Ivan Head: Two Poems

Song of the Actuarial Dollar Chicken

Soft generic birds

you roast well

after you have laid

cartons of eggs by number,

to recoup all costs.

Crop profit by the easy yolk

and a peck beak tax calculus

of feed pellets occurred.

Plus rent of each grass blade,

as paying guest—

multiplied by transport and slaughter cost

actuarialised on the free range conveyor belt; made

to watch the grass pass by, written off boy-chicks

chick-flicked into the macro-grind

incinerated as you go quickly in and out of existence

as that pecking order of

nugget and tenders and burger bound

to the roadhouse of life, Oh

great chieftain of the budgie race.

Ivan Head

Swan River

Recurrence.

I might yet get back and walk in the shallow

rippling wind drift water over the yellow sand,

watching sharp-eyed for fast mullet in the periphery;

anticipate the thrown kylie with allowance for the angle of refraction,

try the home-made gidgie for Cobbler,

or drag a finger through the sand to catch prawns at rest.

A boy knows that prawns rest beneath the sand by day.

It is like knowledge of the Pleiades.

Under the Narrows Bridge I stood for hours and left a line out all night

just in case something else went by;

waiting for the line to race.

Ivan Head