The Best Australian Poems 2011

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.