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The Best Australian Poems 2016

Page 12

by Sarah Holland-Batt


  to gaze back at you. One woman’s fantasy

  is another’s solipsism.

  The melancholia of not being loved,

  firstly in the age of Aquarius and then again

  in the age of the Anthropocene.

  Or the melancholia of window dressing

  the incision between innocence and experience.

  Ann Vickery

  Altogether Elsewhere

  (Auden’s hundred-plus)

  Your first words that I read were “Look, stranger,”

  which really stuck.

  You hymned environmental danger

  and illness welling up from bottled anger

  in the out-of-luck.

  Stranger than any of us was your

  thanatology:

  mental mapping was a chart of war

  but lust for a diagonal metaphor

  fed your geology.

  Ominous uniforms and the sexy furs

  you parsed as threat

  like acid rain in silted aquifers

  the Romans left. From gaunt commissioners

  an each-way bet

  gave your calciferous frontier the chance

  either of Left or Right.

  You didn’t much approve of France,

  for their symbolist poetic dance

  was a downright

  draught of colourless Coca-Cola,

  not for grown-ups,

  a canker in the thinker’s molar.

  You could have liked Savonarola,

  but in his cups.

  You’d have known the date of each bubonic

  outbreak, or heresy;

  you knew that most blokes are moronic

  and your blow-job poem was merely platonic –

  well, ostensibly.

  Ambiguous Europe has its weather still:

  expert in exile

  you turned the twilight into chlorophyll

  soodling along beside the sacred rill

  mile after lucky mile.

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  A Plein-Air Artist Reflects on Timing

  It was a cool summer afternoon.

  White-plumed honeyeaters worked quickly,

  gathering insects from the leaves of a gum.

  A plane swept low in laps for a parade.

  I noticed how the fences of my garden

  stood by idly. I thought, someday if I

  could watch this scene afresh, caught on film –

  a given light, the given earth, and me,

  here, but held by time at one remove –

  then all reserve would vanish.

  I would grasp each detail keenly.

  Alas my thoughts turned to a nerve in my back,

  to the undue fame of my enemies, and to my future

  glory – majestic as the ocean

  meeting the shore. I have recorded nothing.

  Simon West

  On This

  Coming at you like a wave its wide scoop full of surfers

  the threat of marriage. The wedding band

  will encircle you softly as the sea

  laps all around an island.

  You won’t even want to swim to the headland.

  All the world and all its work cry to you

  this is the thing,

  and once you have pegged down a gentleman

  who might otherwise billow like a kite

  in the endless green

  lubbery sky of himself

  once you have got him and he has got you.

  Sapphires glancing in the foam.

  Suitors surge in on tall ships.

  Penelope weaves and unweaves for the one

  above all others.

  How he flowers in the mind like a wild transparent violet

  held to sunlit glass.

  Petra White

  FAUNE et JEUX

  I thought that gold was harder than paper,

  but paper turned out to be harder

  – Vaslav Nijinsky

  Prelude

  A wicked ball, a fluent veil—

  dance itself the object of desire

  not the one who wields or wears.

  So many eyes—it is the war

  and time is out of joint

  with ink— everywhere

  the notebook keeps on sliding;

  all shapes and beauty fluid

  as the fountain pen unleashed.

  This door is never locked

  though people are afraid to say:

  I do not understand—but feel.

  I. L’Après midi d’un faune

  My madness is my love towards mankind

  – Vaslav Nijinsky

  Mischievous sanctuary—withdrawn

  into the score alive!

  another crime:

  the faun is me—

  it’s all in the choreography

  grinding the pastoral air

  two flattened hooves in profile

  blades

  This is my body: piebald on a mound

  quietly, grapes

  one bunch

  two is all you do—

  delight in slow time tease

  a fire in the narrow green

  of Bakst’s impression—

  need for nothing else.

  *

  A distraction: nymphets on the incline

  fleet-footed arms wide open

  crossing flat space like so many lines of poetry

  three

  two

  one rouged by the stream imaginary

  The faun is I—control

  oh head thrown back

  the teeth bared hideous

  the ears pricked

  your lost children, easily spooked by the eye in my forehead.

  I know the true beast

  Ah! Ah! is not horror but joy

  They think I am funny

  unhook my arm and run!

  The goat in me will eat the veil lick it

  push it to the mound

  grinding

  Know this:

  my instrument though roundly hissed

  will whistle life into the vase

  as an outpouring of encore flowers

  II. Jeux

  His cruel and barbarous choreography

  trampled all over my poor rhythms

  like so many weeds

  – Claude Debussy

  I have a secret to share with you:

  a ball thrown astray

  in the garden at dusk

  is how people come together, even

  if we cannot recall

  contact fault love

  sidelined for a flirt

  ~ twentieth-century triple kiss;

  ~ a Zepplin or an aeroplane disaster

  ~ the tango and the turkey trot

  all my ideas, rejected.

  I want pointes in the court—

  back and forth, a three-way match,

  weird trajectories!

  Observe the working of my brain

  as I butt you in the stomach and then you, too!

  It’s a two ball dance and the rhythm is fierce

  enough to knock you up

  stage

  match, set, game:

  The crowd turned wild.

  Curtain call

  Jerky handwriting means kindness of heart.

  He is a bad man.

  My trunks are packed.

  A cure for cancer and a new pen.

  I do not reason in the theatre square.

  I am a pupil of the round

  and round I go—the dance as life

  the life as fun and games “mere delusions”

  Oh now the blood has rushed to my head and down I fall

  easy prey for beasts

  in Zurich’s withered garden.

  Well: I will stalk your faux propriety—hoof

  at your iron closets with my short tail wagging.

  I am the faun, and Jeux is incomplete.

  Elusive game!—

&nb
sp; I know what earth is

  even if the steps are gone.

  One giant leap across that stream

  could prove the skill in an idea—a dream

  of thrusting forward, somehow.

  But what kind of leap to court

  with the wings, closing in?

  (some thought)

  silent, san rigueur:

  return to the mound

  remove the circlet

  discard the veil

  Ah.

  Ah.

  Wild joy is in the brown study

  where the faun will take his leave

  fold inwards

  and sleep, peacefully.

  Sleep, sleep peacefully.

  Jessica L. Wilkinson

  Poppies, Katoomba

  I didn’t come here to write poems about flowers

  but there are poppies of palest purple.

  Blown open, each petal

  cup-shaped, like an empty hand and

  every time I travel my chest winds tight:

  what kind of creature

  cannot take a holiday? In a hotel bar,

  I chance upon an old friend of my father

  nibbling on scones, he says that as a child

  I’d said I want to be alone

  with my own thoughts and this winds me,

  although I can’t say why. The poppies

  are membranous, the poppies are

  precarious, the poppies

  are bruise-coloured at their centre.

  By the time I get the poppies

  to my desk

  they are bedraggled,

  their hard, green hearts

  all they have left to show me.

  Fiona Wright

  Self Publishing

  In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that are never actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publishers include James Joyce Marcel Proust Anais Nin Margaret Atwood William Blake Virginia Woolf D.H. Lawrence Walter Whitman Mark Twain Lord Byron Percy Bysshe Shelley Ouyang and Yu, even Benjamin Britten had to found English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 “partly (though not solely) to perform his own works” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Britten). That’s self publishing. If self publishing is a crime, issue proceedings against us and take us all to an international court where the presiding judge is a well-published and award-winning author who has never self published (Shame on Him!) and will sentence us all to a lifetime imprisonment of self publishers and a deathtime of self publishers

  Now listen, to the rain self publishing again as it did 3000 million years ago, on the page that is my roof

  Ouyang Yu

  Boat Song

  Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,

  ‘Onward’, the seekers cry;

  Speed, you will not, but sink like a stone

  Down on the seabed lie.

  ‘We once had a country’, the desperate cry

  ‘Now we’re officially dead’.

  The Ministers grin, ‘You cannot come in.

  You’d consume all our daily bread’.

  The debris of massacres, blitzkriegs and bombings,

  Putsches and pogroms, war’s goings and comings.

  Tyres are for burning and cobbles for throwing,

  Army surplus for wearing and weeds fit for mowing.

  Lie in military tents with fear gripping breath,

  Forget that you’re living, expecting a death.

  Remote ideologies send bonnie boats

  Like broken-winged birds to our merciful votes.

  And we turned them away, yes, we turned them away

  As we went out to play

  In our dead-hearted country, the bounteous place

  Where neighbourly love puts a smile on each face.

  As we golf and we gamble, eat, make love and die,

  Raise shrines to our roadkill, release a brief sigh—

  Only heaven knows why—and for hours upon hours

  We bring photos and candles and

  Mountains of flowers upon flowers upon

  Flowers upon flowers

  Fay Zwicky

  One Last Poem

  I was going to write one last poem

  but nothing came out,

  only lightning & red sand

  & a campfire that speaks

  at least fifteen Aboriginal dialects

  as it stirs the embers with a stick.

  Even a whitefella can understand

  two or three sentences

  if he’s prepared to press

  his ear to the flames.

  The Pintupi have forgotten more than

  I’ll ever know about the Land –

  its ways & names.

  Too much to remember,

  other than the warning:

  don’t eat kuka in the rain.

  “Proper cheeky bugger, lightning.”

  Today a friend told me,

  “everything’s a metaphor for something else.”

  But what I don’t understand is:

  why, when I wanted to describe you, was

  the only metaphor that came to mind

  the sound of wind blowing in from the desert?

  Billy Marshall Stoneking

  Publication Details

  *All the poems that do not appear below were previously unpublished

  Martin Harrison’s ‘Patio’ appeared in his collection Happiness, (UWAP, July 2015).

  Adam Aitken’s ‘In The Billy Sing Baghdad Bar-and-Grill’ appeared in Peril: Asian-Australian Arts and Culture, June 2016 (online).

  Jordie Albiston’s ‘’ appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, vol. 6.1, January 2016 (USA).

  Chris Andrew’s ‘Advanced Souvlaki’ appeared in Southerly, vol. 75, no. 2, February 2016.

  Evelyn Araluen’s ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’ appeared in Overland, vol. 223, Winter 2016.

  Ken Bolton’s ‘Dark Heart’ appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.

  Peter Boyle’s ‘Discovered in a rock pool’ appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review, 1 November 2015.

  Michael Brennan’s ‘There and Then’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.

  Lisa Brockwell’s ‘Waiting on Imran Khan’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.

  Kevin Brophy’s ‘Siren’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Victorian States of Poetry anthology (2016).

  Lachlan Brown’s ‘Suspended Belief’ appeared in Underneath: the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2015, edited by Owen Bullock and Niloofar Fanaiyan (Axon Elements, 2015).

  Pam Brown’s ‘Rooibos’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).

  Michelle Cahill’s ‘Car Lover’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).

  Elizabeth Campbell’s ‘Cloaca Maxima’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.

  Bonny Cassidy’s ‘Axe derby’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.

  Julie Chevalier’s ‘Plan B’ appeared in Meanjin, vo
l. 75, no. 1, Autumn 2016.

  Eileen Chong’s ‘Magnolia’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 75, no. 1, Autumn 2016.

  Aidan Coleman’s ‘Secondary’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s South Australian States of Poetry anthology (2016).

  Stuart Cooke’s ‘Hinterland’ appeared in Contra Equus Niveus, vol. 3 (USA, 2016).

  MTC Cronin’s ‘ABOVE US’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Queensland States of Poetry anthology (2016).

  Nathan Curnow’s ‘Swimming (my lane)’ appeared in PRISM International, vol. 54, no. 1, September 2015.

  Luke Davies’ ‘Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.

  Sarah Day’s ‘Wooden Horse’ appeared in Underneath: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2015, edited by Owen Bullock and Niloofar Fanaiyan (Axon Elements, 2015).

  Joel Deane’s ‘Following the many elbows of the Yarra’ appeared in Australian Book Review, 21 January 2016.

  Jelena Dinic’s ‘The Silence of Siskins’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s South Australian States of Poetry anthology (2016).

  Dan Disney’s ‘Untitled: villaknelle xvi’ appeared in his collection either, Orpheus (UWAP, 2016).

  Lucy Dougan’s ‘Right Through Me’ appeared in her collection The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015).

  Laurie Duggan’s ‘A northern winter’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.

  Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ appeared in Poetry 208.2, May 2016.

  Stephen Edgar’s ‘Hearts and Minds’ appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, June 2016.

  Anne Elvey’s ‘working from home – to do list’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 November 2015.

  Michael Farrell’s ‘Death of a Year’ appeared in Plumwood Mountain, vol. 2, no.2, September 2015.

  Liam Ferney’s ‘Requiem’ appeared in Island, no. 145, 2016.

  Toby Fitch’s ‘Janus’ appeared in Australian Poetry Anthology 2015, edited by Brook Emery and Sarah Holland-Batt (Australian Poetry, 2015).

  Lionel G. Fogarty’s ‘Ambition Man’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Queensland States of Poetry anthology (2016).

  Tina Giannoukos’ ‘XXXI’ appeared in her collection Bull Days (ASP/Arcadia, 2016).

 

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