Mark Tredinnick
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In recent years, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). He has taught landscape writing, creative non-fiction and poetry at centres in the USA and at The University of Sydney. Photographer :Tony Sernack |
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Urban Eclogues I Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping love's abstract particulars. Football plays on the big screen; I listen like a thief in case the women know the score. But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child. II Witness is a solitary game. There isn't a thing I have left to say but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl, empty and unable to stop. You're in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen. The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down. III The world was always someone else's oyster, a metaphor I never could prise open. All I'm good for tonight is to let the night pass, while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully like a trout on God's line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they'll keep. Two Hens Make prayer at the concrete trough beneath the dripping tap. Flush now with summer the water poplars graze a slow benediction over the birds, and a miser's rain falls through the morning. From my desk I look out on this epitome of good fortune and pray for more rain. The weather has turned. It will do that if you wait. The wind is in the south and the leaves of the poplars shiver silver as though something that was wounded is now healed. These past days have tried and found me wanting, and I have almost failed, but here I am, still who I always was, only more so. The days you love are not the days that prove you. Winter is my weather; I grow by waiting. And there is no end of the dying one did not know one had yet to do to one's self. But you've had days like these. I envy the hens the steady circle of their days, but this is not how mine go; I am strung from stars that once were gods and can't seem to forget. Plenty Dandelions break out like lies in the grass. There's an election in the wind and promises on the table beneath the poplars and even the weeds look good in the spring. But not far west crops fail in their red fields and rivers wither into memory. The future fails and the economy blooms its profuse abstractions. What will the children eat when the wheat no longer rises? And You One child learned to walk the day another learned to drive and in between sixteen years ran before they could crawl me any closer to who I'm meant to be by now. November's fallen back into winter. All day long on the roof the rain writes the only script there'll ever be for any of this. God delivers when you stop praying. The music starts when you stop playing so hard and listen. Some good came along today when I was busy hoping for nothing, sweeping the cowshed instead and putting things off. Want only the rain to fall and your children to find out for themselves. Oh, it's way too late now to hope to say anything new. All the music and all the meaning there ever were have been here all along, and you may catch some – but you mustn't try too hard – between your child's first steps, between downpours, between the sweeping judgments of the broom. The way Nan walks the lane morning and evening behind her dog, each step sounding one year of the ninety she has seen; the way the black ducks land like tardy extras on the rainy grass at dusk – enactments that say something I'd like my life to say. Something the weather says, my children say, and you. |
