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The Best Australian Poems 2013

Page 11

by Lisa Gorton

over a lake (‘water source’).

  One bright spark solved it,

  You want quiet? I’ll give you guys quiet, he said.

  This is gunna be the quietest bug on the planet,

  quieter than anything we’ve done before;

  quieter than any soft-spoken woman at a well

  shielding her eyes from the glare,

  from dreams of water

  in the insectless heat of high summer.

  Sorrowful

  Jennifer Compton

  The house is up for tender and will be sold.

  Houses always sell – in the end. Even if it is

  for the land. Smoking out or treading down

  the haunts takes three days, or even longer.

  A child always has a father even if the child

  must learn to forgive that father for almost

  everything. A father is just a man, just one

  more member of our clan, one of our skin.

  And the mother, a roomy doorway, a pathway,

  a vivid gash – making the baby up as she goes

  along. If she holds the little one too close to her

  it will have to kick hard to make her let it go.

  The brother and the sister and the cousin keep

  all the secrets of how you used to be. Oh a long

  long time ago. In the meeting place impossible

  to prevent the family smell from burgeoning.

  The tea slops into the saucer, the wine is opened

  and poured into that glass of memories, that gift

  that was given to a dead woman, before she died.

  Some of us drink tea, and some of us drink wine.

  The house will be sold, the broken window was

  repaired a long long time ago, some of us will

  die soon – some of us will turn over in our beds

  and do what is needful to call the new one home.

  Spiritual

  Ali Alizadeh

  A place of crosses and bullet shells

  sold by auction. Flattened cars

  sold by negotiation. Muddy ribcage

  to be inspected by appointment

  with an undead agent. Vendors

  stinking cadavers. Property

  of decomposition. A house amazing

  -ly decrepit. Did we enjoy prosperity

  ‘s graveyard? To report

  conditions of infestations? No

  place like home. It’s me and you

  dusting this debris, kicking vultures

  out of our craters. Floor boards

  become of coffins, curtains

  of bloody uniforms. Let’s haunt this house.

  from Stages of Balthazar (with a Chorus of Elders)

  L. K. Holt

  1.

  Uncertain grey of early morning,

  a quick warm cataract

  is the birth of donkey,

  now stuck with grass and its mother’s gum, legs bunched

  under like unlit kindling

  The field totters and rights itself

  as the foal stands planted fast,

  lapidarian beside a sun that shakes

  in its haze, an earth

  shirking underfoot

  —beautiful he

  stirs up still things

  Trailing afterbirth regally

  the mother-mountain instead comes to him:

  strikes him over the head with

  a teat to set

  his flesh on its parting way

  —be ahead of all partings,

  as long gone already

  like winter in spring;

  and be ever-dying in your chosen-poison;

  the cut-glass cup that shatters itself

  and resounds down the great diminishing;

  be—yet know

  of its antipode,

  nothing-source of your trembling ontology:

  Oh I am here! And as such

  I assent!

  Great love overshoots its end

  and shifts back its conception:

  Was it then a thin

  girl hand reached down to touch his curly brow

  commanding in a tiny-headed tremolo

  Father let us have him.

  —Only know:

  this is the animal that never was.

  Of course he wasn’t.

  But as we gave him space

  the poor pure beast persisted

  and in this place so white unfenced

  he barely needed to exist yet raised his head

  Strange, unremarkably so

  Anna Fern

  They just want to keep talking when I read a normal poem,

  but an experimental sound poem

  brings a whole bar of drunks to silence.

  Loading up the car, I admire the enhanced reflections of scudded clouds on the back window, the sun a bright disc.

  Hey, you could watch a solar eclipse on this thing!

  The bathroom mirror says I can leave the house looking pretty good,

  but when I see my reflection in shop windows I want to go home.

  Completing an unremarkable transaction on the phone, the customer says ‘love you’ and hangs up.

  On the freeway, it’s best not to think about the possibility of dying.

  Try to marvel at how cooperative we can be.

  Peak hour, I notice a puff of white fluff from the car in front. Then another. Then a burst of white feathers. A perfect white dove falls plop! onto the road in front of my car, sits up, flies away. I think, the driver of that car is a magician, or maybe an escape artist.

  Tonight, I was greeted by the neighbour’s cat on the back verandah.

  Proof that when a cat dies, all the other cats redistribute themselves

  to fill the empty space.

  Street Encounter

  π.O.

  Napier St., late morning

  a blonde woman gets out of a Yellow Cab, pulls the rose

  out of her hair, and throws it in the gutter

  outside her house.

  The old woman

  with arthritis gets to the Hoddle St. bus (outside

  the Flats); she still knows

  how to laugh.

  HUNGRY JACKS --- empty.

  Small shot / Big Night: Ad for alcohol at the Bus stop

  A Vietnamese woman gets out of the bus

  : H â T

  H2O is the name of a Hand Car Wash.

  CALL THIS CUNT 0423451499

  ENCORE --- will bring you pizza.

  Ad: Red Meat: the Home of Quality

  The Workers (on

  the footpath) are excavating; pipe on shoulder =========

  And piping the whole of the street.

  A woman walking 2 dogs.

  Cross over; – Which way? ––––– untangles the leash!

  CALL O423451499 4 FREE HEADJOB

  *! BangerS & Mash, peas $8.

  A kid on the footpath (outside

  the café) with red boots on, is jumping on all the puddles;

  checking-out how

  deep

  they are.

  A woman walking along

  the footpath, is draped in the Australian Flag. (On her way

  to the Sports ground, i guess). A red rose

  in her hair.

  An entrance (to a Brothel) called Ladies + Gentlemen’s.

  A pretty woman outside.

  .............................................

  (Not
related).

  Over the Hoddle St. Bridge (up

  the hill) and everyone’s ))))))))))))))) on bicycles.

  The YEAH MAAN RASTA

  RAUNT looks very tired; Could do with a good paint job.

  Draagon stops me (on

  the corner). What you doing? he sez. I tell him

  i’m going up the street here, to kill a man, shoot-Up,

  run around the block, walk pass some Bouncers,

  smile at a Copper, slap a PUNK about,

  go back to Vincent’s, and pretend

  nothin’ happened.

  He sez, why don’t i come round later, and

  have a choof.

  from Succession

  Brendan Ryan

  (iii)

  Maybe I should have held onto it longer.

  I did my best thinking in the dairy.

  All those years of dipping hands in hot water,

  feeding calves, ploughing on Sundays, chasing pigs.

  Now I’m chasing what’s left of this life –

  these days I don’t even buy green bananas.

  Wouldn’t it be great to do it all again?

  Start off with nothing, go into debt, shift a bit

  of country. Farmers have hung themselves for less.

  I drive the ute over every inch of grass remembering

  afternoons turning in the seat, face into dust, checking

  the discs, rocks weighing them down, the back

  out of joint, bone rubbing on bone. If I didn’t hand it over

  he would have left. Some days I get silly notions in my head.

  Summer

  Nguyen Tien Hoang

  Summer. The coach veers to a screeching halt. Divided into two groups, women and men.

  I soon would wake up among the infirm.

  Molded. A modicum of light.

  What hits me then, a sudden

  Your face

  and ‘Never’, a curl of a sound

  and all these years, my whole life end-to-end.

  In the grand run-down house, they give me a small cabin

  which looks like a single room once taken by Van Gogh

  minus the writing desk

  The caretaker says he’s Manichean, and will be kind

  He hands me a Napoleonic washbowl

  Indecipherable years scratched out at the base, saying

  Use

  For the snow.

  The Bat Corridor

  Louise Oxley

  Or we could leave the house, the pressure

  of its walls and light, its hard words

  bumbling against the windows,

  and go down to the gully where the creek-bank

  collapses with the autumn rains, something

  you could fall for and put your lips to.

  Come on, bring the mattock for the thistles;

  hold it between us if you wish.

  We won’t know what makes them

  unwrap the bandaged thumbs of their bodies

  and bear away from the canopy

  the moment the day’s balance tips towards night;

  we won’t decipher their insect-seeking sonar,

  or tally the number of beetles they catch

  and the number they miss.

  Yet these little crepuscular bats,

  flying by hand, led by their petalled noses,

  have us mesmerised in the spiky pea,

  motionless, transported.

  Scouts sent ahead of the night, detachments

  from dark like escaped pocket linings,

  one is suddenly there, a sharp dip and yaw

  over the paddock, then gone; there

  and gone, a relay of presence and absence.

  They are mystery and guesswork;

  their flickering fly-past in the half-light is enough

  to make us question the worth of seeing clearly

  and settle for partial blindness; enough,

  when it’s time to go in, to make you

  shift the mattock to the other hand.

  The break

  Caitlin Maling

  To prevent tragedy the brush must be cut an angles,

  no less than ten metres between squares.

  Here my ancestors planted the buffalo grass

  where it burns too hot for the native plants to seed

  and we need these squares between land

  to stop it sparking all the way to our homes.

  After her third institutionalization they suggested

  that perhaps my Aunt’s cingulated cortex be severed,

  there was too much leaping between lobes.

  Now I am the oldest member of my father’s family

  not to have undergone inpatient treatment

  for whatever fire caused my grandmother’s suicide

  and the beating my grandfather gave which sparked it.

  I try to hold my line. To be the space

  large enough to let it all burn out.

  But out of my native climate I arc and arc.

  The Brooklyn International Motel

  Ella Jeffery

  Oily light in the corridors

  and the smell of old suitcases

  we borrowed from your parents.

  You write our room number

  on the back of your hand, spread

  postcards on rough carpet.

  Through the louvers

  we watch emergency lights flash,

  dragging cars out of fog.

  Later, in the dark, you search for the bed.

  Crookedness

  meets your fingertips.

  You grip my bent leg

  like a branch

  to climb up and sit on.

  In other rooms,

  people wait for hot water with a hand

  in the shower.

  From these windows

  the world looks nothing like itself.

  The ceiling has stolen some low stars.

  Come closer.

  The slow roll of cities

  will turn us home soon.

  Across the Pacific

  the battered poinciana still stands

  outside the house we live in.

  The Conscience of Avimael Guzman

  John Hawke

  All Peruvians are liars – Mario Vargas Llosa

  Peru is not a novel – Shining Path graffiti

  In grey wind where snow turns to ice, leaving no shelter,

  you are murdering the woman who made you feel guilty,

  who called you a fascisti. Your fingers at her throat

  you examine her pores and her pock-marks,

  her teeth broken by a rifle butt

  because her parents worshipped an icon of Stalin.

  A high fog is breaking in the acquiescent village.

  Faces carved from the hard material of nature

  reveal no motives. Your hands close on nothing:

  wood, weeds or water. Impossible to tell

  if these people are servants to force alone

  or to your foreign currency of words

  translated from another language – the promise

  of conquest, the repossession of forgotten land.

  Your eyes fix on the face of the woman,

  her ideas reduced to manageable flesh and bone.

  What else could subdue them but your own

  nervous retraction, making a virtue of fear.

  Your tongue removing itself into black cavities,

  y
our eyes concealed among Indians, watching

  the woman’s body slowly digested by insects.

  The strings of your nerves drawn shrill

  by the need to maintain a single extreme moment,

  but that was an error, a point of mathematics:

  better to proceed by denial, eating your own words

  compacted and swallowed in gutters.

  The fabricated voice of the journals dissolves behind you,

  Your carefully bound diaries left on a train

  now somewhere in a distant country – maybe Russia,

  the terminus, the last exit. The veins in your cheeks

  crackle red, and you are outside time, awaiting

  the moment of ignition. But these are autumn colours,

  half-formed mountains at the edge of the world.

  The Amazon running to rock. Vast crowds

  milling together, resisting the pressure to meld or mesh.

  At first there was anger, in the fluttering walls of the throat,

  at the sight of those faces barely released from stone,

  brown feet roasted over open fires.

  Torturers winding back their watches

  at the sign of the scar, at the hour of the sentry.

  Americans with flaccid hands. The light like shroud-cloth

  burning your skin. You made yourself dark,

  withdrawing into the shadows of the century, accepting nothing.

  You are speaking to yourself thanks to the magic

  of an alien technology, which is your own,

  or at least helps you belong to your time.

  But how it really happens, how the same words recur

  in this haphazard way outside of any system

  remains a mystery. A voice speaking over the radio

  mirrors your own, and you cannot break the habit

  of these reflections, cannot even retrace your steps.

  An insidious machine is reading your thoughts.

  The woman raises her head grotesquely,

  and even though you are immersed in shiny blood

  there is nothing left to be offered or consumed.

  The magic of cheap rhetoric is retained

  like a forgotten taste, brushing your tongue.

  All the things that you can touch refer to secrecy

  or symbols, but is that magic any more than a good card-hand

 

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