Prickly Moses
On the growth of an Acacia verticillata planted the year before
Our loose-limbed wattle, our lounger up heights
is gaining leanly to the rungs
of lesser trees
and has struck this spring
her first nuggets of gold, is letting branchlets
roam like tendrils and clamber light like a rope.
We slacken the eye in your pool of green
needle after needle, evergreen, monogreen,
crosshatching space till a painter would puzzle
to botanise a branch with a fuzz of petioles
or go for a Green Knight with red wall poking through.
Prickly Moses,
when I think how long I ignored your name
to marvel at ash and oak and elm,
I guess we’re still shy of the Promised Land.
Like way back when our foreign forebears the squatter
and illiterate wit coined your common name,
cutting mimosa down to Moses,
and reckoning your type by laying hands on a limb
to pluck a sapling for a fishing rod,
and you were found wanting to homegrown wood.
You grow regardless. You obtain, lopsided,
the enlightenment of well-pitched things, your equilibrium a wry smile
beaming in an old bloke’s bristly face,
as I pass you on the pathway at the bottom
of the stair. Your first commandment:
start out from acknowledgment.
• Excerpted from Prickly Moses by Simon West. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Simon West is a poet much interested in trees and their two-way connectivity, ancestral and future-generative. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1974, and educated at the University of Melbourne where he now teaches, having sent a number of years living in Italy. He has published five collections of poetry, a volume of translations from the Italian, The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, and Dear Muses? Essays in Poetry.
Discussing his “fascination with historical depth”, he asserts that this depth “can be found in the natural world as much as the human”. These preoccupations are built into the themes and textures of the collection Prickly Moses. Technically, the poems are a strong fusion of the traditional vertical structures of rhyme and/or stress-pattern, with a spacious sense of the line’s horizontal flexibility, whether investigating the topographies of Australia or Italy. Words themselves engender journeys, and the title poem of West’s new collection focuses on a plant whose presence begins with an intriguing name, the Prickly Moses, a species of acacia.
Another name for the acacia is “wattle” as the first line indicates. The poem wisely resists encumbering itself with facts, but look further and you find out that Australia has numerous varieties of acacia, and that the golden wattle is the national floral emblem. It can grow to the dimensions of a shade-tree, and, in the poem, the initial emphasis is on successful growth. The “lounger up heights” seems to be overtaking the “lesser trees” who perhaps are providing some unintended support (“rungs”). Casually flourishing, the plant “has struck … her first nuggets” – a springtime goldrush of mimosa flowers. In the third verse, the direct address begins, though at some aesthetic distance, after an initial relaxation into Marvellian “green thoughts in a green shade”. Contemplation reveals more detail, ending in a suggestion that the prospective painter might resist the “puzzle” of “green / needle after needle, evergreen, monogreen” and the “fuzz of petioles” and prefer the sharper look of a “Green Knight with red wall poking through”. (Perhaps the Green Knight in question is haworthopsis limifolia, but a character from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can’t altogether be ruled out.)
Now the Mosaic name comes into focus and helps the poem branch further into history. The speaker chides himself for an earlier focus on the great trees of Europe’s historical depths. “I guess we’re still shy of the Promised Land,” he wryly observes. For the origin of the name Prickly Moses we’re reminded of “the squatter / and illiterate wit that coined your common name”. Indigenous people would have known the multiple uses of the tree (from flour to boomerangs) but the squatter, in need of a fishing rod, has (over-fussily?) found the sapling “wanting to homegrown wood”.
The Prickly Moses is tenacious, carefee: “You grow regardless.” Some of its casual quality is captured in the poem’s voice and diction, its pleasure in a certain visual baroque which entirely avoids pomposity or fussiness. The parable into which it finally branches is similarly mild-mannered.
The tree is growing throughout the poem, and the moral dimension expanding. By the penultimate verse, the Prickly Moses has obtained, “lopsided, / the enlightenment of well-pitched things” – think of the Buddha, think of JS Bach. Near-human now, it exchanges a smile with the poet whenever he passes it “on the pathway at the bottom / of the stair”. And, appropriate to its name, it issues a first commandment, rather different from that of the biblical Moses, though not unconnected: “start out from acknowledgment”. Such acknowledgment goes beyond giving some living entity, human or arboreal, “the time of day”. While it doesn’t exclude such greeting, the more essential advice, for the exile, settler, poet, would be along the lines of “don’t underestimate the local, however unpromising it appears. Investigate without prejudice. And, of course, enjoy the naming of names.”
Prickly Moses is a fine floral emblem of West’s key landscapes, forms and ideas. Readers who are new, as I was, to this writer’s work, will surely enjoy the quiet originality of his fifth collection. I’m motivated both to look back into the earlier books and anticipate the next.
