of where I was, what I take away with me,
what I will return to again: terrorzone to rearrange
in this daguerreotype brain of mine. I am saying
that the spread of cactus is a risk to native flora and that we
might extrapolate to make images and analogies
but it doesn’t work in this overburdened tableaux
of land and machinery, of newcomers and the less recently
arrived and the people with the oldest claims. They are
all people and as such are celebrated in my ethics,
but I know the science and I know analogies fail
and the literary cannot always be extricated from science
and vice versa and sometimes people wherever
they walk from walk outside the constructs of language,
the semiotics of waking and sleeping and being intact
where you are. The eucalypts are in blossom
and form a fragrant pomander in the box of my head,
extracted by my nostrils. A messy and unpleasant
image, no doubt, but explaining much that adjoins
without annexing my river moment, split between
two Cactus Islands, but cactus islands of glorious
melaleucas and towering, imposing cactuses,
disturbing the balance in a disturbed realm.
3. Reading in St Gertrude’s Chapel
In the bivalve half, inner cup
of sound of our own voices where
we are watched over by painted visions.
Outside, visitors search for relationship
to anomaly and for contemplative answers.
This decommissioned girls’ school embraces
the terror of secrets, of communion
with cool but sometimes deadly stone—
bricks and mortar, the tendrils of creed
reaching through from the other side of the earth,
passing through the core and igniting futures
outside the enclave. And now, a dozen monks
walk the grounds reciting Dante for next
weekend’s performance of the Inferno,
from which they’d hope to be safe,
but never gloating as the piano
will play tunes of Gershwin
in variation. But that’s a few hours
in the future and due to take place in another room,
at right angles to this room of prayer, with more
external light and a raised stage
where notes might parse without a cross,
without our Lady reading the score
over a shoulder. Listen, between words,
hear her troubled breathing.
John Kinsella
Windborne Avenue
1
There are moths that cross a continent to die in this city.
As black cutworms they suckle Queensland’s
saplings but by spring
the heat is already too much and they make the difficult passage, flying
by night on an inner compass that draws them
here—a place where nothing is too much, where
shunting down the slender reaches of William Hovel Drive
I forget that I’m alive. A city is
a claustrophobic way to be alone.
Some afternoons I feel the whole city on heat—
the pent-up quarter-ache
in Barranugli’s confinements. Though I
love the smell of water simmering in the evening
in a hose left out on the lawn.
2
I want to feel the wind on my back
now that I’m back in the peloton trying
to write to the click-a-clack of my spokes to find a meter—any—
on the boulevard of this city windborne
with thighs around me pumping like pistons.
When the frost first lifts from the sprigs
the moths arrive. More than once
through ventilation shafts they’ve entered
the galleries of parliament—a dissenting
mob demanding only a place to breath in a building
far too much like a flag
piercing the hill’s rump at the moment of annexation.
Like that they were embalmed
and the house closed two days for renovation.
3
Between your breasts I rest my head
when the black hair of the afternoon malts in ashen clumps
from five-hundred insolvent
wishes for some modest certainties. From here
I see the gradient of a mountain
baptised with a slur
for the remnants of another people
who dwelt there in the circuit of their own certainties
for durations that can only seem now dreamlike in their expanse—
here they gathered to eat moths that chose this place
to die. Let me be like them—these moths—these dizzy
vagrants, churning through the elements on wings
of paper, so fixed on their final coupling
they cannot eat.
Louis Klee
The Corpse Flower Sketch
For John Berger
Sunset, climate-warmed and volcanic –
in the hot sky
a giggle and crake of fruit bats
flown south from development
print themselves in the old money trees
of spooked Park Terrace mansions –
the corpse flower is blooming tonight.
In the Botanic gardens queues
strobed with mobile phone flashes
shuffle under the captive palms
and Titan Arum releases its smell;
part dog bone, part teenage sweat shoe.
A velvety, visceral purple,
pleated curtain around a creamy phallic spike.
John Berger died today in outer Paris;
two more species disappeared somewhere in the world.
After sketching this flower
I will go home and read his Photocopies again,
his portraits of ingenious non-celebrity.
Which reminds me it was here, in this opera house
of tropical plants, I last saw my aunt alive.
She who had been a secretary for Menzies
kept her secrets,
but at lunch told us
when she worked for the Southern Cross Hotel
the manager got her to cut up the bed-sheets
the Beatles slept in
so he could sell little squares to the fans.
We came up this walkway
which goes over the lotus pond
and met a bird, a kingfisher flown from who knows where.
Stopping her there in her ninetieth year,
smiling at its magical quality.
Not a word, but a life, and no more than that.
The crowded forest grows inside now.
Mike Ladd
A Tasting
In a bathtub filled with ice I arrange a selection of beers.
Many are from a time when bars were filled
with smoke and blue singlets, others gleam like pilgrims
preserved by winter burial. Some were boutiqued
to the point of being so far up the brewer’s coil
distil has been replaced by crafted and essential oil
as if the word beer itself had become linguistically distasteful.
When I open, prematurely, a friend’s attempt at stout
flipping the wire swing-arm to release a ceramic cap
a sound like the compressed report of an air rifle
is followed by the reek of creek water, the remains
of dogs, and the hessian bags they were drowned in.
I’m no coinosseur, but I can tell a mongrel
from some hopped-up, spring-fed pilsener
in a cafe-brewery, its blackboard advertising pulled po
rk
in chalked cursive, the staff drawing beers to Bon Iver
and extolling the virtues of slow food, clean air.
Next I turn to the long necks - favourite of shearers.
For years they were lifted throat-first from fridges
in outstation sheds, opened with a knuckled flourish
and swallowed hard, each bottle tipped over - dead
and dying soldiers on the boards. I can hear the drone
of flies and stories, shorn wethers standing in waves
of lanolin heat, the sun going down like the lid
of a tin knocked from the sky by a .410 shotgun.
Digging, I find a bottle whose label had slipped away
prompting a blind tasting. There is blood, sweat
and the cold residue of a kiss that took me years
to disengage from. Distracted, I keep drinking
craving that one marker for a time when love
was a spell you surrendered to, then passed out under.
Late at night or early in the morning, unable to tell
Melbourne bitter from something a Belgian monk
might have finessed from cuttlefish ink, herbs
and horse blood, I sleep. Waking to a hangover
like contained scrub-fire behind my eyes, the ice
gone to water, the brewing history of five states
and a few home-grown failures competing for space
in my mouth, I lie back and listen to the bells
of the last bottles knocking against each other.
Anthony Lawrence
Zeitgeist
We admire it because it disdains to destroy us:
beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
Chagall’s falling man, a grandfather clock, a yellow
cow with a blue violin populate an allegory of terror
‘To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency;
to forgive is cruelty,’ said le Père de la Grande Terreur
And an angel of the Lord stood by them, the glory
of the Lord shone round, and they were bathed in terror
Spiders the size of bears, the waking dead, the lights
go out, something claws your arm: the terror
He was a wrist-twister, shin-kicker, a gifted smasher
of cherished things, Verlaine’s pale-eyed holy terror
Dear Mr Speaker: I hereby designate all funding for
Overseas Contingency Operations/Global War on Terror
He burns yet doesn’t flinch a muscle, doesn’t utter
a sound, unlike those who wail and circle him in terror
O say can you see by the rockets’ red glare and the bombs
bursting in air the cowardly stern of the HMS Terror
Late morning in a climate-controlled trailer a pilot
yawns, scratches his head, and resumes his armchair terror
And an angel of the sword stands by me, the glory
of the force shines round, and I am bathed in terror
Bronwyn Lea
Over the River Memory
Prince Alfred Bridge Gunagagi
When I come back I remember it has
been a long time.
Long time passing since
I came back along this track to Gundagai –
town of my childhood.
There are many ghosts – I hear
their voices.
I stand on a solid red-gum bridge – the
longest wooden bridge in the world.
The Irish nuns told me this on a good
day under the gothic arches in the convent
on the hill where I learnt about Australian history.
‘This continent, Australia, is a young country,’
they told us. ‘The history of this place is very
short – shortest in the world!’
They’d seen the world – the nuns.
Maps were pinned on the wall to show
how far they’d travelled to spread the word.
I’d only seen my Country.
The longest bridge and the shortest history –
that’s what I learnt.
Prince Alfred Bridge they called it – built
last century – by the pioneers as
they opened up the lands for progress.
Our teachers said so.
How many river-gums were felled? What
were their names before they were rearranged
across the river – once their life blood.
What was their history?
My Grandmother said this place is old.
She said my teachers don’t know the stories.
I listened.
On a bad day you could be beaten
for asking the wrong questions about
the short history and the long bridge.
At school I learnt to hold my tongue.
The water under the bridge ripples over
my memory now. The bend of the
Murrumbidgee – a deep archive –
flows steady and slow.
I walk on the bridge and I remember how
long it used to take to cross on my little
legs clinging tight to the side rail as huge
wheat and wool trucks thundered over the
ancient planks laden with the wealth
of the nation.
Sometimes the river rose so high it swallowed
the bridge and the town. Short history almost
washed away by higher, older tides.
No trucks now. The bridge long ago closed –
steel and concrete girders bypass the town.
The wealth of the nation rumbles down
different roads.
On the other side I look back across
the flood plains. The old stone convent on
the hill is empty.
I come back after seeing the world.
I hear my Grandmother again.
The bridge is short now.
The history of place – still
long and deep.
Jeanine Leane
Rattling the Forms
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits,
seek comfort, oblivion, anything in caves,
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.
Shrewd reverie in my perilous head,
I struck out through the shambling waves:
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits!
Beyond waterfalls and time lost and the first chastities to mar the shore,
defenceless men set me aflame,
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.
Not me at all, but my double, my look-alike;
not someone, but anyone in a sort of cloak and hood . . .
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits.
How bare the narrative seems!
And nothing! And nothing and nothing and nothing . . .
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.
If you could only see me riding on and on,
babbling like a saint in the open fields!
I wanted to dissolve my marriage, explode the limits,
on a whaling ship, in a hundred other places.
Emma Lew
In Memoriam
On a frosty night,
I quoted Piet Mondrian:
the light is coming.
The trees intoned it sure is.
The Great Ocean Road.
Bring closer the wine,
bring closer the moon;
or a spell to forget you,
as the sayings go.
Cassie Lewis
The Novelist Elena Ferrante
I had in my mind cries, crude family acts of violence I had witnessed as a child, domestic objects.
—Elena Ferrante
For instance, in Ischia. Those dark corners where the sound does not. But I remembered them that way and only that way do they
appear. In each retelling, in the manner of chiaroscuro: stones shearing off the roofs of houses at sundown. Hunting the particularity, the moment, seen so closely from afar. Down the lanes, always in the company of a shadow, a woman, a cleaver. Always closer than before. These slow dances from doorway to doorway—these particular doorways, these particular lanes. My sister—a girl then—clear, cleaving to the shadows, and once. Once we ran from house to house in the dark, calling names, falling and our knees grazed. Dresses stained. Those stones at sundown. Later, in the living room, crowding into corners, watching the walls shake—yellow paper peeling slowly, vertically, folding down in great, wide strips. These days and nights of blood. Clear voices, and distinct, the taste of something metallic. In the corner the broken lamp. The television (silent) in the background.
Bella Li
Epigraph from Elena Ferrante, ‘Art of Fiction No. 228’, interview with Elena Ferrante, by Sandro and Sandra Ferri, The Paris Review, Number 212 (Spring 2015).
Metronome
Listening to Vladimir Miller sing in
his bass huge as Lake Baikal the song
by Basner about the metronome
on the radio throughout the long
siege of Leningrad, it starts to seem
to me that metronomes tend to lean
to a pattern of two beats then some
small silence rather than a drum
of continuous ticking, even the one
copied with such deathly tones
in the song itself. Binary metre belongs
to life’s basic history, alone
reassuring continuity: the poem
or the electronic language on
the internetted brain, the same
tune remains although only one
and a city of ghosts can listen.
The pulse against austerity ticks home
through the blood at the heart of reason.
Jennifer Maiden
Fisheries Raid
Two-face deckies embedded at the caravan park. A month long operation comes to a head on a Saturday with almost sirens and headlights. They check each freezer for bodies or just severed legs frozen into twig piles. All the ballasts are opened on the boats. All the cars’ trunks popped. Who the fuck do youse think you are, loud across the town. If there’s something in a car it’s towed, if there’s one too many on a boat it’s dry-docked. Everywhere the sound of phones as neighbours check neighbours for loss. $25k at number 30, 5k at 24. Somehow 12 has escaped with a slap on the wrist. Something not right there mate. Even Skinny trading hobby cray for tinnies been handed $500 and had his license taken. That’s what it’s come to? A mate can’t help a mate out. Since the raid it’s only them by the jetty been making any money. Pricks. I wouldn’t want to stay in town tonight if I were them. Wouldn’t want to wake up to a shotto through the windscreen. And where would they stay, anyway, the motel? Something not right there. That bloke he’s a creep. That bloke can’t even thread a line in no wind and what’ll happen now there’s nothing left, I’m done, we’re all done in, can’t even get the dollars for petrol to get out of town.
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 8