"12th March 1876" and Two More Poems by Janet Sutherland
"Is there an animal, he asked, more heaven-sent than this?"
12th March 1876 – Julian & Jenny rode over from Emu Creek 11 miles (Julian’s first ride) he & I slept at the Camp Hotel (Eaglehawk, Victoria, Australia)
Old places which seemed comfortable now edge the walker with unease feeling at once both shifted and the same, the home you knew, the home that changed. This house you lived in is not yours, the skin you left there’s thinned and frail and all the people rubbed away. The long view up the valley is what’s left. No father mucking out, no mother feeding calves, no sister wading in the painted ford. I walk here sometimes in a waking dream searching the house, the barns, the fields, the muddy track, an expert witness weighing up what love demands of us and why we leave.
31st July 1876: A Stranger at the hotel called me into his room & gave me a whipsnake skin, some bloodstone, kangaroo tail & sinews & a boar’s tusk as curiosities to bring home. I had never spoken to this person before. (Auckland, New Zealand)
(A stranger on the Sunset Limited sleeper train between Houston and New Orleans, Nov 2023 ) I met a man who’d shoot up birds to make them fierce but not too wired to fight, who shopped for razor knives to tool their legs and researched bloodlines he’d mail order in, who pulled out well-thumbed periodicals, “The Feathered Warrior”, “Gamecock”, “Grit and Steel”, reading old adverts from the classifieds. We shared a table in the dining car— ogled cascading breasts in carmine-plum, wings, a luxe of greens — his Mississippi burr eased us through cotton, corn and soybean fields, virgin plots a man could work off-grid, be Born Again. The roosters test with steel, he said, stabbing each other five feet off the ground, their legs improved with nails, or spurs, or blades as sharp as sin. Is there an animal, he asked, more heaven-sent than this?
9th September 1876 - The train went so slowly, was very pleasant. I amused myself by knocking off with my feet [the] heads of sun flowers growing by the line whilst seated on the step of the platform at the end of the train. The lake looked beautiful, hemmed in as it is by mountains at the far side, a blue tint covering the scene, it looked the very essence of peace on earth. (Ogden to Salt Lake City)
There was a sweet spot halfway down the line when memory was fading but the hook of paranoia hadn't snatched his mind and we would watch his favourite films, five versions of The Thirty Nine Steps Deanna Durbin in a fat box set, light comedies scant of hurt or sex. That room with swirling pattern on the walls maze on the floor, stray clots of hair from last week’s haircut greying in the pile, grooved habits letting in apocalypse little by little in the wee small hours as looters circled the spinning house all night and took him piecemeal strand by strand
About the poems: These poems are part of a new manuscript. All the titles of the poems are short extracts from a long journal of my Irish great-grandfather, Victor Emmanuel Smyth, who undertook a round the world trip with two of his siblings, Geraldine and Julian, in the 1870s. They set off on a passenger sailing ship called The True Briton. Each title notes the date and place it was written. The trip took him from Dublin to Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, The Sandwich Islands, Fiji, the United States, Canada and so home to Dublin. The poems are set in chronological order by journal date. Julian, who is mentioned in the title of the first poem here, was left in Melbourne with a cousin. Severely mentally ill, and ten years after the journal was written, he appears in a coroners report as having committed suicide in the Melbourne Lunatic Asylum having swallowed a fork.
