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