The Best Australian Poems 2013
Page 8
Melbourne, still home
to men with Spam-coloured
faces and no-coloured hair
who stand around on Fitzroy corners
waiting for the saloon-bar doors to swing
and hack away at winter mornings
with lungfulls of Holiday and Horizon
until the first cold Draught
hits the bottom of the glass
and who have never yet called home
on a smartphone.
My Husband’s Grave
Andy Kissane
I ripped a cotton thistle from the grass beside your grave.
No doubt you stepped on them on your last march,
pulled the spines from your trousers, admired the lovely
purple flowers. How far you walked, past burning haystacks
and deserted houses, past women who looked at you
and looked away. I’m sure you dreamt of the shady verandah
at home, bees flitting about the garden, my plum jam cooling
in the kitchen, a long letter safe in your overcoat pocket, a poem
written on the back of a handbill advertising cod-liver oil.
Your dear friend, Miklós Lorsi, was shot beside you,
the bullet slicing into his chin where he once rested his violin.
If you’d marched with the second unit you would have lived,
Miklós Radnóti, like your poems—poems the earthworms
did not eat; love as tough as a thistle and as hard to eradicate.
my singing empty hands
Shari Kocher
i hold the boat steady and my sister
climbs in the boat smells of lavender
as only the image of a boat
can smell of lavender in a dream
water purling at the lip my sister
has not grown any older
my sister says
i smell like garlic
my sister takes the oars
you sit she says i row don’t you know
anything? my sister’s words
smell strongly of washing powder
she flinches when i touch her
shut up she says just let me row
my sister’s hands on the oars
smell of soap and some sinister
cheap perfume my daughter sometimes
wears when she is angry my sister
closes her hands on the oars
my sister does not see me at all
there’s the smell of kelp in the water
some rival in her head do you remember
nothing she says you say is true
i taste the snow in the air between us
my sister rows
precisely and with determination
the book grows soggy in her hand
ink grass clippings blood
why aren’t you helping she cries at last
thrusting the oars at me as she sheds
her crocodile tears you never do anything
the book with which she has been rowing
from under her lashes my sister
watches me my sister’s tears
taste like lamingtons my sister’s voice
shines with the cut of scales
my sister does not see through her crying
the flash of real fish in the flashing water
my sister sits in our small boat
in the middle of that wide little water
with rounded shoulders
the smell of iron filings
something burning
she wears our mother’s hair
Nostalghia
Carmen Leigh Keates
after Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia
In sleep he is sent
to a memory that nears
its incarnation.
He can see his silhouette
in the distance,
it walks a dusk horizon
that curves like the top
of a molecule.
His real life earns
a passing mention
in a lengthy deposition
under hypnosis.
*
In the caverns of the baths,
in his clothes and shoes
Gorchakov walks through water;
there is all the difference in the world
between here and home
and as he wades
he smokes a cigarette.
Gorchakov is in danger.
He can be both
inhaled and blown away.
Rather than a reflection,
on a mirror he is condensation.
Sometimes he is just
the breath of a dog.
This poet is a photograph.
When the emulsion
of his thin silver present
is exposed to light, it channels
an old instinct’s pictures.
His country has formed crystals.
*
At nineteen I was a receptionist
at a photographic college.
One of the students
was a man from the mines. He said
Where do accents come from?
And I said something about
kinds of English sounds breeding along a line
– an auditory line of whomever ended
up in Australia, for instance.
In-bred voice noise.
And he said, But at first?
What is an accent in its own place?
It must be something in the rocks.
*
All the water in this film
is actually voice
that has decomposed.
In Gorchakov’s head,
in moving countries he
has started a precipitation.
Think how Domenico’s house leaks
even when it is not raining –
somehow, sonar has bled.
Gorchakov’s old memory is animated
and it transitions through states.
A liquid distilled from his country
is in his blood.
*
At the moment of heart attack,
it is the gas of this country
that drifts from his mouth.
As the poet becomes unconscious
a stratum is formed
and in this layer
memory is a demon that walks
like a soldier from a tunnel.
Not in vain
Michael Farrell
You think of gracious ladies, I of gents: not so
young, dressed in rain. We are quiet, mad, like drummers looking
for a band. We turn over the soil, marvel at
our tranquillity. All’s well in Paris, according to
the TV. Magic roofs of thatch have descended
creating brown shadows. A rustle and bark, but no
dog in the yard. We’ve seen the international
children crying at the graves of Tutenkhamen. They’re
on tour like us. Cairo’s Proust iguanas his gay
eyes, his gay neck. The sacred lawns are being mown. Mainland
ways. Five minutes sunshine, then Fleur-de-Lys Island.
The attitude of the pottery up there’s chilly. We
throw rocks at its crimson calm. I’d come to imprint
the sky on my green-gold mind. At first I felt flush, vain
boggled. Cooing
images of the lotused ground.
Sunny creature, resting through spring ... grace to be visible.
Nyirbator
Oscar Schwartz
on top of the bridge
the danube’s bullpit the mosquitoes
the brown stones the currency
accumulating everything as it should be and
hair emptying into a plastic bag
outside the synagogue my arm
itchy I pray for the return of
a name this is all so super it is
also regular and I see it as a bright
pink boarder or empty glasses frames
or a nut shell this is you watching me
behave like a nut shell entirely tied up
to some familiar name stoned marble
this is you petrified stoned palpable
the nut is no longer moved by stimuli
not even purple grapes or purple light
on barmitzvahed hands the most
precise siren is silence and if you
wander through the mass names and
rub your eyes is it because you are
expressing sadness or is it because
I happen to be playing with a name
as it used to be I do feel like I’m watching
you yes I am from a bridge do me a favour
visit my family tell me their names
Ochre
Ali Cobby Eckermann
green and bright blue flits of colour
swirl in a mallee-grey underground
amid constant bird song harmony
along the riverbank bee eaters
dart rainbows around her head
as she paints her body with yellow ochre
splash crimson on bleeding eyes
through the tunnel of darkness
honour the dead
Ode on Love
Petra White
What he has taken of me
I don’t even want back,
I don’t want to want back.
This new happiness holds up
a novel mischief that waits in the near.
Why so indispensible?
Before I knew him I did not need him:
if he goes I must replace him,
as if I could. And that circling body-mashing doubt.
How he throws me
into dark and retrieves me!
And with gazes like little riffing flames inhabits me.
What does the bottom-most soul know of this –
that basin of us
concerned only with survival,
collecting residual passion
and washing clean,
shining up that bit of us
that cares nothing?
That idea that every lover is the same,
that there’s a template, a type,
that what I call all-but-worship’s not this man but an all-man man
likely to be just like my father:
being one man he is all,
many desires folded into one bright
bouquet of obsession that springs from the heart like Spring.
He is coasting along his own midnight.
The trapping of his breath, the only outward sign,
I devour it like meat,
as if it was him,
tenderly and watchfully in all love’s creepiness.
Love is a thing, the self’s
undoing that it begs for.
He twitches out hot shivers of love he shifts away from,
exalts and voids me
with the economy of a waiter emptying a whole table with one hand.
Power to love draws the long breath from me.
Petrarch made this a joy, an Other queening distance,
love never shaken by reality, never
whittled by exchange.
I fear whatever we have will puff like a daisy.
And if not?
Mutuality, mutability, love nuanced and grappled, hard.
This seam of encounters can’t peg itself down,
it is or isn’t, it is high or low, a scythe swinging in, or out.
The self tries to locate him, and itself
in all the moving signifiers of love,
lover and love, meaning and feeling,
things that says, love this one, not another.
I lie in bed scratching at the night.
Absent, his beauty
evaporates. He flickers before me,
knowable-unknowable, central lover, man-figure
skating so sweetly at the edge of a beauty.
How I hope against. How I want to know if he.
And love dares the self.
To risk what there is in hope of havocking more to risk.
Trying not to try to purloin him whole
but keep him near – to tell my heart so stupid!
The drawbridge clatters up.
Old Europe (2)
Adam Aitken
You don’t need to queue at the entrance
but then so dark your captions now unreadable
since the children left.
Come dine with me in a dead café.
Let’s dance in my old Turkish residence
lined with uncut books
where a cigar accords with taste
and the chocolatier snores.
You may need to sidestep the urine.
Rémy flew home in a djellaba
the armless no glory veteran
the pigeons don’t bother with the bread
the accordion’s sellotaped to wheeze a tune.
The Romanies sell puppies to lovesick tourists
but the light is what we dream,
Saron’s scything searchlight,
the Eiffel Tower a blingy earring
on the ear of Europa.
In the courtyard of a hôtel particulier
she showed me the seventeenth century
rainwashed and dishabille
with a horse in harness
and a Russian lover who won’t spy for money or love.
A warning: the shih tzu twins are locked in
patrolling my millionaire terrace,
the road a crime scene below, a day-for-night
with Citroen and café shoot-out.
You might have to step over the body.
I only come here for summer,
for language, macaroons,
delicious cod. Good thing Cheryl
got the handbag she wanted she’s
so persistent we filmed it.
On Dreams
Diane Fahey
It needs a strong will, and patience
to hold the dream inside the body
while the mind imprints itself with icons
of bright smoke, and an arm reaches for pen, paper.
Timed out, the dream’s beyond reclaim:
a shoreline’s wash of moon eclipsed by cloud.
A dream saved is this glass of water
which lights a piecemeal, bizarre version of a room,
encrypts and reverses a text in progress,
swells, presses flat, these fingertips.
As the day warms, the glass collects dust,
fresh shadows, kaleidoscopes gold air.
You sip from it, drinking the room, the dream:
here and now and then; nowhere, never.
On Not Getting my Spray Can Signed by Mr Brainwash
Jaya Savige
after Elvis (2009), by Thierry Guetta
It’s not that I’d prefer
another portrait of St. Michael
to Elvis wielding an M16
designed by Fisher & Paykel.
Wait, I mean by Fisher Price –
point being I appreciate
a top shelf Invader piece
as much as any Eurydice,
and I’m pretty sure I get
the way our fetishisation
of the toy assault rifle
inflects his canonisation
as The King. It’s just that capital
encourages this: the endless
permutations of its effects
are hardly less mindless.
The hubris is in thinking
of each meme-savvy mashup
as a protest, allied to a flash
mob trashing Topshop.
It’s not. This canvas is passive
as TV. No caulking with irony
can prevent its shtick’s hull
ripping on the reef of cliché.
I pray to Duchamp not to be
the guy who cries Scheissers!
unfazed that he’s conscripted
by the thing he criticises.
Outstretched Arms
Lachlan Brown
for Noel Rowe
maybe I’m getting used to it the drive down the M5
black bitumen as smooth as any beach
the search for parking in Randwick heels clicking
in hospital corridors and my brother’s
measured breath intensive care is
quiet like a library where machines and nurses
speak in lowered tones as if death was sleeping nearby
not to be awakened we’re trying to talk to him
but it’s hard to speak to stillness
the doctors keep saying you must remember
his coma score was very low
though young people often surprise us
my youngest brother should be studying for the hsc
according to my parents
instead he carts his dreadlocks and skateboard
past hospital security and tries to chat up
the pretty british nurses
I don’t know how to comfort him when he starts crying
so we don’t talk much about the accident
or the operations that aren’t succeeding
instead we argue about the radio station in the car