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The Best Australian Poems 2016

Page 9

by Sarah Holland-Batt


  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

 

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