Poet's Introduction

The following three poems are from my recent book Music and Women's Bodies, (Five Islands Press, Wollongong NSW, Australia, 2002). The poems are "The Calves", "The Goldfish Pond" and "Tchaikovsky". The latter is actually the title poem from the book, since the phrase "music and women's bodies" appears twice at the end of the poem.

I thought these poems would be of particular interest to psychoanalytically trained readers. "The Calves" was written shortly after the death of my father when I spent a long weekend with my brother and his wife on their dairy farm in Northeast Tasmania. It deals with the themes of parent-child separation and of mortality. The image of the moonlight on the hillside "white as the ash of ancestors" is also a reference to my father's ashes being scattered on that hillside, though the general reader doesn't need to know that. It's obviously a Southern Hemisphere poem, with springtime occurring in October.

"The Goldfish Pond" is clearly enough about the infant tenderness at the heart of loving relationships. "Tchaikovsky" deals with a brief period in my early childhood when I thought Tchaikovsky was a lady in underwear and proceeds from that jokey memory into something deeper. Again, a poem that could only be written in Sydney, or perhaps southern California. In Chicago the "winter light" couldn't "blink" on "ruffled water."

THE CALVES
For Mike and Edwina

In the drenched October paddocks one by
one the nubbly shadows stagger upward from
the soil, a gut-reek of new life, mist
boiling from placentas, their Ayrshire
mothers heave heavy with cream
for their tongues, smeared visitants
from an inner-or under-world, day long
living or dead they tumble into the spring light.

The calves born two days ago are already
shoving into the wooden feeding pens to gulp
on rubber teats, slushing milk out of
buckets you fill from the whole herd, a blind
blurring of mothers, milk spiced with acid
for digestion, but on the earthern floor
of the barn your daughter holds a bottle to a calf
too frail to suck. It will die. She'll keep cradling it.

And evening follows with immense vacancies.
The cows yearn noisily for the calves all taken away.
You tell me, "A few weeks from now
In the same paddock they won't know each other."
We open wine for a meal of a male calf.
On the hill above the house the moon pours itself
white as the ash of ancestors. Two thirds or our way
between birth and midnight we eat slowly.

THE GOLDFISH POND

When you gaze in as a child you wait for the fish -
the rocky ooze and then a glitter of bronze
or tangerine. A few moments only. Every one
has its own darkness to swim to. As though
you were staring into the heart of the earth.

Now like a child you sleep facing your wife
More restful knowing you could open your eyes and watch her.
In the morning you can tell her the dream you had.
You were four years old gazing in a goldfish pond,
Glimmer after glimmer, one depth and then another.

TCHAIKOVSKY

Inanimate matter, meaning without soul -
The winter sunlight on the paving bricks
beside the water. What after all if water
looked at us? a fluid changeless eye
watching how my hair and beard get whiter.
Water needs to hold nothing against death.
I picture a boy nestling against his aunt
as she reads the paper and the radio plays,
"So mi re DOH mi . . ." His aunt sotto voce
"That's Tchaikovsky!" He peers at the lingerie ad,
a woman in a petticoat as he'd once seen
his mother, light touching every crest of her.
"That's Tchaikovsky?" He's learned something today.
This winter light blinks on the ruffled water.
I smile at the boy who for a time confused
music and women's bodies. What could he know?
Just that, maybe. All he held against death.
Music and women's bodies. Just that.

Craig Powell
jcpowell@iprimus.com.au