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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                  #9/thyla9k-mw AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 9 The Poetry of Meredith Wattison Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of Photo of Meredith Wattison by Kylie Lyons, 2001. I MONKEYS I GRASS DOG POEM I PRE-COCKING DOG I BASKET OF SUNLIGHT I SWAN'S WING I MONSTROUS I MONKEYS This is one of the few reasons I tolerate the glass box in the corner. (Is it a screen with scientists monitoring my reactions to visual stimuli?) I am watching sweet-faced monkeys on a beach in Africa tease through seaweed on rocks as though looking for car keys or money. They find shark eggs and split and peel them, scrape their lower incisors from edge to edge, occasionally a sac of blood will out as they quickly work, to remind us, this frenetic, carnivorous spree is monkey eating shark. On another channel, down another estuary, soldiers, champing at the bit, eat oranges. Their lower incisors scrape the skin of flesh and pith, and thanks to censorship, there is no little face seen, just the back of the head, its kiss curls wet and pressed like dried seaweed, monkeys sleeping in trees, crabs climbing to eat leaves. We all come from Africa. GRASS DOG POEM My friend, who wrote flawlessly, guilelessly, of weeds and grasses, (her gentle soul's anxious clash with too much order) wrote me a letter. I wrote to her, echoic, of so much beauty under our feet. I wrote of my new dog, an adopted stray, the rest of his litter dead. He is quartz and rust, his belly gneiss, his deep, ferrous eye opens in its oil black with absolute trust, the other a wet, red pebble, white lashed. He is my meditation on beauty. We are true weeds, she and I, rambling sentient towards extinction. She has spoken to chairs on my behalf when she launched my staunch, pied nihilist. The chairs, squarely four-footed, listened to her like Doppler. They did not resemble earth or its fill. My belief in poetry, as business, as game, unctuous, considered. My dog hears life in grass, sleeps hard against it like a dizzy, endangered species, rolls, lolls, soft and swooning, barks a pure eureka. Published in Blue Dog (Australia). PRE-COCKING DOG He leans towards the earth, yoga lithe, four legs planted, tail moonward, head slack, dip-backed. The streaming, paintbrush-tip neat centre of him, momentarily, glints a chain of atoms, spreads a grass-bleaching nectar, sponged by filament and the weight of minerals. He knows not the arc of one paw pointing to Sirius, the other three to the Doric territory of male. Their dewclaws and webbing, Adam's thrilling dysplasia. He coughs up cleaned bones like a pre-teen sea. His planed and cold rib, one of them. Monosyllabic as the neuter knife. BASKET OF SUNLIGHT Bruegel's dogs are hounds. Bruegel's hounds witness proverbial absurds. The mad villagers work, feast, baffle. The dogs' motivation, pretext, is a bone. (human femur?) The basket of sunlight (plenty) will spill over them should its carrier stumble over adultery, extravagance and impatience. His labour and product ineffectual, unneeded, unniched. The dogs are gods, oblivion their unfenced run. They would fit in the basket like small things shifting, explicitly mated, gravid (by light), aesthetically thin, up-lit through a glass ceiling like Flemish soft porn (Wedding Dance). (My dog, a white Chagall, jumped at me, (to greet) blackened my lower lip, purple as an aesthete's reel, blue as an iodine kiss.) Light lifts its like. Opens this. (straining wicker) SWAN'S WING Sitting together, my dog leans against me, (I need his pure etiquette.) I lean my chin on his downy, hypersentient head. We look at stars like primitives, lambent, the moon a spilling, white hole, ethically tingling as a swanskin. I watch his gaze follow, trail, a plane, (blinking moth, falling star, slow flickering bird?) then he turns from a pinpricked, black, flat surface. His dingo mouth gently holds my fingers against his tongue with the pull, pad of a shut oyster. I am thinking of a Mesolithic grave I have seen (doco, Denmark). A child cradled in a swan's wing. This recumbence is ageless. The child sits with us, points to far and objectified swans. We see that the child was cherished, is now almost indistinguishable from bare, frittered wing. They are slack dots and sift to string. Determine. Estimate their tie. MONSTROUS Another one-sided conversation. You absent without say. O.K., Jan, I am pondering mortality. The road from Wollongong is curved and holds the car like a smoothing stone. We cruise over it. The physics work, sing. A skin of water herringbones the road. Trees on both sides of us meet far off, find the vanishing point in this triptych. This sky, (the ideal two-thirds equation) has cast persistent rain for the past week, is now nothing but indigoid grace. Monstrously kind, our vast, wisped wrapping. I could not leave this without heartache, regret. When my day comes I will resist, fight for sky. I will argue for you on your day, ("What about everything she'll miss?") seek you compensation of days, try to beg you more beauty. I will lose. You and I will die regardless. That monster in your head did not come from this sky. It crept in from somewhere else. (This sky.) You slept, it came. If you hadn't slept it would have come. You in that chair, your slippered feet useful only to slippers, the first thing I see when I see you only because they offend me. Red slippers should be (high heels, fluff) kicked into the sky just before you run naked from one joy (bath) to another (bed). I want to know that you will laugh once you have fallen through the chair. (I find you in a Bruegel landscape, (yellow varnished) far off, a chair, red feet in the air, allegorical red herring. Figures near you seem to be drowning a heretic, or baptising, or assaulting their (grim) senses with pleasure; pursuing some kind of masochistic toil- at least.) About the Poet Meredith Wattison The title poem of Meredith Wattison's first book of poetry, Psyche's Circus, shared the 1989 Rothman's Poetry Prize. She recorded some poems from her second book Judith's Do for ABC Radio National's The Science Show with Robyn Williams. Meredith Wattison lives on the pastoral outskirts of Sydney, not too far from the sea. Her 4th book, The Nihilist Line (The Fishwife's Other Tail) was published by Five Islands Press, August, 2003. Meredith Wattison's publications include: Poetry: Psyche's Circus, (Poetry Australia, 1989), Judith's Do in Conversations of Love, (Penguin Books Australia, 1996), Fishwife, (Five Islands Press, 2001), The Nihilist Line, (The Fishwife's Other Tail), (Five Islands Press, 2003).    [Above] Photo of Meredith Wattison by Kylie Lyons, 2001. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.9 (March, 2004)