Two
poems from Chris Preddle's Cattle Console Him
followed
by a note on the author
Cattle
Console Him
1
Cattle
of consolation,
come down, cattle goddesses of five hundred kilos,
sundisk
bodies, bellies, digesters of cellulose,
come
down to my anxious field.
Once
before you filed
into the frame of our picture window, ate our windbreak
of
Cupressocyparis leylandii, spoke, and broke wind.
Come
to me now, tell me the solution,
why it's here or there that a cow occurs
in
a random field, why you're moved without cause.
2
Boethius in his prison
saw
no cause for the headfirst destruction he would suffer
or the king's Gothic
cruelties, until Philosophy
herself
came below
and
nudged his writing elbow:
'Give up your headwork, reasoning and knowledge,
Boethius.
It's divine providence.' Let her not console us both
with
a gift grown upon misprision.
You thought you were one of the Sun's sun-gilded
cattle,
but he sold you off to death, less good than chattel.
3
Thomas in his cell,
a
monastic cell in Windesheim, who seems to imitate
not Christ but all experience,
counsellor and intimate -
you
know how sharply I'm aggrieved
by
the shortcomings of others, how grieved
that my own happiness comes short.
Though I will not seek
dead Christ pinned out like a cattle skin,
how
much, Thomas, your book consoles us.
He endured great trials, says the Chronicle.
He was buried
in the east cloister, by the side of Peter Hebort.
4
The cattle console
me.
We are no manger moocows who bend the knee
at midnight, but hardier.
Like us, be here and now,
mired
in the flesh hocks-
and-oxters.
Turn ox-
wise at the end of every furrow, pull the oxharrow
of your human
nature. O her hair is oxlip-yellow,
her
body curved like a meadowgrass, a culm
of grassflowers. Love her, like herself,
whatever occurs,
be moved as cattle are moved, love without cause.
Groundsel
I am at the door-sill, the ground-sill, the very groundsel-edge
of old age.
Age-old
Greeks,
already in waiting to be shades of Hades, already geeks
of
their own language and intellect, were the first to make this metaphor.
What
they meant it for
was
not the initial going in
to the anteroom which is old age, but leaving again.
*
Common
groundsel, Senecio vulgaris, with its seedhead
like an old knight whitehaired,
was
used in poultices for toothache or an abscess.
There's no old remedy for absence,
or
leaving. At this doorway I've no more to do.
Let me go through.
©
Chris
Preddle is a retired librarian living in Holme, West Yorkshire. A big sequence
of poems has appeared recently in Stand (8, 2, no.186, 2008), and a group
in The Yellow Nib (4, 2008). He won the first prize for shorter poems in
the Scintilla competition 2007 and in the Poetry on the Lake competition 2008.
He won the first Biscuit Poetry Prize in 2001 and published a short collection
Bonobos (Biscuit, 2001).
"Cattle
Console Him" first appeared in Scintilla, 12, 2008; "Groundsel"
first appeared in Smiths Knoll, 43, 2008.
