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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925591859 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fremantle Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 907 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
TERROIR
TERROIR
As long as it takes to make the world,
the ferrous country rises and wears away;
black cockatoos alight in paperbark canopies,
the earth keeps spinning inside the window of the glass.
Not wanting to drink alone I raise a charge to my shadow,
but she is already giddy with the scent of blue scaevola and red-eyed wattle.
Along the flower ridge to the salt life windblown honey myrtle binds the cliffs,
humpback whales ride the Leeuwin Current south;
a wave rises and breaks in my mouth.
Down through the peppermint forest and the body's long hours,
bees hum between marri and grape;
sap is rising in the arteries of the vine.
The afternoon is measured out in rows.
I pass through gated paddocks;
cows graze the pasture grass,
the loam of their making shining from their faces.
The creek rounds the cusp of the hill.
Purling under the thick beams of the bridge,
Wilyabrup Brook tastes like rain; and the earth keeps spinning inside the window of the glass.
My shadow will not join me;
she ripples away, dissolving into leaves and stones.
The bottle is empty, but the flowers keep blooming on my tongue.
COCKBURN SOUND
This morning I have spent hours picking up sea hares from the beach and tossing them carefully back into the sea.
A marine biologist would say that I'm wasting my time,
that sea hares beach themselves this time of year. After mating and setting their eggs adrift in spirals of glistening ribbon,
they give themselves up to the damage of surf,
denting against the shore like giant, homeless snails.
But this time last week it was the stars,
1, 2, 6, then dozens of stars,
whole constellations fallen from orbit,
broken out of space, slipping in and out with the tide, tripping over each other in their impatience to curl up and die on the beach.
Then the useless task of gathering them up against their inclinations,
spinning them back into the water.
Out in the Sound a dredge ploughs the seabed relentlessly back and forth.
I stare out, a purple sea hare limp in my hands,
wondering how much more the sea can spit out,
how much more it can take.
LEAVING ROTTNEST
After boarding the ferry I close my eyes,
feel the swell surging in sympathy with the blood pumping through my heart muscle;
hold the island in those chambers,
hold the sea wind on the south-west bluff,
the osprey circling, diving, returning with a pearly slash of salmon.
On the ferry's TV the West Coast Eagles are slaughtering the Greater Western Sydney Giants,
and I'm repeating names like mantras:
Scaevola crassifolia, Westringia, Spinifex, Lepidosperma gladiatum,
seaberry, saltbush, samphires, sedges, Rottnest Island pines;
picturing the welcome swallows careening above coastal rosemary,
ancient coral reefs split open on the shore,
and the eye's wide gaze across to the blur of harbour and commerce that is Fremantle.
As the ferry speeds towards the mainland the island grows huge inside me;
as seen from above;
a leafy sea dragon adrift in the Indian Ocean.
ASTRONOMY
My niece has never slept outside before so we drag our swags onto the back lawn,
but sleep is impossible with the soughing and creaking of the shadowy pine forest,
the stars illuminating our faces.
She's imagining wolves, and monsters stalking the periphery of our camp,
but it's the animals of the galaxy who pace and snarl in their nocturnal paddock.
Roads and fences torched by sun are rebuilt in pitch, wildings contained there eat blackness,
defecate darkness,
traverse the memory of light.
My niece seems tiny and surreal,
like an animated doll, supine beneath the muzzle of this lambent herd.
I try to recall the names of constellations I was shown when I was a child lying out on a swag with my father,
him pointing out the planets,
then waking up in the night to find the whole picture has shifted –
though it seems that the sky is rotating it is the ground, that feels so solid beneath us, which has turned.
All night the earth pulls away from the sky,
forgetting its astronomy until it returns to meet those stars again.
AN OLDER COUNTRY
Wardandi Country
When I say I like to stay on the track the tall man swallows his laughter and hands me a pair of blue gaiters.
Leaving behind all notions of walking we wade through the Earth's silvery-grey fur,
limbo under the fat bellies of orb spiders trembling inside their golden architecture.
Banksia cones mauled by ngoolyark ignite along blackened branches,
spiking the cloud-bruised sky.
We crest the dunes and plunge through the shagreen swords of shoulder-high sedges jousting to slice off our limbs.
An aquifer seeps from the hillside,
cold and clear, whistling over bleached sand,
biting our lips as we kneel and sip.
Karri tree antlers gleam like bone,
casting pale light across the valley,
as we leave Australia and enter an older country,
pause upon an island of bark and leaves that has been forming for centuries;
leaves fall into our footsteps,
erase borders as we depart.
SPEAKING IN TONGUES
For Sharyn Egan
The ageing monk is wearing his white summer robes that reveal the stains of grapes and thorns and roses.
On Sundays he strolls in the olive grove,
where each twisted tree is planted for a different country in the world.
Addressing every leaf with a prayer,
he says he has to put himself aside and let Jesus do the talking,
for how would a mortal human know how to speak all those languages?
Which is a bit like poetry:
how can a poet know what a poem is when it arrives rasping like a white bird,
rustling its feathers inside the dark cavities of the body?
The carob tree buzzes like a harmonium,
casting a fretwork of shade, a scent of honey;
and everywhere I walk, sliding on red-brown pea gravel,
I'm looking for the parts of you that neither of us know.
The latch of the cemetery gate is an iron cross.
I lift and let it fall, walk among rows of iron crosses planted for all the monks whose bones lie in Yued clay.
Up on the rocky hillside an old stone water tank lies empty
(did you ever dive into it? drink from it?).
Green parrots strafe through the silver gimlets
and below, New Norcia seems so bright and unpeopled, the hot morning sun searing the crumbling mortar of the monastery wall with its red wash of Spanish imposition.
A swatch of bright white cloth exits from a building, crosses the empty compound and enters the chapel.
The church bell clangs into the morning leaden and blunt, but what's louder is the voice of the darmoorluk ringing through the valley,
speaking your stolen language,
telling your stolen truths.
COTTESLOE FISH
My shoulders fuse with the paddle as it slices the Indian Ocean into furrows,
along the reef and out towards the cargo ships perched on the horizon like a phantom city.
Matt yanks the herring out of its last morning;
slashing the blue air, its eyes wide,
gill spike, and final tail thump.
That night at the dinner table I peel its spine from the white flesh,
feel giddy with the motion of this rack flexing, propelling along Cottesloe;
smell seaweed rotting in piles on the shore;
wobbegong, rainbow fish, sea hare,
the enormous tide churning aeolianite into sand.
I shiver as we eat this world,
toss its head into a soup pot,
compost its bones.
PADDLING TO BALD ISLAND
Threading through the fatness of the tabular estuary,
so shallow our paddles jag in the weedy sand;
swans are singing across the bows of our boats.
Salty rain bites my lips as I call out to them, squashing my voice into an approximation of song.
One seems to call back,
its reeds vibrating over the still water to where our bright red kayaks are wedged tight in the throat of the inlet.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Water pools in the ragged scar of the quarry as across the ridge one plant after another blooms in a Mexican wave of florescence.
Inside the tangled tea-tree forests I wonder where all the children are.
Aren't they supposed to be hurtling along the firebreaks, bending their limbs into the elbows of trees?
Shouldn't they be hiding in hollows,
waiting, coming, ready or not?
They were here once; they have left the remains of their species in broken-down cubbies and bike ramps for the archaeologists to find,
hidden in swirls of limestone,
in broken shards of glass.
PHYSICIANS
My legs are my physicians, diagnosing my lament:
they carry me to my boots, to the door,
striding out across the park where rain and ibis have turned the oval into a swamp.
Propelling me across lanes of traffic,
they hike me up towards the ridge,
churning through deep sand,
scudding across the limestone cliff to where Templetonia blazes in drifts of crimson, setting the hillside on fire.
A bobtail lizard thaws on the firebreak lit by a wavering shaft of sunlight,
and the branch of the winter fig tree where the nankeen kestrel perched yesterday,
now always looks like a nankeen kestrel.
Of muscle, bone, and sinew,
my legs hammer out their prescription;
to leave the four walls and roof of my house,
to tramp again across this aeolian ridge.
RAIN
The parrot bush seems to mutter and shudder along the ridge.
Serrated leaves tear our clothes,
scratch camera lenses and binoculars.
After cracking seed cases open and leaving their beak prints engraved in the pods,
the cockatoos alight like a black cloud,
rain falling from the traces of their wings.
NGOOLYARK
Carnaby's black cockatoo
In geological time their existence is nothing but a tiny puff of breath exhaled against a flapping of shiny feathers burnt black by the thousands of years of their becoming.
In human time there are few of us left who can recall now when the sun was eclipsed by the size of the flock carving its trajectory through the ruffled blue of the sky.
Wired to a length of tuart wood in a glass display case, ID tags swinging from their claws,
the ngoolyark are gathering dust,
their plumes fading under scrutiny.
Archaeology has traced this kind of disappearance before,
but what data will record the unravelling in the nest of our ribs when we see the ngoolyark in a now-rare formation
circling over the multiplying city,
above the fine new artwork,
a sculptural representation of their habitat.
THE BEELIAR WETLANDS – A PLACE OF MANY SKINS
KITCHEN MEETING
The fluorescent light globes bleach our faces, insects beat against the flyscreen with clattering percussion,
flocking to this simulacra of moon.
Frogs click and moan,
adding their voices to our agenda of fundraising, lobbying, rallies,
our plans to save the swamp.
The government report claims that the highway design will improve upon nature and we hold our meetings week after week,
trying to comprehend that there could be better ideas than water, algae, and tadpoles that can shapeshift into frogs.
AT THE OFFICE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AUTHORITY
On a map of the future,
the pages are left intentionally blank;
a tannin stain spreads across the assessments,
appendices; the ngoolyark arrive to alight upon nothing.
The table we are invited to bows under piles of reports;
inside the pages, swamp harriers hover and plunge into reed beds,
quendas snuffle amongst sheoak tendrils.
Banksia cones bloom and shrivel as we turn the pages and watch tiny specks turn into pelicans spinning in their gyres, gliding in to land like seaplanes upon the lake.
Ancient water rises, percolates and subsides.
We stand with our feet in the mud as the scrub roller bites into the littoral zone breaking our carapaces open.
THE APPEAL
The hydrologist fears that he will lose his job so we find ourselves meeting clandestinely in an anonymous café where he uses the napkins, salt, and sugar to demonstrate how water flows through different geological formations.
We have come from our homes,
from our children and our poems,
and we follow the flow of ideas from his fingers to the bench,
which is the Swan Coastal Plain.
The cup of coffee is the water table,
moving like a chess piece between the salt and pepper.
The bottled water is highway pylons interrupting the flow.
We watch as the water rises spilling over notebooks, into our laps,
onto the floor and out into the street,
where the afternoon sun sucks it up,
where the pavement hisses and burns.
NGOOLYARK ADVENTURE
Early in the morning a mob of ngoolyark have taken over Adventure World.
Having no tickets, they flap over the fence and perch like black sentinels surveying the perimeter.
They screech over Skull Rock,
following the trajectory of the Sky Lift;
they hurl themselves from the Inferno fifty-two metres into sky;
note the sensational view of the coast before whooping and wefting through the Abyss at high speed g-force 4.5, completing four inversions and an inline loop.
They hit the lagoon for a leisurely drink,
splash guano and feathers on the Luxury Cabana,
then in groups of three they take off,
spinning higher than the rusting bungee tower,
above Kraken, the scariest slide in Australia,
to alight in flowering marri canopies,
cracking open seed pods and insolently tossing the empty cases to the ground.
EVERY SUNDAY
we meet at the lake,
walk the liminal as the water levels rise and fall, birds arrive and depart,
and turtles bury themselves in the thick black meat of the lake bed.
Never able to reach that quaking centre,
we can only stand and gaze across to where the opposite bank is being woven by spiders.
Water mud water mud,
hatched, caught, and repurposed,
reincarnated in the form of a frog,
born already singing.
THE LAW
So this is it:
60 or so of us standing in the road.
The riot squad yelling MOVE, MOVE
but my feet have become stones cemented into the tarmac.
Someone grabs my hand and the police horse staggers into my shoulder,
her sweat and fear smell like my own.
When the drilling rig enters the wetlands surrounded by officers with tasers and guns,
the horse's legs and chest push
into my spine causing me to trip, stand, fall, stumble,
the swamp clicks and sighs;
the Siberian birds wade into the centre,
their beaks piercing the lake's membrane,
their law trembling in the mud.
OFFSETS
The consultant's cheeks redden when he points out the impact area
coloured in khaki; the offsets dotted in dark purple along the margins of the page.
A drying swamp colonised by thistles has faded our shirts and stained our trousers
with pollen and mud and years.
We turn the map around, shift
uncomfortably in the plastic chairs,
examine the colour palette key,
the net loss and gain, while on the other side of the window the sky darkens,
the scout bird circles and wee-loos,
calling in the mob, seeking roost trees that have been deleted from the page.
THE SWAMP
When the first rains have percolated through sand and stone,
sponge and bone, and the frogs
have hatched from their tombs of mud and are singing in the sedge grass,
we turn to look east where the bleached
limbs of melaleucas make ghosts of time;
suburbs fall away and we forget our urgent imperatives;
our feet sink into the lake's edge giddy with the sky's reflection,
dugite curled up around its appetite,
on the edge of winter when the earth is regurgitated as water.
BEELIAR
6 December 2016
Swan and sedge,
dugite and tiger snake,
Nuytsia floribunda, fringe lily, woody pear,
marri, mungite, dianella, jarrah, balga, hibbertia,
quenda, yoorn, Lerista skink, peacock spider,
Christmas spider, peep-wren,
heron, spoonbill, ibis, swamp harrier, little eagle,
musk duck, pied cormorant, long-necked turtle,
aquifer, mud, algae, water, donkey orchid, Spearwood dune, Bassendean dune, tadpole, frog, banded stilt,
pelican, clicking frog, moaning frog,
I call on you to survive.
THE POETS
The day the poets arrived the bulldozer churned back time to the beginning when the earth was soft and there were only spirits roaming the flat, cold sand.
And the poets had to create the world all over again;
they paced the fence line reciting names,
germinating species on their tongues.
The poets filmed themselves re-making the world and tweeted the footage,
posted it on Facebook.
Huddled under a flapping tarpaulin we hoped the incantations would stop banksia roots being torn from the ground,
would hold the present in stasis,
so that marri flowers will continue to bloom in February.
WIND
When you undressed last night,
nuts and bolts spilled from your pockets,
twirling like spinning tops across the floorboards into the corners of the room.
You said that the hardware store had run out of spanners,
as every day the fencers come to repair the night's damage,
and every night the ghosts of banksia and quenda arrive,
dressed in the shadows of moon and cloud,
unmake the wire that keeps people out and bulldozers in.
In the morning we all agree that the wind was very strong last night,
suddenly blowing a howling tempest –
strong enough to knock down fences,
gentle enough to leave trees standing.
Excerpted from "The Future Keepers"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Nandi Chinna.
Excerpted by permission of Fremantle Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Terroir
Terroir 11
Cockburn Sound 13
Leaving Rottnest 14
Astronomy 15
An Older Country 17
Speaking in Tongues 18
Cottesloe Fish 20
Paddling to Bald Island 21
Archaeology 22
Physicians 23
Rain 24
Ngoolyark 25
The Beeliar Wetlands-A Place of Many Skins
Kitchen Meeting 29
At the Office of the Environmental Protection Authority 30
The Appeal 31
Ngoolyark Adventure 32
Every Sunday 33
The Law 34
Offsets 35
The Swamp 36
Beeliar 37
The Poets 38
Wind 39
Nannas 40
Watch 41
Tawny Frogmouths 42
Symptoms of Solastalgia 43
Arrest 44
At Early Morning Yoga 45
After the Clearing 46
Babies 47
Kaata Gar-up-Kings Park
The Future Keepers 51
Kaata Gar-up 52
Eucalyptus 53
The Homoeopath 54
Kings Park Wattlebird 56
Mt Eliza 57
Immolation 58
Permanent Parkers at Kings Park, 1950 59
Cygnus atratus 60
The Climacteric
The Climacteric 65
At Deep River 66
Haematology 67
Nephritis 68
Cartographers 69
Night Duty 70
Lett Street 71
Kindling 72
Daffodils 73
The Ultrasound 74
Another Month 75
Marvin Yarrow 76
Drift 77
The Boy on the Mandurah Road 78
Midnight Stops the Traffic Along Memorial Drive 80
Seals 81
Driving Back From Bruce Rock 82
Old Mokerdillup Road 83
Myeloma 84
The House of Spiders 85
Channelling My Father 86
The Green Jumper 87
Ladies 88
The Ashes 89
In Search of My Ancestors
Mud 93
The Field 94
In Search of My Ancestors 95
Banksia (genus) 99
Inis Oírr 100
Quiet
Quiet 103
Dark Fish 104
Horses 105
Diggers Morning 107
Poetry References 108
Notes 110
Acknowledgements 112