Russell Erwin: Three Poems

For your daughter and her granddaughter

(Lyn and Ava)

 

On the fridge the photograph is doing its work:

you are alive, young and most dangerous of all,

assuredly beautiful. Your life, now ended, is ahead

of you, as you and a friend capture a street photographer’s attention.

 

Neither do you reach out to the future

—you are simply alive with days, potent

like bubbles waiting within the champagne—

nor can we reach back, as if to claim, to touch.

 

Both of us, either side of a border we approach,

prisoners of the light, of the merciful blessings

of ignorance: though I, who did not know you,

know what happens after the shutter clicked

 

and held you there, and truly grieve. Your friend

and you, like smug conspirators, superior

in possession of what you hold, know

as much as I, even more, flare

 

a smile at the photographer,

your heels clipping firmly down Pitt Street,

as your daughter attends to her granddaughter

in a day that’s made up of moments, any one

 

like a photograph.

Russell Erwin

 

In a dream a face

Even those not of your time or your people,

those you’ve never met, more than the day-world,

their faces are, well, in your face,

strong in bas relief, life grained

in their skins, alive like microbes which

live upon the skin, doing their necessary thing.

Maybe you had seen them once: in an advert or a crowd

and somehow absorbed a look, a manner, a tic.

And assumed you knew them, intimately,

down to habits, the smell of their kitchens,

how they got up from a chair, what their eyes see,

like this man I met on the train going to Sydney:

let’s see: white shirt, weathered, tired, a stockman going to hospital

for a cancer he said years of spraying chemical had induced;

his voice, cracked as his hands; his eyes, looking past my youth

to days I would never know, clouding,

the way a screen closes around a bed.

And with it acceptance, the stillness of hills.

 

That morning through the fog and the singing rails,

that face real as a dream. And he travelling beyond

the dream of blue days, of hard things like the shudder

of cattle in the yards, a crowbar striking rock, the eyes of a fox

in the lambing paddock. Beyond. Beyond Central.

Russell Erwin

“My dear man”
i.m. Brian Ridley

 

Dressed, finally, he comes from his room

bright as if setting out on a hike, “What’s

on the agenda today, my dear man?”,

 

his pyjamas clownish from beneath the oilcoat

I’ve loaned him.

“Fencing. Where we were yesterday.”

“Of course. Very good. Very good.”

 

“What would you like me to do?”

“Would you mind stepping the distance

from here to that tree?”

“Of course. Delighted.”

 

And the wind catches his coat as he sails out,

while with pliers I attend to the strung wire

that seems as sure as a lifeline.

 

“497 paces if I’m not mistaken,” he delivers

like a traveller returning with a souvenir, smiling,

triumphant as a fisherman with what he has caught.

 

His death lost among the waters of days

we live in, I stand in that paddock,

the grass at my knees waving. Where am I now?

 

That man, dear man, lost and smiling, striding away.

Russell Erwin