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| ISBN-13: | 9781742194424 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Spinifex Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 106 |
| File size: | 178 KB |
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Modewarre: Home Ground
By Patricia Sykes, Jennifer Strauss
Spinifex Press
Copyright © 2004 Patricia Sykes,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-876756-50-5
CHAPTER 1
HOUSE OF THE BIRD
Modewarre — ways you might approach it
1 difficulties with maps
because the syllables
on the page are not
the land beneath the name
because a childhood memory
of place is not the same lake
upon which the duck floats
because a grandmother
got Modewarre factually wrong
as 'that backwater
where snakes come backwards
out of their holes'
and because of the woman
with the head of a bird
who placed her ancient skull
in a cold stare against my own
the implacable kiss —
a silence inhuman
in its lack
her visible intent
to be a disturbance
in the blood
as a pulse which meanders
among the maps
which do not exist
2 acts of identity
because this is a place of death
it is necessary to resort to books
skin of the plant on which ink
mimics the intrinsic knowledge
of worms who being earthed
have their heads deep into it
doubly advantaged by there-ness
and an un-need for meanings
it's the humming plastics though
of telephone speech not of worm
or page which confirms 'yeah ...
modewarre ... it's Wathaurong
means musk duck' (place of?)
laconic breeze of the vernacular
laid over enforced extinction
of a language the whole country
dotted with such deaths
but in the phone voice the absence
of revenge mocks any expectation
of it by the Wathaurong co-op
I'm helped to understand
that research is on the road
to raise the culture up
I'm helped on to Bruce Pascoe
who helps me on to the posthumous
Lou Lane her boxed white pages
in the Geelong Records Office
un-indexed are fraught
with European-in-origin
local-by-birth offspring
of the irony of method
working for years to retrieve
what cannot be given back
all breath here is spent or spending —
bird you flee from the archives
like a patient escaping the knife
and now again the road is a bare desk
and you a dark-feather creature
since the time before biblical
like wings against distance
growing now more lucid
now less clear unto yourself
and a speck also burning
and watering in the eye like a splinter
out of this a lake rises and rises
it may yet prove an inland sea
the wraith of it says yes let the eyes weep
let them they have need of consequences
3 ancestral
three roads meeting in the one bird:
modewarre (the indigenous)
biziura lobata (the colonial)
musk duck (the common)
between them everything ancestral
their one lung the breath
below water and above it
'and so I am of the junction
and so my tongue rises to be born'
had she lived to draw breath
my mother's last stillborn
may well have said this —
but would she have meant born
to communal or to corporate?
in the epochs of takeover
the umbilical is as necessary
as lifeline
the duck delivers and delivers
the shining eye of water
the play and gleam of it
as it rolls lightly off the feathers
back into its own cup
if it were as possible to live
in the recombined moment
but we accrue as the roads accrue
and the accretions become
at their worst a flotilla
siblings of the first fleet
the wretched journey
that came ashore as a haunting
— as always the modewarre
places faith in its eggs
yolk and the sun
breed each other
in the house of the bird
the embryo in its shell turns
to the arms of its oxygen
4 generation
the return that began in dirt
the wet and dry embrace of it
its reach into every orifice
its hold on the throat
bird you have drawn me
to the brown lake end
of the easy picnic a food haze
dying in its own romantic
and you emerging as the brackish
tang of a bird in water
that swims so low it seems
to drown an in-hiding
a v-wake of dark ribbons
their glossy drag of secrets
like a tug in the pulse
it's not your Kulin life I'm after
its recovering geographies
but how to go on
from here my feet
live off bones my words
play across old veins
what I eat I devour
what I touch fingers me
with scars it's the same
new song progress loves
the individual the ethic
of rewarded self poetry
cannot speak for the whole
it is too full of variants
how then to evolve back to water?
5the bird as it is found
at midday deep in its brown lake
–the sun warming the same compass–
the chevrons and rivulets of the bird's
rippling wake a water entranced
and the oxygen separating itself out
in small flashing leaps
at play as an ecstasy of bubbles
here is proof of the bird books:
the heavy body the low swimming
habit the legs set well back
for the diving life the male darker
grey than the female's brownish
charcoal he in solitary water
displaying himself the inflated
throat pouch the honk the whistle
the churning splash a breaking of light
into shimmer crystals but the people
are charmed by the swans
and the female musk duck is busy
feeding her single young
odd that the books forgot
to note the delicate accuracy
with which she passes
lake shrimp to her duckling's
equally dexterous bill
the swans on irritated
surface patrol forcing her
to combine evasion with the hunt
she is good at this
her predatory skills
keeping swans and duckling
likewise on edge
until abruptly hunt becomes preen
one moment the dive
then the drift to safe water
a haven among water lilies
pink and waxy with succulence
dense raft of protective greens
this is luxury time
this magnet to danger
as the soft paler belly rolls
upwards in preening exposure
how quickly the young must learn
the way of it the swift massage
and flick back to hide the beautiful target
the snatched rest a midday snack
the lake dredge with its steel teeth
already back in the poisoned
muds the road traffic
as the rise and fall
of familiarity's warning revs
how ironically pure at this moment
that the current should roughen
and the clouds come driving in with rain
— chill of the returning hours
the ducks refreshed in their feathers
disturbed into moving on
in such safety as is theirs
their waters still historical
still urgent to be read
song of walking
having come so far, having gone —
this way and none other
the ever hidden duck
who had planned to be a silence
it is known her voice added weight
to creator and beginning
that where she touched air water land
whoever follows has to make a choice
'the fish will fight you
for their lives
the geese claim their own wings
against the winter
the frogs have a reason
to suspect poisons ...'
breathe! breathe!
is this why the duck teaches caution?
how once she gave permission
for a landing and was invaded
by desperates sprouting sails
from their backs? now
an historian writes of strangers who
dance to each other upon the shore
as if they have the sheen upon them
so that when they spread their footprints
they can become not plague but proposition
clearly something hears a music — what more is there
to say of longing?
toxic, kiss
i
whether it was done boldly or with stealth
whether the faces were strange or known
official or private, when they came
among the food, in the day, the night
to conduct their little murders
'modewarre, how far were you
from the poisoned flour
the water laced with arsenic?'
ii
verse, chorus, anthem, voice
the history wars of mixed blood
and split opinion
the duck keeping no records
except for memory,
here, this place
iii
— once, our house Modewarre's small timbers
singing in the night and the stars howling
because the child heard them
from deep inside the kiss of deadly nightshade
purple berries and delicious orgy
smeared across the lips of her pale infancy
we do not call her innocent
we call her blessed, survived,
and talk of what can kill
iv
— after all it is safer in the kitchen not to stagger
food wants always to be trusted but is always in the hands
the duck itself wishes to feed no surgery no medi care
sister, your belladonna is Italian somewhere else,
where
Mussolini livedwas fascism ever here?
the duck knows and the eras 'don't grieve
them'
— only begin again where it began as the confidence
of water everything touchable, and closer
duck psalms
1st psalm
not to deify you, duck, as a god life
a servant of history enthroned
tyrannical impossibly endowed
and you so dark-grey and immiscible
only once have I seen your true feet
they were webbed and animal skinned
and sure of their water, its weeds, its
muds, the life that feeds and is fed upon
— bird without need of a reliquary
there's talk of clever nets and night traps
photography too is on the snatch praise
rather to your bird way of tenable and proof
2nd psalm
the slanting rain-veils across the paddocks
were never a sign of your coming or going
you never there beside the child on her knees
who nightly on brown lino was taught feathers
are skies of angels, heavenly more feasible
than any duck's power to call down miracles
but she was obstinate that girl and left her ghost
behind, a hankering for real wings, the flight
you use only rarely it seems, as if having this
is reason neither for jubilation nor proof, but bird
when you preen there is a touch of something
like faith, a pleasure even, that this is so
3rd psalm
and of course you were there, like a secret
behind the second eyelid; praise to whoever
sees without having to be forced; praise to
whoever looks beyond the lure bird;
when we came with our firesticks and farming
it was poverty's golden goose we were chasing
our hunting skills threadbare and makeshift
and though we never ate you bird we ate your
relatives and never called ourselves cannibal
4th psalm
and now language, so impossibly cumbersome
for discovering the true weight of things
the grandmother would have known
the heft of you, duck, the right size dish
for the oven; you'd have been her novena
of gratitude, a meal stolen from the mouth
of starvation if you were in her grasp
would I have played ingratitude's child?
I think your eyes, those black carbons
would have gone the way of mutton
'food is food' she'd have said,
'myth is myth'
5th psalm
our kindling in its fire-making
lighting neither flame nor image of you
the kitchen's red music oblivious
to the wind's chimney song of a bird
we never learned but the pianola days
could have trapped you, duck
inside the nostalgia of pop song
I'll be your angel you be my wings —
all power then to the bird that went
about its own lyrics, all honour to
the same bird whose daily water
is its necessary choir
6th psalm
the hymns that lived in our small rooms
how they flew from our mouths as
inflations of hope, the art of vanishing
to live among fly specks on the ceiling
lead paint also lived there
and the greasy smoke of rations
the war dead and their anniversaries
over and over the same yearly candles
but there were incubations, duck
and though we sank our necessary well
it was not to drain your wetlands
it was that sweet water meant baptism
each bucketful an evidence of home
each new infant's deeper chance of roots
each stillbirth another travel lesson
7th psalm
when we left in our sad ambulance
you were still invisibly watered somewhere
between kero lamp and starlight
the unmade roads had no compass
leading to nest or feeding ground
our only car pointed towards town
how we were engined and rubber tyred
there was no-one to make a grief over you
a corner shop was our new adoration
I think you did not bother to sing praise
at our going, though it has taken years
to plot this return to sing you, therefore
blessed is the duck whose indifference
is survival, blessed also is the duck for whom
worship is a human thing, strange, even pitiable
conjuring under the influence
the festivals have left for us their careful litter
all the smoked days between have not killed
fresco and proof, bird and domain, gold sheaf
and solar warning the mirror wetlands
always find us think of the goddess in
her ritual room wearing her necklace of ducks
in the prayer it will ensure both people and bird
as if 'futile' never hurt her her knowing
that mutual fertility is no defence the rain
pouring off the window is her own lost river
the glinting silver speed of it, the cold roar
I wade the room hunting each piece of broken bird
there's a neck here stretched like a duck's in flight
naked and shining the way feathers gleam their
oily way through the wet the wattage droops
the temperature shivers, which makes perfect
voltage sense, and still the neck aims itself
towards the sun, hope and yellow fed, wholly
adorned by the embroiled heart's freight
eupathy
under the ribcage
the magma at red heat
we meet
between the furnace and the flying
in the mouth of cohabitation
beneath that other river
the air
dark arc of soaring
when eagles are there
stream of current and
thermal beckoning, riddled
with holes
in open season
or when eagles as supects
were killed by lambs
these farmed in law
as a greater claim
so that it was air
that hovered
looking down upon
the hung Bunjils
their stopped feathers
strung wing-tip to wing-tip
upon the barbed fences
to talk now
of whether this is still so
or if the eagles in free flight
are an option
to speak of
options, land, again
once more
not as that which was taken
is un-ownable
contracting and crowded
but as lava shift
the heat of a river
always underfoot
in a molten indifference
to politics, how the height
of an eagle
knows this
its kill days
numbered to our care
while brain years plan an escape
to the stars what difference
could we commit there
that would make human
safer
less
of a threat?
do the restless feet
know
does the orbiting mind?
or is this just a voice
from the dark matter
of fear
afraid of reach
and plot-based ambition?
as if should the eagles fall
so will the piercing eye
'brid', eight darknesses
i
no belling
by the identity tag
no raucous telling of a
knowledge's secret necessity
the brid's closed throat
somewhere warmer
held, than this gallery
this arrested buying
ii
to desire flight but be human
to own legs but come home
with wings, a falling into
a sky I must believe in
no hum to it, no ticking
only this sung silence
awake and dreaming
iii
the wings infolded
in a dark body
the weight in the body
like floating
hush-la, hush-la
no lullaby but the blood
the brid who never sleeps
its heart's alacrity
which is machete born
iv
— Nyangangu, you carve
like peeling back the skin
inside the brid the next live
brid, there, where you are,
bred of earth, breeding sky
working the uplift, wingbeat
as if sculpting a refusal
to die of white history
v
to take broken eggs
and give them flight
to take invasion
and find the sky in it
how difficult
how simple
to place a machete
inside the tongue
and sing morning and night
to keep survival tuned
vi
daughter of the daughter
of a warrior, the brid
each day leaving my room
each day returning, amid
whether the money I paid
is a cage
though air visits us freely
and daily I warn myself —
vii
it may be financial need
your living to earn
but, Nyangangu
I think you must own
great faith
to trust your brids
to any random house
viii
or not just need but a reaching?
the brid's upstretched throat
forever in natal song
north of this keyboard's
tireless tap-tap mouth
which cannot voice
the interior 'n' in Nyangangu
the one with the tail
the sound of 'ng' in singer
espionage with duck
if it looks like a duck and talks like a duck it must be
a government surveillance device
this not in the wisdom texts
but in the weird science
of an artificial eye whose wine
is calamity in the cellar —
I find you in the museum Wiesbaden
is really code for a duck's quack
has no echo, which is silenced
easily therefore, the shimmer
of plumage and gland of musk
fallen to the gaze, or else to the palate
where transformation is skill of the chef
where the bird who once flew becomes
meat with hot and cold properties,
is a pianist playing, the main course,
with oranges and wild mushrooms
and contextual candles melting
under the heat of Rachmaninoff
but I think for the woman
with cutlery still alive in her hands
the electronic eye makes a worse salad
its vigilance not half as delicate
as the wings on her plate
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Modewarre: Home Ground by Patricia Sykes, Jennifer Strauss. Copyright © 2004 Patricia Sykes,. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
HOUSE OF THE BIRD,Modewarre — ways you might approach it,
song of walking,
toxic, kiss,
duck psalms,
conjuring under the influence,
eupathy,
'brid', eight darknesses,
espionage with duck,
blandishments and enticements, visuals of electronic speech,
eponymous,
flamingo, flamenco,
HOUSE OF WATER,
three years in the flooded paddock,
an answer to crockery,
doll archive,
proximities,
Lake Modewarre cryptids,
the honey lands,
aphorisms bluestone and spectral,
sanctuary: Swan Lake, Phillip Island,
the efficacy of a lantern on the forehead,
dura mater,
profit and loss,
a face in water,
HOUSE OF DETENTION,
blue heimat,
hard garbage,
a ferret in migrant trousers,
Hepzibah,
restitution,
visa as pessimist,
family Rosacea,
great-aunt narrative among the excised islands,
census of the beloved,
dis-locations … a polemic,
focal geology (1),
focal geology (2),