The Best Australian Poems 2011
Page 6
have a face you can imagine
if you recall how you’d whittle
finely at a pencil
and moisten the lead
with the tongue-tip –
a little face that belies its greed,
like that of an infant.
All partly autonomous things
trample others down,
even what is their own,
and the whole earth throbs
and smoulders
with pain. No comfort for us that
in the nights I have seen
how the living pass
about the earth,
that is deep with the ashes
of the dead, and quickly, too,
vanish into dark,
like will o’ the wisps
thrown out of the sun.
At three o’clock I gather
our existence
has been a mistake. I would like
to turn my back on
its endless strife;
but when I look out
at the night, I am offered
otherwise only
the chalk-white, chaste
and lacklustre moon.
-kuing the Rex
Kathryn Hamann
The mathematician rises
to explore parabolic form
the Rex cat sleeps
Purl wave ever
the stylish beehive
bum in my face
Bred into delicate
frame… running true
the Cornish wrecker
In Hearty Street
where two or three
may gather
Merly the Rex
is assuredly in
the midst of them
Busker and Chihuahua, Chapel Street
Jennifer Harrison
He plays an old cicada-shell guitar
his belongings dishevelling a faded blue blanket.
A tape-deck, a pink ice-cream bucket, a tattered glove
(falconer’s or biker’s?), its leather scarred by talons (gravel?),
and his white Chihuahua elegantly avoiding all eyes –
disdainful as a mannequin to out-mannequin god.
Shopfronts were passing like a glance, a glassy shrug
and I noticed the slithery rail in Brave where dresses hung
like marked-down lungs. I photographed the dog’s silvery fur
his hand-knitted jacket of dark arguing wool
snug around torso and haunches – drop-stitched, ragged –
it was a cold winter day to be busking outdoors
near the florist, near the pet shop, near Coles.
Each time the busker played Clapton’s ‘Layla’,
the dog’s ears twitched with minuscule approval.
Kaiser rolls were steaming in the Daily Bell bakery
but like Pierrot’s chiens savants, the Chihuahua was guarding
his master’s alms: a demi-baguette, a pink ice-cream bucket
of coins; and the glove tossed on a pale blue blanket
like a hand begging all alone on the sea.
Through a Window, Looking Back
Paul Hetherington
At last, she thought, looking back
through the train’s jiggling window,
seeing the Italian countryside
like a Giorgione landscape.
But what was this ‘at last’ –
it was hardly being here
away from family and domestic routine,
though, it’s true, she’d longed for that;
for an absence of needing to be
what others required.
And it wasn’t this sense of space,
the chance to do as she chose –
yes, she enjoyed it,
looking forward to the galleries
and canals of Venice – the dank smells
and superb gilded horses of San Marco.
No, this sensation was like vertigo
or the stomach dropping into space
on a steep climb –
thinking of the man she’d meet.
It would be ordinary enough
but it would be her own, entirely,
not possessed by children
or the years that had smoothed her marriage
so that even arguments
had lost their heft.
She remembered it –
how once they’d been at loggerheads
for two days, and on the third, had made love
and had barely known each other
or themselves. She’d wanted to keep that –
the not-knowing, the animal life
that had risen. She had wanted
to stay strange to herself.
The Capuchin
Sarah Holland-Batt
– Gran Lago, Nicaragua
I find him down by the boathouses,
a white-haired mystic with canine rhythm.
He paces and paces doggedly
and has a zoo look to his face.
His chain leads down from the soursop tree
to a pat of trodden mud and dung
where he guards a pool of runoff
and stares at his face in the gasoline.
He is a pet of one of the boatmen
whose blue and green covered craft
ferry tourists to Las Isletas.
I have travelled out there once
and seen his brethren
swinging high in the balsa trees.
In neat black caps and sheepskin
they hung like anvils in the flowers,
ministering deftly to each other
with fingers fine as Julieta cigars.
Like a penitent I approach him
and offer fruit to his terrible intelligence,
a few lime oranges from my bag
dropped into his calabash.
He turns his pink features to the sun
and shuns my offering, curling
his lyre-bird tail around the leash.
Here we are too far from the islands
and there is nothing I can do for him.
He looks at me with a mendicant air
and dips his paw into coconut cream,
then unhinges a long low howl on needled teeth.
His is the last true religion.
He practises sermons too green to transcribe
on the subject of the Sandinista revolution
to an early choir of sandflies,
then screams like the devil as the boats come in
and packs of gulls on the shoreline
carry on their cheerful scavenging.
The Humane Society
Jodie Hollander
My mother brought home
the strangest creatures:
a lamb wearing a big white diaper;
a blind raccoon;
a wolfhound with a broken
hip, spooked by birthday balloons –
Then there was Mary Lou.
Two hundred sixty-five pounds and bruised,
she held a big leather purse,
drank diet pop,
smacked pink gum
and went to the movies alone.
Mother called her a Godsend.
Next, it was Lucy, a little girl
my mother gave violin lessons to
and called daughter.
Lucy wore her hair i
n a bob, took
over my old bedroom.
And then she moved
to sleeping next to my mother,
close to her under the covers
at night, holding her hand
in the big brass bed.
Soon mother kicked all of us out –
gave the seven sick cats
to my sister, found
my father a gritty flat, and took
his van keys. That’s when she
brought home the man who beat her,
the Chinese man who broke her nose,
and pushed her all the way down
the shiny maple stairs.
The Truffle Hunters
Duncan Hose
Dear mam last night
We drank a bottle of Tasmania
I love you a lot only less so
Pidgin monarch, belligerent fairy
Stone St Kilda the crone ’til she moves namore
We would waft ’cept for the human
Gravity of density
Rich phlegmatic lungs of autumn belief
The leaf’s concerted flambé,
Black edg’d and separate
Digitalia, heaped raunch
Impressionism as we were driven through
By our pudgy headmistress, whom we tricked to admitting
‘I want to be adored.’
Territory and plague :TA CHUANG
Vigorous strength, thunder, arousing heaven
The rude tunics of the tiny army
Suck into the hollow
Like degenerate dwarf song
Vespers of dusk come on – Monteverdi –
Where gods crawl through trumpets to get here
O mystery gizzrd, O flunking west!
O copper boned sopranos of Heidelberg!
Old French superflueux by my thin Red-
thornproof hand
More than temples we’ll have left
Wilderstrawberry shits
Across Gaul
My coo lipp’d rare
hipp’d Prospertine
I’m ovrly fond of the weeds where your street crosses
my own your original rigor pasted and pretty
as barbiturates
ride
isobars of clutching muscle
that on odd days
ferry us to orgasm.
FUTURE HAPPY BUDDHA
vs Fake Kenny Rogers Head
D.J. Huppatz
Some people hang these crystals in their homes and cars.
This is called a cobra hood, you can do it silently.
MySpace, yes, Kenny and the Elephants, but who cares?
So these beads are pretty too.
I’m great and
I’m really interested to know you, FUTURE HAPPY BUDDHA.
A zinc finger homeobox transcription factor
acting late in neuronal differentiation:
fake Kenny Rogers Head. Macrobiotic, of course.
So if I was to dig up all these rocks,
I would find dirt on the bottom?
No, just fake Kenny Rogers Heads. All the way down.
The Frequency of God
Mark William Jackson
At a trash ’n’ treasure market,
in an average town,
an old radio
encased in bakelite.
Plugged in and
waiting for the valves to warm
I took to the dial with a frothing sense of urgency,
twisting past horse races and rock and roll,
past right-wing commentary,
searching for the frequency of God,
long lost in digital audio,
sure to be found
in the silver soldered
magic of a romanticised time.
And there
at the end
of the amplitude modulated band,
megahertz away from any generic noise,
a perfect silence.
Miracle on Blue Mouse Street, Dublin
John Jenkins
for Leo Cullen who said: ‘Once Celtic tiger Ireland; now no teeth!’
In a doorway from the rain, on Blue Mouse Street,
he was shouting ‘Miracles! More miracles to come!’
The old beggar with the battered suitcase said,
‘Yes, I am sure there will be one for you.’
So I walked over, closer to his sign, which said:
Miracles For Sale! Compact and Portable!
He spoke conspiratorially when he saw my coins.
‘Come closer,’ he said. ‘To me, you look a little
worried, as if lacking air, or joie de vivre,
but are lucky anyway. Because I see my suitcase
is going to open for you, and believe that a miracle
might well come out of my suitcase. And I look forward
to knowing how this suitcase miracle will manifest
itself, as I am quite certain now that it will!
Now listen,’ he said, ‘and don’t miss out.’
He took a plastic comb, held it to his mouth
and hummed and wheezed dreadfully through it.
‘That tune is called “Our Happiness”,’ he said.
It made all the sparrows shake up from the trees.
And made small children run and cry, and the rain fall much harder.
He smiled, twirled and did a little hop and broken dance.
‘I love my life,’ he said. ‘I love selling hope and miracles out here
in the rain, to all the passers-by on Blue Mouse Street.
Look,’ he said, ‘I have a pocket full of holes. These are my “loopholes”,
and I pay no tax.’ And he pulled his pockets inside out, and showed me.
‘I had a pocket full of hope once, but hope or fine illusions,
or any sort of negotiable miracle, all being invisible,
weigh less than a suitcase I carry for a rainy day like this one,
always hoping for a miracle to manifest, for my paying public.
Look!’ And I imagined I saw us both standing there,
just then, and something was moving. ‘Yes, I believe
it is already starting to manifest, or snap open,’
he said. And the lid swung up and, inside the case,
I saw an old beggar open a suitcase. And inside that
was a smaller case, and us standing there, leaning
over a case that had just popped open, and so on …
but when I turned, he was gone, and so was the suitcase.
Only a muddy puddle where he had stood, but I could still
hear his tune, ‘Our Happiness’, wheezing faintly through the rain.
Coal and Water
A. Frances Johnson
Now the last line won’t irrigate
Dog-jawed ministers pant on camera
wan half-rhymes
filling dry channels
like droplets shaken from a child’s flask
In tour-of-duty heat
a neat tie
may be a metaphor for resolution
If only the lack of a definite article
before ‘country’
didn’t make them stammer so
Meanwhile the press’s compound eye
hallucinates a Chinese-invested coal station
mid-stream, when mid-stream is simply an illusion
of a liquid past
something the doctor asks you
to save
in a bottle
Some poets have forgotten
to ask what it is
they are burning in the grate
On a cold night I am one of them
– the coal-fired heart
the pathetic revenge of the powerless
bringing paper fuel to the table
to burn and burn again
Is this all that’s left?
The restive recitals
the pained nostalgia for trees and rivers
that comes after trees and rivers?
Contemplating this dun catalogue
makes me tired
as if I had walked
the salt bed of the Murray from north to south
dragging my plastic pen
through the silt like an ape
There is nothing I want to save in a bottle
Send in the Clowns
Evan Jones
i.m. Peter Porter
You were the high-wire act,
me in my clown-suit on the slack-rope below.
We didn’t appear much together in fact:
you in your eminence much the more famous show.
Still in the long times we met
we shared all our knowledge and taste,
talking around and around
about politics, art and music without haste
and would have done so for many a year
had you not fallen to the ground.
Send in the clowns?
Don’t bother, I’m here.
Break on Through
Jill Jones
I remember part of my bootleg
something boiling over
but someone still had
an eye on the game
the serene, small television
I was original mono
someone was singing
like milk happening
psychedelic ball pock bang