Helen Hagemann Passing Notes Around & farmed out |
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| Helen Hagemann © Copyright 2002 - Helen is a published poet. Her work appears in the Southern Review, Hecate, JAS (Journal of Australian Studies) & Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. 'Farmed Out' won first prize in the Trudy Graham Literary Awards 2002 |
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| Passing Notes Around ‘It’s amazing,’ we say, lifted calmly out of our dreaming language. Poets circling corners of a polished gallery, as if inventing ourselves. Beyond this exchange of immortality and walls, we trace genius, and no matter what we fashion on the page this art is all one to us, just different depths and temperatures. The surface lures without touch. There’s enough light and dark to see the shavings and ash, the imprint of charcoal on sun-beaten hands. One imagines MacPherson or Heysen travelling tepid marshes, limestone gorges, fern and lupin paddocks to morph such lines for poems amongst river gums where the wind’s softness passes its own comment, through air. Despite the trouble we have gone to, from train to arrive, it’s enough to know we have watched idle days, seen coveralls stretch from too many sittings, the open paint-box, kerosene lamp turned down, notepad folded on the Stirling Ranges. Pencilled energy is released, landscapes levitating parrots overhead, the struggle of wings in deadwood, draught horses compressing ink-wash grass. These forests and plains, like renewal, peel back the paperbark, re-cycle clouds, run shadow-lines through morning mist, so doused in eucalypt oil you can smell the aroma of a wood-fire burning. Later, we meet in the bad light of a towered city block, dust spirals from felled trees and the carriage is swamped with notes, taking us back into the fresh cut of sap, the inlaid heart and inky silence of a poem. |
| farmed out i old jam tins are sleepers in a rubbish dump a scarred hollow of digging, even before the rust came, the yard had a kind of design: trees as old as frost, melon sky at sundown a coattail earth of flax and ants navigating sound before the paddocks came ii ordered out on finance plans they cuddled children with their debts. he drew fear from flood and seedless sun. she traded contradiction for curves and valley hips, verdant sod of earth, reckless drift of goats. when the bailiff came, the end of lamb and beef, she clung to rock and let the salt erupt from hands and tongue the way the body bleeds its bitterness. he roped a bulky contents under tarp, sped through every gate, clouding exile and the bright disturbance of his wheat iii here on this white paper words rim the borderline of their passion it moves in some direction to inhabit lives as couplets of unknown pain. poems cannot see collapsed hearts fresh wounds, first rage, so in here their darkness spills on fingers to form silence like a letterbox, where only the clouds go by |