In The Light Of Burnt Lime

LIME - burning lime


our noses were too clean
with white powder

with too white powder - the biting
alkaloid talcum of Lilydale
was agricultural lime,
powdered burnt-lime

and used by the local ton
on the farm skin,
spread to conform all rank growths
with an oxide - making

a caustic climate which blew
down the familiar winds as air
we breathed -like feelings burnt
off- in those longreaches of soul,
stretched out, then branded
by one’s father’s scorn

any slight love - like rain,
any show of affection -
any unwanted eye-moisture,
would turn our lime heated,
and a glare would grow out of
public sight - a chemistry of fear,
so, fear mongered, fear flared
in our poor heritage vats,
and then, the family hopper,
empty of other largesse,
could only give scorn to
all it did not, wanted not
to understand

this alkaline culture
was, of a course, chock
full of antipathy to fame.

Pah! that any of us
should seek, let alone
have any limelight!

we were raised as if
fame was the thing we
were most in danger of

as if what we most needed
was the purging burn
of scorn, children raised
on the alka-line of
negligence, burnt off
from any flowering -
by a generous limelight
of the scorn
we covered ourselves in

white was pure:
If you drew attention
to yourself you got
belted to the white

mock acid: opposite acid
if you made sensitive art
or wit
you were mocked

not just mocked, the word
scorn seems apt. A word that
appears to have grown of a scar
- a joining of alkaline burns

I myself learnt not
to seek the limelight,
not any limelight! it was
no blacker not to try

I was a mock scholar,
a mock son, mock sibling.
unhappy at home.
unhappy at school.

I couldn't see any reason
to be notable or for why
I should apply myself...

so much lime was applied
I was lilywhite in scorn

scolded in scorn -
in shire-proud lime -
any live plant in the way
was burnt

as the spreader blanketed
its white alkaline cosmetic
in concentrated caustic and
the hydrogen ions re shaped
the familiar landscape,

nothing could get
to be puffed up or be
allowed to be boosted except
the ph measure of our
home-grown fine-wrought
poppyseed-tilth of soil.

I did want to be tall, but to opine,
or to be notable, got you burned.

- flowers were picked in the bud.
- notoriety got you in glaring trouble.

we never let
real poppies grow,
so then we never had problems
with any too tall

we just withered all
desire for the limelight
in the scornful blanket
of local infamy

like Mum the amateur thinker
scornful of all those
paid intellectuals as the most
educated of idiots when what
she wanted most desperately was
to have had an education

or brother Melvyn deriding
the mudbrick of artists at Monbulk
when he wanted to be
an artist in kites like Hargreaves

or Dad's Philistine laughter at
the poor Jewish boy who reddened into
blood visions of mad poems under the
mulching grindstones of berried straws

that reminds me of
one of Dad's old histories: -
the family son told in a biting boast
how his brother, my Uncle Jack,
as a boy would climb up high
out to jump from a branch
of a tree in their creekdam,
saying: "Look at me!"
wanting attention like a human,
but Dad, with his sister & brothers
proudly scorned and reviled Jack
up his needy box, at pains
to scorch his pluck,
they turned their backs on him
in scorn - as if
he was showing his willy.

so the lime spread, and
spread lime whited us out
over broad shouldered acres

'Fame' was for others,
just as light was not for us

It was better to be cowed
denied, to an ignoble common
of a caustic limed dirt...

like public infamy only
far more cosmetic.



Wayne David Knoll © Saturday 14th December 1996

Shopping Without

grocer's orders

Every Tuesday morning the Silvan grocer delivered last
week's order to the stove-warm hubbub of the farm kitchen;
bicarb, tartaric acid, salt, vegemite. jelly crystals, junket,
golden syrup, peanut butter, hundreds and thousands,

gravox, butter, arrowroot, sealing wax or washing soap
-and it could really be gross, John Bull rolled oats,
50 pounds of flour in calico bags, of sugar in hessian,
weeta flakes in the 50 pound cardboard carton.

in picking time the picker's orders were rung
through the Burleigh PO and brought out
in a separate box the grocer readily made
a packet up on weekly house calls

the grocer liked to look ready, his grey apron on,
a pen behind his ear and a willingness to serve.
He'd get any product Mum wanted in, taking a memo
as if he was a serious-minded politician

he'd nod his head and say: 'I'm sure we can
manage that. Yes! You're right Mrs Knoll!
I don't know what the place is coming to,
as if it mattered to him as he toted up the bill

if I was home from school
he'd say as if it wasn't obvious
"Off school sick, lad!' with deadpan delivery
'Mind you eat and get better.'

Then he would take the money
with the handwritten order
for next-week's pantry restock
and current conversation;

For all lists made as busy grocer's orders
were the only way in we ever entered his talked-of shop
as if to travel out to have such commerce would
make us ill at ease, be indignity and disgrace.

The Green Green Bank Of Our Lives

Burbank: Green In the Bank


As budding
plant breeders we checked out Luther Burbank in our Newne's
Pictorial Encyclopedia.
For image in pictures, or vision in words.
My brother Melvyn
got youthfully excited and read it out to me
-the same Newne's Encyclo which I lately found out calls prescient
William Blake's
prophetic poems on The spirit of the West: “the ravings of a madman.”
Newnes backed Burbank, but
we knew
of Luther Burbank before we ever read about him and
he CERTAINLY didn't seem a madman to us back then. For
all our commercial plants seemed to have his touch
bramble
berries were varieties bred by him.
Everbearers!
Boysenberries, Youngberries, Loganberries,
Thornless Youngberries, Lawtonberries;
let alone nectarines, Shasta daisies
or Burbank potatoes. He was the
Mr Plant of the Universe,
Creative Botany, The Genetic Genius, and
Biological Einstein.

A Monbulk-Silvan
hero.
We knew Santa Rosa
plums and Shasta strawberries,
climax of America.
America!
It was also lately when I found
John Dos Passos’
poem biography of Burbank
-in section called "The 42 Parallel"
in his novel "U.S.A."
where he calls him

[I quote verbatim]

The Plant Wizard.


Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster, Massachusetts,
he walked around the woods one winter
crunching through the shinycrusted snow
stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring
was
and found the grass green and weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,
He went home and sat by the stove and read
Darwin
Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural
Selection that wasn't what they taught in church,
so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to
Lunenburg,
found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr Darwin's
Natural
Selection
on Spencer and Huxley
with the Burbank Potato.

Young man go west;
Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa
full of his dream of green grass in winter ever-
blooming flowers ever-
bearing berries; Luther Burbank
could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Bur
bank
Carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in
winter
and seedless berries and stoneless plums and
thornless roses brambles cactus---
winters were bleak in that bleak
brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts---
out in sunny Santa Rosa;
and he was a sunny old man
where roses bloomed all year
everblooming everbearing
hybrids.

America was hybrid
America should cash in on Natural Selection.
He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and
Natural
Selection and the influence of the mighty dead
and a good firm shipper's fruit
suitable for canning.
He was one of the grand old men until the
churches
and the congregations
got wind that he was an infidel and believed
in Darwin.
Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil,
selecting improved hybrids for America
those sunny years in Santa Rosa.
But he brushed down a wasp's nest that time;
he wouldn't give up Darwin and Natural Selection
and they stung him and he died
puzzled.
They buried him under cedartree.
His favourite photograph
was of a little tot
standing beside a bed of hybrid
everblooming double Shasta daisies
with never a thought of evil
And Mount Shasta
in the background, used to be a volcano
but they don't have volcanos
any more.

They devalued our pound Sterling, and then decimal-minimised us,
and repainted us
global. So we
imported cheap, "Green Revolution" berries
from Turkey, Egypt, Mexico,
anywhere where labour is cheap
and the people green,
till our hybrid was
the uneconomic old hybrid
and community atomised.

And then, I realised,
the evil as an evil of our past
(the rotted-basalt krasnozem soils)
a few eons ago, Silvan
was a part of a
volcano too.

Nature And Rebellion

raspberry blue mould

Overripe raspberries glut into a turn
in only the third week of harvest
as daily drizzle slows any pickers
the crop begins to melt into
the ground like an ice cream
bought for you too early,
-before you could get there

the off-flavours increase in
a slur of dripping unberries
the softened fuzz of globules
changes colour till they make
blue whiskers and ducky hairdos
as rebellious as a good punk reaction
going bad in neglect in wet times.

A Dead Weight Of Lightness

the aluminium


Around 1970 it was...
the aluminium won on balance...
click-lock new pipes for the modern spray line
had to be compared
with the dead-weights of rust-poxed iron gal.
Shiny silver,
Aluminium pipes came up so light
you nearly fell over backwards to lift them.

As the aluminium arrived we each had to be
a pivot for all that surprising absence of weight,
turning the lightness like a balance beam,
raising lengths, as if gifted Hercules.

Strong! Pipe was so light you could injure
yourself with the old human strain.
Some strongmen put their back out
with a hefty clean and jerk.

Us boys lifted the two-inch easy,
simple as a tightrope walkers' beam. And balanced
them as if extruded tubes plumbed a line of truth.
Those great lengths in that broad diameter weighed so little.
We loved to demonstrate this wonder. Even with his casual talk
of pentecostal gifts granted, Dad’s new-shod boyish smiles
showed metallurgent science was more our miracle.

What looked to be heavy, wasn't.
What seemed weighty, came up light.
What seemed hard, came near too easy!

None among us even roundly guessed
the three-inch pipe could be so light,
then crush when runover, until well we knew.

Hopeful of the new world we lived, we then played
these aluminium scales on balance with no sense of parody;
Uncle Sam gave our free-world the Statue of Liberty herself.

We believed in the American dream of who we could be.
We were a moveable fulcrum to the shifting pipes
as if we could conduit that light wonder into ourselves.

The Aluminium came mint-new into the seventies,
And I can see us, as we were circa Seven-0
with the Iron Curtain of tanks still haunting Europe,
lifting pipes in this credulous miracle, as if against gravity.

Weighing a world in that balance,
it seemed a balance of power shifted
the old iron world seemed to be passe',
without grace. Who wanted that weight?

As though this free world was a source of grace,
we threw off care, let go big wanting for
that old yoke to be easy, longing to say like the sprinkler sprays:
'I want, I want, my burden to be light.'

But then, even shiny pipes had to be moved
- every shift - trailers and carrier utes built to
transport what-seemed to be light-years of pipe around,
-and driving duly hooked us teenage boys in-

all summer long in the greasy burden of elbows,
tee-pieces, end plugs, reducers, being a pipe short.
Let alone wind changes which left half a land dry and begging
a drink, so that the whole line had to be moved again.

Was it Napoletano?, the migrant peasant named
for his native Naples, who got caught out.
He farmed the creeky little strawberry place
down below our old primary school.

He was shifting into the freeworld as a spray line
out in the middle of his Australian paddock, when because
you could - or for no reason at all -except to enjoy the sheer lightness
that old iron never had, he raised the aluminium
pipe end for end, - and they were tall as masts-

and as the metal went over the vertical
it struck the forgotten
high voltage power lines which took
a surge to earth down the pipe
through him, and,
as if to aluminiumise the idea
of lightness, something went out of him...
left him a dead weight.

Wayne D Knoll