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Jennifer Maiden

Four early poems, 1970

These poems are from Poetry Australia No 32, 1970, ‘Preface to the Seventies’ special issue devoted to new poetry, guest-edited by John Tranter.

The Scent

I’m afraid to say I don’t want you
          The sky looks like white cologne
I grow with a sleep
That is driven down like smoke from the hills
The night dries in my throat with an old dense scent.
          Death explained to me once:
                    “I do not take the people
Who have somewhere else to go . . .”


The Wedding

With my ear on her rib to hear
the slow heartdark beat of her dream
I meet the periphery of night
                    Behind my shoulder
          Crux
And the Pointers glare encased
In the window like hot quartz in water.
                    An austere unhooded moon —
A skull, monk-sallow — burns there,
                                        Cruelly public.
And wit and flesh sleep here
Each ineffectual pulse a gibbet snap
Ringing that a future dangling moment
Will minister and marry breath to bone.


The Factory

Metal from metal, metal shapes metal
Metal eats metal, metal wastes metal
Is rebuked by metal, designed by metal
Metal rules metal. Metal pays me
One thousand three times a day I kick
Metal and metal issues forth, the same.
They say repetition enforces Truth
And ritual is Divine, and here am I
Queen of a chrome bucket
That brims with silver-blue thunder
Clinking as metal finds metal


Climbing

This shadow at my shoulder doesn’t shed
                    The substantial night.
The rope twists all breath
                    From the mountain
                         As simple as a bed
Far above life in heavy wind you might
Fall beyond the common cliff of death.
With all my side and ear adhered to stone
There seems a place like hell to draw the dead
          Down so soft a body wouldn’t wither
But hear the desperate lute lament ahead
          To lull the dog across a bloodless river

This poem is discussed in some detail in Martin Harrison’s article on this site titled ‘A Note on Modernism: for The New Australian Poetry, Part 2 of 2’.

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