Russell Erwin: Two Poems

On hearing of the re-emergence of epilepsy in our family
(for Grace)

From the little I know when it comes there is obliteration.

Like the aftermath of any war, the land you were living in

will be known no more, a new one you remake. There is nothing before

its incarnation. It’s more an insurrection the body just doesn’t see

coming: I remember a student, his head banging on a concrete floor,

his schoolmates amused or frightened but paralysed as much as he

—terror the mind has been lost, we most naked then in our crippling fear.

Having it could have had you tossed

out with the curs and lepers; worst, stoned

beyond its cute, modern sense.

So, he is beyond them: nowhere.

They, at the rim, standing by,

like Saul holding the coats, Damascus up ahead.

I had known this all my boyhood: the pathway it always took

and like lightning, chose to cleave through all other matter

and strike through the life that was my mother:

the way you suddenly look up on an ordinary day

to find the wind has dropped, the air still as if

contained in a glass jar, then spookily, like the dome

aboriginal art places around a head, or the halo of a saint,

a paleness. And it intensely so. Not a light but its absence—

maybe the background field a power station seems to have, humming.

Then for a boy

the descent

as if he had been abducted and made the one to see

how a life could dissolve into something other, this woman,

his mother, now so distant and he, watching helplessly.

Her body lost all form, she’d fall, crumple like dropped clothes;

the jabber, that’s made me contemptuous since of the Pentecostalist

—her words like mantras, without salvation, in the saliva bubbling;

the head independent of the body,

so that I now think of John the Baptist on a platter;

her body thrashing like a caught shark;

the loss of dignity a woman would cringe over if she knew.

And then somehow the adult world would find us.

A bed for her. The blessings of linen. Our Polish neighbour and her love.

The softness of the dark.

The rest of the day for me, back at school,

not sure where the real world was,

like someone returning to a strangely peaceful land,

not able to speak of anything I had seen.

Russell Erwin

Hailstorm

I want to be able to tell you how I was caught in a hailstorm this afternoon,

that I saw it coming but how unusual, hail in mid June! Never heard of. Not mid-winter. Usually it’s snow.

I’m sure the sky over you can make you lift your eyes above a suburb’s roofline as you call your kids

inside and you look long enough and wish you could somehow remember, really remember, what you’ve seen

but this …

I want you to see how the clouds are bruised, darkest plum-blue in their crevasses, with ice-white flounces and meringue in billowing excess and in that ice, the pastel-wash of faintest red-purple, like the faded ink on the label of a bottle left upon a shelf.

And you to know how I was soaked through within a minute by the sago-white shot and needle-insistence

of the hail, my jeans stiff and chafing like armour, so I had to open the gate like a scarecrow,

knowing you’d say, “Oh! You are a fool!” not understanding why, and I knowing a farmer’s wife

was always going to be, for you, out of the question. Then I’d say, “I was out, on the tractor,

fetching a lambing ewe that was in a bad way” and you’d change, “Is it alright?” in a way that showed

you cared, possibly for me too.

And how the earth was pocked, as if by bullets, then spots as large and brown as pennies, as the frog-spawn melted; how puddles spiked as if grain were dancing on a drum and for a while the paddock was rough-cast with that bagged-cement look, the fences brittle with beads.

And how steam fumed around the exhaust of the tractor while the gullies and ridges steamed and

drifted the way long pennons snap and tear and keep thinning into the air that now was fresh, sharp and new-charged with oxygen and the clouds so massive the declining light tipped their lower foothills with

bronze and copper as they do the Himalayas and we wonder about the gods who live there.

I want you to know how cold it was, how cold, and that it was a joy. Which I would bring to you like I’d bring a handful of ice back to the house for you to taste and that you would taste the universe.

I want you to see this farm, this little world, entire as a photograph, a life. A poem whose air you breathe

and in the stillness the singing of birds above the trees, which only your heart will hear.

This though, I should have written two months ago, almost to the day.

Russell Erwin