Horticultural Live Stills - the thinning -

the thinning


Before slim
was beautiful,
people liked
their vegies big
so carrots had
to be thinned
to be carrots.

Us offspring
worked unclassed
in rows, pulled
up the seedled
crowds, leaving
individuals.

Forcing the
fittest to survive,
carrot planets,
with personal space
Like the planted acres
we each could roam,
to grow large.


1996 © Wayne D Knoll
...

Horti-Cultural Live Stills - not rape - baby swedes

swedes - not rape


A sowing
grew like rape,
too-thick, they
call it Canola
in Newspeak now,

I was too busy or too easy
to thin them,
-so cabbage-leaf glutted
they all runted
in together...

I let them age
until I heard
demand had little supply,
then
I cut them,
lopped top stems, cut
each root aside
to point the yellow flesh
from the radicals away
then boxed,
off to market,
the public bought them!
Once re-imaged as
'Baby Tasmanian.'

1996 © Wayne D Knoll
....

Small Life Horti-Cults: CHATS

Chats


Cut,
small,
wormy,
rotten,
waste spuds:
chats were bagged
or banana-boxed
onto the skid-standed,
truck-chassied,
3 ton tractor-trailer
till full.

Taken above
the landslip precipice
down the creek,
where, hand-tipped
like lotto balls, they
talk rot
to themselves
among the lucky
treeferns and winners
down wombat holes.

1996 © Wayne D Knoll
...

Horti-Cultural Still Lives: RUNNY EYE

runny eye

Spud plants curl and blacken,
leaves shrivel
New potatoes, underground,
have got runny eyes.

Like hurt children, weeping
life with its badness out
Stinking. Infected.
Before they've even grown.


1996 © Wayne D Knoll

Horticultural Life Smalls: TOO WHITE

was darwin too white too?


Baby squash:
I bought
the same seed
like other years
–for the Baby White
button squash,
with the slight
green-tinted bloom

But at market
they were a dud!
White? That's too pale!
Three intense acres
intensely wasted.
Half a livelihood
in rampant waste...

There's a new strain!
A trendier cultivar...
- like coloured babies -
everybody wants
to have the ones
with the fresh green tint,
for that
latest Eye-Catch
of cuteness
in baby squash.

1996 © Wayne David Knoll
........................

When Carrots Are Burning Off

Horti-Cultural Small Lives

When Carrots Are Burning Off

Four drilled rows
to a bed,
heat-germinated carrots
barely two-leaved
above ground
on Christmas Day,
the waterless carrots
burn off,
acres of stems cook, just
above ground-level,
where the sun concentrates,
selects!

like an oven
that melts all
life-force mystery
so we children had
to give time
from our one holyday
to help plumb
and fit
the half-installed pump
to give,
burn our fingers,
work to connect the
carrotless water.

1996 © Wayne David Knoll

Horti-Cultural Life Stills: - ready to serve

ready to serve


The main farm track broke down two hundred feet
and bent
levels to equal a quarter mile on its knees of
landslip terrace.
Grades shifted steep before the incline relief
at Middle Flat,
but then, between there and the much-worked
Bottom Flat,
the Big Hill dived centre-earthward under a
vertigo of trees,
so steep the willing Fergie, driven to tow up
3 ton of spuds
in season, used to mount up, with us at
the head, to
brake-steer on two back wheels like a ram
ready to serve.


1997 © Wayne David Knoll

Horti-Cultural Life Stills: wheel weights

Wheel Weights


With slopes like ours tractor wheels
were belled
out wide to purchase hill; steer-axle
meccanoed
maximum stretch. Front rims held
hundredweights.
Wheels in traction were tanked
two-thirds full
of critical-mass water, that way the weight
kept low,
sloshed to ring the bottom note. If you
got a flat
you wet yourself. If you sped you
flywheeled
that centrifuge of water out into the wits
of control.

Wayne David Knoll © 1997

Collecting The Seed 1964

Collecting The Seed ~ Circa 1964



At an end of their market days
unsaleable late French-bean pods
stayed tall on their dwarf bushes.
Denied irrigation, they then dried
as the bean bushes died.

Varieties were animated with names,
like racehorses: Hawksbury Wonder,
Brown Beauty, Windsor Longpod.
the has-bean ladies wilted
as the crop-rows grew yellow
and shed leaves as bean-roots
rot-shrunk in unbroken autumn dry.

Then we’d go in like a benchmark
with a Ferguson tractor, its
stay-barred linkage-arm drawbar,
iron-pinned to tow in parallel form,
a farm-made lengthened truck-chassis
of a trailer, with us farm sons
riding its boxed mudguards in balance
over the trucked axle wheel, drawn like
wild arts in unwritten symmetry.

Whoever was Dad’s old enough
eight year old son was put to
the fundament seat-shape and planted
behind the man-sized tractor-wheel,
to steer-straddle rows in reduction gear,
as us older nascent-men walked bent
to remove rows of beans plucked
like hot goose feathers, in our
boy-arm’s stretch, wide as
young sons in a spare hand.

Each arm’s stretch in dried row
became an embrace, each
loved-moment’s bundle a caress,
rolled into a hoisted bale to make
a mobile bean-hay stack
in a broad-handed stook.

Each armful was held, upswung,
let go of and touched
into the bonding as another
hand-arch added to the whole,
till a wild bran and grain pile,
in the fertile slow-oven of the raw
trailer’s grist, yeast-floured
to a brood-high bean-loaf, in
the warmth of our raising.

Up in the farmyard, spread wide
as a dinner plate, us man-boys
knelt for rain-tank water from the tap,
a tarp laid on crushed gravel
was forked full as Saturday’s
midday mutton roast, and served
with its single dish of yellowed
bean bushes - with a lip round
its square rim to save spills.

Threshing was by gumboot and
rubber cleats of tractor rear-wheels
as the slim Ferguson, unhitched
from its trailer, was kneaded over
- the gum-booted stomp of boys jumped
aside from it as if mere fore play -

wheels in return to the kneading
tread over the bean-bush pile,
- arcing up on and in, rounded,
tilted, driven by fits and reversions,
cracking forward, crunching
back and down, the bean-pods broke
crushed into the rousing, the letting
go, the crunch of release.

From these arid-returns
(as if too late of old watershed)
- the cast-off scabrous chaff-shells
of bean - their kidney-hearts
of bean-seed fell through
in red-bright colours,
gravitating to bottom,
like so many handle full
and able curvaceous spore
to floor below that bony
stick and stem of death.

Then broken bean-bones were
pitch-forked sidelong onto
the trailer for a bean-straw mulch
under walnut or other trees.
What was left was a semi-fluid
mess of beans and bean-chaff
that was tarp-edge shaken
in to a broad cone pile,
scooped up by buckets,
and bagged to be stored out
of autumn breaks in weather.

Soon, on a day when a stiff
north wind was up, Dad would carry
bean bags in their chaff to a headland
on the hilltop, and once again spread wide
the tarp, this time in a smaller square,
and, box-standing high as he could,
he’d bucket and pour this mess
into the wind,

so the red-heavy seeds
would drop like earth-hooks
with a built-in sinker,
a blood of blessing,
winnowed, separate,
kept in place till when,
to be stored for an other summer,

while the crumbs of bean leaf
and the bush-stem of the chaff,
went on, sidelong, freed, like
the infertile dross
of souls without substance,
lifted up to go travel a while
with the wind till it fell apart,
a fuzz of disintegrating.

Collecting the seed
we were transporting sex,
translating something sublime
in the transport of sex
we found the transports
of something other.

Next year we
wouldn’t have to buy!
We had our potency.


2003 © Wayne David Knoll

[ Shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize ]

1st Published in ‘Sunweight’ Anthology, Newcastle, NSW, 2005

Stone Splinter on the Top Flat

[On Finding a Splinter of a Stone Axe on the Top Flat ]


Toolmaking man, I walk in the earthworks, searching
piles of dirt
dug up and out, pushed and turned
by this tool of a bulldozer
to expose a century of tool plough-buried
deep treasures... and
I find an old shard of a stone on the farm’s
family top flat…

Here is other tool artifact! I've discovered an old native tool,
its form is
shaped, the worked edge there, and I imagine
the cracked-off
remainder: a stone-haft absent from this
broken axe edge,
this fragment of the carried equipment of
ancient-tooled man.

For this stone-tool fragment to lie in the palm
of my hand
forty centuries may have fallen under since
the Primaeval
Forest grew here in these cooling krasnozem
volcanic flows,
To which beast and men have sought out
the grunt of life

as we do. Can-do men out possum hunting, scaling
trees like ladders
As if there were rungs, went up like fire-escapes
without the stairs, up
the trunks to the possum hollows, where
the gum-hafted
stoneaxe was used. Maybe it was stone-knapped
further down

this Stony Creek where the cascades bare
A metamorphic glass-stone quarry…
They chopped at tree-locks of the possum place
till, just as
the hard old-wood was breaking away,
the axe chipped,
and the fragment fell here like a lost coin
without image.

But a fat possum was wrung out, killed
and flung down:
the skin a trophy going to make another square
for a man’s prize
possum-skin cloak - and status,
the dark red meat
waiting for evening cooking fires over
towards Yellingbo.

But whether this happened two centuries
ago or ten is
not for me to say. It might be any year of
hunt seasons out
of time. This makes Stonehenge seem
a tent of yesterday.
And, the Coliseum a grandiose
new-fangled bora-ring.

For years I have bent over, leant down, bowed to pick,
as dad, granddad and
great granddad did, whether fruit or bulbs, and earlier,
strawberries and raspberries,
or carrots, before which there were potatoes,
but no prize apple
of the earth has come to hand with
more sense, more

feeling than in this ancient fragment of working
stone, to join stone
of my elemental being back to a primitive,
to first things:
without named maker signatures, with no
sin of graven image,
tying the tools I wield now with men
here of primaeval time.


2006-2009 © Wayne David Knoll

Eye Of The Potato

In The Eye Of The Potato [A Second]


‘It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.’ Douglas Adams


Yet. And yet! It is at most
the dirt farmers
In the bitten fields of Cloud
Cuckoo Land,
Those camouflaged with the
scuff-hidden insignia
of the intuitive eye - and of that
much-eyed potato,
Who know of any shoot of beauty,
exquisite truth,
The vision of the future awaited
in heroic rectitude
In open palm, fingers uncaging,
The crumbs dropping out
of any worked handful of
friable topsoil.