The Best Australian Poems 2016
Page 11
in bossed waves.
Gig Ryan
Smartraveller
Just knowing those colours makes it safer
already and how they’ll change anyway by the time
you, thirteen now, are old enough for elsewhere:
RED ORANGE YELLOW GREEN but not about weather
except for extremity and those are most finite
and fickle, cyclones though murderous rarely durable
as human cruelty. Where are you going?
the site prompts but you choose Browse countries
then List all countries, then run the current date –
not to miss anything – every day you check them
like a thing growing in the mind’s garden
that needs tending, a world of worrying
for others under some degree of mastery; keep track
of flare-up, pandemic, earthquake, and ask me
sidelong, to define civil unrest, safety and security
though these are terms you know, as if rehearsing,
as if there could be something more the words don’t
indicate, a further shade in my palette till now
held back, but I can only disappoint, being arms’-length,
and listen my best as you list the ten tallest mountains
while we head for the school bus because last night
and all this week it was Nepal, and pulling your quilt
around you to ready for sleep was rugging up
for Everest, and before that, another land, one day.
Tracy Ryan
ghosting the ghetto
for Steven
In their third floor brick flat, the one tucked into the asphalt
folds of Warwick Farm, past El Toro motel, down where
the winding road straightens out opposite takeaway tucker,
my grandparents were rebuilding Lebanon, and no one seemed
to mind. Every Sunday we made like pilgrims in Holden
Commodores, traversing highway homeland
to bicker and eat. As adults renewed rivalries, we kids splashed in
the Abraham River, once known as Adonis, an ancient baptismal
turquoise that cleaved through the hallway. Sometimes the country
changed with us & we climbed Mount Lebanon in the lounge,
cooling our bodies beneath old olive trees.
The tapestries were gaudy, the TV a small cube in the corner,
and smoke was forever on the air. In that, metaphor & country are
one. As with every hajj, there were too many bodies and the door
was kept open for us to spill from, an ecstasy of difference.
In this, metaphor & Arab are one: no lone place can hold
in its small clay hands so many rivers
and no Ark can contain us, whatever scripture commands.
In adolescence, the Kaaba flowered between us, a black square
lotus edged in gilt across the sides, doors of gold gleaming in
afternoon light. It made ants of us and the mountains and rivers,
the motels and convenience stores. Now we spoke by rote,
prayers half-memorised in the sacred hours of the insomniac,
sinking budding secrets
and the kinds of questions that can unmake family.
When the girls started to stand apart, trying to hijab
their modesty, we saw jamar t all around us, & lined our hands
with bits of rock to hurl at the devil. Only the walls were a mirage
and it was our cheeks which split beneath thrown stones. Later,
it made perfect sense to learn that in 1627, a gutter was added
to the Kaaba
to protect it from flooding. Or perhaps to stop it from blooming.
Before my grandparents began to recreate Lebanon out of ruined
cartilage, someone should have checked if they were students
of history, or if they knew their way around a map. Beirut became
Bondi became Liverpool, & the local creek behind the cricket
pitch drowned the old rivers, and new names blessed our flesh,
like Nike, Adidas, and Reebok.
Someone should have checked if they knew a flower could replace
the house of god.
Boys have no business with god, except where he can be found
in the slap of hard feet on concrete, in the seismic collision
of shoulders and hips lunging for the try line, or the throng & buzz
of bees and wasps among long grass and thin weeds; or sticky lips
locked on lips in the secret space beneath houses. Boys have no
business with god
until their bodies lengthen and sin begins to stick to their tongues.
Soon after, our weekly hajj halted. Our family became families
and rupture became familiar. In this, metaphor & Middle East are
one. In the long months away from that imagined country, I heard
of an older cousin, a name hushed by others, a man in love with
men, and in his absence I saw my future: who knew you could
ghost the living?
Who knew you could bury the ghetto in forgetting?
I am unearthing yesterday, ungathering this bouquet of quiet,
reappearing in inches. Lebanon was left incomplete in Warwick
Farm, & everywhere else we went, the ragged tops of mountains
peeking out of windows; the Sacred House in fragments, in
bloodied bits of stone, in black and gold petals on the floor.
Though the builders are gone,
they left the blueprints in my skin, every alley & every river,
every ghost & every ghetto.
Omar Sakr
*The Kaaba is a building at the centre of Islam’s most holy mosque Al-Masjid Al-Haram, in Mecca. It is the building all Muslims pray towards, and to which they must journey at least once in their lifetime, which is called the hajj. The Kaaba has many names, including Sacred House, House of Allah, House of God in Heaven, etc.
** As part of the hajj, Muslims perform a ritual known as the Stoning of the Devil, in which they throw stones at three pillars known as al-jamarāt.
Hossegor
Surfing probably didn’t occur to the Vikings
but then you never know—maybe one of Asgeir’s men
found himself oaring his chieftain’s faering
for this Biscay shore, just as a set wave jacked—
the kind that narrows the eyes of the guns
who yearly light up the Quicksilver Pro
(Slater, Fanning, Medina, Florence, Parko)—
and intuiting to lean down the face of the monster
felt it take, the shove as the hull slotted flush
into the vein of the sea god, frisson pitching through
the crew like the shudder of a brained seal
as they fluked the drop on an outside bomb.
You can almost see them now, rolling in from
out the back like hoons on a banana boat,
on course to plow through locals. A nerf howls
to a thud; a kitesurfer eats it. And there must
have been some among the numberless wrecked
who happened to cling to jetsam felicitously warped—
the waterlogged panel of a walnut armoire, say—
as to hitch them a lift in the home stretch
of this crumbling A-frame’s deep Atlantic fetch.
Perhaps one of them even cottoned on
that after breathing, the art lies in the reading
of the break, getting to grips with tide-shift
and how the wind’s caprice vexes the takeoff,
the fickle line-up—but who among them
could have envisaged a Tahitian king, carving?
The guns will return, who are now braving
the skull-crushing torque of Teahupo’o.
Jaya Savige<
br />
The body
The body has many duties. Lust
Is only one of them. Though it is close to hand
We learn the extent of things through the body.
Strange, then. That we are so constricted.
What we thought everything proves to be nothing.
Constriction is the only lesson we carry.
When we are young everything seems possible,
Even flight, but soon enough we are contained
Within the practical centre of our bodies.
So that, in old age, all limitations seem natural.
It is as if the body always held us,
A natural constriction to our widest dreams.
These days I think I am confined
Or at least held back from everything
As if what I dreamed were ever possible.
Thomas Shapcott
Around the World
‘Like a medieval Latvian serf I wait
For something to wait for.’
– Mikelis Norgelis (Michael O’Loughlin, In This Life)
Sydney, sixteen and a half, I took part
in a chess tournament called the Riga Shield,
knowing nothing then of that fabled city.
Byzantium too was yet to traverse my page,
like poetry, and Prague remained
a train-station where we had waited for hours,
in a wagon from Warsaw to Vienna,
for something that would arrive soon enough—
my first climb above the gorgeous clouds
of the Mediterranean behind a Convair
cabin window, front row, portside, right behind
the flight deck’s forbidden musics.
I did know something of the Baltic states
(Soviet Republics then), from Around the World:
some of its pictures brought me the shock
of the real, especially the chapterette ‘IRAN’—
brown print of two blindfolded figures
each strung slumped to a pole, labelled in Polish
‘Bestial execution of democrats sentenced
by the shah’s regime’. It sat opposite
a sample stamp and the silhouetted little map
of the country in question dark within its diagram
continent. I treasure that book, although
now of course I know: little changes—
in some places you can hang for mixing metaphors.
I was happy to mix chess with geography, both
I grew to love. They somehow seemed
to complement each other—and me, in my
consequential otherness. These days we’re cajoled
into splitting our differences, it wasn’t always
thus. But as I skimmed 1965, new skies
unfolding before me, sixteen and a half, that chess
of becoming (my games all zealously notated),
I too was balancing the difference—
between where I had been or never been,
and whatever I couldn’t know I was waiting for.
Alex Skovron
Argument
A poem addressed to Elizabeth Bishop
My husband and I were well south of your temperate Brazil.
We were bunkered in a valley where a glacier, groaning
with the debris of ages and all its splintering wrecks,
had abruptly dammed itself.
That frozen monument clogged the lake outside our hotel,
where the gales slaughtered the rocks on the shore and
roughed the crooked trees into brooms.
This was no place for romance.
Even the birds and insects knew it,
the sky and earth blown of traffic.
Time, though, was everywhere.
Outside our hotel room, three icebergs—calved from the glacier
—sat mammoth on the chopped water,
age-old and dumb.
I don’t remember the trigger: only that the trap snapped and I
was sprung.
(It had never mattered where in the world I ran.)
As always, I dragged down the closest man.
The day wore inexorably on and on, until the weight of the moon
and stars was spilling gravel and filling
the cold hole we were in.
There was nothing gentle, as you described it,
about the battleground of reason’s end.
Days later my husband and I were slumped on a cruiser
designed for viewing all the postures of ancient ice
re-birthed by the radioactive sun.
Quelled of motion sickness, we could barely keep our eyes open.
Meanwhile the other passengers shifted like a tide
from their seats to the deck each time the boat slowed
alongside some blue-faced mutant from history.
Cameras clicked as if there was no tomorrow.
In truth, it was hard to believe in a future.
The tour guide, though, had no time for pathos:
her electrified voice reckoned with us
in one language, then another, and still another.
We drowsed, cold shoulder to shoulder, with nothing to say,
held afloat in that science-fiction Babel.
What will buoy us now, I wonder, as I sit alone in our car,
years later, on a suburban night,
ignoring the tender offering of the porch light?
Now that death looms large, ready to calve, just for the two of us.
Maria Takolander
Jakhan Pollyeva
Putin’s speechwriter in a leopard print dress
with plunging neckline performs her latest poems
before chatting up the President of Kyrgyzstan.
Her heels are higher than most poets wear them.
There are people like this in every palace
of either sex and any age. Each of them
has a following. They are the singers
Ulysses heard, the Loreleis, the stars.
She wears too much lipstick but she bought
her blondness somewhere no-one reading this
could afford. She has for long
been promoted way beyond speechwriter,
is described as “aide”. The future of millions
depends on her stylist and on
the literary critics, which amounts
to the same thing. Those of us who prefer
other voices, other ways of phrasing
sweet evil remember interrogation
and shut up.
At literary events
I try to learn acceptable applause.
Old football commentators say,
“If you wear white boots you’d better kick goals.”
Tim Thorne
Young Folly
It must seem like a mountain of folly
to the old people, but we take our chances
and we’re always on the ready.
We’re on the ready, right now, and yet
they think we’re just a troubled handful
of trouble, just can’t go straight,
can’t go straight like the arrow of time
that speeds from ancient times to right now
to get you between the eyes. This is the realm
behind the eyes, with its whip-quick
answers to how to behave, its cheap vow
to be better, much better, quickly broken
so that what is not better is boarding
at boarding time, those giant flying machines.
We take a drag, and fuck the lung.
Fuck the drag of the air, the horizon’s curve.
We’re all going on a summer holiday, already gone
into sad age waiting, with just a wave.
John Tranter
Note: ‘Young Folly’ began as a draft using the end-words of ‘The Young’ by Roddy Lumsden. The Open Door, page 24.
A stadium can hold the most sound
drowning out the bora ring
mudding the lines we needed to know
where we’re going
now it’s a clusterfuck to get the train home
flip up seats and overflowing beer
the rude odour of tomato sauce
and the black faces they never show on TV
the team with the most blackfullas
they don’t want to win
the commentator’s curse
the tiddling fear
of invisible spears
we can’t score goals
on this sacred land
celebrated as animals
GI doing the goanna, yeah
but not people
with military intelligence
you don’t want us protecting
our land like the Maori
– that means it was our land to protect
we don’t need
a haka of whitefullas
just let us resist.
Ellen van Neerven
An Object exists only as it might exist to Another
The melancholia of not being Anne Boyer.
The melancholia of melancholy,
of listening for factories out there in the sea
when everyone else was searching for whales.
The melancholia of a word without a poem,
of the poem as pristine category looking forwards
to an unseasonable year. The melancholia
of mid-size body suits still wrapped in the box.
The melancholia of the test subject
reduced to running slip or outmoded art form.
The melancholia of the barely perceptible
snakeskin purse clutched on breezy afternoons
of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s true, isn’t it?
Only the romantic can be that real.
The melancholia of sharp, leopard-print belts
burning naively at the fashion blog
found in the heart of yesteryear.
The melancholia of the human
as a class of actors, reciting Moby Dick
to the signature tunes of Prince. The melancholia
of melancholy, writing city rather than cosmos.
The melancholia of repetition,
recidivist as the eye that refuses