The Best Australian Poems 2013
Page 9
or we tell stupid stories trying to capture moments
in nets of cynicism and hard-eyed laughter
sometimes we offer each other alternatives
I’d rather fail the hsc I’d rather fail uni
than have a body prised from a snarl of metal
lying silently beside me perhaps we’re each remembering
backyard games of cricket in fading suburban light
or the three of us on bikes weaving through
south coast scrub on our way back to campfire & breakfast
after one operation the shunts probe
my brother’s brain to measure the pressure
the doctors tell us that we each have an ICP of three
or six when we have a headache now visiting time
is consumed by shifting numbers that seem to be
always rising like sydney real estate or a bad economy
one day it goes up to forty six
and I can hardly stand
when my mother was a child all she wanted was a doll
instead of a school uniform from a culture
that understood mixed business more than Christmas
now she explores the hospital to pass the time
finding all the cafeterias
the Eastern Suburbs views that gaze out over her childhood
and the distant blue of Coogee one day she walks
into a glass wall thinking it’s a door
that should automatically part she isn’t hurt
just dazed and crying for hours in the afternoon
a man sits outside the hospital doors
sucking in smoke and weak sunshine a day later his brother
stops breathing he can’t cope when they turn
the machine off so they have to call security
to pull him from the nurses sometimes I think
I’m not coping well either
giving shopkeepers the wrong money and showing up for classes
an hour early a lady on the bus stares
out into Centennial park what are we doing?
she asks of no-one or everyone
I want to reply but instead look down at my hands
rolling my bus ticket and unrolling it again
as days click past we’re finding tragedy
in each waiting room face sharing stories
and cups of tea over month-old wedding photos
where my brother grins in forty degree heat
gripped by a suit & tie and the speech he had to give
after the accident they had to cut his shirt off
my cousin returned it along with his watch
she hadn’t looked at because someone said
if his watch is okay then he’ll be okay every few days
another family leaves after someone else drifts
out of the habit of living they each wish us luck
as though death were some blackjack game
and you have to know when to quit the table
my father’s got a bad habit of leaving felt-tip pens
in his top pocket so that they burst in the wash
most of his old shirts look like he’s been shot
in the breast he writes down the doctors’ daily reports
in the same steady hand he uses to work through
maths problems & calculations for fluid mechanics
I don’t read any of them though afraid of seeing
an equation that won’t fall out in a QED or answer
to be honest I can’t bring myself to read anything
at all at the moment without feeling the weight
of a more urgent story instead I try to line
my mind with half finished crosswords
& whispered prayers thrown skywards
longing for outstretched arms and words
that european theory declares meaningless
someone suggests we see a movie to pass the time
and to miss the easter traffic
in it drew barrymore has lost her memory
and repeats one day endlessly
it could be the model for the way
adam sandler makes films
but my mother sobs during all the jokes
imagining a different son waking up
eyes glazed like hospital windows I wonder if my brother
will remember Jesus and that to die is gain
at the moment though I’d rather the fruitful labour part
back on the dairy where farmhands sweat and swear
when cows won’t shift remember the suburban baptism
in front of smiling school friends? cool water lapping
before plunging & rising in a backyard pool
(salt water not chlorine) under a grey sky at dusk
but now he’s just floating on his back
on a hospital mattress sustained by breath
not his own a family friend is
the chaplain at the hospital one day he asks if he can
pray with us over my brother
and anoint him with oil it runs down my brother’s
forehead like tears that stiches can’t cover
someone at uni says easter’s the season for miracles
but more than three days have passed and we’re all still afraid
leaving his room we go for a walk along the Coogee headland
wind bending grass like a reefed handbrake
and throwing spray into our faces
what is the Holy Spirit? a boy with a plastic bucket and spade
asks his father on their way back to the car
my ears strain for the answer but the wind snatches
it and sends it
flying
over the cliff face
the sea always reminds me of La Mer an orchestra
of salt & movement I imagine myself at my parents’ house
playing Debussy again on the family piano
The Maid with the Flaxen Hair
it’s afternoon and mum’s cooking dinner
in the next room looking out the window
I can see my brother through the backyard’s fading light
knocking nails out of fence palings whilst overhead
the jacaranda is blessing the lawn with its flowers
each falling gently like a final dying note
Pictor Ignotus
Louis Armand
(for David Malouf)
The conception is everything – grown
from a hostile mind like a city state
in a hot wilderness. Its curve and arc.
Two men in the beginning performed
a simple act – welding two girders
together, then a third. A whole complex
of space – Uffizi-garish, little
Medicis volumising over it …
The procession of rooms – the glopping
monitors’ hum and buzz. Some primitive
Giotto’s Last Supper – jungle-eyed,
a caged figure mewling at its captors,
hook, tail, breast-mound and rude totemic line
(“tantôt libre, tantôt rechercher”) –
the miraculous Daughter of Fishes,
fleshlipped, nightblue, shriving the horse-mackerel.
“Still glides the stream and shall forever glide.”
Five thousand miles of platitude and not
one pale god to be seen. Nolan’s Burke, dead-
eyed like some homicidal idiot,
stands sentry at the tomb of the unknown
artist – bark and red ochre, yellow,
white, a pair of sticks tied with possum gut
to steer through subterranean weather.
Whoever said that art doesn’t conform
to fact? A polaroid nude, the eye’s un-
bridled rut blacking-out a big money
sunset, navy yards and warm chardonnay.
Or an artefact shaped from the stolen
inner lives of appearances. These things
like maps of impending extinction: that
procure such insurance against themselves.
Plant poem
Claire Potter
The decision of a plant
to grow this way or that
might mimic the decision
to leave by this door or that
but ultimately like a plant
one stays put, moving only in minute,
imperceptible degrees, craning
the neck, for example, towards the sun
towards light which remains glacial
towards peace that carries spurs
towards a singular voice, a neon
strobe which may flicker or be broken
but which nonetheless shines some
small thing inwards to pinken
the discoloured mind, brighten the worsted eyes
which look this way or that
towards a door ajar but not open
extending just enough to hear as well as to feel
the work of the feet outside.
Poetry of the Taliban
Anthony Lawrence
In Poetry of the Taliban, a sword beside a flower.
Inside a narrative
on love, a stone tracks a stone across the page
from a community
well to hospital. An unwound turban is an ex-
tended metaphor
for a wound. A goat is a roadside device.
A camouflaged
field-gun jumps and smokes under a hard rain
of shell casings.
The ringtone of a phone going off beneath
a robe sounds like
muted reports of weapons bringing down
migratory cranes
from a dust cloud. They might have been storks
on a day so clear
you could read into it. Perhaps the scene
involved a crowd
of men, just returned from a mass
beheading in the hills:
trouble with young, out-of-wedlock couples
dancing.
pollen wind
Claire Gaskin
the unsettled library flutters at the heart like a moth
my father who disappeared books is two years dead
I pour water from a narrow neck
at the speed of remembering dream
a dream full of my brother’s only confessions
I dreamt he had been in the care of a child I didn’t know I had
the pages of my notebook flick like flame
Postcard for Marilla
James Stuart
The camera shutter comes down on a selection
of Cappadoccia’s finest caves, as if to prove
the fact I’ve never been there. Whole empires
could balance upon your first tooth but this life
we have prepared for you will close more quickly
than it opens, no matter how much we love each other.
Living in a city networked by smog, I dreamed
of novellas set in Beijing where the dead
disappear into its future with each urban reinvention.
Can you distinguish reflection from light yet?
Afternoon sun catches on Mekong Delta brackish glass,
its waters thinning out up stream, one dam at a time.
One day when you are ready, I’ll tell you
about great migrations we have destroyed & marsupials
you’ll never meet, even as they ghost
across scrubland on the television screen. Folly
of the world’s mindless plunge into convenience;
detritus accumulates across the ocean in plastic rafts.
You’ll have to trust me: the index page is useless
without the body to sit before it. Afternoon: I open
the shutters on your latest sleep; overcast day slips in
& a hot westerly slaps windows in their frames
invoking another place, another time. Still-unspoken words
gather as you pull up to me on the bars of your cot.
P.R.B
Cassandra Atherton
I wish I had been painted by Millais. Maybe not as Ophelia in a tepid bath. Perhaps as Lady Macbeth. Or Titania. Or Portia. Not Brutus’ Portia. Portia from The Merchant of Venice. I used to make you sit on a little wooden stool and pretend you were painting me. Stroke after stroke rasping against the canvas. I would unravel my strawberry plaits and stare at you. Sherry eyes. Corsage at my neck. Picking up the small crumbs of wedding cake and passing them through my gold ring. Nine times. But you still didn’t get the hint. And so I am suspended in that moment. Forever bridesmaid. I can’t be your Effie or your Ruskin. So blot out the canvas with grey. Euphemia’s hagiography turns on a wheel and a bear, but I can’t be your martyr. Writhing in my skin, I call out to Rossetti to paint me. I make you call me Guggums and cling to wild heartsease. We both know the laudanum comes later. So you paint me. Regina Cordium. Hooded lids. Heart shaped pendant. There are two still babies in the shadows. One within and one without. Broken hearted, I become your posthumous Beatrice. Dig me up Dante! Exhume me. Consume me. Shift the soil between us and gather me in your arms. Chase your journal of poems around my coffin with your fingertips as you hold me. Let me hear your mew of pleasure when you have it. At last. My copper hair fills the empty space. But the worm’s hole in your journal eats away at your heart.
Prophecy
Nathan Curnow
cliffs ahead the singing ravine
a horse gallops beside the train never tiring
who is stoking the engine? is the lion tame?
the thorn in the paw was a dream
everything ran on grease and sequins
everybody wore a smoking hand
when Habakkuk rode into the desert
with the lighter and a wafered tongue
a trail of bunting flicks and frets
like a projectionist with a stammer
there was never a bridge the horse the horse
every boom gate is a gallows
the spitfire diving for the dining car
will the yogi come out of his trance?
the jewel on his turban charging the ape
with coveting another man’s wife
the ostrich’s light globe head has blown
red beads across the carriage floor
a flapper girl tied to the tracks ahead
every hoof print the shape of ‘you’
as the standoff continues upon the roof
three winds come clapping for hats
and it burns burns burns the ring of fire
there was never a bridge to be out
*
Habakkuk rides the wincing mule
as if it matters how you travel to your funeral
everything is melting down to murder
the mirage is a cake of trouble
the Russian who said only blood will tell
the sun’s throwing knives never miss
may the dust he retu
rns to catch the light
who has eaten his death cap mushrooms?
the mule knows the dangling carrot is a boot
the mule knows how things go around
how summer reacquaints us with our ugly feet
how Bertha pole dances in a caravan
animals in costumes dream of new costumes
Habakkuk rides like prophecy
his sentence dangling around his neck
rabbits knocking on wood in the cemetery
a tongue that tastes like the body of Christ
the mirage is still a cake
sometimes he hears the squeak of trees
but that must have been days ago
as somebody somewhere plays guitar
and chuckles like firewood
the bearded lady or the ringleader’s wife
he should have chosen the other hand
*
it’s not the storm it’s the debris that kills you
in a hot chilli hallucination
eye floaters steering the eye of the film
avoid contact with the air as much as possible
people’s views aside for a moment
they’re calling it terminal
white goats swimming in a pool of milk
dogs nailed to the ground by thunder
the standoff continues upon the roof
and smoke in the projector’s beam
how to turn away from a beautiful woman
duelling with snarls and squints
the hobbled heart and violent mind
the eagle in the baby pram
the gun he draws becomes a banana
only the lighthouse keeper knows
the extraordinary life she lives without him
if they’d only invested in spray on skin
the ape and the mushrooms come to pass
the abuse of prophecy and group hypnosis
when the only choice is how to fall
down on Habakkuk in the canyon
like a ceiling rose with a beautiful voice
about the horse about ramraid mayhem
Rally
Gig Ryan
I marry at your feet, but only you can move me
Nu Folk dangles from a deck
My ekphrastic breastplate speaks to the abstruse courtier
Who would think I was one of fourteen?