though she cannot survive
without it. Sometimes I rest
my brow on the warmth
of a side, a gurgling drum;
most times I croon each one
her own song, her colouring
and temperament, as she
lets the milk down that is
her task, and thus mine.

One shows a starry blaze
on her forehead, and I sing
of the sky for her; the twins
hear my long tale of one past
or another; another pair,
calved the same morning,
hear my droll tale of woe,
its corollaries and ironies;
another, my rhythmic tale.

And my favourites, the three
quietest, hear my songs of
god in a stall like theirs, and
the bellow of the godlike bull
they only sniff from my acres,
and sunny grassy songs of joy.
They come to me always behind
Urania, then Clio or Calliope,
Thalia or Melpomene, then

cantering Terpsichore; at last
Polyhymnia or Euterpe or
Erato, the nine offspring of
memory’s lord to my tender-
ing, stripping hands, between
my knees the gibbous bucket
waxing to full-moon, till I
tip it into the swirling sky-vat,
and we must start again, again.

The Fledglings
by Robert Adamson

They came ashore, human dregs from the ferry,
some of the men hauling cages on long poles.
The imprisoned calls of birds caught in the wakes
of air at the back of the bird smugglers’ heads.

Then they moved along the avenue and passed
my window. I sat in the workshop
cutting patches of cloth that no longer held
the wind – to be used as flags on fishing boats –

They came in each afternoon, trudged
over the cobblestones, their heels clicking
as the first koels of summer made their piercing calls.
Night held the promise of white asparagus

on the shore, iron-rich seaweed at the mouth
of the bay. On dark nights I longed to converse
about the brain fever birds – there was no interest
until you came, with your ear for

the right nuance as it vibrated across
the acoustic threads of our talk. These words seek
the delicate vessel once called the soul,
so take care my love or they may stitch one – flag-like

to the back of your head. These birds
so highly audible by day, are rarely seen – who bears
witness to their dark migrations? They arrive in time
for spring, constantly raiding the nests of others.

When the fever birds perch, they become
flowering branches in jacarandas – here they sing
two notes and lay soft eggs deep within our thoughts –
where they fledge as a longing for flight.

The Fencer and His Mate
by Kathryn Lomer

His chainsaw wakes us every morning – reveille: the first post –
it bites into quiet and birdsong. The fencer’s back,
his wild vibrating instrument in a maestro’s hands; he cut the iron-
bark himself in the next valley; now he saws it to the heart,
x-ray vision finding six fence posts inside each log the way Michelangelo saw
his prisoners. Also freed is a totem pole of red and resin. The sculptor

wants to fly the heartwood home, show it at a European gallery with other sculptures
in a hemisphere where ironbark is exotic. Found art. He wonders could he post
it, or take it on the plane. He has seen the necessary cut away; once back
he will teach others to look differently at what remains. The fencer’s iron
crowbar bangs each strainer into its final resting place, his heart
also under strain. His shouts are loud, rhythmic, like those of ardent love-making, the saw

and its easy mechanical art now abandoned alongside his blue wheelbarrow. I also saw
his blue camping chair and blue esky arranged like a still life, a sculpture,
like large scale trinkets in the satin bowerbird’s bower. This is the post
from which he surveys his craft: he sits and runs his eye along the lines, turns his back
then spins as if to catch the fence out. His strength is honed to iron
but the lines and patterns of this work he knows by heart;

it’s work he’s taken on since his father died on the Diamond Rio. It’s the heart
of the matter, because of when he was a lad and what he saw.
The big truck gleams blue and silver down in the bush and its sculpted
chrome is polished with love. A loose post
caused his father’s fall between truck and load, breaking his back.
The fencer has no need of pencilled marks on the iron-

bark: the pattern is carried in his head like the spider with its web, like his iron
determination to buy back the truck, to go on working in this heart-
land of his childhood, of his father’s. The lyrebird’s taken up the fencer’s grunt, the noisy saw,
and will continue for weeks after this fence is finished. The bird sculpts
sound with his show-off syrinx and his dance upon a hidden lookout post
on the ridge. Visitors will wonder if the fencer’s back

again. His job is done, surely. But he will always be back
for others. Ten years he gives the fence: the wood’s like iron
but the six wire-strand holes he drills through each post’s heart
are a help to grassfires, and can let the barbed wire rust like a saw
left out in rain. He’ll return, in his short shorts and singlet, sculpted
muscles rippling and sliding under blue-tattooed skin as he hefts each post

in place. Among the tattoos is a fencepost; serpent and Love Vine entwine it on shaved skull, his back.
People fear the iron in the fencer, and his tattoos, but there is also a big heart
just below his shoulder blade. I saw it. I saw his fence. I saw his sculpture.

Iron-bark shavings curl on red earth like scented locks of Pre-Raphaelite hair; straight
wires through each fencepost a hexagram of pride. At twelve dollars a metre enough now earned
for a good weekend. The fencer and his mate escape to a woodchop carnival. An axe
to them is aesthetic in the extreme. They feel its weight in their palms like a woman’s breast: true
they might call it, or keen. Their own axe never out of sight. He even sleeps
with his, says the fencer. It’s only new,

says the mate, and I keep the cover on. I’ve heard he’s new
but a natural, six wins under his belt since Christmas, a stroke so straight
and sure it takes away the crowd’s breath. It’s quick this sport, like a very fast orgasm, earned
by readiness, as well as work. And there’s no denying the pleasure: swing of the axe,
roar of the crowd, atmosphere, booze. They joke about drug tests. And is it true
about the women? It’s hard on the missus, they say. Wives sleep

alone at home when the men travel; they are woodchop widows. We don’t sleep
around, but, the fencer says. They shake their heads, the idea of new
loves slowly circling. Got to keep your strength up, stay straight,
says the mate. They’re serious, these two. I’ve seen the fencer down tools for a hard-earned
break and, instead of sitting on the blue chair, uncover his axe
and split a log in seconds. What they say about axe blows ringing is true.

Out over the Shoalhaven and up to the ridge each true
blow rings like a birdcall, one among many, and the lyrebird learns it in his sleep.
Like the bird, these men are alert to making new
their repertoire. They take up the double saw, recognising trust between them, straight
talk and determination, the pairing of bodies. They’ve already earned
a reputation on the carnival circuit. The double saw has nothing on the axe,

no beauty; it’s harder to love. The partner replaces the axe
in this double act; it’s the person you put your faith in, prime. True
blue, they would say. And they enact these movements in their sleep:
the look, the simultaneous start, the give and take, something new
learned between them at each comp. Three and a half hours’ drive to Sydney straight,
chop all day, then turn around and drive home, talk all the way. The prize earned
is nothing to the sense of satisfaction, elation; they show no emotion though it’s earned.

No show ponies here, says their coach. It’s like a good axe to an axe-
man, a feeling to be weighed, enjoyed in private, something true,
like finishing a fence. It’s technique, not strength; even little blokes can do it. Sleep
might bring dreams of fortune, fame; top axemen earn half a million a year. A new
ute is all they’d like, to bring down their practice logs to the troughs, to keep them straight

and moist and ready. To tell it straight, what they earn
is each other’s love, that feeling like an axe, something fine and true,
like a sound sleep, two lives made new.

The Red Sea
by Stephen Edgar

Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,
In which clear surface, just a little way
From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass
With languid ease, apparently unmanned,
Adrift along the day,

Imagining a breeze to fan
Their motion, though there’s none. Siobhan
Reaches a giant hand down from the sky
And nudges with insouciant élan
The nearest hull, her bended waist mast-high.
That hand is just as magically withdrawn.
So moves the catamaran.

And through the Lilliputian fleet
She, Beatrice and Gabrielle
Wade in the shallows, knee-deep, spaceman-slow,
To fashion their manoeuvres and compete
Among the stationed hours to and fro,
While watching through the viscid slide and swell
Of water their white feet,

Made curiously whiter by
That cool light-bending element.
Doubled by shadows on the sand they glimpse
Pipefish and darting fingerlings they try
Impossibly to grab, translucent shrimps
Among the lace weed, seahorses intent
To flee the peopled sky.
Hard to conceive that they should be
Precisely who they are and here,
Lost in the idle luxury of play.
And hard to credit that the self-same sea
That joins them in their idleness today,
Careless of latitude and hemisphere,
Blind with ubiquity,

Churns elsewhere with a white uproar,
Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees,
Or sucks among the scum and floating drums
Of some forgotten outpost founded for
The advent of an age that never comes,
Or bobs the remnants of atrocities
Limply against the shore.

What luck they have. And what good sense
To leave the water with their toys
When called, before their fortunes are deranged.
And still the day hangs in its late suspense
For hours without them, virtually unchanged,
Until the bay’s impregnable turquoise
Relaxes its defence

And sunset’s dye begins to spread
In flood across it to the sand
They stood on, as though, hoping to disown
The blood of all the innocents he’d shed,
Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone
Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand,
Making the green one red.

Guidance and Knowledge
by Anthony Lawrence

A pair of spur-wing plovers throw down
their thin, discordant music
then lift away, all masks and trailing legs
as if relieved of surplus weight.
What I hear is the memory of the sounds they make –
the aural and the visual
have the stem of a cell deep in recognition.
Perhaps the farmer, for whom time moves
in ever-decreasing circles,
heard them and stepped down from his tractor
into that open-air theatre
to stand astride dark furrows –
old crow-scarer, listening, in his angular fashion,
to whatever a call-bringing wind
can summon or invent
from the edge of an egg-laying season.

Ornithology was one of the more enduring gifts
my father passed on to me before he passed on.
He could tell a species
through the viewfinder of a speeding windscreen,
say its other names, and call to it,
his whistle breaking open on a fence.
He revealed information
the way cloud shadow draws back
the machine-sewn covers from an open paddock,
and there was always a little sunlight
on his teeth when he spoke.
While he would not have said
The ghosts of those whose memorials
mark where they fell asleep at the wheel
are most likely to have been
delighted or disturbed by the plover’s music,
or Spectral flight is winter sunlight taking off,
I can hear him saying
something like The trees the sunlight enters
are the shadows that make it real.

The road west out Tarraleah is always wet,
and it steams where the light gets through.
I break the drive
where great silver pipes light the side of a hill.
They are aortic and sub-Antarctic
when you put your ear to them.
But the scrub soon closes in,
and the proper names for groundcovers,
flowers and ferns are beyond me.
I can’t hear or see the birds that live in there,
and my father offers no assistance
from where he might or might not be,
in the disembodied stations of authority
I have named for him.
The truth is I am tired of poetry
and the pathology of its need to altar a scene.
I don’t want a highland plateau
to trade in its low slung trees and button grass
for anything like or as –
no lofty scar attended by clouds and rain,
no animal shapes
in the contained dusk fires of the gorse.
And yet I drive and change what I do not know
into something close to understanding.
There are penalties for trading in such currency,
and they have been accepted and countered
with a hard responsibility.
The road goes on, double-lined or stitched
into symbols for safe passing, and I follow it,
with no field guide to what might break
from a cover of roadside wood.
There is only this, through intermittent rain
and flarings of sun, through the alpha
and beta layerings of daydream,
my words falling away as the words of my father
rise over a plateau, rinsed and singular,
his voice weary with knowledge and guidance,
and I drive towards it.