‘Two Houses’: a poem from Judith Beveridge’s Tintinnabulum

Two Houses
for Stephen

I found a rental with tall trees just beyond the back fence.
It was peaceful except for the three a.m. Friday freight
train slowly pulling the weight of its wagons along the tracks,
wheels grinding, couplings shrieking, derailing our sleep
for at least that six minutes of a much longer run
to get the goods into Sydney. Wherever it had come
from—Brisbane, Casino—that train would have travelled
through the night, a two-kilometre chain rattling
sleepers awake, but we didn’t mind so much because
often at that hour, we’d hear the powerful owls
close by in the trees and we’d get up, take the torch
and wait for the light to show in their eyes, red beacons
flashing on and off like lighthouses if they blinked.
They were so close we could see the mottling and barring
of their feathers, layers of white and grey highlighted
with brown and charcoal chevrons, strong claws
gripping a branch. We’d listen for the slow, deep soundings
of the male, then the higher pitched call of the female,
a short catechism resolving territory and distance.
We watched at dusk, too, for their flight—soundless
distillations of moonlight in the shadows and the trees.
There were flocks of cockatoos also, like that freight
train shrieking us awake, taking us out into the timbered
dawn, our new haunt of astonishment. Everything
that year was new: your move from interstate, my shunting
an unsalvageable marriage to its dead-end siding, the gambit
we took in changing our lives. I’ve heard powerful owls
are the only birds that can carry more than their own
weight. No wonder they became our talismans. Once
we saw a mother owl feeding three juveniles, tearing shreds
from a dead possum. We’d find possums in the reserve
neatly eviscerated, the kills always silent… We live
elsewhere now, our own place. Sometimes, still, we hear
an owl, a male’s wooing, and territory-declaring to bring
a mate in close. But we’ve only seen an owl once,
when sitting out in our yard, it alighted on a low branch,
its pearl-ash and dusty-grey feathers made it look like a puff
of fog against the apricot blush of dusk. Watching the owl
again I thought of how far we’d come—all the actions,
workings, means, and mechanisms across time and distance
to pull to its destinations this rich consignment of love.

From Tintinnabulum by Judith Beveridge (2024).