by John Tranter
the dogs were touching
things with changelings
charged with damages
emptying the fire extinguisher
into the ash tray
I’m taking notes
then must sing them
expedition to a place
where I can think
the end being the apex
hypnotic sound from
someone’s hands on
the vox turned low
I remember being
pulled down a road
I had to stop miming
my watch though
time keeps going
begins to end static
wires tubes and batteries
only present crackles
within the harmonium
and sublime’s shaky hands
I was original bootleg
vox hypno and charge
Triangulating the Tasman
Paul Kane
(i) Warwick, NY
A point has no dimension: the bird in flight across the field
describes a line, but does not exist anywhere on that line.
The cardinal is a red point, the jay a blue.
Here, everything is contained in the immensity of the present.
When we leave for the airport, in anticipation,
with regret, we enter time.
(ii) Talbot, Vic
Atop our ancient volcano, we are cleansed by the heat
of January – pasteurised, as a poet put it.
The agisted sheep gnaw the ground, but the grass is eternal.
We name the mountains around us, ignorant of their true names.
The windmills to the southwest, the new horizon, have no names.
We do not want to leave here, which is the point of coming.
(iii) Kawhia, Waikato
In the afternoon, Carmen sits and drums on a log:
all the cows gather to watch her. We focus on this one moment.
What are the pearls on your necklace, the figures on your torq?
At the heart of travel is blood and family ties.
How much are you willing to pay for what you want?
In leaving, what we leave behind we hope is a gift, not a sorrow.
(iv) New York
‘Get out of my terminal!’ shouts the cop in JFK.
It’s all street theatre here, and underneath, on the E line.
‘What’s the point of travel?’ we ask. Three lines to three places,
only to do it all over again.
The red-tail hawk, with its speckled breast, makes one crashing dive
to carry off the sparrow on the railing.
How pointless can it be, when our lives describe a triangle,
while we find ourselves at home at the centre of ourselves?
Rapptown
S.K. Kelen
A jingle woke and gee-up knew.
Who prime-numbered the village –
routed the countryside? a wolf sack
filled with of courses, perhapses, and maybe.
Power feeds the organ’s gaskets, postures,
lizard, plasma, shouting blue – schism –
people believe and behave. Where country
and town woe begone, the cars breathe fire.
There was relax and friend-hut, warmth
to the chilled the shelterer provided;
a gentle hand opened a door to the future
and the village? A nymph went wild – a guest’s
wheels – then the bull exploded, the creek
flooded, the shower screen was brilliantine.
Temporality
Cate Kennedy
I’ll ask you to assemble here
next to the step where so many feet have stood shifting,
waiting for a welcome,
that they have worn a cupped impression in the brick.
There are no headphones or podcast,
no virtual tour
nothing is animatronic
there are not even signs;
in this museum objects must be noticed
in order to be named.
Let me invite you
to put your sceptical fingers here, into a wall
cracked open like a seam;
in that arid subsiding spot,
with its bite of jagged mortar exposed,
feel the evidence, deliberate as a glacier,
of movement
of the power of slow ruin.
And in the shed on this salvaged beam
taken from the old factory, you can read
the faded names of workers from half a century ago
still scrawled, provisionally, in pencil:
Joe Wally Gavin Terry
This four-inch nail banged in beside them to hold invoices
that they always meant to replace with a decent hook or clip;
see how it’s still holding fast
long after they have gone,
see how they were wrong
about what was temporary.
These are the exhibits worth naming,
the triumph of the nondescript
the steady rise and rise
of the inevitable.
Seeing them here, barely visible, demanding nothing,
might remind you of your own belongings –
the last things you expected to have bundled under your arm;
the shirts washed colourless, and the unfinished books
that you know would have done you good,
one hand clutching the dented pie dish, scored
like an endless unsolved equation
the hat with its forgotten tidemarks of sweat
everything it’s too late to grieve for
that you thought you had discarded
everything you used, unthinkingly,
until it was burnished
into invisibility
these remnants, adrift from their stories,
will end up here too.
Whatever lies we tell ourselves,
these are the things that will outlive us:
that brick
will see us out;
that forgotten nail
driven in with four heedless, glinting hammer blows
back in 1957
will remain immoveable in that piece of hardwood
when you and I are dust.
And the ghosts who’ve stopped in this doorway
and rested one hand tiredly against the wall
to take off their boots before coming inside –
just here, their fingers grazing this worn unsanctified spot –
their voices are as distant
as impossible
as sirens.
Well, this is where I leave you
to make your way through the rooms,
threading back and back into the hushed corners,
your lips moving with recognition,
until there are no rooms
until you are standing empty-handed
in the sunlight.
Expat
Richard King
‘The sun hit me in the face like a bully,’
wrote Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie.
Our teacher, Mr Foster, said that was ‘glib’.
Unfortunately, we didn’t know what ‘glib’ was,
so Mr Foster had to explain,
and the more substantial point was pushed
to the back of the mind. Until today,
when, a quarter of a century on,
and resident in a foreign land,
I decided that he was probably right,
before dozing off with a drink in my hand,
the late sun blackening both my eyes.
The History Idea
Graeme Kinross-Smith
What’s history? Is history
when Abraham Lincoln stands, thinking,
hand on the back of a chair?
Is history those breathless bludgeonings, the sporadic wild words
from the mist at Culloden?
What is history? Is it when everyone believes the handshakes
in spite of all the epaulettes?
Is it history when Picasso and his guests
see six pudgy German tourists
lying in a nude row on the cobbled beach
not far from Antibes, scrotums lined up
like apologetic mice,
like subdued
sausages?
The guests laugh
at these incongruous, privileged bodies –
but the painter frowns, remembering
carolling children’s voices, footsteps of unsuspecting lightness,
the edicted morning school assemblies,
the boots of Nazis misunderstanding
Paris stairs.
Is that history?
The Nazis loved their music. Is that history?
Is history the steaming biosphere, water
lashing empty lanes? Is history present tense?
That’s what history does –
it bites us, then looks away.
It Begins with Darkness
Andy Kissane
People file into the room, find their seats,
fill up the air with chatter. The stage
is bare except for a leather couch
and a lamp on a chrome and bakelite stand.
It’s meant to be an old factory converted
to an apartment – exposed pipes, a ceiling
fit for a cathedral, polished oak floorboards.
A man dressed in black makes an announcement
about mobile phones. The lights go down.
I don’t know what I’m doing here,
I just know that this is theatre, my son an actor.
I hear his voice before I see him. It’s as loud
as the wind swatting at a loose sheet of corrugated iron
on the chook shed. When he comes on stage
he swears five times in the first minute,
all in the presence of a lady. I’ve a good mind
to go down and slap him about the face,
except that I’m sitting right in the middle of the row
and it wouldn’t be easy getting past all those knees.
Then I remember that he’s pretending
to be someone else, that this is his job now.
Soon everyone is laughing – they’re smiling
and nodding and taking in every move my son makes.
I’ve never been to a play before. It’s not
boilermaking, not the flying sparks from an arc welder,
not the precision required for a submarine hull,
nor the relief of taking off your helmet,
gloves and apron and enjoying the coolness
of a harbour breeze as you eat your lunch,
but it is, I guess, a different kind of trade.
I watch more and it all happens before my eyes
and I can see that he loves this lady,
everyone can see it and I want to say, ‘Son,
what are you afraid of?’ I want to reach out
and lift him up as I did when he was two
years old, riding a supermarket trolley
and screaming as if he’d just discovered
the power of his lungs. But I can’t touch him now
or even talk to him and I have this feeling
that it will turn out badly, like the week you have
the numbers in Lotto, but forget to buy the ticket.
The stage is dark again and he’s not swearing now
and the lady’s really pleased to see him
and she burns this scrap of paper and it flares up,
bright and yellow in the darkness
and the flame flickers across his forehead
and I glimpse in my son’s face the unmistakable
features of my father who is ten years dead.
Although the three of us won’t ever meet again,
I’m sure Dad would have loved this – a story
that takes a whole evening in the telling
and a small fire that leaps and glows
and transfixes us, for as long as it burns.
Mise en Scène
Mike Ladd
I dream the films I’ll never make.
They have misty titles like
‘Boy at a Window’, ‘Shadow of a Dog’,
‘Odalisque/Oblique’. They would play
short seasons in empty cinemas.
‘Self Portraits’ consists of fake after fake.
‘Young Loves or the Fang of Time’
is shot with persistent, nostalgic lust
in black and white and blurs of poppy.
‘South Coast Trilogy’ has the distant haze
of over-exposure, of things long lost
that no longer matter, except to me –
flying sometimes, crawling sometimes,
from too much memory.
into the index
Sam Langer
buy some strong alcohol at changi
but don’t drink it
attractive face pileup
each feature a harbinger
it’s eyes that wear uniforms
pinching those witnesses
from the picture
‘what colour do you call that’
/
that’s what my eyes call it
Sydney and the Bush
Martin Langford
In Sydney,
our absence is visible.
Most cities just fall away,
like a tale out of steam.
But Sydney abrupts to a light-cave:
a cavern of leaf-scrawls and glare.
High up, you get to subsume it: your outlook.
But down there and in it,
you hack through a bright lack of interest;
a steep disregard for potential, or goodness, or mood.
Mostly, we like to believe
there’s a shore for each utterance.
But you can’t always reach one. Not here.
Where the bush can pop up almost anywhere …
It is why we’re so smiley. And doubtful. And vaguely bereft.
No point in getting upset if there’s nobody there.
And they’re pretty as this.
Quolls
Anthony Lawrence
Two x-rays of spotted quolls
flutter-slip into a wafer of sunlight in a clearing
where a National Parks ranger
pins the boned celluloid
to a viewing table of lit, woven grass
then stands back to assess the inner, carnivorous life.
She removes her greater glider mask
and the hairclip she’s fashioned
from coral tree thorns.
There is blood on her wrist.
Under her gathered hair
he
r neck is redolent of an embrace
whose details are still alive in her
after thirty years.
The x-rays blow away
with a sound all transparencies make
when no longer useful.
A stopped cloud turns the scene
into a waiting room on a farm
inside the head of the husband
of a bipolar ranger.
Let it rain, darling, he says, with the kind of understanding
you sometimes find
in the eyes of wild animals, at close range
and it does rain, and for a very long time.
Unlicensed (from Spring Forest)
Geoffrey Lehmann
Unlicensed I drive along roads I know well,
in the same year
a widower and great-grandfather.
At dusk my mind takes a short walk
and visits
the burial place on a hill.
With the cattle gone
the land is coming back,
the ruined acres are restored.
Birds I’ve not seen for years
and perennial native grasses
are plentiful again,
and some interloper crimson roses
among blue wattle foliage and red clay
and dogs – my pet wolves – barking through chicken wire
are wet with the evening dew
of doing nothing.
We stood as a gramophone cranked out
‘God Save the King’
then sat on a blanket and watched giant shapes
flicker on a sheet that billowed in the night.