by John Tranter
One day the poet raised his head and spoke – four lines – from out the deep
of his mistake – four good strong tough lines that anyone could remember
and the man from Lecce did and they became the punchline for a story.
But but – I said. I have read those lines, unattributed, in a book of verse.
Four good, strong, tough lines that were worth remembering, and so I did.
Such Antipodean chutzpah to plagiarise Pound, his brilliant rottenness.
Metamorphosis
Michael Crane
The mother is now the child
and the daughter scolds her
for driving late at night
and the mother cowers
on the sofa half afraid of her.
Her disgruntled child seems
taller and stronger than she remembers
and the daughter goes into the kitchen
to cook some beetroot broth
and they sit in the lounge room
quietly together, not a word spoken
and then the mother nods off
to sleep watching television
and the daughter carries her
to the bed and watches her mother
dream and she stands over
guarding the bed like some Roman sentry
and then finally she goes to bed to plan
the next day and this is love
in a strange disguise, but love nonetheless.
Adenocarcinoma Triolet
Fred Curtis
They’ve found something nasty
In the small bowel.
They need to be hasty,
They’ve found something nasty
And not very tasty.
Throw in the towel!
They’ve found something nasty
In my small bowel.
Metropolitan Cannibal Hymn
Toby Davidson
Master of Stomachs, our powers have greyed
absorbed for congruent, apparent eternity.
Hustle and bustle, gristle and grit are no match
for something you cannot pass first.
Lord of Starlessness, lumbering slob!
Skyscraper, babel of crockery, serves you.
Windlicked streets trawl for dross.
Night Sky Swallower, infinite oesophagus,
holes in your mouths become mouths in our holes.
How has the meal of our brains not killed you?
Same goes, O Indigestible Gape.
Mini-series
Bruce Dawe
mais qui voit la fleur, dont voir le soleil
Dawn, clock-face of the heavens, becomes
momentous with fulfilment, birds
with the eccentricity of minutes, wake,
launch themselves into the unfolding
air of time, each with its own beady
reading of history: insects too
stir into action and that same air
in its bland magnanimity, takes them in
as the Cash Converters down below
open their everlasting doors to the latest
needy – the world at large is ready for
business: early ants carting home
the injured and the accidentally dead,
young magpies squawking for
another handout and the heart
punching the body’s bundy only yet
half-awake to what may come
down the chute to it before
the next night signs it off …
Afterimage
Sarah Day
The image lit against the eye’s dark lid
is often clearer than the light of day.
Sometimes I see the view amended:
the missing key, the winter tree inverted
as a photo negative, a blazing x-ray
of the image lit against the eye’s dark lid.
In conversation, details that were hid
may come to light in such or such a way
(for better or for worse) the view’s amended.
It shows what’s dimmed and what’s illuminated,
the shifting chiaroscuro. Who’s to say
the image lit against the eye’s dark lid
is closer/further from the one intended?
And what directs the cutting room, the replay
– where sometimes the truth can be amended?
With luck, by second chance I’m visited
by definition in a field of grey;
in the image lit against the eye’s dark lid,
I sometimes see the view amended.
Homage to Mapplethorpe
Suzanne Edgar
When a perfect purple iris
pokes out its lovely tongue
at the tulip’s scarlet lips;
and the pose of a half-open rose
near a deep-throated daffodil
provokes a pansy’s frown,
but the daisy winks a dark eye;
then the watching calla lily
exposes an urgent stamen.
Passing bees all raise their eyes
though none of it comes as a huge surprise.
‘You know the way …’
Brook Emery
You know the way a snatch of song lodges in your brain and won’t be shifted no matter how you try to trick it out the door?
Well, this morning ‘Amazing Grace’ has come to stay, just the tune and those two words; the bits about ‘no sweeter sound’ and ‘save a wretch like me’
disregarded somewhere else. Which is not so strange as I don’t believe in ‘lost’ and ‘saved’ but I do know forms of grace exist
and are amazing. I think of a dancer’s grace as she glides into the air, or the diver’s equal grace gliding towards the sea: the body in defiance of its limitations,
going through, beyond. Graceful, gracious, gracile, words that multiply and spread like flowering vine. Grace notes of unbelief that still restore the faith.
I’d like to be standing by the laundry door looking at snow piled high in the backyard and stretching away to distant hills, all deep silence and soft light,
indistinctions that are pliable and hint at more and more concealment. Here, today, each leaf and branch is clear, and even shadows are
unsentimentally direct. Surface is baked surface and heat haze won’t bear comparison with mist, won’t let me think transcendence.
The following is true. The water in the bay is pristine, amazing shades of green, a random morse of light, the sea flushing between rocks with the gentle pop and splash
that avoids monotony. But in the channel, among the leaves and weed and scraps of paper, two dead seabirds – black and bloated – bob in the push and pull,
their wings flared and fixed in mimicry of flight, their feet flexed as though they were about to land.
And now I’m stuck in the feedback loop: adrift in sun, snow, amazing grace, dead birds. The binary brain looking for a way out or in between,
a way to celebrate without appearing selfish or simple-minded, without me at the centre pulling strings or getting out the bubble wrap,
without an image of the imageless, or an image of the world devoid of people to make the whole thing work, the dream,
uncalled for, undeserved, of the present expanding as if there is no future or the future is this presence, that leafless tree against the sky,
the glittering humpbacked sea, the thousand flickering things the mind lights on and tries to hold.
Chrome Arrow
Kate Fagan
Cento for Pam Brown
If I could take a flight from zero
to infinity, get lost nearby
that Eloquence – now I am free!
Atomic rocks
form like hills & dunes,
like grass. I do a lot of thinking.
Sky goes rococo as the nearest dream
is led away. We behave badly
in dangerous clothes & laugh for days.
I want to remember this chaos,
song of one breath in A.
Phantoms on the home stretch
call my name. Bird magician
sugar concrete
a woman opening the heavy door.
There are no lyrics left
& another reality howls
as the new gets
newer. I stood exactly where
those piles of books carried me.
Over ruins of this comedy
I lie surrounded by beauty
until the Pleaides blink
like a sparkler in the HaHa Room.
Terns
Diane Fahey
who fly epic arcs, slipping through
atmospheres, past sleeping continents –
so good at bathing, too: cajoling brine
over wings with shivering leaps backwards
then a final shimmy ten feet above
as if to baptise their former selves.
Next, the charisma of flight – their bodies
such an ingenious fit with the world
as they side-swipe the wind, ride its back
to reconnoitre the river, make lightning-culls
from the hearts of sudden white flowers.
Later they stand, dumpy yet winsome
on mirror sand, facing out to sea:
their eyes calm, gleaming like homely stars.
Mother’s (creative) tempat
Jeltje Fanoy
She surrounded the wounded but courageous
love of her life with objects, and more objects
than you can imagine but which sometimes he
wanted to leave behind, and he’d pace the house
like a placid, intelligent but caged animal taking
this as his reality: the pictures on the wall, the
patterns on the carpet, the many figurines and
gaily patterned porcelain, joyously acquired
on outings together to exhibitions and galleries,
she also asked him to search for and research
whenever he felt any sickness coming on again,
relatives were persuaded to leave them objects
and paintings in their wills, adding even more
complexity to this, their private gallery, which I’d
dream about in terms of a gift shop and then
wonder when, finally, we would open the doors
to the public? but my mother kept on collecting,
she even studied Art to become a volunteer gallery
guide, never a word passing her lips about why,
and when I dared to say, near the end of her life,
that I often wondered whether there was anything
‘wrong’ with Father, she turned and looked at me
in silence, with the sworn secrecy of the Resistance
Father took, along with ECT Amnesia, to his grave.
Motherlogue
Michael Farrell
Whenever I start a narrative poem she says God
God God, so you can take that for granted: I’m
editing her responses. This is the yarn of, well,
you’ll recognise it (and imagine her with her hands
over her ears as she does the washing up: with
her elbows I suppose). After my third there was
a swan and then a suckling pig. I’d find myself
hanging out clothes in my underwear – or my husband’s –
and the neighbours drawing the blinds at each other,
saying, she’s not really adjusting to Wahroonga
is she? They – inside my own house – have eaten
me a hole in the couch, and I’m doing the accounts
with one hand and killing a snake with another
while I get an armful of wood. But after a few wines
and a few accidental discounts ‘at’ work, (I have
an online business) I’m ready for Joint Family
Suicide: one of our ‘TV games’. God God God
adding rhythm. Then my eldest comes in with blood
on his face from fighting with some Pymble trash
and says we’re out of water. So I gather up the
tribe: one or two boys, one or two girls, the swan
and the suckling pig, and we head towards the
Lindfield reservoir, each of us with the biggest
water vessel we can carry. Then there’s a shift
in critique, she’s saying you can’t, meaning I can’t,
tell a woman’s story. But I am telling it. Mariah
(named after the wind, not the singer), has crawled
into a crocodile, and I didn’t even know they had
crocodiles on the North Shore, but I’m only a girl
from Nimmitabel with a horde of kids of one kind
or another walking the edge of the road, wine bottles
in hand playing sweet, sweet music with their little
breaths. The swan gets in after her, and I wouldn’t
want to be a crocodile on the other end of a swan.
I think the swan left a torn Coke can in the croc
for good measure. And Mariah comes out all slimy
and beaming with some sorry overbred excuse
for a Wahroonga hound, saying, Mummy, look
I found a puppy! And I say, hooray, what are you
going to feed it on? But there’s a crow eating a
possum as we turn the corner, and Mariah’s got
her waddy so she shoos the crow on the head and
puts it in her dilly bag and sets the little socialite
with its faux diamond collar’s kisser in the pre-
pecked possum. Uh, animal cruelty? Examples
to children? I hear over the lino vacuuming. Bush
rules, I say. It’s starting to get dark, and as I’m
new to this builtup area (only having recently moved
here from Belconnen) it seems very strange and
eerie. The houses here truly have no season, no
blossom, and the lawns have no smell. I had a couple
of cones earlier and a slight feeling of paranoia
begins to resurface. But as anyone who thought
of it would say, you can’t drink paranoia (let alone
have a bubble bath in it or boil spuds). So we head
on, but I’m glad I brought my shotgun. The kids
and co. are all wearing their scapulas, too. So when
the Devil rides up on a horse, I’m terrified but stand
my ground. Nice little herd of pigs you got, he
says, stroking the dead lamb in his lap. He broke
into my consciousness with that one I said to Trent
later. I’ll give you a waterbag for the boy, he said,
not pointing at my oldest, but at Jess, my androgynous
third, and I said no deal. Give us a billy out of
the good of your heart, I said. And while I waited
on his reply I chanted Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with
thee, and he said, Nema eartson
sitrom aroh ni te cnun. Which sounded like nothing
but I soon realised was the Ave Maria in backwards
Latin. And I said, in forwards Spanish, Dios te
salve, María, llena eres de gracia. And the Devil
replied Nema etrom artson alled aro’llen osseda
(in backwards Italian), so I said, grabbing the billy
by the handle as I did so, and mentally thanking
the Portuguese nun I’d studied with, Avé Maria,
cheia de graça, o Senhor é convosco. And he grabbed
the handle too with his bony hand like Voss come
out of the desert to steal my children, my honeybees,
muttering in his best better backwards French accent,
Nema trom erton ed erueh’l à te tnanetniam. I shot
half his head off then, yelling fit to rouse the Nazis
from their Master Chefs in Hell, Gegrüßet seist
du, Maria, voll der Gnade, der Herr ist mit dir!
I knew I was out of languages, and I could tell he
was ready with backwards Tagalog. Jess gave me
her/his saw and I cut off the Devil’s fingers
and took the billy: it was a diabolical billy and
never emptied. So we threw our bottles into the
bushes and headed home, thinking that Trent would
probably be home from the bank by now. Steeds
of Satan though are faster than lightning, and we
got home an hour earlier than we’d left. So I decided
not to smoke the second time round. Gave Mariah
a pot to cook the crow in, and did some journalling.
It looked like we could make ourselves at home
in Wahroonga after all. I can hear exaggerated