Billy Marshall Stoneking [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Billy Marshall Stoneking was born in Florida and grew up on military bases across the US. At the age of twenty-five, he emigrated to Australia with a BA and a postgrad in Education from California State and began teaching in remote areas of the country. From 1978 - 1983, Stoneking lived with the Papunya community about 150 miles northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, where he established a program to help local Pintupi and Luritja people write and read in their traditional language. In 1980, he edited Stories of Obed Ragett, the first bi-lingual text published by an Indigenous Australian writer.

 

Billy Marshall Stoneking (1947 – 2016)

Stoneking’s collection Singing the Snake - Poems from the Western Desert, 1979-1988 is infused with his experiences of the desert, both the diurnal and transcendent. The poem I’d like to share, however, is a dual citizen, like the poet himself. “On the Death of Muriel Rukeyser” connects the Australian desert with New York City, where “death might be / fifty storeys high”, and is a great example of the transportational power of the imagination. In a bid to transcend the assumed mundanity of Rukeyeser’s death, “More likely dead in a dirty brasserie”, Stoneking places her at the foot of ancient “dinosaur hills” in Australia, which, never having visited in life, the famous poet and activist is able to gaze upon in death through the conduit of the poem.

 

On the Death of Muriel Rukeyser

Old Sister Death bit you off
maybe dreaming of my backdoor;
I'd sent you a letter explaining it all:
(living in ancient Aboriginal land
at the foot of big dinosaur hill); I said
drop in and see me... and you said
maybe I will.

But as Annie says,
all's got teeth:
cups and card tables,
drawers and feet.
In New York, death might be
fifty storeys high;
a railing that gives way 
too easily; the last beat 
of a dry martini.

I don't know how it came to you —
not that poetic, certainly.
More likely dead in a dirty brasserie
or impatiently with a pen
after the heat leaked out.
The news I received was impersonal,
the cost of Time magazine:

Sixty-six, poet of social protest, 
Heart attack:
proselyte of the dissident muse
(not Sappho, Sacco) —
the message more important
than the way it's read.
But

if I could reach you now
past solemnity, past Death,
past fame, we might laugh
at that last grim joke;
pointing to the dinosaur hills
you never visited,
your thick, woman voice gesturing:

'Those mountains waited two billion years
for me to be born, and
before I could see them
I was dead.'

 

 

Comments

[David Lehman]

Thanks for this informative post, TM. On first reading << More likely dead in a dirty brasserie >> I mistook the word brasserie for brassiere, which is either a secret meaning or a window into my mind, I guess.