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The Best Australian Poems 2013

Page 10

by Lisa Gorton


  Your Eleanor, my Isobel, whose slippers in the grate

  tarry, but true empathy is kept for this

  I make history in the Tower,

  fleece the rent to peruse a commentary

  time hovels through days’ dreamt tyrant

  To choir would sully this grasp

  Two Americas checked off, one Ireland picked,

  all these wrappings.

  Hived in insignia your enchained horse canters

  as entreaties whistle up a kingdom

  I would push my galleons to charge for you

  blowy and stern

  And here I decipher some longing, the flowered verse

  not sent returns to oak.

  But let’s walk, diplomacy can stick it

  Pennants beam into air, and all trials you meant and break, twinned princes

  not annul but stayed

  Regression to the mean

  Aden Rolfe

  A jar, a thought, a slight breeze. Who else is tired of these props

  and found objects? Left on their own

  they form connections, attach to each other, signal new meanings

  and while we wait in the wings for the next act to begin

  for a guiding principle to wander by

  we might as well reset the scene

  in the cabin in the forest, perhaps, or

  inevitably, return to the water, to that epitomised landscape –

  the sand, the beach house, the predictable sets.

  Thinking on it now, it should never have been about

  what was missing from that experience

  just about being there. You can’t identify a problem

  you’re in the midst of though, and we can’t go back

  and do it over, even when the map is spread before us

  tracing paths up through the dunes. Best not to think of yourself

  as the driving force, as the protagonist

  but more as an empty jar or a thought in the wind.

  Renovations

  Michelle Cahill

  It was a summer of stinking heat, hell-fire days,

  nothing predictable but the violence of time

  whistling throu a sou’ westerly, the dragon lizard

  scampering to underbrush from crops of dry lawn.

  Boxes in every half-filled room, masking-tape rolls,

  anarchic cockroaches slewing between floorboards.

  I learnt how to correct grey hair roots, presbyopia,

  leaking showers. The marriage laws defied me.

  Then one tradie after another, phone calls, texts.

  In my alacrity, I’d confuse their names, driving

  from Canada Bay to Lidcome, Ikea to Parramatta Road

  for blackbutt, bamboo, terracotta. Scott from Prospect

  gave a quote I accepted for all the drop sheets, all

  the brawn and Epoxy sealant it took to keep me single.

  Revealed

  Laura Jan Shore

  To re-teach a thing its loveliness …

  Galway Kinnell

  Nothing much lovely about Grampa Lou,

  not the reek of his cigar, the ash and crumbs

  tumbling from his vest as he snatched us up

  onto his lap, not his prickly moustache kisses.

  He’d suck his false teeth at meals, slurp soup

  and slam the table in a pique, upsetting the gravy.

  Made Grandma blush and squirm

  with his salacious puns and Mae West jokes

  and who didn’t wince at his tenor trills

  while listening to Sunday night opera?

  He pranced like a circus bear spouting Russian,

  though he was only 12 when he’d arrived at Ellis Island.

  Waving his cigar, he’d brag about the two jobs he’d worked

  to pay for law school at night.

  Weeping was a fine art for him and while Grandma lay dying

  he wailed, Mummy, don’t leave me.

  The old aunts rolled their eyes and muttered,

  About time she went somewhere on her own.

  At the nursing home, the staff learnt to avoid

  his flirtations and the occasional pinch.

  By 96, still healthy, he’d had enough

  and refused to eat.

  Cocooned in white blankets, he was

  a shrivelled balloon minus his bluster and puff.

  Groaning in his sleep, wrestling with bedclothes,

  with beckoning angels, he’d cry out, No! No!

  raising his palm to ward them off.

  His eyelids flickered, then snapped open.

  What time is it?

  One pm, Grampa.

  Seeing me, recognition dawned.

  He asked after my children, recalling ages and names,

  then drifted off only to wake and demand,

  What time is it?

  Once he sat straight up, grasping my hands in his icy ones.

  He leaned his grizzled cheeks close.

  Eyes, brimming like Russian lakes, revealed

  the tender boy

  he’d so skilfully concealed

  beneath overcoats of bravado.

  A luminous boy, we’d never met.

  In the light of that naked gaze, he whispered,

  You are beautiful!

  spoken to me and to the reflection

  of that boy beaming back.

  The bare room glowed and everything

  all of it – was made lovely.

  Revisiting Yugoslavia: Rijeka, Croatia

  Rosanna Licari

  I don’t know why but I often think

  I was born in my father’s city, Trieste,

  (the statues of Joyce, Saba and Svevo

  stand in footpaths where they once

  walked and thought)

  and not in Rijeka,

  in a country that doesn’t exist anymore.

  My cousin’s son points to a canal

  lined with small coloured boats,

  and my confusion surfaces.

  I stare at it

  the old border with Italy.

  Rijeka’s language I’ve forgotten how to speak.

  I speak my father’s tongue.

  I remember my mother’s words:

  You know how much your father hated the Communists.

  I don’t know if it’s mine or someone else’s

  but a deep sadness smears the gaps of the hours.

  I imagine my father’s days.

  They become part of me:

  the contempt for the country

  that took his country

  is the unease,

  the shame,

  I feel for my birthplace.

  Rise and Shine

  Cameron Lowe

  ‘What is a / poem, anyway . . .’

  —James Schuyler

  Morning’s kiss

  your kiss

  leaves and noisy sparrows—

  outside

  the open window

  guys are up to something

  of importance—

  ‘… the sewer’s not …

  can you get

  the fucking waders …’

  Rupert in Japan

  Paul Magee

  Prince Shotoku, who dedicated the temple at Horyuji,

  the moment he was born leapt up to pray

  fourteen centuries ago and quite unlike our Rupert

  who was six weeks till his first smile.

&nbs
p; We stare at the deer. Now in Nara Prefecture

  eight months older, in temples of shopping

  and mountain air, his gestures much closer to thought.

  Existing in a state no one’s ever known.

  My book’s page. Its black ink.

  And it’s not quite prayer.

  More like paper’s feel

  of the words.

  And a bell resounds.

  Season’s Greetings

  Kate Lilley

  Digital breathalyser portable garden trolley

  crying kitten weight management capsules

  gesso moulded cup plinth faux drawers

  no photo fruit motif pineapple berries

  Lap desk brass inlaid corners opening

  fitted mahogany interior blue tooled leather

  surface breaks to pen rest antler ink well

  gilt Arabic numerals silvered dial

  Revolutionary subjects in profile 1680s

  gold edge porcelain birds breaks and losses

  pastel portrait presume provenance verso

  paper scales alcohol thermometer storm glass

  Self Portrait at 65

  Geoffrey Lehmann

  i.m. Quinton Duffy 13.11.1971–10.9.2005

  I

  I sit alone watching a Japanese anime film

  on a large screen.

  A moth flickers across projected light.

  II

  I’ve been trying to write about a death,

  my grand daughter’s father, aged thirty-three,

  a perfect human being

  who loved Japanese anime films.

  Past midnight in a hospital ward

  my daughter kisses his inert head

  while her mother and I look on.

  III

  There was a “famous” incident in his childhood.

  His mother hears him, aged five,

  chattering to his one week old sister,

  asking questions.

  He appears crestfallen in the kitchen doorway:

  “That baby doesn’t seem to like me.

  She won’t talk.”

  IV

  My daughter’s regret – and she laughs –

  he missed the fifth season

  of The Sopranos,

  The Brothers Karamazov

  is buried with him, unfinished,

  his shirt sleeves as he liked them

  partly rolled up.

  V

  The females of the household

  (my wife and daughter) resolve

  Ada, not yet three, and I

  will shower together –

  “a male presence.”

  VI

  Three weeks after Q’s death I fly down to Julia.

  She wakes me after midnight.

  We drive the old brown Volvo to the hospital,

  the same car as three weeks earlier.

  It feels like the same journey

  as a small child struggles for breath.

  By three a.m., after antihistamines,

  Ada’s pedalling a plastic car

  across vinyl tiles

  in the fluorescent calm of Emergency.

  There are lurid flowers planted on the wall.

  VII

  I read about an improbable event:

  one of the archaea

  that light up marshes at night

  fused with an oxygen eating bacterium

  and became us,

  all complex life,

  and the improbable fungus

  too small for hospital microscopes

  that killed Q as he lay in an isolation ward.

  VIII

  It’s six months since Q’s death.

  I sit in a glass room typing letters

  for a research foundation.

  The garden wilts in the sun,

  overgrown with climbing roses.

  Tomorrow I stay with my daughter

  who carries his unborn child.

  As the sun declines I switch off my screen –

  I’ve an hour to mow the lawns.

  I change into a torn t-shirt

  and faded trousers

  ripped with splashes of white paint and yellow chlorine.

  My mower starts with one pull –

  a surprise – but now it can’t stop

  until the petrol runs out

  or I jerk the lead from the spark-plug.

  Its staccato roar consumes the grass on my driveway.

  In the street a young man

  is packing his young family into a car.

  They hurry to close the doors,

  alarmed by this obsessive old man,

  red-faced and sweating in his clouds of dust,

  as I reach the grass on the verge

  and mow beside their car.

  The blades are spitting out topsoil fines and dead leaves.

  A pebble ricochets.

  On the opposite footpath an Asian girl

  holds a handkerchief to her nose.

  The young man parks down the road and is back,

  mild-mannered, fair hair and egg-shaped head.

  I depress the throttle to hear his reproach:

  “You could at least have waited!”

  “I was embarrassed,” I say,

  “I do the lawns in a particular order

  and I’ve a tennis court to mow before it’s dark.”

  He nods and walks away.

  IX

  My postscript, aged 68.

  Julia telephones

  and reads a poem of nineteen syllables.

  She asks how many syllables for a haiku.

  “Seventeen,” I reply.

  She’ll send the corrected haiku

  as a text message:

  “and you can put it in a poem –

  So it will be preserved.”

  This is Julia Lehmann’s haiku,

  (now a syllable short):

  “Widowed 4 years, I find

  the wig you made from your hair,

  (still scented).”

  X

  A postscript to the postscript:

  I have to set up the camera again

  with my self portrait

  for a final tracking shot.

  I’m 69

  and having radiotherapy.

  Lying on the slab

  surrounded by lights

  in an empty room with pop music playing

  I shut my eyes

  so I don’t panic.

  That night my daughter

  texts me another haiku for Q

  (the number of syllables correct):

  “Always fluorescent

  in the room where you died,

  my howl is a ghost there.”

  from Shaping the Dark: Three Readings of Tony Lloyd’s Oil on Linen Painting ‘On a Dark Night You Can See Forever’

  Robyn Rowland

  ii. Night holds history inside its black cape.

  You know when your unit reaches the top of this ridge

  your truck will turn, unload, and the firing begins.

  Sarajevo sits sparkling, a diamond sunk below the ring of hills;

  cosmopolitan, blended Ottoman and Austrian and Bosnian,

  a jangle of colour and bright spirit, a tight woven history.

  You enjoy the lights now; ‘like fairyland’, your mother used to say;

  and she’d wonder: ‘what are you doing here?’

 
People below don’t know what you know.

  That they are now targets, ducks in a shooting gallery.

  That fifteen hundred children will be killed, ten thousand adults;

  three hundred mortars a day will burn their books, crush their history,

  buildings and bodies fragmented.

  For four years – no heat, no power, no water, no food.

  Then they will know blackness:

  a lightless city where only your flares will ignite it

  so mortars can find victims in the dark.

  That long black road may go on forever.

  snowy

  Joanne Burns

  they flash past

  like cyclists through

  red lights with or without

  consequence is there a need

  to hurry is there an agenda

  as they wait for particle

  rearrangement, reassignment

  another incarnation; do they

  get impatient or is this messing

  around merely spirit at play, a

  version of ‘being’ italicised; are

  the dead on the look out for

  groceries, hungry as they visit

  dreams footpaths crevices

  vestibules auditory canals, beings

  we recognise, or don’t; what

  fills the space between the ‘be’

  and the ‘ing’, what would coleridge

  have to say in his lime-tree bower;

  you surprised me deep in slumber

  under the snowy doona, your

  emerald dress like a sudden

  summer –

  Soar

  A. Frances Johnson

  It began with structural analysis of a dragonfly wing.

  The first task was to create

  flow in the DelFly II.

  Wing flexibility in ‘clap-and-fling’

  and ‘clap-and-peel’ were tested.

  But what of appearance variation cues

  and obstacle avoidance?

  In the end they took a sky segmentation approach,

  while others dealt with complex tail effects

  in flapping flight. Even so, after years of work,

  hear-and-avoid problems beset

  indoor and outdoor dragonflies.

  All parties were insisting on micro air vehicles

  quieter than any insect that ever hovered

 

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