Caitlin Maling
One Way or Another
They can’t give you a date
for your bypass operation.
Before Christmas,
if you are lucky.
‘We’ll be in touch
each Wednesday
to let you know
one way or another.’
And so your future
waits, somewhere
outside, while you
sit inside and re-read
Muriel Spark: The Takeover,
Territorial Rights,
The Driver’s Seat.
You read them obsessively
each night, as insects
swarm under street lights,
free of consciousness
and futurity.
You see in the New Year,
and time passes,
your nervous system
a shivering horse within you.
But everything can wait,
one way or another,
as you discovered in earlier
visits to the cardiology ward.
The ‘code blue’ announcements
and even the arrival of
ambulances at A and E
downstairs were less rushed,
more stately, than you
would ever have expected.
Just like the helicopter
outside your ward
those times—lifting off
into the night air,
heavy, and unhurried,
towards some unseen future.
David McCooey
Remembering Sandstone Country
The road is long, always bending
winding through & over sandstone country
a snaking strip of graphite coloured bitumen
pocked with potholes you try to miss
keeping inside double yellow lines
hairpin bends that twist one way, then another
through dark rainforest gullies
small stands of ghost gums & tree ferns
echoing bellbirds, perhaps a lyre bird
then just as quickly drive up along a straight cutting
by the gravel verge, broken bottles, plastic bags
scribbly boronia & wattle, gymea lilies
tall & weathered by the dry, then out onto the ridge
in a blast of sunlight, the sky
on a long
sweeping corner we pulled up
at a lookout facing west. We stepped out
into cold wind buffeting, springing from the tops
of a sea of eucalypts, the sweetness of brown boronia
thrown like the scent of light
like electric wild honey in the air
as we walked to the fence & looked out
across a million acres of sandstone country
low flat olive green & blue outcrops
of bleached yellow, orange & grey stone in layers
carved to a rounded valley, eroded by occasional rain, wind
& the endless light of the sun, moon & stars
falling
for a few hundred million years in a mist of endlessly
streaming photons, the sandstone
gradually printed in a negative of the known universe.
It’s all we saw, the known universe
& all we failed to know, or failed to feel.
A wallaby crashed in the bush below
the universe changed again.
Peter Minter
The Spanish Revelation
Your education came too early, before you had seen an alcazaba
Before you learned about the journey of pomegranates.
You didn’t know how to create paradise in a white city
Or the sudden turns these strongholds would have to make
Not to admit your enemies into a garden of oranges
Where the women sit, not quite prisoners,
Gazing through lattices at the bareheaded hills of Spain.
You didn’t understand the way God moved through history
Northward with the hacking sword
Revealed through a tribal touch for flowers.
You couldn’t allow exactitude and softness to make love
And birth a Caliphate, azure and unflinching
Arches holding up the heart like an eternal Córdoba.
You knew nothing of the interior architecture of your own first name.
In the dark night you smuggled your selves
Out of Tehran, legally or illegally.
Black crows strode down the streets in pairs
Tented, your own small gender, with mystery under the skirt.
On the plane you tugged at your mother’s headscarf:
You don’t need to wear that anymore.
You carry the girlchild’s instinct, you spit in the face of the caul.
Then you found Andalusia and through the hand glimpsed
The divine romance worn by wind and the human palimpsest,
The taste man has for vanquishing himself.
Under the lights of another Roman theatre, lit below the fort
Loyalty grew in mathematics, worship in the stone.
What was past carved itself a resting-place where you could briefly see
Further than a veil, into Revelation, exhaling with the fall.
Marjon Mossammaparast
Anna Karenina
As the train’s breath scoops her up,
she remembers Vronsky’s boots stamping
outside her door, but also how he delicately
crossed his legs to pull on a new glove.
Hard to judge the gravity of such a gesture
among vile travellers on a muddy platform,
their sotto voce spilling out like spiders.
And Alexei’s high-pitched voice as he shook
the sweaty hand of Count Bezzubov,
the knock-kneed clairvoyant
who in his sleep could see no divorce.
She judges the two wheels exactly
as if preparing to go into water
for a swim.
No longer the weight of his vanity,
the hooks that dangle in aquamarine rooms
where count and countess
purr the etiquette of butchers.
Now she desires to drift like smoke,
to float over Levin’s farm
with its snorting horses and fine fat cattle,
above the poisonous salons of Moscow
and soldiers in strawberry columns,
then come to ground in a choir of wheat
having willed all this at last
with a man’s casual hindsight.
Philip Neilsen
Bombala
From the road you see it still,
vanishing in yellow grass,
the old Bombala line—
small embankments, minor cuttings,
low structures over creeks.
For thirty years these pale Merinos
have paid it no attention.
You stop the car, remembering
the signs they had at Central,
those wooden slats with destinations.
Bombala? Where was that exactly?
You contemplate the proud advances:
Cooma, 1889;
Nimmitabel in 1912
(in time for WWI recruits
laughing from receding windows);
Bombala, 1921.
You think too of the politicians
paunched and praising the Monaro,
those conscientious clerks all day
with maps and manifests,
the Chief Commissioner of Railways,
the calm men with theodolites
setting out directions,
the sweaty men with heavy arms
who tap the lines down tight. You see
the first train, rich with dignitaries
and self-congratulation,
the handshakes at the station,
the women standing back a bit
but welcoming the Future. You hear
the soot, the smoke, the hiss of steam,
the driver hooting at a crossing.
The rails are long-since pilfered but
an underlay of stones
and slump of timber bridges still
retain the sounds for those
who care to stop and listen.
It’s been just thirty years.
The villages are mainly
growing sleepier.
The bitumen’s a winner as
we should have always known.
The price of wool is less than half
of what it was in ‘53.
Obliging trucks are quick to haul
direct from yards to abattoir.
You stand there in a gap of silence
between successive cars.
You’re looking for a word—say hubris—
but that is too dramatic for
these blonde and treeless landscapes,
these human traces, half-erased,
surfacing and sinking back
across a narrative of paddocks.
Geoff Page
The Hidden Side to Love
All summer, the bees worked
between bells of laburnum
sockets of foxglove, blades of lavender
—they saw a task and rose to it.
I busy myself with the washing
untwisting funnels of sock, boughs of jumper
rosettes of flannel.
In spare moments I put words in the freezer
reheat coffee, fill inkwells
I stir out hot dinners.
Passing along the hall sheaved in light
I imagine a nectarous meadow
I think of waxen wings brought thudding
to the ground.
I look down at my dress and see spikes of burdock
thistles in plaits hanging all around.
Crayons, soldiers, ropes of daisy
the couch, the doorknob, the stairs—
They all gather to me
Until I stand and rub my hind legs emphatically
until I disengage everything
to its proper place
and emerge like a queen
made anew from decades of trying.
Claire Potter
Pigeons of the Dome
From here on the balcony we see them: pigeons
in Hagia Sophia. They roost high in the dome,
their view is ages old of pilgrims and tourists
crowding the marble floors of this cathedral, mosque,
and now museum.
Always they have flown here,
in this still air once hallowed and now profane.
They look down today on these flashlight tourists
as they did on desecrating crusaders whose pirate king
lies buried here, he whose holy marauding
brought him down at last;
and then Mohammedans,
sons of the Prophet, spreading the word by the sword.
The pigeons have seen it all. They nest in the dome
as they have from its first raising up, their feathered kind
has prospered two thousand years while kingdoms
have come and gone.
They glide in the still air,
while far below, a child looks up from between
her parent and cries for birds trapped, it seems,
as they drift from icon to icon in artificial light
under the arching heavens.
Her father, learnéd, devout,
but ignorant of the pigeons’ history, murmurs to her,
Aren’t we all. Who knows if the arc of heaven will hold?
When the temple falls at last, these birds will surely escape
the cupola, will fly free under the blue dome of the sky.
Ron Pretty
The Lowlands of Moyne
Mud darkening the stories
what’s passed down
utterances, quips
a way of looking at fences
the dark stretches
a scattering of bricks where a dairy was.
Farmhouses facing narrow back roads
wrecks of Commodores dumped in cape weed
beside rusted sheds. Heavy country you could
fatten a bullock with. A mother into farm politics
and the boot-deep mud around her dairy.
There were three brothers who drank day and night
until they killed themselves.
A mother who burned her house down
before leaving her husband.
A house with a green roof
fifteen kids came out of.
Children walking barefoot through John’s Bush
stealing fruit from Faulkner’s fence
after getting the cuts in a one-teacher school.
Stories the paddocks give up
like bits of pipe, old whiskey bottles.
Stories that go right back there
to a baby being brought home in a fruit box
a boy cutting thistles for one and six,
a girl walking away from the smell of onions
to a rail canteen at Spencer Street.
Once a week a draught horse pulls a car by rope
through water-logged paddocks.
A family of thirteen
cramped and grinning before Mass
slide around behind the horse
hauling them out of their rain-soaked bog.
In the days before electricity arrived
my father said it was like skiing in mud.
Brendan Ryan
Muzzled Altar
The planned onslaught, reedy, timed out with your passage
to starry boulevards
apropos here, winched as caution
Train pocks the country’s shore
that shelters behind its painting, or reveals it
as money buttons a screen’s
pressing submission or oft-repeated flighty tangent
Alter later
A trophy rolls over the parquet
It was the sliding person not the poem’s entrance
as if effusions writ
(on the up, was the combed narrator)
Some wished to rub the shine
petalling beyond itself
Childish sparks reverently fizzle
Gig Ryan
Homeschooling
Because the old
microscope when
we dusted it off was
crudely broken
and a new and subtler one
is coming, we prepare
by rehearsing
rules for handling:
sidelong eye for
precision in lowering
lenses, not headlong;
patience in making
and working slides,
letting cover-slip
drop deftly with toothpick
(all these nice
distinctions painful, still
utterly abstract, a prep
for no lab but this
inescapable partnership
from which you’ll develop
self-reliant experiment)
and only ever carrying
the weighty instrument
with one hand under,
like lifting a baby
I say, the way I
lifted you, and mimic
with empty air now
the shape we made
Tracy Ryan
Strange Music
Mahler’s 2nd (The Resurrection) and the Ants
Behind the notes’ invisible drama is God. Hearing Mahler
as if lunatics and gravity and ants ceaseless as the first
and second movements the strings and pregnant loads
of differing directions, of front and side and pivoting
chords, or ants unable one at a time to stand
still.
Ants as tendency, ants as ants in columns on grooves
like dots on CDs the focal movement irrelevant the Sign
and crotchety anywhere of their purpose, their restless
mania for abstraction. No programme notes to read but
then what do Mahler’s say — why do you live? Is it all
a huge joke? they carry sawn-through leaves as big as
key-signatures, sugar to the living (they rise again) (and again).
No falling back for a cigarette a quick snort a sinus moment
of whisky or cocaine just to keep their fingers and limbs
agitative, the job the job, ants as the minor keys the swell
of doom, ants run onto the track of brassy and timpani
exoskeletons, in Mahler’s grimmest anti-closet . . .
She cries out in heart-stopping anty-mezzo Oh believe
O glaube Es geht dir nichts verloren No, you will not
be lost. And only after the heavy chords, only after
burden-bearing back and forth the difference the diff
-erent and the diffident ants (there have to be some
like us): Die as I shall, so as to live! Who isn’t moved
by their famous power-to-weight ratio so very serious
(lift and lift! they lift us up! they are the Resurrection!)
Sterben werd’ ich um zu leben! sings the soprano,
Yes yes and ja ja say the ants.
Philip Salom
Fort Dada
Once off the ship from sector blah blah
she checks into a spa in Baden Baden,
wet air spiced with a pile of old Who’s Whos
and warm custardy wafts of ylang ylang.
Only the new filtration system’s murmur
and three perfect smiles of pawpaw.
Bowls heaped with wild mushroom couscous
suit the one girl from Wagga Wagga
who knows her rendang from her gado gado.
Bright and rare as a golden bulbul
she caught on quick, so flicked the froufrou,
went off-piste: first tai chi, then the cha cha.
Love’s dance, though: now that was lose-lose.
They often wound up tangled in her yoyo.
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 9