by Lisa Gorton
Your Eleanor, my Isobel, whose slippers in the grate
tarry, but true empathy is kept for this
I make history in the Tower,
fleece the rent to peruse a commentary
time hovels through days’ dreamt tyrant
To choir would sully this grasp
Two Americas checked off, one Ireland picked,
all these wrappings.
Hived in insignia your enchained horse canters
as entreaties whistle up a kingdom
I would push my galleons to charge for you
blowy and stern
And here I decipher some longing, the flowered verse
not sent returns to oak.
But let’s walk, diplomacy can stick it
Pennants beam into air, and all trials you meant and break, twinned princes
not annul but stayed
Regression to the mean
Aden Rolfe
A jar, a thought, a slight breeze. Who else is tired of these props
and found objects? Left on their own
they form connections, attach to each other, signal new meanings
and while we wait in the wings for the next act to begin
for a guiding principle to wander by
we might as well reset the scene
in the cabin in the forest, perhaps, or
inevitably, return to the water, to that epitomised landscape –
the sand, the beach house, the predictable sets.
Thinking on it now, it should never have been about
what was missing from that experience
just about being there. You can’t identify a problem
you’re in the midst of though, and we can’t go back
and do it over, even when the map is spread before us
tracing paths up through the dunes. Best not to think of yourself
as the driving force, as the protagonist
but more as an empty jar or a thought in the wind.
Renovations
Michelle Cahill
It was a summer of stinking heat, hell-fire days,
nothing predictable but the violence of time
whistling throu a sou’ westerly, the dragon lizard
scampering to underbrush from crops of dry lawn.
Boxes in every half-filled room, masking-tape rolls,
anarchic cockroaches slewing between floorboards.
I learnt how to correct grey hair roots, presbyopia,
leaking showers. The marriage laws defied me.
Then one tradie after another, phone calls, texts.
In my alacrity, I’d confuse their names, driving
from Canada Bay to Lidcome, Ikea to Parramatta Road
for blackbutt, bamboo, terracotta. Scott from Prospect
gave a quote I accepted for all the drop sheets, all
the brawn and Epoxy sealant it took to keep me single.
Revealed
Laura Jan Shore
To re-teach a thing its loveliness …
Galway Kinnell
Nothing much lovely about Grampa Lou,
not the reek of his cigar, the ash and crumbs
tumbling from his vest as he snatched us up
onto his lap, not his prickly moustache kisses.
He’d suck his false teeth at meals, slurp soup
and slam the table in a pique, upsetting the gravy.
Made Grandma blush and squirm
with his salacious puns and Mae West jokes
and who didn’t wince at his tenor trills
while listening to Sunday night opera?
He pranced like a circus bear spouting Russian,
though he was only 12 when he’d arrived at Ellis Island.
Waving his cigar, he’d brag about the two jobs he’d worked
to pay for law school at night.
Weeping was a fine art for him and while Grandma lay dying
he wailed, Mummy, don’t leave me.
The old aunts rolled their eyes and muttered,
About time she went somewhere on her own.
At the nursing home, the staff learnt to avoid
his flirtations and the occasional pinch.
By 96, still healthy, he’d had enough
and refused to eat.
Cocooned in white blankets, he was
a shrivelled balloon minus his bluster and puff.
Groaning in his sleep, wrestling with bedclothes,
with beckoning angels, he’d cry out, No! No!
raising his palm to ward them off.
His eyelids flickered, then snapped open.
What time is it?
One pm, Grampa.
Seeing me, recognition dawned.
He asked after my children, recalling ages and names,
then drifted off only to wake and demand,
What time is it?
Once he sat straight up, grasping my hands in his icy ones.
He leaned his grizzled cheeks close.
Eyes, brimming like Russian lakes, revealed
the tender boy
he’d so skilfully concealed
beneath overcoats of bravado.
A luminous boy, we’d never met.
In the light of that naked gaze, he whispered,
You are beautiful!
spoken to me and to the reflection
of that boy beaming back.
The bare room glowed and everything
all of it – was made lovely.
Revisiting Yugoslavia: Rijeka, Croatia
Rosanna Licari
I don’t know why but I often think
I was born in my father’s city, Trieste,
(the statues of Joyce, Saba and Svevo
stand in footpaths where they once
walked and thought)
and not in Rijeka,
in a country that doesn’t exist anymore.
My cousin’s son points to a canal
lined with small coloured boats,
and my confusion surfaces.
I stare at it
the old border with Italy.
Rijeka’s language I’ve forgotten how to speak.
I speak my father’s tongue.
I remember my mother’s words:
You know how much your father hated the Communists.
I don’t know if it’s mine or someone else’s
but a deep sadness smears the gaps of the hours.
I imagine my father’s days.
They become part of me:
the contempt for the country
that took his country
is the unease,
the shame,
I feel for my birthplace.
Rise and Shine
Cameron Lowe
‘What is a / poem, anyway . . .’
—James Schuyler
Morning’s kiss
your kiss
leaves and noisy sparrows—
outside
the open window
guys are up to something
of importance—
‘… the sewer’s not …
can you get
the fucking waders …’
Rupert in Japan
Paul Magee
Prince Shotoku, who dedicated the temple at Horyuji,
the moment he was born leapt up to pray
fourteen centuries ago and quite unlike our Rupert
who was six weeks till his first smile.
&nbs
p; We stare at the deer. Now in Nara Prefecture
eight months older, in temples of shopping
and mountain air, his gestures much closer to thought.
Existing in a state no one’s ever known.
My book’s page. Its black ink.
And it’s not quite prayer.
More like paper’s feel
of the words.
And a bell resounds.
Season’s Greetings
Kate Lilley
Digital breathalyser portable garden trolley
crying kitten weight management capsules
gesso moulded cup plinth faux drawers
no photo fruit motif pineapple berries
Lap desk brass inlaid corners opening
fitted mahogany interior blue tooled leather
surface breaks to pen rest antler ink well
gilt Arabic numerals silvered dial
Revolutionary subjects in profile 1680s
gold edge porcelain birds breaks and losses
pastel portrait presume provenance verso
paper scales alcohol thermometer storm glass
Self Portrait at 65
Geoffrey Lehmann
i.m. Quinton Duffy 13.11.1971–10.9.2005
I
I sit alone watching a Japanese anime film
on a large screen.
A moth flickers across projected light.
II
I’ve been trying to write about a death,
my grand daughter’s father, aged thirty-three,
a perfect human being
who loved Japanese anime films.
Past midnight in a hospital ward
my daughter kisses his inert head
while her mother and I look on.
III
There was a “famous” incident in his childhood.
His mother hears him, aged five,
chattering to his one week old sister,
asking questions.
He appears crestfallen in the kitchen doorway:
“That baby doesn’t seem to like me.
She won’t talk.”
IV
My daughter’s regret – and she laughs –
he missed the fifth season
of The Sopranos,
The Brothers Karamazov
is buried with him, unfinished,
his shirt sleeves as he liked them
partly rolled up.
V
The females of the household
(my wife and daughter) resolve
Ada, not yet three, and I
will shower together –
“a male presence.”
VI
Three weeks after Q’s death I fly down to Julia.
She wakes me after midnight.
We drive the old brown Volvo to the hospital,
the same car as three weeks earlier.
It feels like the same journey
as a small child struggles for breath.
By three a.m., after antihistamines,
Ada’s pedalling a plastic car
across vinyl tiles
in the fluorescent calm of Emergency.
There are lurid flowers planted on the wall.
VII
I read about an improbable event:
one of the archaea
that light up marshes at night
fused with an oxygen eating bacterium
and became us,
all complex life,
and the improbable fungus
too small for hospital microscopes
that killed Q as he lay in an isolation ward.
VIII
It’s six months since Q’s death.
I sit in a glass room typing letters
for a research foundation.
The garden wilts in the sun,
overgrown with climbing roses.
Tomorrow I stay with my daughter
who carries his unborn child.
As the sun declines I switch off my screen –
I’ve an hour to mow the lawns.
I change into a torn t-shirt
and faded trousers
ripped with splashes of white paint and yellow chlorine.
My mower starts with one pull –
a surprise – but now it can’t stop
until the petrol runs out
or I jerk the lead from the spark-plug.
Its staccato roar consumes the grass on my driveway.
In the street a young man
is packing his young family into a car.
They hurry to close the doors,
alarmed by this obsessive old man,
red-faced and sweating in his clouds of dust,
as I reach the grass on the verge
and mow beside their car.
The blades are spitting out topsoil fines and dead leaves.
A pebble ricochets.
On the opposite footpath an Asian girl
holds a handkerchief to her nose.
The young man parks down the road and is back,
mild-mannered, fair hair and egg-shaped head.
I depress the throttle to hear his reproach:
“You could at least have waited!”
“I was embarrassed,” I say,
“I do the lawns in a particular order
and I’ve a tennis court to mow before it’s dark.”
He nods and walks away.
IX
My postscript, aged 68.
Julia telephones
and reads a poem of nineteen syllables.
She asks how many syllables for a haiku.
“Seventeen,” I reply.
She’ll send the corrected haiku
as a text message:
“and you can put it in a poem –
So it will be preserved.”
This is Julia Lehmann’s haiku,
(now a syllable short):
“Widowed 4 years, I find
the wig you made from your hair,
(still scented).”
X
A postscript to the postscript:
I have to set up the camera again
with my self portrait
for a final tracking shot.
I’m 69
and having radiotherapy.
Lying on the slab
surrounded by lights
in an empty room with pop music playing
I shut my eyes
so I don’t panic.
That night my daughter
texts me another haiku for Q
(the number of syllables correct):
“Always fluorescent
in the room where you died,
my howl is a ghost there.”
from Shaping the Dark: Three Readings of Tony Lloyd’s Oil on Linen Painting ‘On a Dark Night You Can See Forever’
Robyn Rowland
ii. Night holds history inside its black cape.
You know when your unit reaches the top of this ridge
your truck will turn, unload, and the firing begins.
Sarajevo sits sparkling, a diamond sunk below the ring of hills;
cosmopolitan, blended Ottoman and Austrian and Bosnian,
a jangle of colour and bright spirit, a tight woven history.
You enjoy the lights now; ‘like fairyland’, your mother used to say;
and she’d wonder: ‘what are you doing here?’
People below don’t know what you know.
That they are now targets, ducks in a shooting gallery.
That fifteen hundred children will be killed, ten thousand adults;
three hundred mortars a day will burn their books, crush their history,
buildings and bodies fragmented.
For four years – no heat, no power, no water, no food.
Then they will know blackness:
a lightless city where only your flares will ignite it
so mortars can find victims in the dark.
That long black road may go on forever.
snowy
Joanne Burns
they flash past
like cyclists through
red lights with or without
consequence is there a need
to hurry is there an agenda
as they wait for particle
rearrangement, reassignment
another incarnation; do they
get impatient or is this messing
around merely spirit at play, a
version of ‘being’ italicised; are
the dead on the look out for
groceries, hungry as they visit
dreams footpaths crevices
vestibules auditory canals, beings
we recognise, or don’t; what
fills the space between the ‘be’
and the ‘ing’, what would coleridge
have to say in his lime-tree bower;
you surprised me deep in slumber
under the snowy doona, your
emerald dress like a sudden
summer –
Soar
A. Frances Johnson
It began with structural analysis of a dragonfly wing.
The first task was to create
flow in the DelFly II.
Wing flexibility in ‘clap-and-fling’
and ‘clap-and-peel’ were tested.
But what of appearance variation cues
and obstacle avoidance?
In the end they took a sky segmentation approach,
while others dealt with complex tail effects
in flapping flight. Even so, after years of work,
hear-and-avoid problems beset
indoor and outdoor dragonflies.
All parties were insisting on micro air vehicles
quieter than any insect that ever hovered