The Best Australian Poems 2013

Home > Other > The Best Australian Poems 2013 > Page 13
The Best Australian Poems 2013 Page 13

by Lisa Gorton


  Pines melting in the middle distance

  Dark green glass shards sliding into the earth

  A path trodden flakes of rock

  Through clumps and bristles of grass and wet-stemmed seed-heads

  Dropping over bright plastic bits and rusting caps

  Squashed with dirt into a bleak loam

  A field scattered with the bones of my predecessors

  Wandering aimlessly over turquoise hills, smoky dead trees

  I find I’m outside the future, overgrown

  Great walls of roots & earth crumbling sodden in the muddy weather

  Wooden claws of hackberry gum

  Knotted foetal in the grey wind, contrail chords in the sky

  Lines unfurling between hard matter and blue

  Blown above a jetliner’s silver precipice

  Disappearing into the end of a broken branch

  Time and space are orange as mud in gravel

  Trees a-glint with a wild fire

  Sparks flying across the horizon the singular grey abyss

  Every bramble has been the same, I think

  As they all rush from my past like black swans, snow geese

  Drawn into the circle of gravel

  A formation of birds dropping suddenly into mind

  As I walk around, feathers widening

  Angular as they land into the poverty of the world

  The horizon always looking, then retreating from the present

  And all it holds, the skeletal frame of a sparrow chick

  Its absent eye resting on a quartz pebble

  Left as a sign to the logic of inhuman death, clear, immensely old

  A grain of cold stone, the indifferent raw tangle

  In a bracken fern halo, the silent forehead of a sickle moon

  Tacked strangely to a wooden light-pole

  The sound of water tinkling and gurgling, treble & bass

  A silver banner fluttering and wending

  Through the poplars and brace of pines

  Darkness somehow equal to its bright and random melody

  Caught in the cold pomegranate at the road’s end

  Crimson flesh held in a world of white foam

  Mist correlates, transpires, solid shapes beneath the moon

  & stars, hips and haws, love and hate

  No matter how opaque and powerless I become

  I still cry into the night as it springs burning into felony

  Emptiness glowing through dry yellow stalks

  No match for the whorl at the crown of your head

  Telescoped to a galaxy, a whale from the old world bare

  As a chunky key-ring nob lost in the mossy grit

  Where I walk & look, no doubt within

  Perhaps hell-bent as gravel paths spread from me chaotically

  All the same, having wandered here before

  And knowing how each will always yield its own

  I fall away into the roadside ditch

  Sticks and mud stuck in my hair, the back of my throat

  Catching the gold sunset

  Behind, of course, bitumen spread Bauhaus thin and black

  A wall of glass windows over the road

  A mercury pool shimmering in the wind

  The whole reflected world shuddering.

  The Slide

  Jill Jones

  Sometimes they put you in seas

  or rivers without telling you.

  The river is dark, let’s say

  and trees are low over you.

  In the branches are owls

  making noises like a machine

  breathing.

  After you come away from this

  you have a scar and a jar

  where you swim.

  It is chemical, archaeological

  and violent.

  So you wash it all away.

  It’s too early for things to be

  broken or twisted

  but even when you run, you fall.

  All your life, if you could fly

  all your life slides from under you

  and you do not have to swallow

  water or hear it.

  You do not have to but you must

  as the clouds fall without telling you.

  from The Vanity of Australian Wishes

  Alan Wearne

  8

  One Saturday evening Forbes and I leave his monastic,

  lino-paved North Carlton house, heading for Brunswick Street.

  We know what to expect:

  Bohemia as a free-market, tolerant-enough, rock’n‘roll

  republic for the Kids in Black, though tonight

  hosting the Templestowe hordes,

  the Menai, MacGregor and Joondoolup hordes

  who John observes, ‘Go for all this

  with the same intensity they’d go for wowserism.’

  Admirably correct of course, and I won’t forget it,

  but does he feel as if some Leagues Club

  propped by the four pillars of its demos ethos

  Good beer, good tucker, good mates, good times

  might somehow be wowser-free and purer?

  I dare not ask him.

  Meanwhile, one or two ks west

  The Great Gangitano is doubtless shaking down,

  or planning shaking down, or celebrating shaking down

  the subjects of his lulu kingdom. Then later,

  with Jason and whoever needs the thrill-enough,

  find him in King Street, lots of heads in King Street,

  some to get cracked, some to look away;

  lots of tits too, sweet and getting sweeter;

  and lots of space to be caught on camera just like that,

  like that all-too-real-thing, a movie star, is meant to be.

  What this man needs is a brother, to set his limits,

  for if you must standover, please … with style?

  Broadsheet, tabloid or talk, whatever gives a crew its name

  they have to deserve their reputation and Alphonse

  you just aren’t deserving it.

  Is this what made them visit you

  that mid-summer Friday night?

  It might’ve been when the bro-talk started, it sure was where

  and when it stopped: lots of shouting in a big house.

  Know the it of You’re losing it?

  Well you lose plenty but when the it occurs,

  your mate Jason loses plenty more

  and the Robert De Niro of Lygon Street

  finishes as the Joe Pesci of Templestowe,

  whacked from behind because he was a fucking lulu.

  The following evening I visit John who leaves

  for an hour, push-biking in the heat,

  probably to Preston for his cough mixture

  (whatever that mixture’s holding in reserve

  spirits are resurrected, though little else could be).

  All doors and windows of a stuffy house

  opening onto a stuffy Melbourne,

  we watched The Merchant of Venice,

  a series of static tableaux perhaps, though

  drenched in poetry, with John like some De La Salle brother

  quizzing boys on certain passages, characters

  and all its ambiguity.

  I’ll speak to him once more,

  we’ll talk about Bruce Dawe, how he writes ‘themes’,

  how English teachers love their ‘themes’,

  how because of ‘themes’ Bru
ce Dawe makes the syllabi,

  how his books sell and how, if not rich

  he’s far richer than we’re becoming,

  though which one day could still be ours

  like Shakespeare might be. Yes.

  And then the wish-list ends.

  And then the day they’re burying that other one

  John dies.

  The View from GOMA

  Angela Gardner

  I can see into the empty offices

  and on the far bank, through archways,

  a factory yard frames groves

  of plastic crates stacked onto pallets,

  where trucks jackknife

  to reverse park.

  It’s quiet here between shows. The river

  side hotel advertises cable tv,

  empty balconies (a single chair

  and aircon units) level with the traffic.

  Clouds are building. Through a break

  XXXX.

  Observe: a sign flashes, a man walks

  across to the hostels on Roma.

  Thunder is in the air, it’s time

  -lapse, incremental, and no-one

  lifts their heads, as cars exit

  the bridge to approach the roundabout.

  I address the park – soft-headed

  with grasses, formal with bike paths,

  where only water-pipes and stop-cocks

  lie prone on the grass.

  The ward is new

  Geoff Page

  A signature and so

  I’m through two doors and in

  this freshly opened smallish airport

  terminal of light

  which slants in through clerestories,

  a view out to the mountains.

  The whole thing’s done with courtyards,

  a scattering of smokers,

  thoughtful mostly, sometimes talking

  softly to themselves.

  Mainly it’s communal,

  a wary sort of wit.

  A Psychiatric Treatment Order

  is what my friend has got:

  medications, calibrations,

  side effects to be withstood,

  a restoration, mil by mil.

  The rooms are pleasantly en suite,

  a motel minus cars.

  The staff are friendly, well intentioned,

  gentle with their skills

  and on the other side of glass.

  The patients wave to catch their eye,

  dance perhaps or shout a little.

  The afternoon is turning drowsy.

  The brain’s electro-chemical,

  sparking its connections.

  What are we but its tuning really?

  In three weeks time, or maybe months,

  his friends and he will reacquire

  a tightrope-walker’s balance.

  They’ll be a present to themselves.

  It’s all approximate, they know:

  the tentative nomenclatures,

  the rescue wrought by measurement,

  the let’s try this, the let’s try that.

  The talking cure is later on

  and soft around the edges,

  the childhoods now too far away

  and slipping into fiction –

  or narrowed to the past few weeks:

  the shoebox of a family;

  the square dance of addiction.

  Broken bones or melanoma

  would be a lot more simple.

  The afternoon is hard to treat

  and has no diagnosis.

  The architects have done their bit though.

  The ward is new and wide with light.

  To Drag the Saints back from Heaven

  Anne Elvey

  In the first week the saints will be available

  only a little at a time. They will be busy

  learning the names of things. Two or three

  may attend memorials in their honour, but

  you need to know you cannot count on this.

  In the second week the saints will find heaven

  heavy with rain as if they sat day after day

  at the cyclone’s fringe. They will not yet

  know that this is grace and may try to return.

  Do not drag them back with your prayers.

  In the third week they will begin to forget

  that heaven and earth were separated once.

  They will spend all night and half the day

  enthralled with the songs of frogs. If you make

  your prayers amphibious, they may hear you.

  But if, at the end of the third week, you drag

  them back, you will see in their eyes they are

  not yours. To keep them, you will need to feed

  them cheese and bread, toast and jam, lentils

  with brown rice, carrots and apples, a daily

  bread in season. You will need to show them

  things whose names heaven has not learnt:

  the coastal banksia’s bent answer to a place,

  its shape against the sky. With spikes of

  blossom you will pin them to your prayers.

  True Listening in the Palace of Treasures

  Michelle Leber

  Ling Lun, legendary founder of music theory in China, created pitch pipes and discovered the ratios of the 12-tone scale (c. 27th Century BCE)

  Miserable— the cloud emperor who sits under

  the tree of no music

  seen in that seventh month

  ruled by the breeze of the heart.

  No appetite. No sleep.

  Slow breaths. His mind

  assigning a passerby with the name of a bird—

  Dark Bird Swallow, master of the equinox,

  why do you perch on the sagging half-life?

  As a remedy— Ling Lun, busy with bamboo,

  cutting between knots, scraped and carving,

  blew into hollows.

  Birds gathered

  even the phoenix

  ears uncoiling from their dark labyrinths.

  Ling Lun’s flute, watery cadence, his first note

  aligned with the firmaments,

  that same tenor of the bird.

  Six notes for summer.

  Six notes for winter.

  At this, how an emperor, all beings will travel

  beyond the ordinary world—

  with music,

  the night arising from its prison to hold light

  in trembling hands.

  Twenty Questions

  Peter Rose

  after Donald Justice

  Is it constant in your land?

  Does it rain constantly?

  Are you a real character?

  Have you ever got your hands dirty?

  Is your passport current?

  Are we closely related?

  Do you honestly believe what you’re saying?

  Would you like to see the menu?

  When did you last examine a scruple?

  Have you ever forgotten your lines in public?

  When were you last in the Holy Land?

  Where is it precisely?

  Are you a forerunner?

  Have you ever been truly sorry?

  Are you Cancer?

  Do you worry about the future of the novel?

  Have you found those binoculars?

  Who watered the pitch in 1958?

  Have you ever rhapsodised?r />
  Would you mind completing a short survey?

  Under the Radar

  Stephen Edgar

  Flaring and fading like the blips

  That flash an instant on a radar screen,

  The bellbirds’ brilliant little flecks of sound

  Illumine and eclipse

  The points where silence has been slung between

  The branches of the trees. Such flimsy tips

  To bear the weight it gathers on the ground.

  As when you wade through water, slowed

  And heavy, hardly able to progress,

  Your senses, working through this thick dimension

  Of stillness, share its mode.

  Each leaf glint, shadow, bird note, each impress

  Of foot on twig that snaps beneath its load,

  More slowly but more clearly holds attention.

  Once all the world was this. Alone,

  And dozing through the spell of midday heat,

  You register that chittering outside,

  A neighbour’s telephone,

  The drone of traffic on a further street,

  The ticking house – each floated overtone

  Dragged by the soundless groundswell that they ride.

  And so it was when you were led

  To where her barely conscious form lay waiting

  And silence held the burden of the room.

  And leaning by the bed,

  You swayed in that abeyance, concentrating

  To hear far off her scarcely warranted

  And weightless breathing falter, and resume.

  Up at a Villa

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  So, it felt alright at first, but now you rabbit on

  expressing indisputable views on everything, in vivid

  agreement with yourself, reinforcing the big Yes,

  it having been determined that all popes and poets

  can be no more than cocksuckers, arseholes, or merely both.

  You smile with anger, red behind rimless glasses,

  and right. Well, you could hardly be wrong, eh?

  Even the pleasant CD cannot stem your fucking flow;

  I wouldn’t dare to try, I tell you that.

  Why is all this display of petty power so important

  now to you: pretty well always has been. And why

  does the furious cortex hunger after correctness,

  in just about everything? Buggered if I know,

 

‹ Prev