Selected poems, p.1
Selected Poems, page 1
Philip Hodgins
New Selected Poems
About Untapped
Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.
See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.
Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.
About the Author
Philip Hodgins was born in 1959 and died in 1995 of leukaemia. His awards include the Bicentennial Poetry Book Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Award, the Grace Leven Prize and the National Book Council Poetry Prize.
He is survived by his wife Janet and their two children, Anna and Helen.
The publishers wish to thank Peter Goldsworthy, Jamie Grant, Robert Gray and Les Murray for allowing us to republish poems to or about Philip Hodgins in this book.
Thanks to Pete Sharp for the hostel story in ‘Second Thoughts on The Georgics’ and to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Blood and Bone (1986), Animal Warmth (1990), Up On All Fours (1993), Dispossessed (1994) and Things Happen (1995) published by HarperCollins Publishers. Down the Lake with Half a Chook (1988) published by ABC Enterprises.
The poem ‘The Discs’ previously appeared in Animal Warmth with the title ‘A Prayer’.
Contents
From Blood and Bone
Platform Verse
Room 1 Ward 10 West 12/11/83
Room 3 Ward 10 West 17/11/83
Room 1 Ward 10 West 23/11/83
A Palinode
Leaving Hospital
Catharsis
Kite
The Dam
The Wait
The Universal Pig
Country Football
Making Hay
Question Time
Insomnia
Self-pity
The Cause of Death
The Barbecue
A Difficult Calf
The Haystack
The Needle
The Change
The Pressure
Death Who
The Birds
Spleen
Walking Through the Crop
Planting Them
A Bit of Bitterness
Ich Bin Allein
The Guest
Dead Calf
Trip Cancelled
Apologies
The Shoot
From County Down
Resurrection
An Education
Hotel Minerva
Sant’Ivo della Sapienza
Radio Thanatos
Bad News
From Down the Lake with Half a Chook
Death After Life
The Drip
The Secret
Leeches
The Effect
The Deadline
Pudge
The Cow
Strathbogie Ranges 1965
A Farm in the High Country
The Devil’s Work
Sludge
The Drop Kick
Dirt Roads
The Drum Net
Chopped Prose with Pigs
The Noise
Shooting the Dogs
Going Back for a Look
The Past
From Animal Warmth
Pregnant Cow
Milk
The Bull
Standard Hay Bales
A Farm in New York State
The Ibises
The Big Goanna
The Cattle Show
Second Thoughts on The GeorgiCs
In an American Wood
Superphosphate
Five Thousand Acre Paddock
The Map
The Dry
Shotgun Distinction
Gestalt Test
The Discs
Pastoral Feature Film
From Up On All Fours
The End of the Season
The Scarifier
A Note from Mindi Station
After the Shearing
Milk Cream Butter
The Tail Paddock
The Rock Paddocks
Rural Affairs
A Half-remembered Visit
J.H.W. Mules
The Hoop Snake
European Carp
The Rabbit Trap
After a Dry Stretch
Driving Through the Mallee
Erosion and Salinity
Three Pig Diseases
The Farmer
At the Sheep-parasite Field Day
The Verandah
Sport
The Practice Nets
So-and-so’s Famous Poem
Getting Through a Strained Fence
The Calling of Saint Matthew
Carracci’s Self-portrait
The Puddle
Saint Francis and the Angels
The New Floor
Little Elegies
The Garden
The Prey
Leaving
A Memorial Service
The Pier
From Things Happen
A Jillaroo
The Meaning
Bucolica
The Land Itself
A House in the Country
A Decaying Form
The Drinkers
Midday Horizon
The Snake in the Department Store
Woman with an Axe
The Exploding Snake
Nocturnal
Two Dogs
Those Tabbies
The Creek
The Incident Room
Her First Poem
Blood Connexions
Prognosis
Haematopoietics
The Sick Poem
The Last Few Days and Nights
Home is Where the Hurt Is
Cytotoxic Rigor
More Light, More Light
Wordy Wordy Numb Numb
The Precise Moment
Melbourne Heatwave
Kitchen
In Memoriam
Eye of the Needle
The Invisible
Philip Hodgins (1959–1995)
Blue Roan
For la famiglia:
Janet, Anna, Helen, Hattie, Margie, Rob, Stefano, Donata, Hartley, Jennie, Arthur, Dugald, Roddis, Liz, and the Port Phillip Gentleman
From Blood and Bone
Platform Verse
a man stands single
on a railway station platform
alone with the smell of his own body:
the sun is low
his shadow is bigger than he
the wind interferes with him:
a train comes
its shadow blocks out the shadow of the man
its smell blocks out the smell
of his socks and armpits:
the train catches its breath and creaks
and rolls right out of town
Room 1 Ward 10 West 12/11/83
Today they said there was no cure,
that all this stuff could do no good.
They hadn’t spelled it out before,
and only now I understood
what one uncommon word had done
to human gestures never made.
Tonight the dying has begun.
There is no cure for blood gone bad.
Those friends who’ve seen me in this room
in time will see me to the earth
and stand around in groups and say
expected things about this death.
But will they think I chose to play
my most important piece too soon?
Room 3 Ward 10 West 17/11/83
The sun begins
beyond the not-forgotten farm.
Two hours of work
before high school I kawasaki dogless away from sleep
to end cowsleep in a glazed paddock.
Although obscured by gumtrees thronged along the creek,
I see the light is badly bruised and in one spot
it even bleeds.
An ibis crosses my ken
old-fashioned as a pterodactyl.
Water h ens duck into the otherworld rushes.
Dawn air reddens my don’t-leave-me grip and freezes
my face on fire while I pogo tufts and ruts,
buzzingly sorting out stones.
Arrival has no effect.
They remain levant and couchant in join-the-dots
dispersal. I go to the nearest sleeper,
a honey jersey, and beat her drum.
She collapses up and awake. I go further
into the paddock and forget about cows
finding instead a ghostly breakfast tableau.
Beautifully clean mushrooms
made gregarious by night
hold white above the staining green.
Each group a reject dinner set, some chipped,
some the wrong size.
I take the best,
lifting them slowly as a saucer of milk,
and feed them to my duckbilled cap
remembering their power.
(Once, after rain, I found one
punching through a disused tennis court
with a shard of the old asphalt poised on top.)
Ignoring not-there-yesterday
golden gobstoppers and Pine Gap puffballs, I come back
over simple speed traps,
primal screaming at cows.
Not listening, udders up, they funnel
into the lane,
some syringing shaky milk-graphs onto the dust.
Tails lazily trying to be everywhere
herald the beginning of flies.
The unfinished tapestry moves by habit in easy,
muffled commotion to a fixed finishing order
and nagging relief.
I follow them with my gift.
Room 1 Ward 10 West 23/11/83
Wordless afternoon
before my friends
for all their reasons
look in on me
They have time
to choose the words
they would
like me to hear
I am attached
to a dark
bag of blood
leaking near me
I have time
to choose the words
I am
likely to need
At twenty-four
there are many words
and this one
death
A Palinode
My second childhood has begun
but the rhythms and the rhymes aren’t quite right.
The way my cells increase
is not unlike the vague, unbitten child
reaching up to childhood’s end.
But with one difference.
My half a bucketful of blood
is filled with rumours of an early death
and I am alone in a room
full of dying flowers.
I think it is the body’s palinode
and as far as I can see there is no God.
Leaving Hospital
There was no joy in leaving. Nothing was resolved.
Blood and bone were shot and death had shown
a way with words beyond the usual sophistry.
Wounded by prognosis I had brought people together
and encouraged conversation. It didn’t help.
The right debates were held alone each night
after the chatter of the last drug trolley down
the polished corridor. It was impossible to match
death’s vocabulary. I gave up and got ready to go.
No amount of speechmaking could reassemble
those disparate friends or justify all that fuss.
On the steps I felt the hospital’s immensity
behind me. I thought of how this blood, this
volition would bring me back here to die
in stages of bitterness and regret. I turned around.
The doors are open.
Catharsis
Beyond incorrigible death, childhood’s small killings
are still there blinking up at me as I hoisted the bale
of hay. All a tabby mother’s love and cunning were
undone by the necessity of feeding out. I counted seven.
Their softness began to stir as I took them away
from the haystack’s labyrinth. They caught on my jumper
like roses. Behind the machinery shed I plunged
their new warmth into a bucket and watched tiny bubbles
escape from the paralysed struggle. Two minutes expired.
They came out cold and bony. I put them in a sack
and threw it in the dam and watched it sink.
Today it floated to the surface.
Kite
I am plugged into the sky.
It is not pleased. A high, long,
windy sound coming down sharp string tells me
I am touching a nerve
on a loose connexion. I have to
readjust each time it hurts.
And though I have easily mesmerized
the sheep, the kite has done the same
to me. It pesters the sun like an insect
at a light. X-rays reveal two crossed bones.
A shadow swims around me in the flowing grass.
Mendicity has stiffened my arms and neck.
The kite is haggling over length. Its caprice has
burnt lines across my hands. I wait
for another tense struggle.
But not for long. The line is dead.
The kite has lost its nerve. A red rag
is kicking in the grass and I have won
a sudden disappointing victory.
The Dam
The dam at the end of the deep green field
is a metre of brown wrapping paper
covering the clay that hasn’t congealed.
In the days before the excavator
two men with shovels dug it in a week.
When I was young I nearly drove the tractor
in. A load of fodder held us back.
In summer it’s popular with the herd
who muck it up by floating green cow pats
and come out caked, with leeches on their teats.
In winter it’s the spot for shooting birds.
Two ibises stand on the rim like taps.
The Wait
You write of what you know.
Waiting for test results.
It could go either way.
The room is filled with people
waiting for test results.
Somewhere else
the quality of light is different.
Late afternoon. Little men
playing cricket in football shorts.
Bodies glowing brown
like the dirt pitch. And miles away,
on the treeline, hundreds of cockatoos
breaking up the light.
That is nearly twenty years ago.
Your childhood.
It could be this time
or another.
Either way you write of death.
Your death.
It will be horrible. I know.
The Universal Pig
Some slow low shape slinks pink out of the blue.
Lazy but cunning it comes round the bend.
You think you see the pig before you do.
Something puts the wind up the kangaroo
Who bounds away to where the fences end.
Some slow low shape slinks pink out of the blue.
The dogs are raising hell at something new.
It will be more than they can comprehend.
You think you see the pig before you do.
Roosters are sounding cock-a-doodle-doo
As if the farmer’s knife had been sharpened.
Some slow low shape slinks pink out of the blue.
In the dairy the cows are nervous too.
No gentle words can make the milk descend.
You think you see the pig before you do.
And in their pen the restless pigs look through
The rails for the arrival of their friend.
Some slow low shape slinks pink out of the blue.
Do you think you see the pig before you?
