by Lisa Gorton
It’s time to snare those starfish hands—
but God, how to blunt such silver flecks?
Bushfire Approaching
John Kinsella
I
I am ready to evacuate if need be.
My wife emailed to say a fire is out of control
on Julimar Road, less than ten kilometres away.
She says she’ll return with the car, but I say it’s okay,
we’ll monitor and speak through the gaps.
She insists she will return: listening to the chat
in the library at Toodyay, seeing smoke in the west,
checking the FESA site. I say I will take a look outside
and get back to her in minutes. She is waiting. I climb
the block gingerly with my torn calf muscle striking back,
and see the growing pall over Julimar. A great firebreak
and a bitumen road are between here and there, I reassure,
though I will keep a close eye on it. The breeze blows
from the east, but is ambivalent and could swing
about. There are no semantics in this. And Paul Auster
is right where William (the lumberman) Bronk was wrong:
the poem doesn’t happen in words, but ‘between seeing
the thing and making it into a word’. Location location location.
As evidence: if fire sweeps through, only the mangled
metal of this Hermes typewriter will remain,
a witness, philosophy in-situ vanquished, and an elegy
made from bits of a different seeing with different words,
remain. Figurative density will take hold, and landscape
will be less fragile, the font more robust. It won’t rely
on paper: ash become an idea, a taste for some.
You stop seeing the red when it’s on top of you.
But true burning feeds on ash and the idea
of fire: it perseveres and requires only oxygen
and memory. Wild oats caught in my socks
taunt my ankles. Fuel for fire. In all seriousness.
II
I am not hearing AC/DC’s ‘This House is on Fire’
out of perversity. This morning a rush of colour
brought on a flashback, and I’ve not had one of those
for a decade. Strychnine-saturated, like the bush
where rangers claim to conserve native species
through poisoned baits. Rapid heartbeat, dry mouth,
outbreaks of laughter (grotesque, face of death),
colour codings of annihilation: spiritual and topographical.
Phantasm of acid trips – pink batts, supermen, green dragons,
orange barrels, purple hearts, clearlights, ceramic squares,
goldflakes, microdots, lightning bolts: nomenclature
of William Blake and weird melancholy of habitat loss.
Lost and unfounded. A run on images. Voices in the room.
Excruciating paranoid cartoon violence. So, I check
outside again and the plume is still moving southwest
though the wind is tentative and temperature
up five degrees over the last thirty minutes. This is realtime,
unlike hypnogogia, hallucinations? Grounds for worship.
Foundational ontology. I should mention that I have flu
and that’s why I stayed home in the first place. Harvest
is full-on though I have finished grass cutting here.
I wore myself out and my defences are down. Run down.
Antibodies hesitant if not docile. I make rhetoric
out of the flood of image-fragments: seems like good sense,
making the best, keeping a grip, cool in a volatile situation?
III
I’m abandoning my poem on the wheatbelt stone gecko
and the ‘keeled tail’ of a black-headed monitor
which is running amok through the roof, along walls,
scaling trees with maritime skill. The images lack
explanation and coalesce, are minimalist, but will
serve as a poor kind of last will and testament.
One sheet in my pocket, and it will be this.
IV
The wind has dropped, though smoke – not impenetrable
but more substantial than ‘thin’ – hangs over the block,
a tentative fallout. The birds are doing their silence
thing, or have shot through. We keep no birds in coops.
The air is almost acrid. Defend or abandon?
It’s when the smell of burning reaches upwind
that you know it has bitten deep. Firebreaks: check.
Water: check, but if the pump goes that’s an end to flow.
Fireblanket: check. Personal papers and evacuation pack: check.
No room for ‘literature’: just this poem, paperweight.
Ready to lend a helping hand: always, to best of ability.
Essential medications. Maybe the boy’s most precious toy,
but he wouldn’t expect it. Something of my wife’s.
Insects thick on the flyscreens: suddenly Hitchcockian.
V
Smoke-mushrooms are haloes about wattles they haven’t yet touched
where it counts. Prelude. Early life of devastation, its long legacy
too long in its brief moment of, well, beauty. Back again after
staggering uphill – glimpses of lush green moss amidst stubble
and granite are bemusing and bizarrely cheering – and all is suddenly
military, warzone, combat. Helitacs, fixed-winged water bombers
coming over the hills. Dousing. Or maybe it’s anti-militaristic?
No time to think about this. Three years ago, fire destroyed
forty homes just south of here. It was like this then, too.
VI
Alert Level: ‘a bushfire is burning near Julimar and Kane Roads’;
‘stay alert and monitor your surroundings’; why use quote marks?
This is barely copyright in the life and death of it. Plagiarism?
Blame burns with a heat unlike any other and burns long
after last embers have faded. And with days of heat and high
winds ahead, even a dead ember might find heart again, and leap
to the occasion. Elemental showdown. Proof. Precedent.
Test case. Habeas corpus – the body present. The burning
question: people build houses in the bush, then blame the bush.
My brother, life-long surfer, says: If I get taken by a shark
remember it was while doing something I love in its universe.
Remember me in this light. The fire has jumped Julimar Road.
Chimney
Maria Takolander
By day it does its thick and heinous work,
only slowly,
clogged with the sweat
of coal, meat, sticks and wood.
It is like a character from folklore
—or something older—transmogrified
into this domestic hunkering
of brick and soot.
*
In the evening it partakes, ominously,
of the sky’s transfiguration into night.
When the men and women have come and gone,
like loaves of bread,
and the darkness solidifies and the children dream,
the cold of the planets begins to seep in.
Before dawn, with the embers quiet,
the chimney opens itself to the stars’ dying light
from Chinatowns
Kim Cheng Boey
Over and over you study the menus, the recipes, the difficult names
of herbs and roots, the cures that awaken a forgotten hunger.
You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them
like sutras Xuan Zang fetched from India, testing ways
return might be possible against these homesick inventions,
trace the traveller’s alien steps across borders, and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home.
City workers during morning rush hour, Collins Street, Melbourne, 2013
Peter Bakowski
Perhaps not fully awake, elbowed and bumped, you alight from trams,
Exit Parliament Station, to join the ballet of the brisk.
Rebel by sitting on a park bench. Such a luxury may incite a
Scowl on a passing face. Reading the
Obituaries in The Age, you’ll learn how often a certain
Nuclear scientist was married. This knowledge of a more troubled life may
Allow you to take a break from painting the town grey.
Look at the bird borrowed sky. It’s not raining rats and tarantulas.
What a gift is hunger. Because of it your ancestors left their caves,
Explored plains, valleys, rivers, seas. These
Adventures became paintings, songs, tall tales, family legends, headlines.
There’s the story of each person, on the trains, trams and street corners.
How vulnerable you are, how strong you are. I want to reveal your
Essence via the camera of this poem, as you swarm and
Rush in the business district, glancing at your wristwatches.
Closed on Mondays
Pam Brown
too nice
& when you leave
everything is white noise,
no traffic,
no music, no muffle,
just thick air
whirring
greyness leaks
into the afternoon,
a dirty kind of day
kids are rolling
down a mound
of irradiated tilth
the world’s
assembled curatariat
is queueing unhappily
for their passes
in light drizzle
perdido’s
on eastside
& I’m trying ballerina moves
on the fibre mat,
preceding biceps curls
with pitiful
one kilogram weights
a tiny plastic ‘T’
snipped from
a price tag,
caught in the mat
is there any
news from Mars
that’s better
than here?
*
latest is
R.Mutt’s a meme
it was when you said
“say
‘thanks Marcel’”
*
death’s announced
to
a quick declivity
(joke)
of upload, list & link —
scrolling,
the final ritual
mourners weeping,
for themselves,
no ghost
in the crematorium machine
*
like Georges Perec wrote —
Nothing is happening, in fact
every single thing’s
a tourist destination
&
everything’s
available to everyone
taking phone photos
of the brickworks stacks
from the back seat
on saturday night
gawking at the mud
caked on cars
drifting
on the flood plain
*
time experienced
as a perpetual rush
to
the latest in new
o no
it’s Monday
it’s closed
& you reveal
a dour scepticism
of pop culture
but
I’d give it
another chance
following
my dorky polestar,
relentlessly discursive
*
open the cider
‘thanks Marcel’
*
so you want
to write in a cave
&
take your source material
with you?
*
searching all over
for the house
where it’s quiet
because
Wallace Stevens
says it is
*
a vase
of droopy roses
fine dust
covering
a tower
of expended
nivea cream jars
*
&
when I arrive
there’s a manuscript,
poems, new to me,
open for reading
the first pages
have
draft numbers—
Draft #1 Draft #2
—at the top
before anything else
the rims around
my eyes
feel tired
the empty room
purrs its scope
I imagine
a well-polished
furniture voice
trying nonchalance,
the sheets of typing
called
“my stuff “
*
it’s coming along
*
stretch out now,
a woven plastic lounge
muscle & bone grind
shoulder bone
grind
warm your dead feet
beneath the baobab tree
*
thin transparent oil
slowly leaks
from the barrel
of the souvenir pen,
the plastic historical figure
no longer slides
along the mini city backdrop,
he’s stuck
at the bottom of the scene
*
mid april
&
the xmas wreath
is still pinned
to the front door
of the neighbour
who died
on boxing day
Co. Kerry
Paul Kane
for Peter Steele
The very smell of the sea beckons –
pungent, redolent of other shores.
I walk the beach with my forebears.
They set off and I returned,
We have found one another out.
The lighthouse at Fenit
looks in all directions at once:
comings and goings its only concern.
This is a place of stone.
This is where the long view obtains.
Limestone conglomerate
holds it all together.
Beyond the farthest reach of this ocean,
someone dear is fading fast away.
He may be gone as I say these words.
His faith is that he has always been the life
that is leaving him, leaving us.
The sea beckons. The lighthouse is dark.
Clouds obscure the high hills, the wind is steady.
This is where we find ourselves.
Coastline
David Musgrave
I walked along the cliff-top at around eleven
one September morning, wondering why the level
of the sea at the horizon
seems always higher than where I am, even though
the waves kept shuddering into spray on rocks far below.
Was it a kind of horizontal vertigo,
or a species of the sublime, a newly released cogito,
I think therefore … I must be a dwarf
standing on the shoulders of other dwarves, each one shorter
than the one before? I filed this thought for
later use and kept walking past clumps of bustling
grass, on a concrete path glittering in bright sunlight,
past a jogger threshing air,
all elbows, knees and sweat, who paused a moment, oinked,
or so it seemed, and jogged on. The morning light coined
a mint of silver on the ocean, golden shivers
of droughty stalks flared from the footpath’s fissures
and I was rich for a moment,
richer than the waterfront exclusionary
viewkeepers, the prinked promenaders, even the cemetery.
I passed a clique of tourists gathered at a corner
of the white retaining fence, where locals reckon
the face of the Virgin Mary
appears each day at around eleven, and armed with cameras
and mobile phones they waited with a calm air as
if faith was merely a matter of patience. I prepared
to wait for a while as well, but nothing appeared
to happen, so I strolled on, dissatisfied
as ever. Back then I wanted to be an anagram
of what I should have been: not a Manager
but a flâneur perhaps, or a traveller or taghairm
prophesying in ox-hide by a stream, or migrate
in reverse to my two great-
grandfathers, Musgrave and Quealy, who lived across the Shannon
