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Judith Beveridge

Sixteen poems

The Caterpillars

On the headland to the lighthouse,
a brown detour of caterpillars
crimped end-to-end across the road.

Poke away the pilot and the line
would break up, rioting,
fingering for the scent.
Put him back, they’d straighten.
You could imagine them humming
their queue numbers.

I’ve only seen such blind following
in the patient, dull dole queues,
or old photos of the Doukhobors
the world’s first march of naked people.

I watched over the line for hours
warding off birds whose wings, getting close,
were like the beating of spoons
in deep bowls. I put a finger to the ground
and soft prickles pushed over,
a warm chain of hair.

This strange sect, wrapped in the sun
like their one benefit blanket
marched in brotherhood and exile.

Later, a group of boys
(their junta-minds set on torture),
picked off the leader.
Each creature contorted,
shut into its tight burr.
I could only stand like a quiet picket
and watch the rough panic.

I remember them, those caterpillars,
pacifists following their vegetable passion —
lying down in the road and dying
when they could no longer touch each other.



On an Evening in Late Summer

I want the bird with the key-maker’s drill,
the chime-maker’s hammer, the bird that sounds
as if a child with a piece of larchwood
hit icicles off a grille. And the man who comes

to sweep leaves from his gate, who feels
the shadows amass across his face the way
blowflies convene and scatter over the plums —
I want for him a sunshaft wide as a sombrero,

one he could nap under beside a stream
and a wild chyrsanthemum. I want to put
my fingertip in the eccentricities of a web
a spider has darned in the Christmas bush

and free a fly from its orbit. I want to be
taken where the sun puts the scarlet note of
poinsettias into the depth of a quince-coloured
sky, where the fringed wings of the thrips

and the ephemeral beetles of this February night
go on in the mind of a child who finds
in the honeysuckle and in the mayapple, a choir
loud enough to make her hum her desires.

I want to watch from the secularised regions
of the juniper a praying mantis step out
and tremble on anorexic legs as if it searched
for the chords of any diminishing number,

a psalmist trying to sustain a rhapsody
for Betelgeuse and the moon. What I want
is for the night to shake loose and whirr and dance
like a chanteuse of the treetops, like the bees

and the wasps drunk amongst the passion flowers
as if they were the ends of bows zipping
across strings in a concerto; then, over
the compost and the roses — in etudes about

life versus decrepitude. I want the wind
to rustle the buds of the lavender and birds
to tin-talk with the rain and the fall of summer
fruit. I want the wind to call like a Mexican

in his dreams the name esperance, esperance as
it blows across the uncut grass. And as I drag
my bench across the porch tiles this time of day,
weighty with the calls of cockatoos as it is

with the perfume of the gardenia, I want the fly
to turn the world on the turnstiles of its eyes,
I want a girl to turn plums in her hands,
each a magenta sun, and never need to wonder

how far anything is from a peer or a rival
while she hums her desires into the lobed leaves
and the scarlet bracts of the poinsettias, her finger
still sealed in the strings of an immaculate design.



To The Islands

I will use the sound of wind and the splash
    of the cormorant diving and the music
any boatman will hear in the running threads
    as they sing about leaving for the Islands.

I will use the sinker’s zinc arpeggio as it
    rolls across a wooden jetty and the sound
of crabs in the shifting gravel and the scrape
   of awls across the hulls of yachts.

I will use the wash-board chorus of the sea
    and the boats and the skifler’s skirl
of tide-steered surf taken out by the wind
    through the cliffs. Look — I don’t know

much about how to reach the Islands, only
    what I’ve heard from the boatman’s song
and from a man who walked the headland
    to find a place in the rocks free of salt

and osprey. But perhaps I can use
    the bladder-wrack and barnacle, the gull
wafting above the mussels and the bird
    diving back to the sea. Perhaps I can use

the song sponge divers sing to time each dive
    and then use their gasps as they lift
their bags onto the skiffs. Perhaps
    the seapool whispers of the sun-downers,

or the terns above the harbour are what
    the divers sing to as they hold their
breath and swim the silent minutes through
    with prayer. I will use the gull’s height

and the limpet’s splash and the wasps’ nest
    hanging like a paper lamp under the pier
and the little boat sailing out. Even the
    fisherman lugging shoals over the stones,

even the sailors shift-walking the decks,
    even the end-blown note of a shell levelled
towards the horizon. I will use the eagle’s
    flight moored in the eyes of children

and the voices of men, the ones, they say,
    who’ve made it, though perhaps the purlin
creaking on its rafter, the gull squawking
    from the jetty, the wind calling

along the moorings and the notes the divers
   hear in the quiet waters of their breathing
as the seek release through the depths
   are all I’ll know about finding the Islands.

Meanwhile, I’ll use the sound of sunlight
    filling the sponges and a diver’s saturated
breathing in the lungs of an oarsman
    rowing weightless cargo over the reefs.



The Dung Collector

Each morning she wipes the sweat that runs
from under the red dupatta veiled across
her face and lifts another load with a gasp.
Soon, she’ll sit with her stupas of dung
and hallow the flies. Soon, she’ll pray
each stack into the day’s chapatis;
each new vat of dung into a tureen of dahl
to stir above the evening smoke. And she’ll
work another hour or two raking the unbaked
yet steaming dung from the mud.
              I have seen heifers
given more freedom to wander the earth
than this woman who carries another load
to her wall then chants with the traffic.
              She could almost be any
woman humming at a task — moving a ladle
through vichyssoise in a perfumed apartment
off a sunny boulevard; watching light
slip into a room like a spoon into ingredients
for hollandaise sauce while she contemplates
the arrival of guests, the early yellowing
of the alder leaves.
              Clearly, though, this is not
about workmanship; not about having a thankful
heart in a beautiful place; not about
being a speck in the slurry of a rushing
Punjabi street, or about a woman who must
save herself by labour and prayers.
              It’s about a woman who
must live under the anus of a cow as if
it were her star, who must slap dozens of
discoloured moons onto the side of her house
for an orange sun to bake; who hears
the sighs of the world as her bracelets
slip up and down her arms like the songs
of insects in overflowing grass; about
a woman who bends to scoop dung into a dish
each morning with her arms and hands
and looks straight into my eyes.



The Dice-Player

I’ve had my nose in the ring since I was nine.
I learned those cubes fast: how to play a blind
bargain; how to empty a die from my palm
and beguile by turns loaded with prayers —
then sleight-of-hand. Ten or fifteen years
and you get wrists like a tabla-player’s, jaws

cut and edged by the knuckles and customs
of luck and deception. The fun’s in sham,
in subterfuge, in the eyes smoking out
an opponent’s call. I let my thumb stalk
each die, get to know which edge might
damage probability’s well-worn curves.

See, all dice are cut on the teeth of thugs,
liars and raconteurs. I’ve concocted calls
those dealing in risk and perfidy, bluff or
perjury, would envy. But I’ve never stolen
or coveted dice fashioned from agate
or amber, slate or jasper, or from

the perfumed peach stones of distant shores.
Some think fortunes will be won with dice
made from the regurgitated pellets of owls;
or from the guano of seabirds that ride only
the loftiest thermals. I’ve always had faith
in the anklebones of goats, in the luxated

knee-caps of mountain-loving pugs. Look,
I’ve wagered all my life on the belief that
I can dupe the stars, subtend the arcs, turn
out scrolls, louvres, pups, knacks, double
demons — well, at least give a game rhythm.
I know there’ll always be an affliction

of black spots before my eyes, that my face
has its smile stacked slightly higher on
the one side, that the odds I’m not a swindler
are never square. But Sir, when some rough
justice gets me back again to the floor,
then watch me throw fate a weighted side.



The Domesticity of Giraffes

She languorously swings her tongue
like a black leather strap as she chews
and endlessly licks the wire for salt
blown in from the harbour.
Bruised-apple eyed she ruminates
towards the tall buildings
she mistakes for a herd:
her gaze has the loneliness of smoke.

I think of her graceful on her plain —
one long-legged mile after another.
I see her head framed in a leafy bonnet
of balloon-bobbing in trees.
Her hide’s a paved garden of orange
against wild bush. In the distance, running,
she could be a big slim bird just before flight.

Here, a wire-cripple —
legs stark as telegraph poles
miles from anywhere.
She circles the pen, licks the wire,
mimics a gum-chewing audience
in the stained underwear of her hide.
This shy Miss Marigold rolls out her tongue

like the neck of a dying bird.
I offer her the fresh salt of my hand
and her tongue rolls over it
in sensual agony, as it must
over the wire, hour after bitter hour.
Now, the bull indolently
lets down his penis like a pink gladiolus
drenching the concrete.

She thrusts her tongue under his rich stream
to get moisture for her thousandth chew.



Girl Swinging

A swing grinds on its chains.
A child sits pushing.
There’s no eucalyptus,
atlas pine, or flowering ash,

no other child is calling
from the tender modulations of leaves:
just each note
of her ringing heart,
the feeling of being pushed
into the air.

I often think about
the long process that loves
the sound we make.
It swings us until
we’ve got it by heart:
the music we are.
But sometimes I sense

the child’s life
twisted away from its
own mystery: the voice
struck, held back.

I long to be a symphony
levitated by grace-notes.

Quietly, I wait
listening to myself
when, suddenly innocent of misery —
that feeling comes
of being lifted into the air:

that clear singing
above bare stones, above
the common rattle
of chains.



When will the Kennelman Come

When will the kennelman come?
The dogs are barking and the moon is gone.
The owls are out in the eyes
of the Doberman Pinscher hunting low.

When will the kennelman come?
Deep in the forest the kittens are lost.
The dogs are gnawing the soundless bone
and stars glow in a measureless paddock.

When will the kennelman come?
The bowls are empty and the barn’s gone black
and the eyes of the dogs are scratching
the scents from the winter yard.

When will the kennelman come?
The kennelmaid has fallen over
the whimpering hound by the door.
The dogs are snapping at flies,

the coonhounds are running the rivers
and lamplight is scourging the lake,
the whelps are baying like swans
nailed by their wings to the gate.

If only the kennelman would come
out of the long grass, out of the orchard
where the fruit’s gone bad, out of
the shadows of the prowler’s face.

When will the kennelman come?
And which one of you, my dogs, should I watch —
which for the scent of his kill
and which for his pitying whistle?



Man Washing on a Railway Platform Outside Delhi

It’s the way he stands
nearly naked in the winter sun
turning on and off the railway
station tap. I have seen people
look less reverent tuning Mozart.
I have seen hands give coins
to beggars appear nonchalant
compared to the way his hands
give this water to his body.
Don’t tell me this is a man
released for a moment
out of poverty, a man who wants
the penance of each cold drop;           
a man who wants the smell
of his neighbours to vanish
from his skin, who wants to taste
what is beyond the scum
and effluent of the village ditch.
And don’t tell me each drop
he takes to glisten his body
will never be neutral, though
he holds each clear spill
with equality. It isn’t just
the water. It’s the way his hands
take the water from the tap
to his body. It’s the way
he attends each pore. It’s the way
he decants the water back
and forth as if receiving
instruction for the repetition
of the names of God. And it’s
the way he knows his poverty
without privacy — and the way,
though the water is free,
he takes careful litres.



The Saffron Picker

          It is necessary to pick 150,000 crocuses
          in order to produce one kilogram of saffron.

Soon, she’ll crouch again above each crocus,
feel how the scales set by fate, by misfortune
are an awesome tonnage: a weight opposing

time. Soon, the sun will transpose its shadows
onto the faces of her children. She knows
equations: how many stigmas balance each

day with the next; how many days divvy up
the one meal; how many rounds of a lustrous
table the sun must go before enough yellow

makes a spoonful heavy. She spreads a cloth,
calls to the competing zeroes of her children’s
mouths. An apronful becomes her standard —

and those purple fields of unfair equivalence.
Always that weight in her apron: the indivisible
hunger that never has the levity of flowers.



The Lake

At dusk she walks to the lake. On shore
a few egrets are pinpointing themselves
in the mud. Swallows gather the insect-lint

off the velvet reed-heads and fly up through
the drapery of willows. It is still hot.
Those clouds look like drawn-out lengths

of wool untwilled by clippers. The egrets
are poised now — moons just off the wane —
and she thinks, too, how their necks are

curved like fingernails held out for manicure.
She walks the track that’s a draft of the lake
and gazes at where light nurses the wounded

capillaries of a scribbly gum. A heron on one leg
has the settled look of a compass, though soon,
in flight, it will have the gracility of silk
           
when it’s wound away. She has always loved
the walks here, the egrets stepping from
the lute-music of their composure, the mallards

shaking their tails into the chiffon wakes,
the herons fletching their beaks with moths
or grasshoppers, the ibis scything the rushes

or poking at their ash-soft tail feathers.
Soon the pelicans will sail in, fill and filter
the pink. Far off, she can see where tannin

has seeped from the melaleucas, a burgundy
stain slow as her days spent amongst tiles and
formica. She’s glad now she’s watching water

shift into the orange-tipped branches of a
she-oak, a wren flick its notes towards the wand
of another’s twitching tail. There’s an oriole

trilling at the sun, a coveted berry, a few
cicadas still rattling their castanets. She loves
those casuarinas, far off, combed and groomed,

trailing their branches: a troupe of orang-utans
with all that loping, russet hair; and when
the wind gets into them, there’s a sound as if

seeds were being sorted, or feet shuffled amongst
the quiet gusts of maracas. Soon the lights on
the opposite shore will come on like little

electric fig seeds and she will walk back
listening to frogs croak in the rushes, the bush
fill with the slow cisterns of crickets, her head

with the quiet amplitude of — Keats perhaps,
or a breeze consigning ripples to the bank;
the sun, an emblazoned lifebuoy, still afloat.



Bahadour

The sun stamps his shadow on the wall
and he’s left one wheel of his bicycle
spinning. It is dusk, there are a few minutes

before he must pedal his wares through
the streets again. But now, nothing
is more important than his kite working

its way into the wobbly winter sky.
For the time he can live at the summit
of his head without a ticket, he is following

the kite through pastures of snow where
his father calls into the mountains for him,
where his mother weeps his farewell into

the carriages of a five-day train. You can
see so many boys out on the rooftops this
time of day, surrendering diamonds to the

thin blue air, putting their arms up, neither
in answer nor apprehension, but because
the day tenders them a coupon of release.

He does not think about the failing light,
nor of how his legs must mint so many steel
suns from a bicycle’s wheel each day,

nor of how his life must drop like a token
into its appropriate slot; not even
of constructing whatever angles would break

the deal that transacted away his childhood —
nor of taking some fairness back
to Nepal, but only of how he can find

purchase on whatever minutes of dusk are left
to raise a diamond, to claim some share
of hope, some acre of sky within a hard-fisted

budget; and of how happy he is, yielding,
his arms up, equivalent now only to himself,
a last spoke in the denominations of light.



Grass

All morning reed-cutters swing
their arms near the river.

All morning I hear them balancing
among the perfection of those arcs.

A cold circle of sound picks up
the moon in the glint of each blade.

Each stroke comes in on the surest
wave; each blade reaches my heart

in regular rhythm. Who are these
men scything grass? All day, the moon

unknown to itself, floats like a bird;
and there’s a sound too in the wind

of many imponderable things.
This river goes on. And all day,

I’ve listened, held between earth
and sky, wishing I too could take

my work into the cold; wishing
I too could find precision among

unweighable songs; here where
the river curves, here where the moon

dies, here where the wind eddies —
and here, where the men poise —

then scythe their absolute measures.



The River

Today herons don’t fly but stalk with jurisprudence;
and there’s a line of retreating water where they put

their beak- and step-marks. I watch them go forward,
then reconfigure each step. Here, no cadence lifts

them through a tightening sky; but they seem to
watch the scansion lines fish make when they mouth

the surface. Today, no bird need transpose its steps
into an over-solicitous reach, or find a current through

their feet. It is enough to watch a river widen with
loose and silent evidence of a strenuous life beneath.



The Sea

          The sea should have settled him
                    — Derek Walcott

By now the sea should have calmed me, a woman
who pulls the curtains across so the distance thins
into sea-spray and mist, so that the moon grazing

across my view can, like a cowrie, vanish under
a quick surge. Only the wind calms me, what
the clouds claim and reclaim gusting across my

window where no gull fixes its cry and no sun
razes the grey light of the sea. There are still
the same cursory mornings, the same horizons

where each day the sea and sky converge until
the air becomes intangible, a white space where
my nerves can gather for their repose behind

my latched doors, my shut eyes. Sails meet
then part in the wind like salted pages; curtains
blow in as high as breakers when there are

no shallows to offer for what I know of the
sea creeping over the shoals; part of the soul
burrowing into a hole, starved and ready to die.



Capricorn

Through the end of an old Coke bottle he tracks
    the flight of a petrel, until it is tattered by
sea-wind and another blurred mintage of the sun.
   Along the pier, he hears the men with their
reels, with their currency of damp sand. His rod
   quivers — weighted not with fish, but with

the names of storms: Harmattan, Vendavales —
    turbid winds running the vanguard of
dangerous straits. He kicks at a pile of fishscales:
    galleon ballast, a hoard of ducats spilled
from an old Dutch dogger. The men will soon
    chase him off, this raucous hero plundering

brigs. But now the bottle is a horn into which
    he pours so much breath, and the air has
a tone borrowed from a blowhole, from wind
   singing through a bridge’s rusting struts.
A crab sifts sandgrains for its hole; its claw,
    an old sea-brigand’s hook, is paying out

doubloons and threats. Ah, but you know — if
    you were to take this child’s hand, if you
were to keep his gaze in yours and wait for
   each circulation of his breath; if you were
to watch the pirated scenes of daydreams
   play out through a windfall of glass — then

you’d see the copper-coloured sun. You’d walk
    this beach a long time with your thoughts
trading in weather and wind, the petrels keeping
    pace with the rackish lines of dreams
sailing in with the clinker-built storms. The past
    and the present would not be depressions
           
facing each other, nor would there be grains
   of sand abrading your fate... On the shore,
a gull, dead from the night’s storm. With his rod,
  the boy flings it up, the glove of a dueller
he’s just Zorroed with his sword... No, the world
    would not be a wave repeating its collapse,

but whatever mintage of story a boy can find
   among fishscales, sand, and the common
issuance of wind; a boy who knows nothing
   of the linkages between storms; nor of
the men, yet, who log weather’s quick decay
   onto gauges of abuse; who knows nothing
about paying for that old voyage toward death.

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