2007 Porter Prize Shortlist

Full-Bucket Moonby Ross Clark for Ted Kooser Dawn and dusk I milkmy herd of nine cowsby hand, the best part ofan hour and a half takensquirting warm milkinto the bucket straddledbetween my knees, whileeach beast chews grassand ignores my husbandry, though she cannot survivewithout it. Sometimes I restmy brow on the warmthof a side, a gurgling drum;most times I croon each oneher own song, her colouringand temperament, as shelets the milk down that isher task, and thus mine. One shows a starry blazeon her forehead, and I singof the sky for her; the twinshear my long tale of one pastor another; another pair,calved the same morning,hear my droll tale of woe,its corollaries and ironies;another, my rhythmic tale. And my favourites, the threequietest, hear my songs ofgod in a stall like theirs, andthe bellow of the godlike bullthey only sniff from my acres,and sunny grassy songs of joy.They come to me always behindUrania, then Clio or Calliope,Thalia or Melpomene, then cantering Terpsichore; at lastPolyhymnia or Euterpe orErato, the nine offspring ofmemory’s lord to my tender-ing, stripping hands, betweenmy knees the gibbous bucketwaxing to full-moon, till Itip it into the swirling sky-vat,and we must start again, again. The Fledglingsby Robert Adamson They came ashore, human dregs from the ferry,some of the men hauling cages on long poles.The imprisoned calls of birds caught in the wakesof air at the back of the bird smugglers’ heads. Then they moved along the avenue and passedmy window. I sat in the workshopcutting patches of cloth that no longer heldthe wind – to be used as flags on fishing boats – They came in each afternoon, trudgedover the cobblestones, their heels clickingas the first koels of summer made their piercing calls.Night held the promise of white asparagus on the shore, iron-rich seaweed at the mouthof the bay. On dark nights I longed to converseabout the brain fever birds – there was no interestuntil you came, with your ear for the right nuance as it vibrated acrossthe acoustic threads of our talk. These words seekthe delicate vessel once called the soul,so take care my love or they may stitch one – flag-like to the back of your head. These birdsso highly audible by day, are rarely seen – who bearswitness to their dark migrations? They arrive in timefor spring, constantly raiding the nests of others. When the fever birds perch, they becomeflowering branches in jacarandas – here they singtwo notes and lay soft eggs deep within our thoughts –where they fledge as a longing for flight. The Fencer and His Mateby Kathryn Lomer His chainsaw wakes us every morning – reveille: the first post –it bites into quiet and birdsong. The fencer’s back,his wild vibrating instrument in a maestro’s hands; he cut the iron-bark himself in the next valley; now he saws it to the heart,x-ray vision finding six fence posts inside each log the way Michelangelo sawhis prisoners. Also freed is a totem pole of red and resin. The sculptor wants to fly the heartwood home, show it at a European gallery with other sculpturesin a hemisphere where ironbark is exotic. Found art. He wonders could he postit, or take it on the plane. He has seen the necessary cut away; once backhe will teach others to look differently at what remains. The fencer’s ironcrowbar bangs each strainer into its final resting place, his heartalso under strain. His shouts are loud, rhythmic, like those of ardent love-making, the saw and its easy mechanical art now abandoned alongside his blue wheelbarrow. I also sawhis blue camping chair and blue esky arranged like a still life, a sculpture,like large scale trinkets in the satin bowerbird’s bower. This is the postfrom which he surveys his craft: he sits and runs his eye along the lines, turns his backthen spins as if to catch the fence out. His strength is honed to ironbut the lines and patterns of this work he knows by heart; it’s work he’s taken on since his father died on the Diamond Rio. It’s the heartof the matter, because of when he was a lad and what he saw.The big truck gleams blue and silver down in the bush and its sculptedchrome is polished with love. A loose postcaused his father’s fall between truck and load, breaking his back.The fencer has no need of pencilled marks on the iron- bark: the pattern is carried in his head like the spider with its web, like his irondetermination to buy back the truck, to go on working in this heart-land of his childhood, of his father’s. The lyrebird’s taken up the fencer’s grunt, the noisy saw,and will continue for weeks after this fence is finished. The bird sculptssound with his show-off syrinx and his dance upon a hidden lookout poston the ridge. Visitors will wonder if the fencer’s back again. His job is done, surely. But he will always be backfor others. Ten years he gives the fence: the wood’s like ironbut the six wire-strand holes he drills through each post’s heartare a help to grassfires, and can let the barbed wire rust like a sawleft out in rain. He’ll return, in his short shorts and singlet, sculptedmuscles rippling and sliding under blue-tattooed skin as he hefts each post in place. Among the tattoos is a fencepost; serpent and Love Vine entwine it on shaved skull, his back.People fear the iron in the fencer, and his tattoos, but there is also a big heartjust below his shoulder blade. I saw it. I saw his fence. I saw his sculpture. Iron-bark shavings curl on red earth like scented locks of Pre-Raphaelite hair; straightwires through each fencepost a hexagram of pride. At twelve dollars a metre enough now earnedfor a good weekend. The fencer and his mate escape to a woodchop carnival. An axeto them is aesthetic in the extreme. They feel its weight in their palms like a woman’s breast: truethey might call it, or keen. Their own axe never out of sight. He even sleepswith his, says the fencer. It’s only new, says the mate, and I keep the cover on. I’ve heard he’s newbut a natural, six wins under his belt since Christmas, a stroke so straightand sure it takes away the crowd’s breath. It’s quick this sport, like a very fast orgasm, earnedby readiness, as well as work. And there’s no denying the pleasure: swing of the axe,roar of the crowd, atmosphere, booze. They joke about drug tests. And is it trueabout the women? It’s hard on the missus, they say. Wives sleep alone at home when the men travel; they are woodchop widows. We don’t sleeparound, but, the fencer says. They shake their heads, the idea of newloves slowly circling. Got to keep your strength up, stay straight,says the mate. They’re serious, these two. I’ve seen the fencer down tools for a hard-earnedbreak and, instead of sitting on the blue chair, uncover his axeand split a log in seconds. What they say about axe blows ringing is true. Out over the Shoalhaven and up to the ridge each trueblow rings like a birdcall, one among many, and the lyrebird learns it in his sleep.Like the bird, these men are alert to making newtheir repertoire. They take up the double saw, recognising trust between them, straighttalk and determination, the pairing of bodies. They’ve already earneda reputation on the carnival circuit. The double saw has nothing on the axe, no beauty; it’s harder to love. The partner replaces the axein this double act; it’s the person you put your faith in, prime. Trueblue, they would say. And they enact these movements in their sleep:the look, the simultaneous start, the give and take, something newlearned between them at each comp. Three and a half hours’ drive to Sydney straight,chop all day, then turn around and drive home, talk all the way. The prize earnedis nothing to the sense of satisfaction, elation; they show no emotion though it’s earned. No show ponies here, says their coach. It’s like a good axe to an axe-man, a feeling to be weighed, enjoyed in private, something true,like finishing a fence. It’s technique, not strength; even little blokes can do it. Sleepmight bring dreams of fortune, fame; top axemen earn half a million a year. A newute is all they’d like, to bring down their practice logs to the troughs, to keep them straight and moist and ready. To tell it straight, what they earnis each other’s love, that feeling like an axe, something fine and true,like a sound sleep, two lives made new. The Red Seaby Stephen Edgar Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,The water swells against the sand,Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,In which clear surface, just a little wayFrom shore, some four or five petite yachts passWith languid ease, apparently unmanned,Adrift along the day, Imagining a breeze to fanTheir motion, though there’s none. SiobhanReaches a giant hand down from the skyAnd nudges with insouciant élanThe nearest hull, her bended waist mast-high.That hand is just as magically withdrawn.So moves the catamaran. And through the Lilliputian fleetShe, Beatrice and GabrielleWade in the shallows, knee-deep, spaceman-slow,To fashion their manoeuvres and competeAmong the stationed hours to and fro,While watching through the viscid slide and swellOf water their white feet, Made curiously whiter byThat cool light-bending element.Doubled by shadows on the sand they glimpsePipefish and darting fingerlings they tryImpossibly to grab, translucent shrimpsAmong the lace weed, seahorses intentTo flee the peopled sky.Hard to conceive that they should bePrecisely who they are and here,Lost in the idle luxury of play.And hard to credit that the self-same seaThat joins them in their idleness today,Careless of latitude and hemisphere,Blind with ubiquity, Churns elsewhere with a white uproar,Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees,Or sucks among the scum and floating drumsOf some forgotten outpost founded forThe advent of an age that never comes,Or bobs the remnants of atrocitiesLimply against the shore. What luck they have. And what good senseTo leave the water with their toysWhen called, before their fortunes are deranged.And still the day hangs in its late suspenseFor hours without them, virtually unchanged,Until the bay’s impregnable turquoiseRelaxes its defence And sunset’s dye begins to spreadIn flood across it to the sandThey stood on, as though, hoping to disownThe blood of all the innocents he’d shed,Macbeth incarnate or his grisly cloneHad stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand,Making the green one red. Guidance and Knowledgeby Anthony Lawrence A pair of spur-wing plovers throw downtheir thin, discordant musicthen lift away, all masks and trailing legsas if relieved of surplus weight.What I hear is the memory of the sounds they make –the aural and the visualhave the stem of a cell deep in recognition.Perhaps the farmer, for whom time movesin ever-decreasing circles,heard them and stepped down from his tractorinto that open-air theatreto stand astride dark furrows –old crow-scarer, listening, in his angular fashion,to whatever a call-bringing windcan summon or inventfrom the edge of an egg-laying season. Ornithology was one of the more enduring giftsmy father passed on to me before he passed on.He could tell a speciesthrough the viewfinder of a speeding windscreen,say its other names, and call to it,his whistle breaking open on a fence.He revealed informationthe way cloud shadow draws backthe machine-sewn covers from an open paddock,and there was always a little sunlighton his teeth when he spoke.While he would not have saidThe ghosts of those whose memorials mark where they fell asleep at the wheel are most likely to have been delighted or disturbed by the plover’s music,or Spectral flight is winter sunlight taking off,I can hear him sayingsomething like The trees the sunlight enters are the shadows that make it real. The road west out Tarraleah is always wet,and it steams where the light gets through.I break the drivewhere great silver pipes light the side of a hill.They are aortic and sub-Antarcticwhen you put your ear to them.But the scrub soon closes in,and the proper names for groundcovers,flowers and ferns are beyond me.I can’t hear or see the birds that live in there,and my father offers no assistancefrom where he might or might not be,in the disembodied stations of authorityI have named for him.The truth is I am tired of poetryand the pathology of its need to altar a scene.I don’t want a highland plateauto trade in its low slung trees and button grassfor anything like or as –no lofty scar attended by clouds and rain,no animal shapesin the contained dusk fires of the gorse.And yet I drive and change what I do not knowinto something close to understanding.There are penalties for trading in such currency,and they have been accepted and counteredwith a hard responsibility.The road goes on, double-lined or stitchedinto symbols for safe passing, and I follow it,with no field guide to what might breakfrom a cover of roadside wood.There is only this, through intermittent rainand flarings of sun, through the alphaand beta layerings of daydream,my words falling away as the words of my fatherrise over a plateau, rinsed and singular,his voice weary with knowledge and guidance,and I drive towards it.

Full-Bucket Moonby Ross Clark

From the New Issue

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The jazz singer who transformed American song by Judith Tick

God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

‘Information and transformation: The continuing expansion of AustLit’ by Maggie Nolan

Open Page with Anne Manne

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Full-Bucket Moon
by Ross Clark