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| ISBN-13: | 9781775582014 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 64 |
| File size: | 205 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Pastoral Kitchen
By Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2001 Anna JacksonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-201-4
CHAPTER 1
Rocket
In the mid winter weeded over
vegetable garden shoots up
the self seeded rocket
and flowers.
Sproing!
The pastoral kitchen
In my pastoral kitchen I wash and dry
the dishes, as my thoughts stray
like sheep I guide
and serve. From tomorrow's photo order
to the end of evolution they stray
and graze.
The spiders' webs over the kitchen
windows fill with flies.
The cat comes in
and cries at me as if I were her mother.
I fill the lunch boxes
and wait for Di.
Camellia
Diana says, with her cardigan on,
come here, camellia.
She leaves her kete at the kitchen
door to stretch and reach.
Leaves and twigs and petals catch on.
Comb your hair, chameleon.
Tahitian pohutakawa
This baby tree is growing
leggy, or armish in
fact just
like a two-year-old suddenly
clutching at you all
over from all
directions with a fistful
of arms, waving
little leaves.
Up it clambers from the muddy
lawn and from the hole
we dug
for Elvira's placenta. Feed, baby
tree, I can't wait to see you
flower.
The peacock of motherhood
This is the gift my son gave me,
strutting through my life, tail dragging,
perching on everything I do and as soon
as my back is turned, jumping down
with a thud and a cry, following me.
The pea-hen of girlhood
makes no sound now, sleeps
undisturbed. I can hardly remember
so brown a bird; if I try to think
up flashes the tail
of motherhood to distract me.
I remember she was as brown as thought.
But the peacock has found other cocks
to flash his tail at; the peacocks
of motherhood are strutting
at the school gates, the gifts
our sons gave us. The birds strut
and preen, flash their tails,
while the mothers smile
till the bell goes.
Kitchen drain
Elvira is talking to the drain again:
a language learnt at two
is a mother tongue.
The drain mothers my daughter,
and she replies, supplies
her own grammar:
'Grammar, mother', and the drain takes
grammar and swirls it away
with fame and genius,
swirls it away with a trillion people
but we don't care, it all comes up again.
It is a bulimic drain.
Why do my hydrangeas turn yellow
and shrink as all around them
swill swamp lilies?
Because it all comes up again.
They yellow with grammar and Elvira
is speaking English again.
Watch
Elvira says look! there's a clock
on my watch!
There's a clock on my watch too.
Now I can watch the time
objectively, as if I weren't internally
clocking the time with every cell,
every beat of my heart.
Who beats my heart?
I can't beat time, just watch
the clock.
Elvira says, I am a dog cat,
woof meow, woof meow.
Tick tock,
watch clock.
The hen of tiredness
Tiredness sits on me today like a hen,
a tame hen, too heavy
to fly much, and too confident
to shy away when I try to get up.
Instead it digs in its claws
and shifts its weight violently
from side to side.
It smells of flaky hen-skin
under its feathers.
Sometimes tiredness is a whole flock
of birds, little yellow birds
that fly together in a cloud
like Bella Akhmadulina's
rain, following me
wherever I go, fluttering
above my head and keeping up
a running commentary in song.
Everywhere I go I leave yellow feathers.
There are usually a few yellow birds
perched on my shoulders, balancing
on my head, but activity
will dislodge them,
or even emotion, if I express it.
But the hen! Today, I have a hen
of tiredness and it is very very tame.
It is making a nest with the hairs from my head.
What will I do if it lays me an egg?
The computer hen
The computer hen waits for me at work.
She sits on my screen, and thinks.
And nobody knows what she thinks,
because she never drops a thought
onto the screen but wraps them all
around her in a green glaze.
Chook chook chook I drop
scitter scatter onto the screen little words
like grains of wheat, but the computer hen
has no feet. She never does come
striding down to eat my words
but sits, a wingless, footless bird
inscrutable on my screen.
All the same, I address these words
to her. I don't write 'you'. Not to
the computer hen. But I think
she knows who I mean, for
although she has no ears,
she pricks her eyes,
and it seems to me she pricks her beak,
her beak of clay, almost a speak.
The vending machine
We need the vending machine. We are all of us
so far from our mothers now, some of us are
mothers, though not here, not now. Here, now,
we are quite quite autonomous. And so adult.
We could not possibly receive our lunch
reclining, in a lap, with arms around us,
and our lunch coming liquidly into our mouths
like hair brushing our faces, or a finger brushing
our faces,
to remove an eyelash, say, from a cheek. Not
in these clothes. We are buttoned up, now.
We operate the machine with coins, from our
wallets,
coins we have earned ourselves with our readings of texts.
We make our selection, salt or sugar, but not
tears,
or even perspiration, and not milk, certainly not,
imagine
quite how many tears or drops of milk it would
take
to make one packet of crisps or one chocolate
bar,
imagine the tears and the milk it would take to
fill
the machine, it would take a year of crying and
feeding,
feeding and crying, from a mother not coping
very well.
But no, no, we need have none of that,
we take our lunch packaged up in plastic and eat
it
at our desks, as we read and sometimes even as
we write,
drinking tea or coffee, which as it is dehydrating
is only sort of liquid really and sort of is the
opposite.
The pastoral reader
I slow down to browse at the library,
in a body suddenly aware
of its biology,
a complex ecology, even, housing
viruses and bacteria
all with some autonomy,
if not, perhaps, personality.
I browse, and they graze
and divide inside me.
Sarah's hair
As red as the beak
of a takahe
it punctuates the air,
her hair,
saying hey! Here
I am! And where
am I? Beside
Sarah, my eyes
on Sarah's
hair.
Home time
Diana says,
go yellow,
ginkgo.
Pick up
How under the weather
the Russians were,
Akhmadulina with her rain
following her everywhere,
Mayakovsky with his drain
of despair.
But my cloud in trousers is
Elvira in a fluffy pink coat,
and she isn't hip-height yet.
I am over the weather
and my little pink cloud
runneth over, too.
Kikuyu
By evening what we call a lawn is pooling
inwards onto the concrete
carport.
Around the edges the kikuyu swells
and spreads like a sea waving
(not drowning).
Yes, I see you,
kikuyu.
In a minute
I will look at Johnny's work in a minute.
Not now because now is a dark wood
the length of a beach
the height of the sky
with three beasts
standing panting
between my son
and me.
I don't need a road map,
I need a life map.
I don't need a map, I need a vehicle,
I need to climb into a minute
and sit with my son in
the front seat
with the windscreen
wiped clean
and my eyes
wide open in wild surmise.
After the nit shampoo
Johnny says,
Elvira's hair
is clear
as God
and glass.
Kitchen chair
By the kitchen light, I sit till late
and read to the end of evolution,
the logical conclusion.
What kind of history we will enter
then, when we alone
will enter it?
In the end, will my viral flock
go forth, and evolve again,
outside of me?
Still I cling to family,
and the continuity
of history.
These kitchen days must never end.
On this, so much
depends.
Feet
The pastoral farmer
walks over the earth
with many feet.
The arable farmer
digs in alone,
undoes
the earth, to start
again, create
a clean slate.
Feet fall like rain,
move off
again.
Eden
When the Persian Gulf was flat
and dry, that
was our summer time, our
Eden.
We could live there today,
on holiday,
in a tent, with or without
a portable TV.
I could manage with the children
even,
lying out on the grass,
fruit falling into our mouths,
we could let the gazelle
pass.
For our paleolithic family
it was a paradise,
and our numbers grew.
Our family grew like grass.
Flood
The end of the ice age
released the seas
and where we lived in paradise
is now the Persian Gulf.
We were so many when we
climbed to the highlands.
Too many to live
on fruit and fish,
wheat was our saving
and our undoing
and the undoing
of our entangled world.
We carried it in on the stalk,
not the apple but the wheat,
and learnt to till and toil.
In the sweat
of our faces
we learnt to eat bread,
and bred so well,
so well fed
we were, only bread
could keep us.
Death Star
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime
and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you
are dead.
Nabokov, Pale Fire.
The extinction of the dinosaurs
was just the last
of the mass extinctions
of the past:
five we know of, tens of millions
of years apart.
It could be a 'Death Star' orbits
with our sun,
every few billion years
pulling down
a storm of asteroids like the one
that killed the dinosaurs,
punctuating a history
with cataclysms
of extinction, ecosystems
collapsing in disarray.
The most recent mass extinction
began a few thousand years ago,
when people took in great numbers
to the sea,
colonised, farmed,
industrialised.
We are losing species at a hundred times
the natural rate, a thousand times,
and the rates of extinction
are increasing.
We have become
our own Death Star.
Dodo
Bulky and
hook-beaked
and flightless
it sat
on an egg
the size
of a pear.
Now
nobody knows
its song, though
the taste
of its meat
is on record:
sailors called
the Dodo
Walckvogel,
'disgusting bird',
the longer boiled
the tougher
and more greasy.
But easy
pickings.
In 1662
the last few
Dodos were finished
off
saving a party
of castaways.
It was the first extinction
of note,
the first noticed
as such.
Huia
Huia feathers were always rare treasures,
kept in waka huia,
treasure boxes.
An iridescent bird, blue-black like petrol,
with a greenish sheen,
rarely seen,
the huia hopped along the ground, grounded.
But sang like the tui,
like a flute.
Dressed in treasure too valued by people
for the bird to be valued as bird,
the huia is no longer heard.
When the Duke of York was presented
with a feather for his hat,
trade
in huia feathers leapt to extinction.
Now the waka huia preserve
other treasures.
This is my waka huia for the bird.
Takahe
For so long gone,
how strange
to find them again
not extinct
after all, small
families
passing on skills
for survival,
mother and father
teachers
in the intricacies
of tussock eating,
fern rooting,
and how
to hold food
with a foot.
Its beak a red
exclamation
mark, the takahe
shows how to find
the sweet core
through knowing
the tough exterior,
what to eat
through what
to leave:
watch me eat
the tussock core
so sweet
and so cold.
This is just to say,
takahe.
Moa
The first Maori waka arrived
at a pastoral kitchen,
stocked with moa
roaming on giant drumsticks,
named by the Maori settlers
'chicken', which is
to say, meat.
They moved as slowly
as a crowd, and loudly
as a feast,
which is what, after all,
they were.
Those pastoral days
when we walked
with our dinner,
two legs by two,
if we had not got along
so well, may well
have lasted
longer.
Kakapo
(for Gideon Climo, who sent the feather)
In our cabinet, folded
into a piece of paper,
sits a kakapo feather,
green-tipped
and spotted yellow,
out of context.
The kakapo are known
for their smell,
sweet and musty
as a clarinet case.
So few kakapo
survive, kept alive
on an island
stripped of pests,
yet once the kakapo
filled the bush,
their booming calls
the heartbeat
of a bird-rich island.
When a kakapo
leaves its nest
the smell of kakapo
lingers on.
And in our cabinet,
a feather, in place
of a song.
Kokako
They still go, the kokako,
in bounds and glides,
through small islands
of mainland bush,
the farmland surround
a buffer zone
from the predators we introduced.
Here in these islands they bound
and glide, and in the early dawn
rise to the highest perches,
where each bird beats its wings,
fans its tail and arches its neck,
clucks and buzzes a random note,
then launches forth into melody.
Called by the settlers 'organ bird',
the kokako calls female to male,
male to female, across the tops
of trees, in complex harmonies
sometimes picked up
by neighbouring pairs,
to sing a rondo
in the bush.
Rondo on,
kokako
Amazon islands
The new pastoralists first make
their pasture.
A tax incentive was invented
to save half the forest of Manaus:
every rancher put fifty percent
of the land in reserve.
Now there are thousands of
Amazon islands,
ten hectares here,
ten hectares there,
and every one surrounded by pasture,
and every one unravelling.
First the big predators were lost,
the jaguar lasting less than a year.
Then the tamarins ran away,
seeking lost feeding groves;
and two bearded sakis, confined
on one of the islands isolated
from their social group, pined
away and died.
The howler monkeys disappeared
from island after island,
bird density fell year after year
after year.
The few ant colonies ten hectares
sustains do not sustain
the antbirds. There are no island
antbirds now.
Then the islands began to shrink.
The trees along the edges
were scorched and died,
taking others with them
when they fell,
the gaps letting in more light,
more pastoral weeds,
more pasture.
Fifty percent diminished
to forty-five, forty, thirty,
And every island fled away
(Revelation, 16:20.)
Babakoto
Through a reserve in Madagascar swing
the Indris, the babakoto,
largest lemurs,
'little fathers',
'grandfathers', or
'ancestors'.
Here a remnant population
lives on,
here on this islanded
prison,
surrounded
by roads people could walk
in a day,
Indris never cross.
An Indri needs a network of trees,
traverses the forest in leaps and bounds,
long legged, quick footed, acrobat
without a trapeze.
Little fathers, little mothers,
little babies clinging on,
sing to us
of family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Pastoral Kitchen by Anna Jackson. Copyright © 2001 Anna Jackson. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University 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
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
The pastoral kitchen,
Rocket,
The pastoral kitchen,
Camellia,
Tahitian pohutakawa,
The peacock of motherhood,
Kitchen drain,
Watch,
The hen of tiredness,
The computer hen,
The vending machine,
The pastoral reader,
Sarah's hair,
Home time,
Pick up,
Kikuyu,
In a minute,
After the nit shampoo,
Kitchen chair,
The pastoral elephant,
Feet,
Eden,
Flood,
Death Star,
Dodo,
Huia,
Takahe,
Moa,
Kakapo,
Kokako,
Amazon islands,
Babakoto,
The song of the babakoto,
Spotted owl,
The birds of Guam,
Iriomate cat,
Butterflies,
Sea grass,
How to strand an elephand,
The pastoral elephant,
From farming,
Conclusion,
The creche turtle,
References,
By the Same Author,
Copyright,