I’m watching a Swamp Harrier through binoculars. It lands on the island in the middle of the irrigation dam and from here it looks like it’s dancing. It rises a few feet and then falls, a sighing. Finally it lifts with something in its claw. It flies a loop of air as if the dam is forgotten and then just at the edge of memory it circles back. Now the stick is gripped in both its claws. Its rump flares white as it comes to land in the middle of a reed bank. Moments? later it rises and flies to the edge of the dam. Again it hovers before landing, but not in the sudden dive of a hunt. I can see it grasp a tall wand of dried grass. It flaps hard, tugging the resistant stem. I know the feeling, can even feel the resistance of the plant. It gives up and finds another one and repeats this until it has the material it wants and again it flies a loop away from the dam. I imagine it scanning the skies until they are empty and only then does it turn back to the dam, where deep in a raft of reeds it is building a nest.
We are sitting up on the hill where we check the big mob of maiden ewes. We have twice the number this year because last year we didn’t join those ewes born in the drought of 2018. They were just too small and even though the season had broken and the paddocks were covered in a thick pelt of feed it was still the right decision. They spent this time last year eating and growing without the stress of being pregnant or raising a lamb. We were worried we’d have trouble with twice the number of maidens, but we haven’t. They’ve lambed really well. In the second week we’d picked up one who’d got herself cast delivering an enormous lamb. Her lamb was dead and had been stripped bare by predators but she was still alive and though the crows had started on her back end she would survive. We bought her back to the yards, gave her a shot of penicillin, a drink and a new lamb. She’s fostered it beautifully. So it is this mob I am meant to be looking over. But we are at the beginning of week five, and the flood of lambs has slowed to a trickle. The scene below me is bucolic. Ewes and lambs are all lying down, the ewes chewing their cuds and the lambs fast asleep, pressed against their mothers or sheltering behind a tussock curled around themselves.
On the far hill I can see a group of 5 young deer, still in their velvet, have spotted us, though we must be over a kilometre away. They make for cover, clearing the fences as if they are mere thoughts and not the reality of wire and wood. The deer are the largest and most obvious of the world that would prefer to remain hidden from us. I’m conscious of the ripple we make. We are the watches being watched. The binoculars bring the world close. But they also remind me of how much of what I see I do not understand and in not understanding I am a stranger. As we drive home past the dam the Swamp Harrier, that usually silent bird, whistles.
The poet Emily Dickinson’s first poems were written in pen. But she soon swapped her fountain pen for a pencil stub. You can’t carry a fountain pen in a pocket. On my desk this week (and let’s face it I haven’t had much chance to do more than read the introductory essay) is a beautiful production of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems. The book, The Gorgeous Nothings is both book and art. It’s set out so on one page is the stark simplicity of the scrap of an envelope with Dickinson’s pencilled poem and on the facing page, reproduced in the same shape, with the words spaced as they are on the original envelope, is the typeset poem. It’s a book of fragments and utterly compelling, not least because it has brought Dickinson’s writing days to life. Jen Bervin, in the introduction, notes that Dickinson’s one surviving dress has a large external pocket on the right side where her hand would fall easily to rest. In it, perhaps, she kept her two inch pencil nub and the scraps of paper on which she wrote. Here’s one, a few lines scrawled in the confines of the triangle flap of a small envelope:
In this short Life
that only (merely) lasts an hour
How much- how
little - is
within our
power1
It’s a question (though Dickinson doesn’t frame it as such) Spring animates more than the other seasons. I have five lambs on the bottle. Each one of them is a lesson in what is and what is not within my power. One of them I picked up curled against a tussock. It was limp, its mouth cold like deep cave, like the earth it was slowly returning to. I held it in hot water until it twitched back to life. Another, a twin, stood by its smaller brother while an eagle stripped the still living flesh from it. We happened upon them and saved the strong one. There are two crossbreds, their eyebrows so fierce they both look like Winston Churchill reincarnate. And there’s Maxie the pool noodle lamb (if you are new here, his story is in Issue 7), who is battling on. On the one hand it is ridiculous to expend energy on Maxie. He’ll never make a good sheep. But I don’t care. I feed him three times a day. Every week J and I open his splint, squeeze some ointment on his wound, give him a shot of penicillin. J does it to humour me. But I do it because in this short life there is so little within my power.
Every day we pass the dam where the Swamp Harrier is nesting and I will wonder at the secret work of the female sitting on eggs and I’ll watch for their hatching as both the parents appear in the busy cycle of feeding them - frogs, fish, eels, ground birds, small birds, a rabbit if they are lucky. We’re now driving through paddocks where the lambs are old enough to leave their mothers and form great gangs, sometimes 50 or more will play on a dam wall, racing each other in a mad rush of joy. We will also pass the small corpses of those who didn’t stand up after they were born. In a few months the only sign of their brief lives will be a patch of grass little bit sweeter and higher than the rest of the paddock. Strange as it seems, these patches give me hope.
Reading
This essay by Vivian Gornick Put the Diamonds On: notes on humiliation had me lingering over my coffee on Saturday morning. Susan Songtag on meeting Thomas Mann. I’m loving Richard Powers new novel Bewilderment and Debra Gwarney’s I am a Stranger Here Myself deserves its own post. If you love a mix of history and memoir then this book will be right up your alley. I tore through Helen Garner’s latest Lockdown Diary in The Monthly and cannot wait for the next installment of her diaries - especially as there are advance copies being flashed all over the place. Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light arrived yesterday, but I suspect if I open it then all other reading will stop until its finished.
Listening
I’m in a bit of a podcast slump with only Our Ads (he interviewed Colson Whitehead this week and it was fabulous) capable of pulling me out of it. But I did listen to Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight with the bloke who wrote that famous YA novel, John Green something about the stars - which I have never read…there was a movie…anyway he tells Jonathon about a moment in his life where he realises he cannot be a priest. It was quite powerful.
Writing
I am a little written out. I need a couple of reading days to recharge….maybe I’ll get them next week. I have an article due to Country Style, it’s going to be on the tradition of the school bus and another to Graziher.
Have a great week mx
Emily Dickinson The Gorgeous Nothings, New Directions, New York, 2013
This Short Life
Nature is a cruel, hard bastard. I have spoken to friends who will not take the COVID vaccine. To explain this position, they often cite some version of, "My body, and in particular, my immune system is naturally equipped to deal with viruses. I don't want to put anything unnatural or 'chemical' in my body." I wish they could read your posts and understand how beauty and cruelty coexist in nature. And how hard we work when we stand in the space where those forces collide, valiantly wrestling to tip the odds, ever so slightly, in beauty's favour.