The Best Australian Poems 2011
Page 8
My kin wore wide-brimmed felt hats.
We believed ourselves royalists
but acted like republicans.
We were pink Anglo-Celts who drove
a scattering of dark-skinned tribes from their titles.
We killed as they killed,
and the dead can’t apologise.
I drink stolen water
and taste no contamination.
I conserve seeds and flowers and names.
But the world is not a museum – we are not curators.
The ballad’s afterglow
is consumed by the future.
Sierra Nevada
W.M. Lewis
i am Lew Welch hurrying
into the hills, vapid fumes of hope streaming behind me;
the entrails of an animal thought extinct.
the gun stashed
(not even my friends know i like guns. well they do now.),
but uncomfortable against my skinny ribs, elementally exposed.
rap rap rapid words
bubbling so furiously you could ride them
to the mountain top, if such a thing. you know.
And this damn gun.
the stars blinking on, the day slinking off.
the night welcoming; the salt earth
beckoning my tired bones and feet that
move independently as does that lizard’s eyes.
i forget which. i forget which.
After all, this is just a story.
i am the silence hurrying
down the barrel, down the goat track.
i can’t get there fast enough. (what
does it mean to disappear? tell me
that.)
the place i’ll know or it will know; a
mutual concurrence of exhaustion,
singing like cooling rocks and beasts under the clear eyes of desert.
the names of these slopes and valleys
an unrequited love. (dimming now but methinks
that’s just the light.) musical and terrifying. as if San Fran or Chicago never existed.
and why i took it or why it took me
as mysterious as the word
‘posthumous’.
And then there’s this thing the gun wants; an irrefutable quiet.
as if Lew Welch never existed.
Crush
Kate Lilley
When I say that history was my favourite
I’m thinking less of the Weimar Republic
or the militarisation of Japan
than Miss R’s contralto discipline
and her homemade Chanel suits.
For her I spend my afternoons
between the light blue covers
of the Cambridge History of England.
Pendant mes vacances
my special project is Eleanora Duse.
When she asks if she can keep it
I am nonchalant as hell.
Bodies of Pompeii
Debbie Lim
It is not the delicate detail, for the cast is too crude
for that: this girl’s face obliterated by weeping plaster,
a man’s extremities reduced to rounded stumps. It is
the large arrested gesture that tells these bodies, saying:
So this is the shape of death. Familiar lovers fastened
on a stone bed (whereas life might have ripped them apart),
a dog’s high-pitched contortion, an entire family sleeping,
the baby rolled absently from its mother.
Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.
They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many
stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.
But in the end, this is what halts you: how a young woman sits
with her knees drawn up to her chest, hands covering eyes.
How a child’s body folds, alone at the final moment –
and a man rises from his bed, as if waking for the first time.
5.30 a.m.
Helen Lindstrom
It’s 5.30 a.m.
God and I stand
on the verandah.
I’m surprised to see
him smoking a pipe.
‘I don’t do the drawback,’
he says. His corduroy trousers
are the colour of wheat-stubble
and the deep pockets of his moss-green
cardigan exude an earthy smell.
His voice seems to rise
out of his pipe-smoke
as he asks how I like the morning.
I tell him that the rosy glow
hovering on the horizon
reminds me of the liquor
I got when I poached
the white peaches last summer.
He sucks on his pipe and nods.
‘What are you on about?’ I ask.
He stares at the limpid sky.
The pipe gently ignites.
A puff of smoke ascends
and becomes a cumulonimbus.
‘Looks like rain,’ he says.
‘You’d better go in.’
Lovetypes
Astrid Lorange
I speak of love in one pan; love for potatoes
love in a tablet, love and debts or sermons.
I mistook pleasure-giving for a seedtext –
two cowboys and a pickaxe – sheepdogs
nudging ewes for a droplet. Needleworking
guts as a cat lopes, a cat disappears like a dumb seed
nosing into the folds of a sheep’s fleece. A cat
is in love, in love with Russia, with minerals and
rivers. The way we love borders. The way we
learned to love physics, the way we used to
love globalisation. THE WAY WE LOVE
TECHNOLOGY! Loving difference or Buddhism.
Pornographic or scatological loves at odds with
chance. Love so slovenly, so clumsy. I love it and
I tell it. I abandoned illiteracy as untrustworthy.
Sew up the sheep’s neck with stitches where it
was bitten by an overachieving dog, you will find
that the neck tastes as catnip, a zone for loose and
metallic thinking, stretched out, guts airing.
Someone’s gonna read this, this love like police presence.
In the Laneway
Roberta Lowing
And voices come over the back fences, and the phttt phttt phttt
of the sprinkler throwing out streamers of crystals
past the bleached wooden posts
into the shadows
on the cracked path of the laneway.
The shadows are from the trees in the backyards
– there are no trees in the lane –
only tufts of grass between the cracks
and here and there, a yellow daisy
in the windless half-light. If you stretch your neck
you can just see the lucky people in the backyards.
They laugh in the sunlight, the wind lifts their hair,
their clothes are bright squares of colour.
But the ache in your neck means
you cannot strain for long; you drop back
to the hot dirt and look through the shadows
to where the lane rises into a darkness you’ve never noticed.
You walk past the yards, past entire lives lived
while you were sleeping, towa
rd the slow murmur of the others
at the end of the laneway. But everyone who matters
is further ahead or hasn’t arrived. And you wonder,
Was all that writing about the dead a game? As the last crystal drop
disappears without a trace in the dirt at your feet, was it real
or was it a dream?
You wonder, Is the dirt at your feet real? The last crystal drop
disappearing without a trace must be a dream. Maybe
while you were sleeping, everyone who mattered
arrived and went further ahead.
If you walk past the slow murmur from the backyards,
you will surely find the others at the end of the laneway
beyond the rise where the shadows drop into darkness.
You cannot be bothered straining to look into the lives
of the people in their hot backyards: many will be sleeping. Why
stretch your luck when the world here has so many bright squares
of colour: tufts of grass, a yellow daisy. It is odd
the way the dappled shadows shift across the cracks:
there are no trees in the lane.
The windless half-light lies down
on the cracked path. And the stream of pale crystals that wet
the bleached wood posts are unstrung in the laneway. They fall
and are still as the sprinkler goes phttt … pht … tt … ph … t … t
and the voices over the back fences stop.
Sonnet
Anthony Lynch
The hills arrived and I kept driving.
With every civic car park this theory
Of joint tenancy grew more abstract.
There were shared passwords
And beds unmade with abandon,
But I didn’t want to ruin
Our argument with the past.
Citing roadkill would be callow
So I sent back cards
Left blank for your thoughts.
I counted ructions
And the miles between them.
Where the road withered
Lay a Switzerland of the heart.
(Weldon Kees)
David McCooey
Everything is ominous.
–
Another ordered loneliness.
–
The future is fatal.
–
Even the open field, a labyrinth.
–
The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.
–
A list of names: good news, or bad?
–
The long silence of rooms.
–
History with its morphine headache.
–
The anonymous rain falling on motels.
–
The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.
–
The cars parked under melodramatic weather.
–
Finally, every future is fatal.
Grandfather
David McGuigan
Began my search in middle-age: for the drunk with florid face gazing
from a grainy photo. First your gravesite, words wearing
away from the slippery stone both smooth and blanched. Website
offering wartime records touted the existence of medals
that would never be recovered. Verified you married in London
and brought home the bride. During the war you were court-martialled
for insubordination, often arrested on premises out of bounds.
But gambling dens or brothels? I don’t know which. My mother supplied
some snippets: knowledge barely covering thirty minutes
– let alone those thirty mislaid years. Your brick-making trade demolished
by the Depression, you chased jobs you could seldom grasp, scampered
from house to house before landlords clobbered you for their rent.
Your only sport, the Australian Crawl through an ocean of booze, cascading
down the bars of Adelaide’s public houses. Loss of an eye laying pipes provided
compensation, and furniture finally arrived for the family. Furniture
my mother had only seen on the cinema screen. Your wife at forty died lonely
and homesick in this foreign land. Ironically, from a weakened heart
– though most conceded it had really been broken. Disintegration
of immediate family followed, then the dalliance with a sodden neighbour.
And I was puzzled by your urgent quest for a life in the west, only to return
and die painfully, a few months later. I questioned and researched
but found no account of this time: where you went, what you did. And the one
who might have remembered has now joined you on the other side. Rumours filtered
down your new wife was killed by a car after visiting your grave. But she left
no death certificate, nor paper trail I could follow. It’s as if she vanished
with the remainder of your whisky-stained notes, and drowned herself
in a billabong of booze in some obscure corner of your tarnished empire.
Late Night Shopping
Rhyll McMaster
It is late at night when the Primitives emerge.
They withdraw their cash and go marketing abroad.
Strung with small hard parcels Malice rushes in.
She joins Obsession, Hate, Revenge.
They fuss about dressed in puce, red, yellow.
They stay their hand and while they prevaricate
Doubt sidles by without a word.
Panic takes off and hails an outbound bus.
Anxiety tries it on for size but rarely buys –
The price is never right and she can’t negotiate.
Fear’s on a bargain hunt but stuffs the whole deal up.
They will not seize the hour –
Uncanny, unlucky bedfellows.
A Great Education
Jennifer Maiden
(When asked if there was an example who had inspired her as Dietrich Bonhoeffer inspired Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard replied ‘Nye Bevan’)
Aneurin Bevan woke up in flat Bathurst, to the drone
of Julia Gillard’s ‘Ben Chifley, Light on the Hill’
speech as she condescended that Chifley
always regretted his lack of ‘a great education’.
Bevan had left school at thirteen, self-taught proudly
like Chifley. He wondered if Gillard ever knew
the power of freely chosen knowledge. When young,
he’d detested that chainstore quality he called
‘Everything in its place and nothing above
sixpence.’ She liked ‘universality of education’, her faith
in uniforms startling to a man who thought
socialism meant avoiding them, her stress
on educational achievements hollowly passim
insisting one acknowledge all her own. He thought
of Chifley and Evatt roasting baked potatoes
on a Murray houseboat, each free of envy
of the other’s erudition. Then his irritation
became pity when he pictured Gillard
Welshly stiff in a little uniform, Welsh-mam-bossy
like his own mother, or nervously flirty, that old anxiety
of women for respect in crisis leaping
at their throats like blazer emblems,
&
nbsp; unable to orate as he had: to think swiftly
on the spot, as his hand pressed on his heart.
Snake Lady
John Miles
Over the fence my newest neighbour greets me
swathed in her pet python (green and gold:
a good two metres). Never in a million years
could I pick up a thing like that. I’ve always had
an absolute horror of snakes of any kind.
Go on, she says, he’ll let you stroke him.
Her hair twines down in ringlets, dark and sinuous.
I stroke him. He feels like a rather expensive handbag.
The snake lady’s arms are silken and not like a handbag at all.
Claustrophilic Lavallière
Peter Minter
You were too good to cry much over me.
And now I let you go. Signed, The Dwarf.
—JOHN ASHBERY
I’m presuming, I know (just as winter will
unite enemies in spring, betray soporific words
left a tiny bit unhingd &, all gilt, such paroxetine
somnolence weakly ornamented – I thought
error might better pass enclosd, your coercion
somewhat sluiced by a subigated rose, an ouevre’s
brocaded recitations, garlands left dishevelled
in the fog; my foliate despair (a locket) shows
(ingenious as mind-control ordaind by queer cherubs)
a Sun King smiling radiant while drawing
unself-conscious blancs from her morphine powderd
throne, an asthenic coterie (kept glad of work!)
laying about the cruel enclosure with studied
cartouchés, eyelids clasping inlaid silver birds.
So, the reason why I right up Verse, ills aside,