Russell Erwin: Two Poems

The Fish Pond
(Visiting the Little Sisters of the Poor, Mount St Joseph, Randwick, 1960s)

There was our weatherboard church, suburban, Protestant and insignificant
and that massif of brick on brick on sandstone foundations;
the contrast between a light, flimsy, almost vaporous, among the pews
(how vulnerable, how easily ignored, among lawnmowers triumphant)
and as it was, captured there, dark honey on brown lino floors,
wide as acres. Deep as the rubbed varnish of centuries, faith-polished.
And a gleam off wood when mid-afternoon, sunlight slipped through
or lustrous, sliding around the marble columns like languor.
To enter needed girding. This was duty. Every Sunday.
Inside, the days of the week were politely but firmly immured.
And no diplomacy would achieve their release.
An ambulance siren, a screech of brakes so stark
as if silence served to teach how other the world outside was
—its windy carelessness, the random selfishness of life,
in short, its sin, beyond those penitentiary defences.
But to us this was foreign, a fortress, Roman Catholic,
implacably cold, scary with the possibility
this was how God’s promises would turn out.
Unsettling most was not the anonymity of the ever-gliding nuns,
the apartheid of their habit, the face shorn of adornment, rarefied to care:
no, worse: the statues of those in anguish, suffering forever
for the faith. St Sebastian, his arrow-pierced flesh,
at his feet dogs adoringly licking the pork-white wounds;
worst though: braving the weather, a bit like an exhibitionist,
a stoic Christ baring the garish blue and red and pumping, bleeding heart,
blood vessels like tentacles, plump with his sacrifice
while his mother, sickly-blue, looked from across the garden, helpless in her pathos.
For we children this was too much:
avoiding the following eyes, their quiet hunger,
we escaped to the tidy gardens—a green pond
with pale carp and their bloodless gaze,
listlessly in motion.
A flick and a slip, a glide,
they, unperturbed, endlessly circling their days.
                                                    Russell Erwin

              Bloodlines, Stud Breeding

He is ageless, has always been.
He is Chinese. He is Harry.
And now he is in a room with a crucifix,
and photographs of children on ponies jumping,
or in new school uniforms, taken ten,
fifteen years ago. They’d be adults now,
with children of their own. Not his blood
but they are the only blood he has.
And a photo of him as a young man.
Impossible, it must be someone else.
There was only one man for this name.
A name from the simple generation
that knew nothing but work.
There was no past. He was just there.
He had come with the property
when the place changed hands
and they kept him on.
His hands thickened into paws from milking.
He jog-trotted, was ever deferential, stammered,
was hardly ever off the place, except for church,
though cattlemen spoke to him first.

He was not of their blood
and so, he is here in this room.
Anyone else would be adrift.
The staff like him: are very fond.
He does the gardens; is loved
in that useless way old age is.
Never married. Was there ever a girl?
One he fancied but being Chinese …
He was not of their blood
and so he is in a room,
that’s quiet as a crucifix,
ponies forever lunging mid-flight,
the afternoon slumbering between meals.
                                           Russell Erwin