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.
