AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 2
Geoff Page
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Geoff Page by Alison Hastie, 2006.
CH: What is your favourite animal and why?
GP: Hard question. I think the human being. We need to remember that we are animals in all the best and worst senses. I'm somewhat unimpressed with the Old Testament's dietary image of animals and our God-given right to dominate them. I'm also not sure that that we are made 'in God's image'. I suspect the echidna is no less in God's image than we are. PS. I did have a family cat for many years in 'a former life'.
CH: Talk about a piece of visual art that has touched you.
GP: There are too many to name. Emily Kame Kngwarreye's paintings for a start, the 'middle period' in particular. Also William Robinson's 'Creation Landscape -- Land and Sea' is a good example of how one can be deeply moved by something one doesn't really believe in.
CH:
What are you working on at the moment?
GP: Individual poems plus other projects too embryonic to reveal.
CH: What kind of working environment best suits you?
GP: A silent room without distractions. I also like to be within a short drive of a good coffee bar. I grew up on a cattle station on the Clarence River, NSW, but have no desire to write there.
CH: Why is poetry important to you?
GP: There's no short answer to this. All art is important in that it helps us to live life more richly. Poetry is just one art among many but it's the one I have worked in (and around) for more than forty years now. I also love jazz.
CH: What is your most memorable childhood incident?
GP: One I remember when I was about five is hearing my mother on the phone being told that a young playmate of mine had just drowned in the river not far from his home in Grafton. I hid for quite a long time under my parents' bed before I could be persuaded to come out. Life was proving more dangerous than I'd anticipated.
CH:
How do you measure success in your life?
GP: I think William Carlos Williams had a successful life. He was gainfully employed helping people medically for fifty years. He developed his own approach to his art and eventually prevailed over (most of) his opposition. He didn't make too many mistakes in his personal life (though he did make a few). I think he was more 'successful' than James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain (or Hart Crane, for that matter).
CH:
Talk about an incident that has astonished you.
GP: Having a polite cappuccino with my 'ex' after a hard-fought property settlement and talking good-naturedly about the grown-up son we still have between us - and a few other topics, I guess.
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Dancing by the Sea
Peace and Justice,
abstract nouns,
were meant to be together.
Transparent and
opaque by turn,
they love the salty weather.
How far back
does Justice go
and whose turn is it now?
The brawling boys
are in a queue -
the only question's how
the local lad
will polish up
to ask her for a dance.
She's delicate,
hard-pressed and rare;
he'll have to take his chance
for both sharp sides
of Justice must
be honoured - then forgotten
as Peace, while waltzing
round the room,
wears only flimsy cotton.
And so our pair of
abstract nouns,
is dancing by the sea.
In bed together
afterwards
they dream of you and me.
2.
The sweat dries on
their bodies and
they're languorously spent.
'I shouldn't tell you
but,' she yawns,
'you've lost the argument.
Waving guns
and gods and flags
can never be the answer.
No girl will ever
sleep with those,
however smooth the dancer.'
Young Justice doesn't
quite know how
he got her into bed.
Who was it who
was following?
And who was it who led?
The boys back home
may spill their beer
and say he's sold them out
but, now that he
has slept with Peace,
he knows what life's about.
Their future may not
last the summer;
they have no guarantee.
A moon, though, pales
their bodies and
a breeze blows off the sea.
Heaven
"When their snipers kill one of us
we go to heaven as martyrs;
when we kill them they go to hell."
-- Abu Othman, Iraqi sniper, 2005
"Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (There is no salvation outside the church)"
-- Cyprian of Carthage
1.
The infidels are roasting elsewhere;
their smell is sweet to heaven.
All outside the church will burn ...
including that Iraqi sniper
who praises God each time he kills -
his victims drop straight through to hell.
High there in his minaret
he's just a shellburst short of heaven.
2.
The poetry of
fear and loathing,
how long's it been around?
Between what once were
Eden's rivers
it's on the mobile phone:
the panicked rifle
slanting down,
the man still on the floor,
the rhythm, the alliteration:
fucking faking, fucking faking -
and then the poet, under pressure,
trying it the other way -
faking fucking, faking fucking
as now one shot resolves it.
Well, he's dead now -
the poem not quite
finished somehow.
3.
What's his sacred elevation,
this martyr in his rage -
as, courtesy a robot crane,
he's hauled away offstage?
Is he halfway up to Heaven?
Is he almost there?
Does Allah's hand reach down to him
across the savage air?
Will all those promises be kept?
Is there some further test?
Does Allah want the half blown-up
who failed but did their best?
Waking later with the wounded,
the chaos of their sounds,
his soul is one small fleck of debris
floating slowly down.
4.
We need the gods
to raise the green
when winter's almost done.
We need the gods
to guarantee
spring's tilt towards the sun.
We need the gods
to teach us how
to recognise the cruel
and help with our
rapprochements when
our tempers start to cool.
We need the gods
to promise that
we never really die,
that some essential
part of us
will soar into the sky.
We need the gods
to tell us what
we're certain they would say,
how heretics
and infidels
must burn if they should stray.
We need them, too,
beside us as
our breath is thinning out.
I love the sad,
agnostic god
who taught me how to doubt.
My Mother and the Minarets
Nearly 92 by now,
my mother's frisky on the phone
though anxious all the same.
Everything she says is mantra;
television's just a blur;
its soundtrack sets her off:
"Born in war and married in war;
it looks as if I'll die in war."
Muslims, she's convinced,
desire our empty spaces,
they're on their boats for Australie
How long, she asks, until a mullah
says: "No worries, mate"?
She's never seen a chador
around her beef-and-dairy town
whose main street these days anyway
is well beyond her reach.
The wash-up's done by texture only;
the fridge is full of use-bys.
Her cleaner and her Meals on Wheels
corrugate the week.
The TV rattles in its corner,
up too loud despite an ear
more accurate than mine.
It's Arabic that sets her off:
"Muslim, jihad, hijab, burqa",
breeders on their leaky boats,
prolific and seditious ...
like Catholics in her childhood.
She's on the phone again forthwith
(my number's there in outsize print)
insisting I should find the words
that very soon might have us all
bristling in the high north-west
with .303s and long low tides,
ready for the minarets
dividing the horizon.
Out There
The stars out there between the towns
reach right down to the edges -
or hang as if thrown up by chance
and casually tethered.
It's 'bible-black' - except for them.
There won't be any moon.
They're floating there like funeral flowers
across a dark lagoon.
I have no wish to count them off
or be their registrar.
I've seen what's out there way beyond
the city lights and cars
that flow like complex sentences
too difficult to parse.
I love the carbon compromise,
the smell of coffee bars.
Acknowledgments to: Reaching Out For Peace (Minumsa, Seoul, 2005), Heat (Australia), Meanjin (Australia). |
About the Poet Geoff Page
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Geoff Page is a Canberra poet who has published thirteen books of poetry, two novels, a biography, and a book of short stories and poems, and has edited two anthologies. With time off for occasional short grants or residencies Geoff Page has worked full time running the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT since 1974. He has also either read his poetry or talked on Australian poetry at Bern, Switzerland (1984), Beijing (1988), London, Lecce and Bologna (1992), Guangzhou (1994), Singapore (1995) and New Zealand (1996). He was also one of four Australian poets on a reading tour of North America in 1985. He has been Writer in Residence at Wollongong University, the Australian Defence Force Academy, Curtin University and Edith Cowan University. |
[Above] Photo of Geoff Page by Alison Hastie, 2006.
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Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007) |
