and all around the falling snow.
Debbie Lim
Possibly
How’s Possibly doing today?
She’s okay, she’s possibly
recovering from a possible asthma attack.
What’s Possibly doing? The impossible,
That’s what. Attending to twenty students
some of whom will possibly fail
tasks Possibly set which they feel
are impossibly high.
Possibly is cooking dinner for ten
and being polite in impossibly demanding
situations. Possibly would like to take a break
from her situation but can’t possibly
because she needs the money.
Her impossible husband
will possibly rock up for Christmas
needing money and certain other things.
Possibly talks to me
about Milton and Sophocles.
She brings in the washing laughing
knowing she’ll possibly manage
and between the cracks of impossible demands
find happiness sometimes sitting
at our picnics drawing the headland
which resembles an ancient Roman.
Kate Llewellyn
Pastoral / ‘Asset management’
winter once more and still
the grapevine’s crimson
leaves veil
the front fence
as the number-cruncher
declares
‘you should cut that back—
it’s a classic
white picket
you’ve got there’
Cameron Lowe
Orchards
(Melissa Parkes’ parents had an apple farm in W.A., Julie Bishop’s a cherry farm in S.A.)
When she met the Christians Bishop had arrested
for protesting detention of refugees, Parke
wore a coat like apple blossom: pink,
white and green, translucently. Bishop
on the day the Bali two were transferred
to the death island wore a dress
the colour of cherry blossom, dark pink,
looked gaunt with anxiety. Politics
will pierce you with its empathy, if you
practise it successfully. Apple flowers
spread raggedly and openly, breeze
dapples through them. Cherry blossom
reblooms so densely, brilliantly, that we
plant temples to ensure its resurrection.
Jennifer Maiden
Intimacy
During the French film,
I spend my time wondering
how I can put doors and windows into poems.
The director shoots them
always straight on, so they frame
the old man and woman in the film like pictures.
Really I’m trying not to think about ageing.
The woman in the film gets dementia,
spends her time on an electric bed.
Fewer people will ever see this film
then saw Briana Loves Jenna,
which is the tenth-bestselling adult DVD of all time.
In it, Briana loves Jenna
orally, mammarily, vaginally and anally
for close to an hour.
No one enters or exits the room.
Or maybe they do
and I had left the room where we were showing it.
By that point, it’s hard to keep straight
the g-string, porn and cigar parties
we threw for our fifteen-year-old feminism;
hours spent deep-throating brush-handles,
looking for our epiglottises in mirrors
that fogged up like windows.
The old man in the French movie
is changing his wife’s diaper,
directly over his shoulder is a window,
you can’t tell if she can see out of it.
In her autobiography Jenna Jameson
uses the word ‘wee-wee’ instead of penis,
like “he had a big ‘wee-wee’” or “he took out his ‘wee-wee’”,
her vagina is a ‘pussy’, never a window,
but it often opens doors, so she says.
The man comes back from behind the door,
we see his face for a second.
I hadn’t realised how I’d missed him.
I forget so many things,
we were so young, I remember.
And so tender.
Caitlin Maling
Visitation on Myrtle Street
I was woken at some hour
of darkness before dawn by a scent so heavy
on my senses, on the room, that I was convinced
a burglar had broken in
and was loitering
upstairs or in the hallway, or having caught
my step on the stairs above him was lying low
in the laundry, or sitting
upright and unbreathing
in one of the Windsor chairs, unaware it was
his scent that betrayed him.
I checked the door to the balcony, then the door
to the street with its double lock. In the dark front
room I checked
the sofa. Stretched full length
on its French blue he’d be hard
to detect. No one was there
but the scent was overpowering. ‘What kind
of scent?’, K would enquire
at breakfast. ‘Was it
musk? Was it pine?’ ‘No, something sweeter – why
do you ask? Something sharper, maybe cheaper.’
‘Because that would tell us,’ he told me
seriously, ‘what kind
of angel you were visited by.’ ‘Here?’
I protest. ‘In Myrtle Street?’ ‘Why
not?’ I took it in. Sometimes I wake to the smell of coffee
being brewed downstairs. It wakes me. Why not
the smell of an intruder?
When I woke again the scent had faded. What
had not was the change I felt
on my skin, on my nerves.
Later I worked for an hour or two
at my desk, struggling with angels
of another sort, who leave
no trace I would call a scent. Of musk or sweat,
or pine. Only pen-strokes on a page
they have changed with their lingering, when they deign
to linger. Or a dazzling
blankness when they do not.
David Malouf
Invisible Cities
i)
Back home from hospital again.
You read Invisible Cities outside
in the morning sun. A small lizard appears.
Its solar-powered musculature moves
across the paving stones. Its skin is both matte
and jewelled in the sunlight. It stops and flicks
its front legs down to its sides, like an ingenious
Edwardian gadget snapping itself shut.
You and the creature take in the sun, then
the lizard heads for the maze of grass,
hiding from the hard-nosed suburban birds.
You take yourself indoors into the dark of the house,
clutching Calvino, the old fabulist.
ii)
Later, the sun performs its drawn-out
power-down, summer already merciless.
You take the dog for a walk, its gait ginger,
while it fusses over what to piss on.
Around the corner, the audacious stadium lights
vie against the sunset. The smell of frying meat
is in the air; the bitter taste of Anginine
under your tongue.
iii)
You read at night, while a lawless wind
upsets the house. You lose your thread.
Calvino engenders fantasies. Da
rk staircases
frequented by music students and government men;
a forest in which night squats;
an empty Ferris wheel, with all its moral weight.
The dog in his fur
sleeps on dusty floorboards,
and twitches like a muscle.
David McCooey
Study of a Lion
In black chalk the beast
brusques forward Silence Rubens
has stopped his mouth
with a single line He is already
awed by the den
he will find himself in even now
as his mane curls into wisp
of emptiness A study on paper
But there in white chalk the grim
pose brightens
into recognition smudged nose
bent toward the scent
of viewer Eyes steadily lighting
toward the years one swift textured paw
lifted ever so slightly
Patient as an avalanche
Kate Middleton
Craft
The craft of my enemy is my only aim
its perfect end. The great anvil is an eye, cornea hard,
good as new. The nodding tongue
agrees my discipline is fine, if tone deaf.
Not dependent on confinement
the psyche is diminished, buried, then quarried so.
One stone rests in the ear, rolls like a torso
in the new, smashed on consignment.
How can we take it, so knee deep in tragedy?
There’s a circle of girls, a circle of laurels
on each blank head, perfectly voiceless. With intricate phrasing
their white clothes oscillate and vacillate, walk on by.
Bright flowers are a bride, held dearly in the breath.
Ship lights fade away, hard as sarcophagi.
Peter Minter
Nuclear Family Bees
Little native-bee hives
clotted all up the trunk
of a big tree by the river.
Not pumped from a common womb
this world of honey-flies
is a vertical black suburb
of glued-on prism cells.
Hunters stopping by
would toe-walk up,
scab off single wax houses
and suck them out, as each
smallholder couple hovered
remonstrating in the air
with their life to rebuild,
new eggs, new sugarbag,
gold skinfulls of water.
Les Murray
Shakespeare & the State Library
An avalanche, in Alaska (in
1958) caused, a tidal wave 1,740 ft high.
Diane Arbus’s work (in her photographs) violated
all notions of “privacy”. -- Kennel-up -- stop talking!
Bluish-black lobsters, are made red by boiling…
It slowly dawned on me, that i was the one
who was expected to somehow pull, yank, drag, get, and draw
the family out of poverty, by somehow becoming
a Doctor, or Lawyer, or something else, and that the family
would “willingly” sacrifice everything it had “for, Me”
(including, the girls); i was somehow the Great White Hope.
My My my… / Shakespeare used “my” 12,964 times (in
his plays) as in the line, My life hath some interest in this line.
It freaked me out. I didn’t know, how
i was going to do it, but i knew getting an education
was part of it. A phobia, is a neurotic disorder.
I told the parents, i couldn’t study here i.e. at the back of
the shop -- i had to go to the State Library (in the City), and
they agreed. (But not to make a famine, where
an abundance lies, it had to be, when the shop wasn’t busy).
-- The pressure was on. -- No excuse! (Hope is the feeling
that something good, is imminent). But, what??
One day, walking up the marble-steps i saw Barry Jones (from
Pick-a-Box). It made my day; desiring this mans art, and
that mans skope. He was smart, and had brains, and
i was somehow like him, cos i was in the same building.
(But) how can i then be elder than thou art? One day,
my father (a little drunk), called me over, grabbed me by
the stomac, looked at me, and said, “When, i die --
you get Nothing!” [He lied, he cost me a funeral, and
a gambling debt, about 30 years later]. With my pocket-
money, i bought a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
from Collins Bookshop. O change thy thought,
that I may change my minde -- i was rapt! -- i was
in love with Greatness, and i knew this was Greatness.
O how I faint when i of you do write. It seemed
exactly how a poet, should say it. I started swimming in it,
guessing what words meant, or re-wording them (for
my own pleasure) as in, seek that beautious roofe
to… “urination”, instead of that beautious
roofe to “ruinate”. (Let it mangled be, for joy
delights in joy)! O that you were your selfe, -- and that last
line (in particular) struck me. In between all this,
i was studying hard, and getting smart, but Not from
the stars do i my judgement plucke, And yet me thinkes
i have Astronomy. But aside from all that
philosophy, the Sonnets were ultimately all about Love, and
they dug deep trenches in thy beauties field.
Over dinner one day, my father asked me, what i was reading.
I didn’t know what to say. How could i say, To thee
i send this ambassage, in Greek? Or mine this, mine thus,
mine thee, mine must, or why should i hast
my hence (or some such)? My father, wasn’t anything like
Shakespeare’s, who as a decrepit father takes delight
to see his active childe do deeds of youth.
So i said, i’m reading this book by this guy
called Shakespeare. (He didn’t care or know, who
Shakespeare was, and i knew it). (He was only interested, in
where the next quid was coming from, on
the gambling table). So i said, its about a bloke
who’s in love with this woman, and its taken him
about 20 pages (so far), just to kiss her hand.
My father, looked up at me, and said “O”
we’re up to, that stage
are we?
π.o.
Letter from the swimming pool
we are trying to substitute
our thoughts for these blossoms
an always-already erotic run of
small buds not made in our image
bouquets of plastic spoons
travel overland
to be opened in detention,
odourless murmurs
service brought to life
threats arrive ziplocked
ridiculous like Oldenberg’s
inflatable lunch
a golf ball sinks
amongst the harbour crud
launched from a ‘private party’
I begin collecting pins
it was the dream about
‘clients’
in basso rilievo
repeated pattern becoming unreadable
overloaded
a lobster crawls out of the waratah
too much to be resolved in lino-cuts
wet branches make cybernetic filigrees
or one unbroken line of paint
a map to the yams to
purple commas up & down the brachial bone
skinned over but
barely functioning circuitry
tender
-stemmed / granulating city
thatch of light industry
you can pan for gold
in a real colony
while noting civic displays of tidiness
mushrooms grow
in upset ground
slow-turning deciduousness
crystal form data-mining in the apricot light
Ella O’Keefe
Cyborg me
first thing I’d hack would be my womb
hack it right out like the tin woodman with his enchanted axe
put a music box in there, have it play Greensleeves
with my artificial lungs, I will unquit and smoke
four packets a day
print new bones as needed
my fibre optic hair will flash like synchronised fireflies
my forehead’s going to be an LED scrolling message
sometimes it will say FUCK OFF, unprovoked
other times it will say USE YOUR INITIATIVE
robotic blood cells will allow me to hold my breath underwater
for hours, my tetrachromatic vision means I can see every colour
not invented yet, my cuttlefish skin means I can be more invisible
than usual, I will have a periscope
that comes out of my skull
I will jump over trees like a vampire in Twilight
stick to windows with my gecko toepads
I will never be too cold or sad
I will write poems eight times faster, be able to smell a grizzly
in Montana, Wyoming, those kind of places
my auton fingers will be gun barrels and when I see those kids
littering or drawing penises on my fence with permanent markers
I will shoot them dead
Meredi Ortega
Ekphrasis
One thinks of how the details must converge,
the storytellers’ small manipulations
across the wild millennia of firelight,
the father and the son, their unfamiliar
waxy wings, their awkward altitudes,
the sea and metal sun withholding judgement,
the young man flying (as he must) too high,
the older man more cautious over whitecaps
as artists, in their turn, who feel both callings,
the sun which lifts a youth beyond himself,
the waves below mere space between two points
which must, they know, lead on towards that more
pragmatic view designed to bring us Brueghel’s
The Best Australian Poems 2016 Page 9