The Best Australian Poems 2017
Page 10
The holiday in Crete they fought like kri kri,
or way back in the early days in Woy Woy
when she went walkabout with the .22,
blood blurring loud above the never never,
visions surely no one else had had
(her naked papa brandishing his atlatl).
Day-to-day distress remains hush-hush
and being seen wallowing is a booboo—
so Fuck you all, she sighs, and pooh pooh
to the pricks skeptical of my juju . . .
Hence the spa, hence the Liszt by Lang Lang.
The diurnal chaconne is in four-four,
night’s celloed maestoso, otto-otto.
Autumn shook its crisping ochre pom-pom
when in the thermal mists of Baden Baden
she winked back from her replica tuk tuk
at old sector blah blah, and clinked cin cin.
Jaya Savige
Nudge Nudge
Any nuance, any gesture gets me back to this,
Back to the human, back to thinking how it
Comes about I’m here and why, etcetera:
Does it matter? Destined to be dusted into urns, we evoke
Ennui in others. Evening creeps on pads of silent feet on city roofs.
Fat ugly autos prowl the suburb, driven by fat ugly folk.
Get out? Graffiti says ‘Why look up here? You are the joke,
Hell isn’t others, it’s yourself’.
In 2010 all poets were aged thirty, even all of those long dead.
Just joshing. That’s my business: I go fishing for bright words,
Kick sounds and ideas round, score goals, get into touch.
Life is after all no graceful sentence but a word.
Most spell it out. A micro-story.
No amount of saying yes negates the fact that no is underrated.
Over time, the mouth that is the origin of trouble
Proves that statues have the best time. No use
Querying their accent. They have earned their right to silence.
Reach no further for the why and how, etcetera,
See life steady see it whole, the gemlike flame that burns us up.
To burn, to live: we tidy up our mums and dads,
Usurp their thrones, their little plots, a little while. The children smile,
Veins full of juice, skin taut: they pole vault over us
While counting: vault or wall-niche, what’s the cost?
Xylem feels like that when phloem tips the wink in passing:
You-tube action, up they go, while we go down to sink cells,
Zip from zenith. O the circulatory zing.
Michael Sharkey
Not to be
His quad bike overturns in the creek. Yesterday or tomorrow
the kelpie would have gone for help, but today, today
she is at the vet, today there is no take-back, no near-miss
tall-story germ, only pinned arms and the chassis sinking in slimy willow-muck
and thousands of cold brown gallons against his lungs.
A bloody-minded magpie swoops the kids two paddocks over;
they lie down and kick out at it, legs in the air, backs riding a sea of ploughed clods,
just as he’d showed them, laughing and swearing the spring air blue. His slowing thoughts of them:
Cheeky buggers. Why can’t we go at all our troubles like that, eh? - fuck them off
with a swift kick. Not bloody fair. You and your Mum will have the insurance, but.
A new silence spreads by the water, ready to fill with questions, with words
like misadventure, with deep green mud opposing all dredging.
In the end the left-behind can know nothing cleanly, and all he knew
is what he wanted for them, and what he didn’t want.
Melinda Smith
A Note to Alvaro
You can be happy in Australia as long as you don’t go there.
—Alvaro de Campos, June 4, 1931
A poem is a clear defiant thing
and what you wrote in 1931
sounds funny from a naval engineer
who never saw the place where I was born.
You lacked a certain gravitas and calm
unlike your captain friend Pierre Loti.
Yours is a sad bewildered poem.
My home town was pretty much like yours,
a great port on the sea lanes of the world.
I remember the liners, the merchant ships, the yachts,
the wailing of the sirens, the swooping cries of gulls
and fishing boats at morning round the wharves,
the hidden melodies of sea and sky.
Imagined places might be best of all,
perhaps that is what you were saying.
Geography is destiny I’ve heard.
We do not choose the place where we are born.
Vivian Smith
Nox
A poem addressed to Anne Carson
My husband is wheeled from emergency to theatre
along a hallway carpeted with silence.
Escorted to a waiting room, almost fin de siècle Victorian,
I survey medical books encased by glass and
blighted like old taxidermy.
The registrar, wearing a Freudian beard, stalls at the door,
unimpressed by my progress in mourning.
The heart has failed, he insists.
He draws a childish diagram on a scrap of paper
pressed onto the coffee table.
I must strike him as thoughtless, but I am thinking.
Hospitals were not always like this.
When I was a girl, gurney wheels trundled on a bright-and-shine floor
that disinfected all memory of grief
—sanitised the griever, whole.
Now, with the registrar spilling words, I am cleaning up after him,
revising his sentences into tidy units of five or ten,
repeating the most pleasing combinations again and again.
My fingers type at my side, next to invisible.
The only person who would see them has, by now, been anaesthetised.
I did not invent the typewriter, but at some point in the high school
typing pool, it secretly invented me:
aaa space bbb.
Before then, I was silent as a rabbit beneath
the zig zag of a classroom ceiling,
enthralled by Pythagorean heaven.
Then suddenly: a surge of electricity.
The machine was oneiric, like good gothic technology.
It brought words to my fingertips—words, words, words—
to be purified through mathematics.
But here the registrar, persisting with his lesson on the heart,
knows nothing of my scientific art.
When he finally leaves, satisfied I am pathological,
I remove a laptop from my black bag of tricks,
usurping the drawing of cardiac arrest.
Nox is not here.
Your book on grief is at home amongst my alphabetised books,
a perfect accordion sheaf folded in a rectangular box.
You might understand how I compose.
This elegiac poem, recounted just so.
Maria Takolander
Shells
Shells on my shelf are an empty civility
they speak of oceans lost to their memory
but whorled in their spiral architecture
they lure me into something
as complex and better designed
than a legal system, as intricate
as a nation’s finances and much
more beautiful. They’re dead
replicas of Leptis Magna
grounded on sand. They announce
that their once palpitating citizens
have spawned off, or salted into decay
leaving these bleached wonders, beac
hed
now on my window ledge where a saltladen
breath of the Indian Ocean
whistles at their open doors.
Andrew Taylor
When I am Gardening, When You Ask
I will tell you that the heart can lie
in dying weeds: a sculpture of twinings,
this crispness says something of the time we have taken
this cooling rips open the wind, these shortenings of day
wait for fire – it is a choice, but I pull out the weeds anyway,
knowing it is you who pulls me inside, then outside again.
Heather Taylor Johnson
Waking
Note the passive voice in that last line,
the denial implied. ‘People were shipped out.’
The agent with a conscious brain linked
to a hand with a pen or a gun felt his own grip
all along the neural pathways.
Some noises we can sleep through
but even the softest can be an alarm.
Sailboats in the calmest water are still not swans,
not even, despite voyages and size,
albatrosses. This can only, however,
be a dream resurgent after eighteen years.
Too awake for anything but analysis,
a brain will cling in turmoil to whatever
rock of clarity presents. ‘This is not happening’
is not a valid option. Imagine:
not the slow comfort of waking
from nightmare but its opposite.
The colours of no apparent ceremony
covered not only skin but politics,
history. Most of all they hid the will to act.
Tim Thorne
The Habit of Wings
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
—Rumi
Every season is more than itself alone;
Each moment and slow passage of time
Has a twin. Feeling bleak and daunted
All this grey Easter long—doing grief’s
Work, as it’s best done, alone—I caught
In the mirror, more than once, a man
So much lighter than the man I’d been
Hauling about, like a burlap sack
Of granite, like four decades of dropped
Anchors, and he put me in mind, this other
Self, of a goshawk making ready for flight.
And for a moment, that’s stretched
Into a week, I flew, too (thankful for
The mirror and the doubleness of things).
Sometimes one’s flown the cage, already,
That holds one in. One heals by bearing
The pain and all the days one’s left behind;
One heals by setting them aside. Inside
The stone, there’s light; inside the heft
And harrow of all you’ve lost, a flight
That aches for air. The soul wants,
First, to clench, and then to spread its
Fingers. Love is made of feathers and of
Bone—and healing has the habit of wings.
Mark Tredinnick
Horse
Bending to the earth, the silhouette of a horse
is a hillside, dense as almond wood.
From wither to tail, a bristling escarpment
drops to a levelling range and a broadening flatland,
its bare-blank spine, cradles the sprawling horizon
and valley depths. At first light, with the long
slope of its neck plunging groundward,
it stands steaming among the outcrops,
thawing with the quartz stone earth.
As the sun lifts, the mist comes quietly,
idly avalanching the treetops before draining
into the white void of the morning air.
On ironed hooves and crooked stumps, the horse
stays grazing, dipping and disappearing into itself.
Frostmelt drips from the red-brown furrows of its hide
down into the mud and clover.
Blowing in from the tops,
the air shifts and stirs; long flanks of light
strip shadows from the clay. Dozy, not asleep,
the horse sinks further into a wilderness within its skull.
How easily it drifts, stooped under such tonnage,
poised and unmoved in its thickly furred slack frame.
Motionless, under half-closed lids it has slipped,
as if flown from the bars of an unlocked gate,
bolted to the blind spot between its eyes,
dawning headlong deep in the dew.
Todd Turner
Crossing Galata, Istanbul
Flying fish
on Galata Bridge,
rods bowing and bobbing
like suppliants at a vizier’s audience.
Each fisher has his own space program,
launch pad,
elbow room, bait bucket,
like this sleeve-tugging city. I’m
for the fish, somehow. Down there
there’s piscine stitching of continents: Europe – Asia,
ferries and fish restaurants. Crossing
their sunshine
I pass between poles
of then and now,
a fish caught
in a rip of time, the zip of bait, the
howl of hook in mouth, it flips me
onto this bridge and off, too scrappy a catch,
victim of cheap jet fuel and wanderlust.
John Upton
Even Solomon in All His Glory
Brilliantly bleached sunlets
those big daisies bulge on their bush
the lurid cyclamens are crouched
in squeals of shocking pink
pigface and campanula
contribute their costume jewellery
but raggedy scarlet geraniums
have been out all winter
and don’t give a stuff, in their simple way
aping these worn bricks and bluestone:
they are in, you might say
for the long unblushing haul.
Would it were possible
that we could all just keep on
blooming here
like they might long well be.
Ha!
This is mere lament
but I have seized at least
the coarse-barked, fruiting tree of life
and shaken the living daylights
out of its crown.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Long-On
A famous big hitter in cricket
Hit his cover drive into the thicket
Where girls tanned in the nude
And no gent would intrude,
But Long-on was on a good wicket.
—Douglas Catley
Fielding at Long-on, a ruminant admires
the valley of eucalyptus ficifolia in full flower.
1
Long on detail, short
On operational procedure to contain them,
For someone supposedly fielding
In some outfield that will be forever
Offlimits, this vista should beguile the over
With sky motes and beams falling.
2
Long on the minds of that ruminant
Is the untoward forwardness
Of many items in the visual field
Under the lofted sunshower:
The persuasively cloudless horizon.
3
Long held notions of grace – such as
The passage of a wake
In ringlets along the furrowing bow –
Propose events at whose horizon
As it were (always as it were),
Someone is running in to bowl.
4
Longinus on the Sublime
Might well have noted the vista from here,
A valley of blossoming eucalypt canopies,
Acres of crimson cauliflower,
And leaned into the wind
And missed any number of overthrows.
5
He, that nominal fielder at Long-on,
Student of foliage, registrar of stasis,
Might between overs puzzle over
Elizabeth Bishop’s favourite lines of her own:
“All the untidy activity continues
Awful but cheerful.”
6
A she-oak at Long-on
Appears to be well within the boundary
Which is, it must be conceded,
Uncertainly marked out with white flags.
It (the she-oak) is a shady lady
Beautiful but indifferent to the game.
7
Long ago this part of the outfield
Was a cold swimming-pool
Fed by mountain springs,
Then was levelled and grassed,
Perhaps at the time this she-oak took root
Where swimmers dived and surfaced.
8
He has become forgetful, this observer,
Musing on the old joke: a musical umpire
Sings to a famous melody
“After this ball it’s over”
And when over is called, unnoticed,
He stays on longer at Long-on.
9
The longstanding late afternoon light
Draws him increasingly to the valley
And away from the distant batsman
So that he finds himself
Confronted by canopy upon canopy
In a procession of raised torches.
10
Long overdue, a change in bowling;
A pullover is handed to someone
And white trousers run up in the remote
Distant motes and beams.
Long-on is undisturbed and on
The point of strolling towards the she-oak.
11
In the she-oak’s curtained shade
Within the uncertain boundaries,
A gingham picnic is underway
As over is called. Mothers and children,