The Best Australian Poems 2013

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The Best Australian Poems 2013 Page 5

by Lisa Gorton


  immigrant degrees,

  making a new start.

  3. Homeless

  Later, when all fell apart:

  off out of the

  Marital Home and all alone,

  cramming

  into your Charger,

  lairy car she called the death trap, dossing

  on back seat, teacher now—my teacher

  for a while there

  though I didn’t know where

  you were living

  planning your classes and marking

  on front seat,

  washing in beachside blocks, moving on,

  til when we met again

  in my twenties

  you’d holed up

  in a caravan with just room enough to stretch out –

  how could I not let you in?

  4 Expired

  Red compacts, marked

  with a little white cross,

  discarded,

  old entities

  in the bedside drawer:

  am I still the bearer?

  I own each particular.

  Each unused Leave to Enter.

  Acknowledge derivative status,

  canton

  where I was never born

  and had never been,

  cold northern town

  of your first known ancestor

  mine

  by assertion –

  a woman takes her husband’s

  Place of Origin, in the Swiss system –

  handed on, in this wise

  to my children’s children,

  with no Swiss ‘in’ them,

  IDs accreting,

  cancelling and slashed,

  buried now among piles

  of underwear,

  sketches for a portrait, Wildean,

  that cannot flatter;

  the stages of breakdown.

  How lightly I thought to cast it all off!

  There’s this whole other apparatus

  that wants to track me,

  my representation,

  that notes all my sins in the context

  of civil status

  and translates them.

  5 Origins

  Bülach, Bürgerort, is up near the border

  almost off the map.

  I’ve no real business here, revisiting,

  kicking down streets I barely remember

  and that never knew me.

  You hadn’t been there either,

  just learnt by rote the family lore:

  Place of Origin means

  if we are ever destitute, we claim

  this right: they have to take us in.

  You were always losing your foothold,

  the very roof over your head,

  your good

  schoolmaster-father

  Swiss-village pillar

  somehow ruined,

  so that when we toured

  so many years later, you showed me

  two childhood homes: Before and After.

  Then on to the school for boys

  who ‘sensed a vocation’, under the chill

  watch of that Black Madonna,

  her foot

  kissed so often it had worn down

  like a patient child,

  bearing Einsiedeln,

  place of the hermit,

  alone in a crowd.

  6 Absolved

  You were vowed to the Lord

  and enrolled

  to spread his Word:

  Missionshaus,

  Maria-Enzersdorf, in Vienna.

  Always Maria,

  substitute mother.

  When they expelled you

  after many years

  (you who’d been telling,

  townsfolk Priests can’t really forgive your sins)

  you went back to find your cell stripped

  and reassigned.

  For months you slept

  in an attic, fed by a soft-hearted nun

  who brought secret plates from the kitchen

  that was trying to starve you out.

  Did you think of Bülach then,

  with nowhere to turn,

  knowing that shame meant your parents’ door

  was closed forever?

  7 Outsider

  The real Bülach is starkly quiet as

  I scout around it,

  looking for

  nothing. I head across town

  and a young man,

  thinking me English, warns,

  ‘But Fraülein,

  that is the Catholic church!’

  Dust

  David Brooks

  When I came back

  after almost a month away

  a wild wind had damaged the roofs of the neighbours’ houses

  and brought down the cherry laurel in our yard

  and there was a fine layer of dust over everything: dust

  in the cupboards, dust in the drawers, dust beneath the dried, cut roses,

  the dust of our neighbours, the dust of the city, the dust

  of the Simpson Desert

  two thousand kilometres west.

  What’s there to say?

  Sometimes, as I talk, I feel the dust

  creeping through my sentences, thoughts

  turning to fine powder

  as they wend through the motes of it:

  theories, philosophies, histories. Our dreams

  are dust, our loves

  are dust, the things

  we fight for are dust.

  In the Taj Mahal

  they are sweeping the dust; in the Pentagon,

  the Vatican. In the Louvre

  they are brushing it

  from the face of La Gioconda. In Padna

  Emeliano is ploughing the dust; on the Hay Plain the sheep

  are straggling through dust; in Canberra

  the Prime Minister is coughing

  because of the dust.

  In the evening the dust

  turns red in the sunset: there are

  worlds up there,

  and centuries, huge

  cathedrals, great

  archives of dust.

  Sometimes,

  when the wind dies,

  you can hear the birds

  crying

  because of their burden of dust: crying

  or singing, I don’t know (the world

  flows

  through the dust of us,

  sometimes it sings).

  Earth Hour

  David Malouf

  It is on our hands, it is in our mouths at every breath, how not

  remember? Called back

  to nights when we were wildlife, before kindling

  or kine, we sit behind moonlit

  glass in our McMansions, cool

  millions at rehearsal

  here for our rendezvous each with his own

  earth hour.

  We are feral

  at heart, unhouseled creatures. Mind

  is the maker, mad for light, for enlightenment, this late admission

  of darkness the cost, and the silence

  on our tongue as we count the hour down – the coin we bring,

  long hoarded just for this – the extended cry of our first coming

  to his ambulant, airy

  Schatzkammer and midden, our green a
ccommodating tomb.

  Edith

  Andy Jackson

  1.

  When I was between eleven and twelve, my thin body

  stooped slightly. My family took the matter in hand.

  An orthopaedic manufacturer, an immensely fat gentleman,

  the colour of a November fog, constructed for me a prison of iron.

  Under my arms were thick pads of leather, reminiscent of saddlery.

  My arms were constantly numbed. When I went to bed, my legs

  were immured in a contraption of steel. I could not move.

  My feet were strapped down onto a kind of steel sandal with a most

  complicated lock and key system, four inches deep under the soles.

  Sometimes Miss H screwed them into a position pointing downwards

  and the discomfort kept me awake all night. Sometimes they pointed

  heavenward, and the same pain happened. Impossible

  for me to have left my bed, even if the room was on fire.

  My only happiness was that during the day I was able to secrete

  a book of poems in the fastnesses of my bed. I learned Pope,

  Shelley, Shakespeare in a profound secrecy, hurriedly and guiltily,

  by the light of a single brightly-feathered candle, whilst outside,

  the seas of beauty, the wildness of the spring, broke upon a magical shore.

  2.

  A long train journey back to a ravaged capital,

  in a compartment with three badly burnt airmen.

  The pointed smell of antiseptic cream.

  Out the window, the manicured and scarred hills,

  green hills of England. One soldier has lost

  his nose and lips, his face a terrible blankness.

  He is quiet the whole time, doffs his hat as you leave.

  Later, in a journal, the words appear –

  What woman could ever be worthy to love him?

  3.

  Until she has made a technique for herself (and one has to forge it

  for oneself, there is no help to be got), any woman, if she is going

  to be any good at all, must write in as hard and glittering a manner

  as possible, with as strange images as possible (strange but believed in).

  Anything to avoid that ghastly wallowing. Deformation or

  distortion in art is a necessary quality. Not only is this not a defect,

  it is one of the sources of pleasure and interest. I was not pretending

  to put forward a new theory of the universe – I was just

  doing technical feats of an extreme difficulty and having fun.

  Oh, why won’t people realise poetry is a specialist’s job! Always

  I have been a little outside life, like a ghost, a dead person.

  When I was very small I began to see the patterns of the world,

  the images of wonder and I asked myself why they should be repeated –

  the feather and the fern and rose and acorn in frost on the window,

  repeated again and again. Even then I knew this was telling us something.

  4.

  The engine, steaming. In the headlights, someone

  is finishing off the howling alsatian who leapt

  inexplicably from the bushes into the path of the car.

  A slight tremor, you slowly realise is your body.

  The dreadful silence pressing in.

  When the car gets underway again, you speak

  loudly about poets and composers, as if

  your heart was not left there beside that road,

  black tree wishing birds to land in your branches.

  Back at the house, a large owl has come

  to live in a courtyard, and in the morning,

  it is one huge graveyard of the bones of mice.

  Ellipsis

  Jo Langdon

  Rain streaks the window. Somehow her hair

  holds the smell of matches struck.

  The wind is loose around walls outside, tying itself

  up in trees (birch leaves soft as ash).

  She watches: breath showing and fading on glass.

  He said if, and she waits, not knowing his language,

  all the things he might have meant.

  from Ephemeral Waters

  Kate Middleton

  Rocky She starts in a trickle

  Mountains

  National a rill

  Park

  a thread of water

  Colorado you can easily straddle, if only

  River you walk so far—

  Trail

  she starts miles out beyond road

  upstream far enough that only river lovers

  river readers

  might follow the scent

  might find source

  yet on the trail upriver I meet

  them all—

  Just yards along the path

  young families

  toddlers helped uphill

  by sibling hands until

  they’ve seen the water and turn back

  further along, small groups, all groups

  out for an afternoon stroll, ripples of trios

  and couples Alone I overhear

  their small talk, return a nod of the head

  as I pass with a faster gait until, miles further

  toward the source day-hikers break

  for lunch at missing Lulu City

  —while the city is gone

  the vista remains

  Water just covers my feet

  the rocks of the streambed bloom

  in orange and lilac

  and I use the snow-melt flow to cool

  my bottle I watch

  as every few yards

  another

  unmarked

  unmapped runnel

  choirs

  into

  the gaining

  stream

  *

  Soon upriver becomes

  upstream

  up

  trickle

  source When through rock I spy the seep

  there’s nothing to do but turn back

  downstream retrace the downward flow

  A mile downstream again, water at ankle

  She pools, climbs, carries

  modest skirts onward

  Another mile, water laps at my knee

  again walkers spray

  across the trail Their clusters

  ooh and aah at the pines

  the mountain columbines

  at each ascent

  descent

  the rough trail makes

  Some hatless

  in sandals and fluorescent shirts

  others, grubby, well-kitted

  each visible limb

  brown enough to recede into tree

  while along the streambed green

  runs the gamut, olive- to bottle-

  A modest start, gathering water

  —gathering, gathering—

  sweeping along the banks of buried history

  arriving again

  Lulu at the ghost of Lulu City

  City

  Five Abstractions of Blue

  Paul Hetherington

  1. Prussian Blue

  It is the dense compression of glaciers

  that the artist has seized for his paint.

  It lives as a flame’s after-image


  on a plain wall.

  It is The Great Wave off Kanagawa,

  der Werff’s Entombment of Christ

  and the colour of Mary’s grief.

  2. Refugee

  Not night but the inside of a darkened cell

  where every murmur of a life has been stilled,

  minutes hanging on reinforced glass

  like droplets smeared by a child—

  or someone peering into a lake

  at restless fronds of weed

  standing in refracted haze—

  an afternoon as blue

  as a faded willow-pattern cup

  on a rickety shelf;

  as blue as dementia that has let go

  of all detail except a child’s slow climb

  up the rungs inside a well—

  the blue-white

  of that waiting circle of light.

  3. Plumber

  Here is a bubbling drain

  and a main adjoining pipe.

  His eel wriggles towards

  a cliff-face’s stain of seepage

  into an ocean basin.

  He stands facing the horizon.

  There is blue wherever he looks—

  even the horizon

  is crossing out of purple,

  as if sunset is siphoning day

  into an estuary

  on the other side

  of his blinking observation.

  He thinks of the vast flow,

  the possible backwash,

  the way he stands now in the offing

  of that ensconced and draining light;

  of his embayment

  in the reaching, shallow glow,

  its impressionistic shoal.

  4. Paragliding

  Up here she is in free fall;

  up here the wind catches her dropping spiral

  and fills her parafoil; up here

  she turns across

  the shattered rectangles of ground—

  all that fuss of traffic and laws

  and her unsteady, deflating marriage

  dissolved in gravity’s tug

  and the wind’s upthrust. The sky

  is thrall and abeyance

  and a dense, yellowing blue

  that absorbs her ascent;

  her single, teardrop wing

  stiffened against its harness.

  5. Indigo

  Soak the leaves

  until they ferment, mix lye.

  Follow the way of ancestors;

  make cloth that has always been made.

  Dress in blue. Don’t stand

  in the vat during pregnancy.

  Look to alter your life.

 

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