the glint of an eye,
bend sinister of the mouth;
half is in eclipse,
an orange shadow,
the other half glances out
at invisible events,
history maybe, or
just a present
occurring somewhere
behind you;
a glow, or
halo surrounds it
Laurie Duggan
Distance
After Jordie Albiston’s ‘Cartography’
What is the space between this hut and that mountain
but impenetrable black, and frosty cold.
She is writing this at a table in the cabin,
spinning thoughts like threads, as if they can hold
her boys tighter, pull the mountain in, with their bold
tents blooming like flowers in the snow.
Can thoughts, or mad desire, shift the world
slightly, tilt ranges so their faces lower
to her own? Upthrust, tectonic forces, the whole slew
of geology sped up, so contour lines diminish
and lakes freeze, ice thickening to a deep blue
while those dark mountain peaks relinquish
distance; and this long night will finish.
Her writing is a thread to lure them back,
their faces filled with snow light, dolerite, the itch
of time alone, the cold breath of height. Face facts:
the contours between here and there are shifting. Pack,
and ask, what is the space between home and out there,
between their beginnings and these beginnings, but a lack
of courage; what is distance but a prayer?
Adrienne Eberhard
The Apology Day breakfast
my mother did not grow up
with her mother I did not
grow up with mine my son
did not grow up with me
how does one define the jigsaw
when the pieces are misshapen
by the constant hands of others?
the gift of life is maternity
and the removal of this is
a reparation that has no price
the picture is askew in the portrait
you offer and rejection is the new
graffiti to rewrite the script
you offer breakfast and forget
I found my mother
and rebirthed my son
Together we are the Banquet
Ali Cobby Eckermann
La Vita Nuova
A flock of them that day took to the sky,
The paragliders, harnessed loose and slung
Precariously to fly
The steppes of air, those empty replicas
Of paddocks, where their shadows warped and swung
Like a windborne attack.
Above them, though, began to magnify
In roiling folds what was
About to take her life, and give it back.
From all that flight of dozens, it plucked her.
A miles-high mass, it snatched her parachute
At the perimeter
And sucked it in, and up the roaring siphon
Of pressure, hail and black light in dispute
To grapple and transform
Her body to a frozen armature,
Which lofted with her life in
Suspension up to the ceiling of the storm.
Almost an hour she hurtled in ascent.
Unconscious soon enough, with eyelids sealed,
She missed the main event:
The luminance, the lightning-ravished caps
Of clouds. The parachute would likewise yield
And, long before the summit,
Froze rigid as it bore her upward, bent
Around her in collapse,
Then, spat out at the top, began to plummet
Down all the storeys it had climbed before,
But now outside the storm. Who could have guessed
That falling would restore
Her life to her and thaw the chute, which snapped
Immediately open to arrest
The plunge where she was bound?
With ever wider swoop and glide it bore,
Incredulous and rapt,
Her cold but breathing body to the ground.
Stephen Edgar
Putting on your boots
The child’s boots are tough brown leather with holes
in each side of the heels for the prongs of the callipers.
The callipers themselves have steel rods at the sides
and, at the top, wide leather bands to circle the swell
of the calves. Each band’s held tight by buckles
and straps, each fixed with a buckle’s thick needle
through one of five eyelets in the strip of the hide.
The skin of my hands is soft and light, faint
with peach. With my young fingers, I ease the boots
onto your feet, pivot the callipers into place, tighten
the straps and, standing behind you like a spine straight
to your curve, hold you close, and with my right foot
nudge your right foot. And when your right foot has slid
forward, with my left I nudge your left.
Together we take three steps until you slacken
in my grasp. Those callipers, you know, were long
gone when you died in the quiet of a private
room. It would be overly romantic to say that you
walked from the world. The night before, we sat
with you, through the seizures and the flash of diodes
spelling oxygen saturation and pulse.
I returned just after you had slackened, your flesh
warm beneath my touch. There was the old scar
on your ribs where a bed sore had formed
like an eyelet in the skin for a needle of normality
and there, too, the persistent curve of spine. You left
us so gracefully with smiles for those who stayed
as if dying was the most natural thing to do just then—
like the way a peach holds and gives its juice
or a calf’s skin lends itself to a child’s calf
and a child’s fingers learn the workings of a thing.
Anne Elvey
Because, like the weather
Because, like the weather it colours this place
you do not notice. Maybe, you’ll sense
in the way something is put, something avoided,
neatly, because though they’re friendly enough,
no matter how long you have been among them
you can’t be trusted to understand. How could you?
So, I tell this as an anecdote.
They’d been seeing it for some time,
even caught sight of it padding by the back door,
its stink down by the chook pens,
but now it’s here, in a cage they’d set
with one of the lambs it has killed.
There is panic in the froth of saliva.
Eyes engorged with brilliance.
Their dogs, the fox.
They bay and snap at the cage.
It is sweat-matted and concentrates its stare
on its newest threat, swivels and snarls,
and snarls and is lost in the mash of its fate.
One by one
a new dog is introduced
until terror extinguishes with a yelp.
The cage, silent as the hills,
as all witness is.
“The best way to blood pups,” he says.
Trusting me with that much.
Russell Erwin
The Art of Birds
Golden pheasants
Nature invented art,
so they remind us — gripped by
their need to seed self-copies
ad infinitum:
; each one a mobile Venice.
Mallards
with sequined green heads,
cobalt wing-panels, change to
feathery icebergs
while they feed from the depths; rise
with iridescent sang-froid.
Glossy ibis
So eerily red —
a Mephistopheles bird.
Nests deep inside sedge.
Just a hint of Art Deco,
with Egyptian blue-green eggs.
Lady Amherst’s Pheasants
True aristocrats —
bodies, solid as trust funds;
each tail, a poised quip.
Head-capes, fanned wide in display,
show them artfully one-eyed.
African Greys
They snub pleasantries,
obsidian eyes agleam —
each glance shrewd, icy.
If revenge were to be had,
what torture would they devise?
Corella
She swoops in, close to
the heads of the audience,
does tricks as required,
talks back with quizzical zest.
Flirty eyes, bright as gumdrops.
Bleeding-heart pigeon
A crimson stab-wound
on its delta of sluiced red —
a living symbol
set off by plumped beige, flinty
grey: the shades of schadenfreude.
Greater Bird-of-Paradise
Once, on boughs near clouds,
acrobatic moves all day,
the flounce and flick of
plumes — yellow, airy silver;
many ticks on the dance card.
Azure-winged kookaburra
An old chuckler with
summer skies emblazoning
his wings; the browns of
wattle bark and river dirt:
an uncanny completeness.
Diane Fahey
The Snake
i’m not Building a House, though i
go Under them like a Low creek
i’m not Playing a role when My
de Facto hip hits the Stage or
bumps the Record my winding Mind
a human Feeling a mental Flexing
with a Whiff of dead bird Or mouse, to
the Discerning. i head to the Eternal
Verandah, discarding contortions and Blue
herrings. i Have a Diamond on my head
some Frost on my tail and Apple on my fangs
Turning’s what counts the Steady tone, transfixing
people with Ears and Winters under their
Belts. i drag my Belly through the dirt
yet am Clean enough by the Time i enter
the Australian literature library to Shed
my skin. i’m Always there always Travelling
shifting Shape, leaving a Wriggle where it’d
been Said was nothing or Maybe a trickle
long Dry. did i say I’m a feeling
a sober Mood part grim part True?
Without intent and yet with Business
to Attend to social Habits to
pursue and Contest at my Best i
wear a Helmet and a Nettle dress
perhaps you Saw me exit the Ocean
from your Eyrie or Unblessed yacht?
or Felt me enter your Swimmers while tanning
but That’s decades ago. i was Still
highly Pastoral then not So forgiving
now I’m ecumenical the Word of god
or Sod suits me Seduction itself’s
just Education or lies to Protect
the needy. Rest- lessness is my Mainstay
the Road as seen from an Alpine car
or cushioned Chair Risk need not be
forced. any Minute Momentum might be
blocked, or Random disrupted Joying
devolve to Vice and Spice my life
with Strikes or cut me Dead, how annoying
Michael Farrell
For Cornflowers to Sing
Blue must be stolen.
There must be purple
plums, cherries, telling us
blue insists on the flower.
The silence of the jar
must be the centre
which grows the painting
Unlatches stillness,
resists composition,
detonates the seasons.
For cornflowers to sing
each line must scar
its making.
There must be light
and the idea of a window.
In each fold of creamy linen,
blue corners
crouching under the table.
For cornflowers to sing
they must be fallen.
Blue slalom.
White grave of the table.
Susan Fealy
‘For Cornflowers to Sing’ is a response to Brett
Whiteley’s Still Life with Cornflowers. The title is
an adaptation of ‘for the cornflowers / to sing . . .’
from ‘Cornflowers’ by Robert Adamson.
Main Street Social
O Hail! to the days of wine and typhus,
the arrangements of battlefields in early spring,
the glory of a factory that rifts your body
before it wipes your mind, religions vivid
as blood sacrifice. Rise up King Pepe!
Pwn the noob descending the staircase,
these Chads will know the beta’s far cry.
PTSD was straightforward
when you could just belt your wife.
These days all we have is a toilet stall
where you can sharpie “Ted Bundy
would have loved her as prey”
across a picture of Patricia Krenwinkel
and no one will delete it.
These days it seems to me
people have their favourite monkeys,
bonobos or capuchins, smart as dumb likers.
I might just borrow yours.
Welcome to the shit show
and remember to vote with your wallet.
Liam Ferney
Stones
For Ellen Hinsey
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away.
—Wisława Szymborska, ‘Conversation with a Stone’
The pebble
is a perfect creature
—Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Pebble’
We generally assume
they’ve no interior or soul.
When we break them open
they present a new exterior.
They’re a fraction more
than nothing: a quality
of hardness, a resistance
to our touch. To our sight
bounded shapes: unmoving
inanimate. We speak of their faces
only metaphorically: lacking eyes
and mouth, at most they’re blank.
But sitting by this stream
I’m struck by your simple
presence. Meeting you
the water slows and wrinkles,
rushes on. Not going anywhere
to you it’s all the same whether
you’re clothed in moss or bare,
dappled, in sun or shade.
The stone is worldless, Heidegger wrote.
But is this a deficiency? I agree
their detachment’s perfect;
they seem outside relation—
to call them you a conceit—
indifferent to our distinctions:
geologic, metamorphic, igneous
sedimentary, sandstone, true or false.
But this afternoon as I worried
about what to write and do, they
and not the versatile stream,
appeared as sage—in the world
beyond the world, as though
they were primeval Bud
dhas
who attained complete humility
and sunken in meditation
hardly noticed death—
only an increase in light.
Luke Fischer
27 Materialisations of Sydney Cloud
a tsunami (risen above an east coast low)
a dust red dawn
an electric bluebottle jellyfish
a pleasure cruiser
a head of beer (frothing over glass towers)
a colony of gulls
a pavlova (sunbaking)
an oyster
a mosquito net
a bushfire’s black ghost fingers
a soft koala (somewhere above The Rocks)
a haemorrhage
a fancy suit
a low-flying plastic bag (against a screen-blue sky)
an Utzon structure
a blankie for the supermoon
a bank
a vapour trail of bats
a brown Holden (leaded petrol)
a total fucking gas
a purple stucco ceiling spray-painted pink
an undulating sprawl
a giant pomeranian (recently washed) above a park full
of smaller white fluffy ones
a waft of Turnbull rhetoric
a layer cake of development flats
an asteroid belt
a shark
Toby Fitch
Before the Storm
This afternoon there is a soft knocking at the door, it is the sound that leaves make when they brush against glass. A man is staring at me through the flyscreen. He has the manner of a flight attendant, or a nurse. The sunlight is mussing up his hair, which is grey and thinning but was once a deep black, one imagines. He is sewn over his bones. He knows my name and says it like a prayer that is repeated every morning, upon waking. I reach my hand into the black, damp past and feel about in it, among sightless things that glide on the ocean floor. Dad? I ask, but this is not a question. It has been fifty years since I called a man my father. On the windy surface of memory, my mother is tangled in her bed sheets, and the long cry of loss. He reaches his arms towards me, like a man who is fumbling in the dark. Oh my boy, he says, my boy. We are standing at a threshold, where there are lives to be known, and time lost. The afternoon has tired of itself, collects streetlights. Dusk is shuffling through the undergrowth of houses. A storm is coming over.
John Foulcher
The Western District
My uncles had set that day to do the whole thing,
and the day was forecast to be clear.
That meant locals and their other mates
magnetising to the paddock spot:
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 5