dugong

If anyone has a dugong photo to share here that would be great. They are beautiful undersea cows who graze on seagrass. In Australian waters they are under threat - especially from developments like unnecessary marinas - plans for which are forever cropping up along the coast.

what Queenie says about the philosophy cow (1)

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-philosphicus.

what is a cow?
an animal
a symbol
a statue
a vocalic
a smooth surface with all the hair going the same way?

an economy
a religion
a politics
a mysticism
an experiment: erste die Kuh, dann Du?

a love object
a lesbian motif
a good meal
a mother
a milkmaid’s best and only friend?

a danger
a lover
a droning sound
a-um
an ocean of milk for all?

a cloud
a constellation
a herd of stars
a word
a voice heard?


is the cow at the limits of my thinking?
what sort of cow am I seeking?
the native cow?
the underwater cow?
the marine cow?
the unseen cow?
the sea-grass eating dugong?
is the dugong a cow because of its shape and size?
or because it is a herbivore?
what happens to dugong dung?


what of intersecting worlds?
the moment when I see the centipede
pulling its hundred legs
over the rim of the wall above my line of sight
ein Blick of another world

the moment when I hear
unspoken histories
genocides
eliminations of the unwanted
every rewriting of history continues that erasure



Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1974. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

micophile

I wrote this poem early last year and stumbled across it again a week or so ago and I felt this little mushroom should get an airing.






mushroom dreaming dp31

when I was a mushroom
life was simple
the world was dark and warm
and very safe

around me were fungal rhizomes
sprinklings of spores
the odd hard rock and root
and pliable soil

but I was offered advancement
progress, they said
to human form, and now in the light
I feel lost in darkness

so many troubles, wars, torture
economic collapse
I long for regress, to slip back
into the silence of the mushroom

golden cows and non-sense

I couldn't help myself when I saw this golden cow in a hotel foyer in Jaipur. I don't know which book in the Bible it is, but I do remember the movie image from The Ten Commandments which I saw when I was about ten - Moses coming down the mountain and raging about graven images - and I recall a beautiful golden - calf - I think - a bit like this one. No one goes into rages about such things any more.

A nonsense is anything anyone says which you don't agree with and here Queenie is being ironic. If you've been following my blog and reading cow poems for months, it is beginning to come into shape and Queenie is one of the cow characters who has emerged. I'll say more in a later blog, but suffice for now to say that the word queen comes from the word cow!!

what nonsense Queenie says

seven cows came out of the river
heaven born and heaven sent
these cows headed into the storm
unafraid of anyone’s wrath
they set up camp by the next river

the wild storm passed and the cows
ate breakfast of dewy grass
they conjured up a golden calf
to carry all their wealth
seven cows went into the river