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Mother Russia

12 Sep, 2011 Poems 
from siberia: the fisherman's cooling room
is a cave chinked out of a cliff of ice - there
the fish lie swollen while the nomads chop wood
in the snow & while my foreign tongue gags
on the names of lost cities & apartment
buildings hazily appearing now through
the window of my helicopter - as we circle
the lights of nurry urengoy - hastily built
sitting atop a field of natural gas - lots of it
frozen within a red bottle by a stubbornly icy cork 

          (thus read my - hmmm
suspiciously poetic briefing crumpled grimly
in my gravel-encrusted mitten) 

        "so you see
chuck"  he breathed along the thousand mile
cable connected to my alaskan telephone
"this is the place where only the gallant
survive - where there is no turning back
so if the going gets rough - "

                 gahhrrr! 

"moonlight and vodka takes me away"
croons the one-time concert performer
to an incomprehending audience of short
time miners & oil riggers thawing in the bar
what else is there to do the alcohol slides like
penguins from glaciers down throats &
karloff's tears flow in buckets while the men
sway from side to side now and then grunting
as they discover the faces behind the frozen beards
they worked with on that damned oil pipeline

the dream of a balalaika: slowly crushed
beneath a timber truck o god i want to go
home this place this place of deja vu it's
riddled with shanty towns & factories &
refineries & summer fun & dirt bikes &
ballet & grizzly bears & snowy ideal resort
frozen lakes & oil derricks & aeroplanes
& national geographic photographers
& helicopters & heads full of maps &
jigsaw names & red faces & hangovers

& a terrified memory of a young boy
crucified on a bare flat table wrapped
in chunks of ice so his body will cool &
his pulse

                          slow

enabling the surgeon to get at his heart

‘Mother Russia’ was my first published poem. It appeared in 1991 in the extremely short-lived Sydney journal Textbase (not to be confused with the later Melbourne collective of the same name). In fact, I think only one issue of Textbase ever appeared, and even that one only appeared very, very briefly. It was put out by the people who ran the Reasonably Good Cafe on Abercrombie Street in Chippendale. I remember attending the launch of the issue and reading my poem while squashed between an audience member and a piano. Afterwards someone told me I read as if I was calling the races at Harold Park. Actually, now I think about it, that night was also my first public reading. Twenty years is a loooooooooong time, eh.

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