Chase and Nip and Frisk. Watching or being watched is adult business; evil eyes are everywhere, especially on the dark side of the head, though even in the deepest jungle there are opportunities for introspection which remain untapped, as if the secret of happiness is to lower the mind's eye below the mirror-sill, and keep it politely downcast. Published in New Selected Poems (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, Leviathan, 2002). Morbid Song I learnt to love a body once, dead a year, in pickling spirit. It was my nearest friend. Every other day I lifted back the linen lid and unpacked fitted things. The weird contents had been worked inside a ribbed and leathery case as if by ancient Oriental luggage arranging arts, less anatomy than origami, with economy. No compartment went unused, or bit or piece of space. It was an installation. Or else the winner of an organ-cram, a record squeeze inside a Mini or a Beetle exoskeleton. The only rule: the parts must pack in two by two, paired, like matching luggage, with a spare of everything, except a heart. Published in New Selected Poems (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, Leviathan, 2002). About the Poet Peter Goldsworthy Peter Goldsworthy's novels have sold more than a quarter of a million copies in Australia alone, and have been translated into Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish, Mandarin and Japanese. His novel Maestro has also been published on CD-ROM Multimedia. Among his numerous literary awards are the 1982 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and the Australian Bicentennial Literary Prize (poetry) in 1988. His 1991 novel Honk If You Are Jesus was a Times Literary Supplement International Book of the Year. His poetry has been set to music by leading Australian composers including Graeme Koehne, Richard Mills, and Matthew Hindson. His most recent books are the collection of essays, Navel Gazing, and the novella Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam. A book-length study of his work, The Ironic Eye, by Andrew Riemer, is published by Harper Collins. His novels Maestro and Honk If You Are Jesus are currently in development as film scripts. A dramatised version of Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam has been released on CD by ABC Enterprises. He wrote the libretti for the Richard Mills operas, Batavia (2001, Opera Australia, Melbourne) and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Victorian State Opera (1996) Opera Australia, 1999.)    [Above] Photo of Peter Goldsworthy by photographer unknown, year unknown. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.7 (March, 2003)