John Foulcher: Two Poems

Ten Meditations on a Crowd

1
An unfussy parliament,
it makes laws
for no one and follows them to the letter.
2 It rallies around things it thinks true
but rarely thinks about truth.
3
A crowd is a sure place.
A crowd is generous with winners.
4
You are never, and always, yourself there.
5
Always unhurried,
a crowd waits for no one.

6 It’s whispered about
with a shake of the head
by its pious cousins—
audience, procession, congregation.
7
A crowd swings.
It worships the single life.
8 Its greatest hits are sirens and whistles.
9 It knows what it thinks
and it does what it’s told.
10
A crowd never apologises,
though it forgives
everything.
A crowd turns the other cheek.
                         John Foulcher

                                                          Ash

Cameron Allan (1955–2013), classically trained composer and musician,
produced the initial recordings of many Australian bands, such as Mental
as Anything and Icehouse, and composed soundtracks for several seminal
Australian films. He migrated to the USA in 1986.
Under the weather, the boat sways.
Your brother holds you for a moment,
then casts you out, all at once,
into the place where your parents
were cast, your parents who are long dead
now. You drift in the cloudlessness,
the gleam, and the sea sorts through you,
disperses you, though something
of a finer dust lifts on the swell.
Your brother has nothing to say.
He scatters into the tide the crushed things
he’s felt for you, that aren’t so easy,
and they dally there, like petals.
There’s a sober quiet, a reckoning.
He recalls how, years before, you talked
of your mentor who came to see
he would never be Stockhausen, who unfastened
his life, drink by drink, until there was only
blood and regret. Of course, he says,
I should have seen what was coming,
meaning you, Cameron, drinking your life
away, you who were not Stockhausen.
But we all know this boat, the thump
of the waves on the wood, the hollow
of the hull, the hold of the sea and the sound
of the gulls, the sounds rearranging
as if by chance, becoming this song
always in our heads, this song of a possible
self. Atonal, perfect, lingering. This lovely, frail song.
                                                     John Foulcher