were visiting their clan village, where
they found out that his father had for decades
been funding the local schools and were treated
like celebrities, they realized the ghost son-in-law’s
village was near. His mother declared:
‘We must visit our relatives.’
~
Not a village: high-rises over smoke
and rubble, like Tang Dynasty mountains!
~
His mother rheumatoid, pained, looked up
at the five flights of stairs between her and family.
He asked her if that might be too much.
‘No. We must pay our respects.’
Then began her ascent in his arms,
her own, toughly sensitive, encircling his neck,
the two of them, frail mother and devoted son,
lightened, almost pushed up the stairs
by ghostly hands.
Fire Imagined
Past fire is present in thick grasstrees
chaotic with naturalism, prehistoric growth.
Someone said it’s more intense in mind than
out there: towns divide the emptiness into distance,
graveyards beat the glare between shards of
flowerpot, weed and headstones that are bottled
heat.
It’s like when last year my mother saw
an angel in the clouds.
Being realistic I told her in this heat it’d
melt before hitting the ground.
The Frog-Memory
The frogs’ name and sound, pobble-bonk,
is enough to return me to those first nights of the rainy season
when a small cloud would gather
over the six-foot pond behind a friend’s house
and the unseen frogs would begin their lingua aquatica
as though erratically thrumming lacky bands,
as though that sound — ponk-pobble-bonk — were the name
they’d call themselves.
Contemplating a Migraine
Words, there are for this, but the thing — a distant flaring
under the crust of my skin, deep inside its shifting homeliness.
Pain: the purest life. I could start to pray …
Through the window, as compensation, the rain gently gives me the garden,
its mossy rocks, its green benevolence, the garden that drops away
Into the soaring cedar forest suggestive of the opposite of whatever
this pain is.
I would say, a kind of mountain.
But maybe I am the mountain,
and the pain, hidden in cloud, is a foreboding shrine, unvisited.
Emma Rooksby (b.1972)
Garbage
The whir of dawn sprinklers is drowned
by the song of the garbo, as he stubs the knob
that lifts the Otto bins. They displace their loads,
then clatter down, lids flailing, lie postulant
beside the road. Garbage sacks split and crack;
household flows mingle indiscriminate
in the dark tank. The truck starts, stops,
on erratic communion through the streets.
All this seems automatic, once the rates
are paid. ‘The Lord giveth.’ You thank
nobody, it being a matter of entitlement
that the fat black bags should accumulate,
be transported, suppurate in the sun,
burst on distant afternoons.
Miriam Wei Wei Lo (b.1973)
Don’t Call Me Grandma
‘Don’t call me Grandma
when I’m in here
call me old witch Eva’ —
that always stopped us
on the threshold,
words whistling out into breath,
we’d watch
a moment longer,
she’d move
between lumps of clay,
a half-formed pot on a wheel,
hair catching light
through a dusty window —
‘Grandma,’
we’d say,
‘Don’t call me Grandma
when I’m in here!’
‘Old witch Eva,
can I come in?
Can I make something too?’
Magic words,
we’d pass that magic line
where house crossed into shed
and grandmas into witches.
Pressing our own cold lumps of clay
into clumsy teapots and lopsided animals,
we’d watch her shift
across the room, her woolly hair
bunned up or streaming down,
a sudden glance, a little stare,
she still looked like Grandma
but you couldn’t be sure —
Was that a broomstick in the corner?
An owl perched on her chair?
She’d whisk around and lift her arms
to make us shriek,
then settle to her work —
the rhythmic squeak
of a potter’s wheel,
the whisper of slurry
on hands throwing clay
and behind her back,
the night-bird, startled from sleep
stretches up on its chair
and begins to beat its wings.
Bumboat Cruise on the Singapore River
Rhetoric is what keeps this island afloat.
Singaporean voice with a strong American accent,
barely audible above the drone of the bumboat engine:
‘Singaporeans are crazy about their food.
They are especially fond of all-you-can-eat buffets.
Why not do as the locals do and try out one of the buffets
at these hotels along the waterfront.’ The Swissotel looms.
The Grand Copthorne. The Miramar. All glass
and upward-sweeping architecture. Why not do
as the locals do. Here in this city where conspicuous consumption
is an artform. Where white tourists wearing slippers and singlets
are tolerated in black-tie establishments. Dollars. Sense.
How did I ever live in this place? Sixteen years of my life
afloat in this sea of contradictions, of which I was, equally, one:
half-white, half-Chinese; the taxi-driver cannot decide
if I am a tourist or a local, so he pitches at my husband:
‘Everything in Singapore is changing all the time.’
Strong gestures. Manic conviction. ‘This is good.
We are never bored. Sometimes my customers
ask me to take them to a destination, but it is no longer there.’
We tighten our grip on two squirming children and pray
that the bumboat tour will exist. Nothing short of a miracle
this small wooden boat which is taking us now past Boat Quay,
in its current incarnation, past the Fullerton Hotel
to the mouth of the Singapore river, where the Merlion
still astonishes: grotesque and beautiful as a gargoyle.
The children begin to chafe at confinement. My daughter wails
above the drone of the engine. There’s talk of closing the mouth
of the river. New water supply. There’s talk of a casino.
Heated debate in the Cabinet. Old Lee and Young Lee
locked in some Oedipal battle. The swell is bigger out here
in the harbour, slapping up spray against the sides of the boat,
as if it were waves that kept it afloat, this boat,
this island, caught between sinking and swimming,
as I am caught now. As if rhetoric mattered.
As if this place gives me a name for myself.
Claire Potter (b.1975)
The Appeal of Cranes
wing opportunity
to see impressed in a wall
&nbs
p; held in special —
priests severed wing shape marriage
but which a couple
dancing in frieze facing winter
tempting monogamy appropriate a wedding
a ritual connected to costume destroyed
(one wing, one cattle horn deposition of materials
origins ancestry Division, of birds
Toby Davidson (b.1977)
H2
Home is, then the heart is.
Home is a poem halved.
Home is making peace
where the ocean
killed a man with a shark.
Peace is shadows listing
on a grassy path.
Paths are wet feet welding
home to heel at last.
Press kiss, home is
torn love, birthmarked.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell (b.1977)
him
for tim
out farther, stars are the
art in heaven. hollow be the
sky that does not contain
them. hello be the aim of
an introduction. thine
winged one, my heart is
undone. you are worth every
penny from above. give in
& say let us go to bed
, for we need to undress
, for we need to undress
& press us against us
. it will lead to temptation
, which will quiver an
upheaval. for i am
your winged one
& our love will flower
song in the face of the
eternal. forever
endeavour to be a
lover, a partner, a boy
, a man
.
Eight Letters To A Lover, II
4 a.m., Port Augusta Train Station
we have warped the stars
with technology
, electricity
pinned them with wishes
so they hang pregnant & low
. we now know
that satellites & planets
move among those suns
— our gods & goddesses
who hid in constellations
remain an astrologer’s game
of connect-the-dots
. listen
, the Universe’s
saucepan
was left unattended
. it churned heat
& bubbled
spilt
vapour
which pinpricked & hardened
. from this act
of neglected cooking
the stars were spat out
over the darkness
. there
my lover
i have written
a myth for you
— made the stars
looser
to navigate through
.
Jeremy Balius (b.1979)
Day 6
This flotilla appanage
short shrifts my confession; & after
such accentus, what forgiveness? The reader
trembles, Charlie trembles, you tremble — until
raft-bound adrift you don’t know is about is.
What’s anything about? Anything’s not about.
Is what it is:
remembering bare in Canossian shame hearing ‘we’ll
let ya back in, but it’ll cost ya’; & so I got weary of try-
ing to be my friends. & the mind no longer
has will to resist & the will to live consumes
a wretched man on a wretched raft
on a wretched sea. & so Augie died
so Charlie could live. I can’t do it.
It can’t be done. I can’t do it. It can’t
be done. I can’t do it. It can’t be fated.
I can’t do it. It can be done. Codetta:
& I etched
into the rail Charlie was
here & I weren’t
impressed. May be dying &
surviving say the same thing; & -but at least
nobody’s solemnly swearing ‘I loved Ricardo Villalobos
till that album’ while referencing mix-
tapes of every great song
ever. May there be mercy on my soul.
Forgive me, Alcy, forgive me, everyone.
Necessity knows no rules
Coda: for I whose eyes discern a revolt
of repulsion; plaudite!
Shevaun Cooley (b.1979)
let down at birth into the dark well and overflowing with it
Wednesday’s Child
is that what you think
poet, what do they mean full of
woe, are we receptacles always
learning the best way
to contain
Celan never quite said keep yes
and no unspilt, dark wells we,
with answers cupped
in the palms, so full
they fall through
our fingers
once we’d have said over
the last sheaf, Wodan
gallops across:
the harvest done,
Wednesday’s god rode
his white horse
through stubble,
collecting the cut
souls, driving them
out
clearing
the shed, my father
found a rusted scythe,
perfectly crafted, it was
possible just in the holding
to imagine the motion
it asked for, its use locked
into its form, the un-
splintered grips,
the curve of the snath
I stood on the already-
mowed grass and reaped
the air, cut swaths
you’d never see,
the light suddenly clear
as if an old cry
whyed tautly
across the low hills
and west to the sea
J.P. Quinton (b.1981)
Little River
Windows reveal the soft stopping
Hush of the little river below,
Little eyes poking out,
There’s no symbolism
In little eyes of the little river.
Blind like a family jumping
Out of windows
The little river’s bends
Hang from the bough.
It’s so heavy
No rock will ever
Skip across the surface
Indignant like an ocean
No stone will ever sink to the bottom.
Keep at an appropriate distance!
Little river will destroy you
It will make your fears succulent.
We will try to prevent
The little river from hushing you
Through the twilight
Through the broken glass
On the pavement under our shoe.
It will be of no use
The little river will stay hushed
And keep bubbling like a soda,
Its waters will rip.
But I am pessimistic,
It is no use.
I cannot fathom its depths
Or judge whether it is good or bad
Chipping away at its shores
The banks will spread water
To where we stand.
We will embrace
It like a sponge
Lapping at its greatest ascent
Our second body clean and soft.
What effect will little river’s
Encroaching waters descend upon us?
Us non-believers
Us realists who discredit
Its sparkling leaves
Resenting the sharp sky screen.
Because of each other’s thoughts
We lapse to think less of you, little river.
Still, you remain
still
And quiet, in the stillness of unrest.
Ode to C.Y. O’Connor
We know you topped yourself, Charlie Boy, but the dead
Are alive and the living dead, have a cigarette instead.
Been following your pipe for a few days, from Grass Valley
To Doodlakine, Burracoppin to Bodallin, been thinking of you
And what your life might have been, but maybe failure
Was your motive, maybe you knew the pipe would work
An entire town built on falsehood:
‘Good Country for Hardy People’ the district motto.
Today I pulled into a camp just outside Carrabin,
A man wearing his wife beater on the outside, starting a fire.
Are you allowed to camp here? Dunno, I am.
Is there any water around? He shrugged his shoulder
Swivelled, Not that I’ve seen. Your two silver pipes
Were behind him, but there would be no friendship between us.
Caitlin Maling (b.1985)
The Break
To prevent tragedy the brush must be cut at angles,
no less than ten metres between squares.
Here my ancestors planted the buffalo grass
where it burns too hot for the native plants to seed
and we need these squares between land
to stop it sparking all the ways to our homes.
After her third institutionalisation they suggested
that my aunt’s cingulate cortex be severed,
there was too much leaping between lobes.
Now I am the oldest member of my father’s family
not to have undergone inpatient treatment
for whatever fire caused my grandmother’s suicide
and the beating my grandfather gave which sparked it.
I try to hold my line. To be the space
large enough to let it all burn out.
But out of my native climate I arc and arc.
Corey Wakeling (1985)
Lingo Surprise
Lingo as a last keen sanctuary for the purpose come
to the circle who saw philosophy and then turned back.
The coral and the woods, and the ankle blisters from biting,
were better, so went apace. Then of course
you think of his Fremantle and the aeronautics stories,
his confidence, your pauper’s dreams of sailing, a generally
spare reference to an abstract agriculture.
Better the excitement became devotion in the Darling Ranges,
The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry Page 23