The Best Australian Poems 2016
Page 7
Natalie Harkin
Tinnitus
5,000 angels dance on a pin
creating a thin, high-pitched singing
in the empty area of my ear,
plucking each high harp string
in a Morse of ping and whistle;
I can hear the whistle
but can’t discern the music,
suffer its relentless din – day
into stinging night into day.
It can’t be cured the doctors say
so they play audiologists’ tricks
to fool my brain. My curative sound’s
the shilly-shallying of surf,
of water fussing and trembling
on sandy shores, or flopping
a susurrus over rocks. You can hear froth
laced to the surfaces of sound.
For a year I’ve listened
to this slumbrous rustling cure,
surf splashed in the computer’s core,
gushed through the car’s soft speakers,
water thrushed over my head
in whispering sleep.
And still the angels sing
their dog whistle tingling,
their unchanging I-Ching,
the shrill denizens of my inner ear.
A thousand pins drop tinkling
down cliffs of ice, and zing
again in a tympani of feeling;
for folly is as folly does:
this brain is not for fooling.
Dennis Haskell
Archive Fever Making Tracks
the arkhē appears in the nude—Jacques Derrida
You are I am a tracker bent crouched close to the page ground looking
for traces and signs that sense you has have passed this way
You sniff sniffing for the scent of absence you
but above all feeling
for the gap in your my life
that wants to fill this page
alone
The air is incandescent
The white page track glows
Emptiness talks back talks back talks back
to the heat that cracks open the world ground
This is a land of surfeit and lack
of hardness and clarity of image
of absence that opens out
or closes up the world
and sometimes the heart.
Dominique Hecq
Derrida, J 1998 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trans Eric Prenowitz, p. 92.
Black Dress
For TAW
This black dress
is also a painting—
it hangs on a wall
where light holds it close.
It’s a doorway to places
no-one quite knows;
that bloom and rain
with extravagant vistas.
We’ve sometimes entered
into the painting
dipping dark hats,
watching children
riding down lanes
(their slit-eyed scrutiny
prickling our backs),
finding a house
made out of art—
colourful images; chaotic signs—
and in a long room
have seen a black dress.
Approaching the work
we’ve watched ourselves there,
climbing through streetscapes,
avoiding riders
and ducking rain,
entering a house
made out of painting,
finding a room
with a black dress inside.
Now standing here,
outside of the image,
the dress seems mute
hung on its wall;
yet inside the painting,
through folds like a curtain,
we glimpse narrow laneways.
The sound of rain
is prickling our backs.
(from ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’)
Paul Hetherington
Relocation of the Big Prawn
Cutting you loose was always the Big Hernia,
five crustacean manholes and an ocean view semaphore.
Severing yourself at the canticles was the angle grinder’s delight,
guide lines and trophy wives scrapping for a slice of spine.
Upmarket seashells splitting effigies of you,
spraying mantis spilling multiple eulogies in reverse.
Downtown, cranes shrapnel our deep dream limelight,
tethered to the countenance of primordial withers.
Hindenburging the Baudelaire was just a serving suggestion,
the dust of syphilitic kings sulphuring the contradictory.
Negativity these days means ‘how to deflect light’,
Gulliver’s Travels ghostwritten by miniature Don DeLillos
sepia the distillation of several small children into Norfolk grog.
I want to swim upstream like a deathwish, through permafrost, to Canada.
Relocation means taking it offshore. So we flush out the interior
and reroute the Pacific. Seared to the pig iron of a new beginning,
we becalm posterity, pop their eyes out on stalks. In the tunnels
of a granite bedroom I wrestle and tug. Misreadings underwritten
by fantasy gambling—the stochastic improbability of this whole
thing being true. Of an evening I thrash responses to the electric
field, parry the overdetermined placenta of hair, miasma, sweat.
In the absence of fixed references, you avoid me and I prefer it.
Too much proximity fills my holes with lungs. I dissolve to be,
scuppered in the inevitable playlist, half-lunged in the backflip
of the ocean suite pedestal. At reception, the welder’s pen hustles
while I swing, huddled in the roof space of countries old and lost.
Down below, henchmen fiddle with the drains, swearing like nuns.
The new guy severs a number of feelers, wonders—what fresh
apothecary will bleed this mother’s tongue? An old hand floats
to the surface, joins us at last in the reappearance of our long-lost
juvenilia. The number of relationships formed on the basis
of a single misinterpretation is how the apical resorption
of the skeleton explains a decrease of the kype in kelts.
When the hacktivists come we’ll scrub our hands with lemon,
warm water, blood, Greyhound ourselves senseless on a dirge
bound for Ballina, where the replacement of your breeding
teeth will make love to the hygienic cruelty of my Titles,
Feedback, Loops. In the hinterland, we’ll build an art gallery
that truly shreds, draft a tell-all sign for the soothseer’s
window in open source aspidistra sans. We’ll feel nervous
about the past and nostalgic for the future, skywrite the word
jukebox in bits of broken. In the cubby of a keyhole winter we’ll say
the right words are hanging from the trees, each one a fruit
of historical strangeness. In September, we will cut down
their bodies, wind their salutations into sheets.
Fiona Hile
Modern Woman Sonnets
(Labé 21; 20; 11)
What places a man beyond comparison? What shape
and shade and look drives us to despair the least
circuitously, without the patience pace
for comedy or tragedy?
What playlist most befits the whole
man, who can he outsource his outpouring to, who
still plays the lute, who could be Nature for him?
Let’s say we are, at least, a breath-piece
with a sex a gait a tract and a brain upturned
and we each can know one thing at a time
and t
his is mine:
all the art that improves on the world
has a tinkling-nóthing effect
on lust’s blue hot blue overruns.
There’s a face precise from the deep’s allowance:
the stranger on a sofa I knew just once,
the pristine first sight before the second sight
that love claimed with its almost-claws.
Seeing how he loved me hard
I took pity, utter, and then fell despite,
in the valley of the young and well
in a lot of little hurries, detailed rushes
in a dearth of field. Grey green incertidumbre.
But as I watch now the low-pressure system
massing darkness its gale-forces
smearing stars, I wonder who-what did finely arrange
my shipwreck on my rocks, then en plein air
cross-hatched from cliff-top in thin ink the scene.
How lovely your eyes and their looking,
small gardens with sex-minded flowers. …
into flesh le fleche de l’amour shot from
their shaded bowers. My gaze was holding, calling
wrongly your bluff, me and the blown rose
and its fresh interpetals of air.
So I’ve cried my days down the days-drain!
You my eyes were lit lucky objects of his eyes
but you my heart—meat!—with your surface-envy
retreated past red past desolation,
till that first replication which was desolate. …
Let none believe I’m a single cell at ease,
not when my heart and eyes can’t share
a good or bad or neutral word.
LK Holt
The change room
This morning, walking almost naked
from the change room toward the outdoor heated pool,
I become that man again, unsettling
shape to be explained.
Such questions aren’t asked to my face. Children
don’t mean anything by it, supposedly, so I
shouldn’t feel as I do,
as my bones crouch into an old shame I thought
I’d left behind. Chlorine prickling
my nostrils, a stranger
compliments me on my tattoos and shows me hers –
a dove in flight over a green peace sign –
as if the canvas was unremarkable.
She turns and limps away,
and something makes a moment of sense.
I lower myself into our element
and swim, naturally
asymmetrical and buoyant. Quite some time
later, showering, the man beside me
is keen to chat – how many laps we’ve each done,
how long I’ve lived in this town, the deep
need for movement.
Speaking, our bodies become solid.
Andy Jackson
The Jews of Hamburg Speak Out
Voyage of the Damned (SS St Louis, 1939)
To all those who seek asylum, do not think
we have forgotten you.
Four months before the boil on Europe’s knee
burst open, we were thin with hope like you,
sallow with stars
and reeling from Krystallnacht, whose terror
was untranslatable. We fled.
The ship transporting us through the dark
raised a sham swastika up its mast.
I recall, one time, standing on the stern
under a sky that did not smell of death
as the tail of Germany diminished
to a speck.
Such luxury on board! Cut glass and chandeliers,
but even so,
they turned us away at Havana, you know.
The doors clanged shut, the inns all full; the same old story
at port after port. Our ship retreated with a vertebral groan,
sailing east towards the death camps of home,
whose gates swung open to receive us.
Lisa Jacobson
Plot Points
On the rafting ice
The afterbirth of seals
Leaves stains like pink blancmange.
Glyco proteins in the fish
Keep them from freezing.
M13 in Hercules
Is a globular star cluster –
A glitterball that my mother
Could have danced the Charleston under.
She had lovely hands.
Renoir, choosing models, always looked
At their hands first.
After the war, at Lodz,
On a tour of the concentration camp,
Rubinstein said ‘I was born here.’
In Melanesia, the House of Memories
Contains the treasures of the tribe.
The Somme chalk was good for tunnels.
When the barrage broke them,
The parapet bags spat white.
At Kokoda, the treetop phosphorescence
Turned the night to Christmas.
The Aussies in Tobruk
Brushed dust from bully beef.
In the dry valleys of Antarctica
Dust is raised by the katabatic wind.
With the Wehrmacht stalled in front of Moscow,
Even the grease froze. The 88s
Were jammed by their own shells.
Rasputitsa was the mud
Of spring thaw and autumn rain.
On a hard day in the Alhambra
The Sultan sent an apple
To the virgin of his choice.
The logo on your Macbook
Is an echo of the manner
In which Alan Turing killed himself.
In the battle for Berlin
The last panzers were overrun
Before they reached the start-line.
A dead hippo in the Tiergarten
Had an unexploded mortar bomb
Sticking out of its side.
While you were reading this
Millions of stars moved closer
Towards their own extinction
So many years ago –
But let’s believe our eyes:
They say it’s all here now.
Clive James
First contact, Kakadu
Leichhardt’s grasshopper
And then one wet season there
you were. Lightning-child, improbable
creature feeding, secreted
on red rock, blue sky articulating
brick-red-ink-blue limbs, clefted
close to January waterholes
where locals plunged and carried on
as if there were nothing extraordinary
about that Sunday afternoon, as if
it weren’t the first and last time
we would see you. Surrounded by a high-pitched
insect-churring in the scented aromatics
you were eating, voraciously, head tilted
above a shrug of denim shoulders. Intense
vibrato resonated. We felt as much
as saw your tensile antennae
sounding, sensing something out there
far beyond us, this improbable future.
Virginia Jealous
Diary of an Anti-elegist
1.
Even poetry dements in the end; fatal attractions to dank earth
and ash albums don’t fool or buy time. Poetry cherry-picks memory
for its own ends; yet that’s a medicated narcissism for some.
Earnest elegies are often rejected by dogs and children.
Listen to them howl. Voting for life outside of ritual.
I’m on your side; I’m with the hounds and the kids.
I won’t let elegy make you over into a bad oil painting,
don grief’s sack cloth pantomime.
Next time I see you walking down the street, checking for spot fires
/> in unseasonal autumn heat, light fidgeting up the shape of you
between drunken ghost gums, I will laugh and say:
the death of my father
has not made a poet out of me,
no, not yet.
2.
One thing: If you do the clanking chain and sheet,
let it be pure sight gag.
The quiet wit of the dead is yours. We expect nothing less
than theatre-restaurant ghoul. Our task, to entreat you
to turn up late to a Xmas of bad bon-bon jokes
and re-gifts. We will be waiting, in sodden crepe crowns,
drinking from someone else’s warm stem glass, rare cooked animals
pressing down on First World intestines. All of us vying
to claim you. When it’s too ha-ha or too sad I will bang my glass,
as ageing relatives blow fluoro party whistles,
hoping they’ll be first off the sinking ship. Before she jumps,
one loved aunt flushed with booze
and sundowner syndrome, confides en passant:
the death of your father
has not made you a joke teller,
no, not yet.
3.
You chose a plain pine box, authenticated lightness
a clear and quick return. Death’s a quick diet in that respect,
though the anorexic spookhouse cheapens –
neither sums you up nor summons you.
Most days, light and lightness refuse to pun.
Meanwhile, daylight’s broken projector screens your old movie
in fits and starts, in the shady zones. I guard my ticket jealously,
fighting the light to scratch you out of faded Kodachrome.
Some days I catch sight of you sweeping leaf litter
down the coppery tow paths of late afternoon.
You always put a plant in the earth the moment it was
given to you. Weighted it in. Now I am putting you in,
not as swiftly as you would have liked.
You have no technique I hear you say. Build it up around the bole.
Water it in, pat it down. That way it will flourish.