Russell Erwin: Sightings

Sightings: Around, About, Among

i.

Currawongs—so much this country

—that despite its yellow eye, the sense

all is judged, calculated by scales hard and undeviating,

it is the lingering, incongruous syrup of their call

early evening, among pines, out of mist

drifting up the escarpment, like a curfew,

saying the lonely sea of the dark is here,

it is now cold, and this is no place for you.

 

 

ii.

Of mist: out of the threads of it, like a tatty shuttle, back into it,

its scrawny tail trailing as if combed, a lyrebird skitters across

the road as we ascend,

back into the silence from which come

leaves of sound, voices

of worlds and words not its own.

 

 

iii.

I can only speak of it as a thing fugitive,

always spearing its bill like a missile

away from wherever I am,

a Japanese snipe, flecked

in the tones of a rice-paper screen.

 

 

iv.

My son when small, carried a stick, scything

it about and shouting loudly as he entered

a paddock tall with phalaris,

so as not to be alarmed

when quail burst, exploding

small guncrackers at his feet.

 

 

v.

A sea eagle in one long low swoop slices

the glass water of the lagoon and breaking the surface

strikes a fish and carries it with its mirror image

to a tree and beyond this morning.

 

 

vi. Mount Alexandra, Mittagong

 

Among pegs, plastic milk-tops in his grass and bracken thatch

he attends not like a fisherman but more a petitioner,

his desire beggaring him while she inspects.

What does she want? He waits.

Traffic from the town rumbles up

to us here on Mount Alexandra. Lights go on

in the street.

 

In the morning I find the pegs pearled with dew

like toys left out in the rain,

the work torn down.

 

 

vi. Little Eagle

 

That day, this autumn, ploughing for winter forage,

suddenly above me, circling, so near I could see its markings,

and unperturbed it swooped low and close to the tractor

a number of times, then satisfied, swum leisurely off to

a stand of timber nearby and I knew then that distance

which keeps all things in awe or fear.

 

 

vii.

Once, inspecting the lambing paddock strange

like a weathered root newly there, then closer,

I’d say haughty but not really, just staking its claim

with one feathered trouser, it heraldic and refusing

to be intimidated, a wedgetail on a lamb. Its eye

held me till I left the paddock. Fair exchange I thought.

 

 

ix.

Tonight, after a dry season, rain and Bogong moths are dusting

the screen, their eyes iridescent as they surface to the light.

Then there is a thwacking or a swatting, a sudden flaring of wings

the spread of them like a shirt hung out—an owl coming out

of the dark for an instant bares its barred chest, falls away,

then comes again and then again.

 

 

x.

Within view of my window a grape vine which hardly bears fruit,

when it does has berries, small, bitter and big-seeded.

In the yellowing leaves one autumn after a season

when all things had done well a ruffling unusual for

little things such as wrens. Noisy, greedy possibly,

unconcerned that there would be any danger,

as gold as Yeats’ gold enamelling a golden oriole

emerged and perched for a moment—

never seen before or since, held there among

a mosaic of those leaves and the bitter-sweet fruit

of that vine.

 

 

xi. Yellow-Rumped Thornbills

 

Not wind-blown but spread

like a net flung into it,

collapsing this midge-cloud,

like one who having forgotten

remembers, turns suddenly,

it becomes yellow florets of chirruping

and squeaks among the leptospermum

becomes one mind,

like the wind.

 

 

xii. Plumage

 

Which? The Brett Whiteley-cadmium white cockatoo,

—donned completely like an acolyte,

an ascetic’s purest sensuality;

if they were not so raucously common

the delicacy of their roseate-pink,

rising from a doona-soft grey,

these galahs wheeling against the sunset

and settling would be like calm the spirit needs

or as Gang-Gangs, their more striking cousins

in Kings’ School uniform, alert, confident,

their red bonnets defiant of a Canberra winter;

a sudden brilliance—a sacred kingfisher flashes,

too quick, all that colour, its name so apt—sacred,

like incense quickening the senses;

but most this, the finest cross hatchings of olive,

blue-black-touched, and rufous too,

all velvet to a brooch—an eye ringed

clear as honesty, sure in its name

—silver-eye.

 

 

xiii. Funereal Cockatoos

 

Rain coming! Pleased as prophets, they cry.

In sorties, like Lancaster bombers

they pass over as if in complete command

of the air then knowing my Hakeas settle there

stripping branches, you can hear them cracking nuts,

at ease like bikies who’ve taken over a pub,

as more slow beat, slow beat, slide into a feast.

 

 

xiv. The Grey Shrike-Thrush

 

Of all I want to sing

as Stewart did

of his bush robin,

of you who nest

each year in a tea chest

in my garage, whose song

is spring to me,

whose plumage, soft-grey

is such as a chorister wears,

so as not to detract from

the joy of your liquid praise

filling life after winter’s silence.

 

Russell Erwin