Stephen Gilfedder: Six Poems

Allie Riding Mr Gentle

My daughter on the black horse
shouting watch me against a landscape
with no distractions has me thinking
of another variation on the archetypal
parent theme: if only
your great-grandmother could see you now.
Fordie, the teenage jillaroo and cook
in Wild West Gippsland, rode

from Carrajung to Fish Creek in a day.
Caught in an electrical downpour,
sheltering in the cattlemen’s wattle and daub
with the rammed earth floor and chooks
cooped up inside against the foxes.
Mustering, snapping out the stockwhip
like a goanna’s tongue before the dismissive
stationhands, aureoled by her pride

and joy red hair, later scythed
with crutching shears when a bat
flew in her room curtained by a tarp
in the shearers’ quarters and got entangled.
Giggling If I was a horse, they’d shoot me
in the Base Hospital, not recognising me
but speaking to my presence as a boy.
She died light as the light-as-a-feather

cream puffs she’d bake in the speckled range
from dawn, clutching a lock of her mother’s hair
and worrying about her long-dead
younger brother playing piano
in the movie palaces and sly grogs
around the year Sister Olive won the Cup.
We gathered in the crematorium
among the plastic flowers in desolate Traralgon,

cement dust from the factory floating
over the car yards and supermarkets
while the ghostly footy played out
in grey and white above her empty bed.
My daughter laughing as the big black gelding,
spooked by the wind, pigroots and kicks
against the dying day, the dying season,
hair streaming like sunlight in the sky.

Stephen Gilfedder

Captive

Checked in and speechless
Before the muted motel television
We prepared to meet the living and the dead.
Spying on your childhood, we could see
Clear across the north paddock
To the sleepout with the flypaper
Tacked along the edges of the mesh.
That night old Belvoir Lad, gelded late,
Ran the irrigation channels, roaring
And pigrooting under the freeway lights.

Undressing, you told me bedtime stories
Of his shouting till your head rang
After a bad day at the races or the trots.
To me, he was always proper and remote,
Slicked back hair and a committee badge
Looped through one lapel
And a tie no matter what occasion.
We’d just got in, I lied to your mother
The next day under prints of your father
Leading winners back to scale.

Ma could look no-one in the eye
But got her own back when he had the stroke,
Keeping him penned on the back verandah
Where he moaned like a yarded steer.
At his wake you drank with his mates,
Phoning when the young buck son
Of the local MLA put the hard word on
That you pretended you were someone else
With a brood of kids and a psycho lover
Not who you were, anyone in another life.

Stephen Gilfedder

The Snowline

The dog was curled
Beside the trig point cairn,
The sheltered winter sleep
Unending, the snow
Blanket drawing back.
We wouldn’t even have looked
Unless your sunglasses had taken flight
As you swung around accusingly
When I trod on your heel, the frame
Skittering across the billiard balls
Of scree as we moonwalked
The sprung trail to Kosciusko.

At one point you left the mesh
To brush your legs through wildflowers
And stooped to pick a kangaroo paw
Pushing through the rock.
That first weekend reappeared
In digitised clarity, you dousing
The sauna coals, the one luxury
Appointment in the budget motel
That caught our eye from the highway.
You hadn’t spoken
More than a few words

When we met the Danish students
Coming down, mocking
“Big snow, huh, quite a glacier”,
Their faces painted in white
And red zinc cream flags.
Your laugh was the original
Not the recent teflon imitation,
Trilling, It’s almost summer here, you know.
At the ski-lift station there was water
Tumbling down the Funnelweb run
And you took my arm, guiding me
Around to see the frozen cluster of tourists
Under the spell of the wedgetail
Riding thermals overhead.

Stephen Gilfedder

Captive

Checked in and speechless
Before the muted motel television
We prepared to meet the living and the dead.
Spying on your childhood, we could see
Clear across the north paddock
To the sleepout with the flypaper
Tacked along the edges of the mesh.
That night old Belvoir Lad, gelded late,
Ran the irrigation channels, roaring
And pigrooting under the freeway lights.

Undressing, you told me bedtime stories
Of his shouting till your head rang
After a bad day at the races or the trots.
To me, he was always proper and remote,
Slicked back hair and a committee badge
Looped through one lapel
And a tie no matter what occasion.
We’d just got in, I lied to your mother
The next day under prints of your father
Leading winners back to scale.

Ma could look no-one in the eye
But got her own back when he had the stroke,
Keeping him penned on the back verandah
Where he moaned like a yarded steer.
At his wake you drank with his mates,
Phoning when the young buck son
Of the local MLA put the hard word on
That you pretended you were someone else
With a brood of kids and a psycho lover
Not who you were, anyone in another life.

Stephen Gilfedder

After Parthenius

In the echo chamber beneath the morning swell,
I swim the septic green of the rough sea pool,
Waves slapping over iron-grouted basalt,
Pitted and razor-sharp, dissolving
Webs of foam curving from the edge.
From the windy sheds in the Twenties
Boy Charlton smeared with muttonbird oil
Stretched laps that ended in the ozone dark,
His trainer shouting splits from a fob-sourced truth.
Defined to one-hundredths, slicked and epicene
I perform stroking and tumbling from that moment
On the blocks, diving into the image of myself.

Stephen Gilfedder

The Snowline

The dog was curled
Beside the trig point cairn,
The sheltered winter sleep
Unending, the snow
Blanket drawing back.
We wouldn’t even have looked
Unless your sunglasses had taken flight
As you swung around accusingly
When I trod on your heel, the frame
Skittering across the billiard balls
Of scree as we moonwalked
The sprung trail to Kosciusko.

At one point you left the mesh
To brush your legs through wildflowers
And stooped to pick a kangaroo paw
Pushing through the rock.
That first weekend reappeared
In digitised clarity, you dousing
The sauna coals, the one luxury
Appointment in the budget motel
That caught our eye from the highway.
You hadn’t spoken
More than a few words

When we met the Danish students
Coming down, mocking
“Big snow, huh, quite a glacier”,
Their faces painted in white
And red zinc cream flags.
Your laugh was the original
Not the recent teflon imitation,
Trilling, It’s almost summer here, you know.
At the ski-lift station there was water
Tumbling down the Funnelweb run
And you took my arm, guiding me
Around to see the frozen cluster of tourists
Under the spell of the wedgetail
Riding thermals overhead.

Stephen Gilfedder