The Best Australian Poems 2016
Page 4
oblongs of card has a sprig of pressed flowers glued
to its back twelve hand tinted images of various
iconic scenes: deep and rich as illuminated dreams;
the flowers’ colours have faded the tissue interlaid
turned brown but mostly the shapes of the tiny leaf
sprigs are firm and resolute; one flower has lost its
leaf and stalk but its red petals reveal a patient
heart the vanished stalk has left a pale
imprint it endures, this tenacious ghost —
as a three year old i visited bill’s rose bay home
in a block of flats in balfour road a name that
matters like allenby street in the picture of old
tel-aviv underneath the main inscription he had
written, now in purple ink more & more & still more -
of all you wish yourself i’m trying to keep this
poem simple just ‘flowers from the holy land’ like
an intact reverie but this old gift of a book leans
unprotected never gathering dust on a poetry shelf
two down - i suddenly note - from ‘selected
poems of darwish’, born 1941, galilee
where did his ‘carnations’ grow ~
Joanne Burns
* The carnations image comes from a Mahmoud Darwish poem I Have Witnessed the Massacre
Car Lover
It can be healing to walk the vacant streets
of these suburbs, over tree-buckled pavements,
the ground cicatrised, I’m a proverb of missing
woman with tablet, with handbag evidence.
It can be therapy to loiter in the park, streetlamps
glow with yellow discernments though V8 utes
may be scarce, the road rule is swift and strobic.
The sky is gagged but I’m a sentence in heels.
Trees camber, pencilled in mist, row by row.
Cars gear in/out of driveways front or rear-ended
with gear-stick discovery. A frogmouth cautions me,
the rose-lit church grounds pray for my flesh.
Consider me slumped cold against a brick wall.
What device pedals thought’s accessories?
Cars sing hosannas for the freeway, pulsing
nocturnal. I improvise, I turn like leaves rasping.
Dumped by sleep’s apparatus, there is a girl who
beckons from below the liquidambar. I’ve heard
her chafing. Bring an ice pick. Send a coupé to
abduct me, my bones whistle of that other Spring.
Michelle Cahill
Cloaca Maxima
Any, every, thing that was exposed
goes underground and is washed into the Tiber.
This is what some people do
with faces, burying. You see them,
the heavy ones, chests like rivers, their heads
bowed down with great
antlers of thought invisible.
After many seasons, the fronts of their bodies
terribly developed to carry them.
Venus of the Drains, the woman with the scum
at the corners of her mouth who talked
for a long time, scarred by burning, perilous thin,
then told us we had made her day.
It is seen, what should not be seen. It is I sees it.
Shameful, to feel so heavily the shame
of others—to hear and echo
that note always waiting in the voice to be sung.
Do I make it happen
to her by having
face and chest that wash with red?
Elizabeth Campbell
Axe derby
Never were knuckle-men.
Choked up on planks
of smoke, they haul
towards the peplum, stabbing
back at time, splinters of it
flip like cars. Rolled sleeves,
knees cooked, the rousie
is flirting with her broom, a blonde
with criminal simplicity with
historical truth we can detoxify
a poisoned planet. Now
they’re descending the spirit heap
dribbling pinkies along fair knotty thighs.
Children are returning to pick up the butts.
Still the brunette is caving in the face
of time, is making herself a living
treasure from this surplus
hour the minutes fly
Bonny Cassidy
Plan B
After Vivienne Plumb, ‘The alternative plan’
Plan A: find man sympathetic to children but who loves me best of all. Plan B: become pregnant. Plan C: surf web re older mothers & childbirth. Plan D: establish relationship, difficult enough without a child. Plan E: buy lingerie, stay single & childfree. Plan F: push borrowed labradoodle pup around block in borrowed $1,200 pram. Plan G: stay single & have baby that doesn’t bite. Plan H: search web for sperm donor without tatts. Plan I: have one-night stand with only gym bloke not on steroids. Plan J: prick condoms with sterile needle. Plan K: second-night stand with same gym bloke (despite ’roids). Plan L: separate finding partner from acquiring child. Plan M: search web re twins by artificial insemination. Plan N: time travel to fifteenth-century Florentine orphanage with Kathmandu carry pack. Plan O: move to Italy, this plan requires proficiency in Italian & a grant. Plan P: think of another plan. Plan Q: search web re overseas adoption agencies with sympathetic international agreements (finance dependent). Plan R: arrange wealthy patron, superior sperm & gravy baster without telling therapist. Plan S: observe o/s adoptees’ picnic in skanky suburb. Plan T: terminate contact with sperm donor & surrogate agencies. Plan U: visit a single mum’s chat room disguised as Leila the foetus. Plan V: join kidnapping chat room. Plan W: become novice in Our Lady Queen of Procreation Convent. Plan X: pray for visitation from male angel with no active addictions & grand sperm count. Plan Y: Search web re Renaissance names. Plan Z: Change nothing.
Julie Chevalier
Magnolia
A son’s birth means tragedy now.
‘Song of the War-Carts’, Du Fu
I rise from my pallet: it is still dark
and the men are asleep, their naked chests
inflating and collapsing like a smith’s bellows.
The moon hangs beneath the clouds: soon
autumn will arrive, winds rippling the fields.
Back in my village, the farmers are preparing
for the harvest. I press together strips of linen,
line it with moss I’d picked from the base of trees.
It is my time, and my secret. Tomorrow we advance
towards the border. The war-carts are loaded,
the horses will be tethered to their burdens.
Here the quivers of arrows wait to be spent.
I carry a skin of water and squat in the grasses.
Now it is safe to loosen my robes. Carefully, I clean myself.
Even in the dark, my hands are sticky with blood.
***
My first kill was a chicken. It was the new year.
Father handed me his knife and gestured at our hen.
She strutted around the yard, cocking her head this way
then that, scratching and searching for worms.
In the bamboo coop her brood of chicks cried warning.
I pushed up my sleeves and advanced. No fear –
we’d done this before, her and I. This was betrayal.
I carried her to the back of the hut, her heartbeat
pulsing in my palm. Her feathers so alive against my skin.
***
My faithful horse bears me for many miles, carries me
into battle, comforts me with his touch. Between my legs,
the saddle creaks my name: Mu Lan, Mu Lan.
Not for me the embroidered magnolias of marriage;
I give birth to no
thing but blades, arrows and death.
My sword is my husband, my brothers my men.
They think me one of them. I drink sweet wine
fermented from plums; I curse and spit and plot.
I kill without mercy. Beneath my armour, secreted
in a pouch: a carved jade favour from the King.
In the night I draw my fingers across the dragon
twisting around the sun. The morning dawns emerald.
***
A soldier unfurls a banner and I plant it deep
in the soil. Another day, another frontier.
Men are busy at the fires: they grind millet
and cook it into gruel. So many mouths to feed,
so many sons, fathers, brothers… How much longer
before I gaze upon the lined face of my own father?
Beyond us, the mountains rise in mockery.
Wei is surrounded, corralled on all sides:
Qin, Zhao, Yan, Qi, Chu, Han…
If I were a hawk I would take off, wing towards
the west and the setting sun. I would hunt only
to survive, I would feather a nest, I would fly.
Eileen Chong
Notes:
The poem is based on a legendary character in Chinese history, Hua Mu Lan. This character was first recorded in The Ballad of Mulan, a work thought to have been transcribed around the 6th century A.D. in Musical Records of Old and New. While the original text has been lost, the tale has survived in an 11th century anthology, the Music Bureau Collection, which clearly attributes the source of the text.
Hua Mu Lan was a young woman who dressed as a man in order to take her father’s place in battle. She rose to become a General during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–536 ad). It is said that she served in battle for a total of twelve years before returning to her village.
I have taken poetic license with the use of the seven Warring States, which were in existence during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bc) and not during the Northern Wei dynasty.
Secondary
Angling over star-fields, the pitches
lit like billiard tables.
Those lengths you were shouted up
and back, lungs scoured
by Brillo air. The lazier concord
of close mown grass and low hanging fruit
of the short boundary. A tang
of primitive electronics: the circuit board’s
braille labyrinth, the slab type
of Amstrad. This callow path you cannot take
curves around and through
the way a perfect river might. You find
a little gate unlatched,
and the light tangles, as you step
into the ferment: into the heady reek of itch.
The aubergine, by the window, glossy
as an eight ball: lavender,
the road, a torn-open
mountain pouring cloud. Noble erosions
from sceptre to cushions,
from mitre to trademark. A lavish
glut of adjectives, dissolving
in a merlot hour – flabby as any
soft landing among
the rubber bells of foxgloves.
The heart as wound or badge, a tattoo
smudged like junk-mail wet.
A fading haze from clubs
like grates where fires have been –
signs hung out as dirty washing.
Easier to paint
than rhyme, this volatility. A poet-envy
of the art-fluke, or ripeness
cut in segments sucked to the pith.
A plaintive case deflating
on a snack bar counter
where citrus men
swash fizz through lunch
and later repair the voltage of night
in the out-of-sync bounce
of signal and blinker.
You take a little kindling, the light
of a cupped match,
to hazard across deciduous campuses:
the vast, blue continent of theory. Go, softly on.
Aidan Coleman
Hinterland
first the mag
nificent stone slapped
across the valley
/
(acacia brushing the gusts
leaking with shadow, the dark glows
asking the pastures), then
to play
/
my turn
to balance on a thermal, dizzy
with eagle
rivulets of vineyards and scattered avocado
groves
glints in an eye, a single, I’m joining
with the split, gulps
at a sun, itdoeswhatitdoes, painting
the etceteras
— of topoi
the vast plumes of broccoli
the heads of the innumerable gums
stooping to draw the path
the canopy’s hazy scales
the cusp of
weight, fluvial wake coiled tight
around solemn magnets, they
mash paints, all that brush
from here to the image of it
from the light to what leads it
the burning eye of a snake coiling
))
into the west I can see its path I can sense
what it might do as I step
out
and fill my intention
with curling canyon
)
strings of creeks r
attling b
ack to the coast
Stuart Cooke
ABOVE US
Above us we hear the windmill yelping, circling like a
trapped dog while the house sits like a black skull on the
hill. Above us the tombs are rising from their rest and
travelling along the roads beneath trees turning sourly.
Above us the wind flings uncountable seed into the
dignified light tossed through the depths by a green moon
rolling over and over in the shifting lens of the waves.
Above us nakedness stretches forever against danger,
ravishment and smoke. When we wake our lives are on fire.
Above us only our sleepy souls drifting like reeds catching the air.
MTC Cronin
Swimming (my lane)
The bug is in my lane, drowning fast,
riding the ripples I make, picking at the water
with hopeless oars, frantically gathering loss.
My times are slipping but I still have reasons
for getting wet every day, hauling myself
up that long, black line, the monologue
I have to follow. The print keeps me straight,
a fat stemmed gift I steer to a sudden T.
I’ve seen so many—junctions, crossroads—
relapsing every twenty-five metres. All I do
is cry out, kick off, go back like moving forward,
up and down that stem, flushed by routine,
the reach and rob of constructive habit.
So I scoop the bug in the pool of my palms.
I don’t think of Anne Sexton right away.
It’s later I recall her posthumous title,
The Awful Rowing Toward God. Over again,
keeping the beat upon waves of my own
making, wrestling at daybreak above
tissues of light that shed with every stroke
I’m attempting. Holding the course, rowing
the surface, working these bags of breath.
I scooped the bug just to cup my hands
as in the days when I had faith to receive.
Nathan Curnow
Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield
Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar.
Roberto Calasso
Accommodate the action in y
our life
to wrest the deep perspective of the real
from cubic content realms of atmosphere
at play beyond the bank and shoal of time.
Then resonance begins, and all vibrates.
The syntax of position no more sculpts
this world of interpenetrative forms
than syntaxes of motion render grace.
Yet syntax is the caul on all our births;
and mothers claw the membrane from our eyes
to fret us into life, in losing theirs.
From there, each choice engraves a different choice.
The decades pass. One needle for one groove.
The canticles flare chaos from the spin.
The gyre to crackly zero stays the same.
(You’ve got to love the Hindus more than most.)
We saw grand sweeps of swells from tiny arcs.
We sliced the wave face, tumbling into light.
My mother hugged me goodbye at seventy-three,
knowing, just then, her strength may outlive mine.
Accommodate the action in your life,
she said, to aeronautical exhausts
of every plane and cab I ever caught
(my own arcs more elaborate than most).
Accommodate the action of your life,
she seemed to say: make past and future fuse.
I felt her fingers dig into my back:
That strength I had is yours. Things die. Not love.
Luke Davies
Wooden Horse
on your crude wooden sled,
you were once –
a broom, a length of rope,
a handful of off-cuts,
two screws and eight
three inch nails.
You are not quite symmetrical:
one rocker pine,
the other, hardwood.
And your plank torso has
more of a bevel on the left
than the right.
Your hard round eye
has been drilled right through
your plank face;
from above
this gives you a bright
dark vacancy.
To a child this might lend
perspicacity (squatting
and peering I can see
the evening ocean through
your clear gaze);
the same bit bore
the hole for the dowel handle