I
My daughter, not yet one,
spacespacespacespacespacespacrawls to my chair and takes my pens
and tries to steal the book I try to write in. This could be a metaphor;
but who knows? My son, fresh from the bath and naked yet,
steps into my boots. This could be another, but I hope not. I sit in the corner
of the thick of my life, and I think I’ll keep on writing till I run out of pens.

II
I write to sound the world
spacespacespacespacespacespaand to try the shallow syntax of myself
within it. The moon is full. Awake at 2 am, I walk out into the refined poverty
of night in the yard. If this were day, you’d call it dark;
but it’s not. The wind is a young god just off the bench, and the night knows all
about it. The original world: no one should sleep through this.

III
It is good to live where the mud
spacespacespacespacespacespaon cold mornings ices over in the ditch
and the fallen leaves trapped there look like the faces of the dead.
One of the hens has been taken in the night.
A raven caws three times in the stricken branches of the poplar by my shed.
I try the ice with my bootheel. It cracks and clouds over, and the present kicks in.

IV
On the third night the moon floats
spacespacespacespacespacespayellow and irreproachable
out of a brown wind and a desultory mob of cloud slouching along the horizon
and it stops the winter paddocks at their prayers.
Sunday evenings were always like this. Nextdoor’s black dog slumped
on our stoop. No one finished with last week; no one quite ready for the next.

V
In company, these days, I’m solitary;
spacespacespacespacespacespain solitude, gregarious,
part of every conversation going. I’m quiet within my family
the way the dams are quiet in the paddocks after rain. Five horses choose
five minutes south of sundown to canter the ridge
above the Wingecarribee Swamp, a theatre of shades, the soul of the world at play.

VI
What I want is the intelligence
spacespacespacespacespacespaincarnate here, or hereabouts.
I’d like to know the mind whose ideas I step out into daily—this stream
of consciousness, which is never the same stream twice. I want
the grammar of the dialect my days are spoken in. Mauve cloud passes west
to east. A spinebill scatters some phrases about. There’s some of it.

VII
So windy today you’d swear
spacespacespacespacespacespait was August. So warm you’d call it spring,
the winds walking in from the desert. Here is never the entire world
one belongs to. Or now, for that matter. The present moment
is a frantic mosaic of the broken pieces of the past and future. It’s made
of birdsong, trace elements of a hundred epochs. And oneself.

VIII
Everything’s in motion
spacespacespacespacespacespatoday. The river. The birds, the atoms and the slaters
in the firewood by the door. Memory. Predation. Hibernation. The place
composes itself over and over in quavers and rests.
The birch at the south window is the morning’s percussion. Plainsong
on the cd player is as near to stillness as I’m ever going to get.

IX
The wind lets up and the bluewrens
spacespacespacespacespacespain their overalls piece the hedge together again.
Now they’re at my door, telling me the same shapely thing I miss each morning.
The shed conspires with winter; cold sunlight divines
the grasses. Standing among the pear trees, I notice crimson rosellas
at the hens’ feeder and wattlebirds at the scraps. Nature wastes nothing but time.

X
Sometimes at night God comes into my shed
spacespacespacespacespacespaand disrobes and sits in the blue
chair by the window, where the models used to pose. He never bolts the door,
and the world gets in when he goes, and the place is an unholy mess
in the morning. Mortality’s the price we pay for form, and I think God likes to sit
where so many women sat, incarnate, and recall why he set it so high.

***

About the Author

Mark Tredinnick, author of The Blue Plateau, is an award-winning poet and essayist. He lives in the highlands southwest of Sydney, Australia.

As well as The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir—published in Australia (UNSW Press) and North America (Milkweed) in 2010—Mark is the author of The Road South (poems on CD), The Little Green Grammar Book, The Little Red Writing Book (published outside Australia as Writing Well: the Essential Guide), The Land’s Wild Music , and A Place on Earth.

Mark’s honours include the Blake Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (runner up), the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Calibre Essay Prize, and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize. His work has been anthologised and published widely in Australian and the US journals. His poems have appeared in The Best Australian Poems; his prose in The Best Australian Essays.

To find out more about Mark, visit his website at marktredinnick.com.au

Poetry Retreat with Mark Tredinnick

You can join Mark for a poetry writing weekend retreat at Olvar Wood Writers Retreat, April 16 to 18. As part of a small, intimate group of writers, you'll enjoy the pleasure of learning more about poetry, and gaining personal guidance on your own writing. Click here to find out more details, or to book your place.

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