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The Best Australian Poems 2013

Page 12

by Lisa Gorton


  or a huge library reverberating messages between lines of shelves?

  You fear asking the simplest question

  because the answer is always the same,

  and the voice that returns it is the familiar dominating one –

  your teacher, your master, robbing you of all will,

  keeping you as a servant.

  The desire to subvert yourself, to speak

  in the voice of another, to knock a chaos

  into this order of illusions. And when they pass over you,

  these shadows distinct as faces piercing the surface of water,

  what do they drag in their wake? The presidential candidate’s

  dream-speech delivered in bubbles of his own blood.

  The desire to destroy. A selection of words

  to mask your jealousy, every tentative emotion concealed.

  Your arrogance the revolver in its holster.

  Because there is no longer any guilty internal world,

  your private thoughts lead you to a plain

  where huge figures stand frozen, towers and monuments

  shuttling messages into the air, light patterns

  and gaudy over-obvious symbols.

  There are no more images for you to touch,

  only these hard prints on the eye

  mistaking jungle-foliage for military uniforms.

  Extinction breathes its gentle colours,

  pastels of tensions released. Falling softly into a chair

  you believe you are outside everything,

  a light tune disappearing. At last

  you become leader, compelled to speak.

  But there is danger, for what have you left to confess

  except constructions? The high chair, the fabricated podium,

  disgust you like some story spilled at gunpoint.

  You take the woman into your arms, but dark smoke

  has entered your bones, and there is no remedy

  but the need to continue travelling among these tortured bodies,

  these trees, these flayed mountains.

  You wanted to capture precision,

  the insides of things, but each new word

  dazzles you, is a prism of caught light,

  and you are frozen in captivation.

  Each second snaps like a forced door.

  You have been absent from the city too long,

  concealed in an ambush of riddles,

  and now you are scarcely recognisable.

  The clear strategies inhaled at high altitudes,

  formed from clear air, are swept clean away

  by your embarrassing forgetfulness.

  What was the use of all the lost time

  learning that you could no longer lie?

  Perhaps you were only parroting

  the words of a saviour, practical solutions

  that carry across the seaboard

  like the sound of distant gunfire.

  The demagogue’s beard cultivated in a garbage dump.

  The priest’s sash sweeping across polished boards

  as prickly infection wipes a baby’s mouth.

  You are too malleable. A servant’s hysteria

  scours you with painful laughter. Lawless

  your shining objects shake from the walls.

  Make neat piles of them. Scrub your empty face

  until it burns. Make up a story.

  The Dark Sisters

  Robert Gray

  for Stephen Edgar and Judy Beveridge

  If it’s possible

  as you travel

  you should turn north and see Glencoe.

  Some will say no—

  keep a sense

  of the Renaissance

  about you. I know that you are not among those

  who choose

  to ignore what history’s shown us to be,

  beneath a grandeur or grandiosity.

  Be sure to go

  late of a long afternoon (although

  it is dark there in the blaze of noon).

  The tourist buses have moved on

  at that hour

  when you arrive by bike or car;

  and as you stand alone

  in the ravine

  you will experience the Sublime,

  which Burke defined

  as Nature that is ‘terrible’

  (but which enlivens, if the watcher is safe for a while).

  Hard to tell

  the lie of the land—

  those three long ridges incline, each to its mound

  that is a misshapen, bloated globule

  in a swamp, or on murky sump-oil.

  The hills are stolid,

  a cold lava, stone-naked,

  or they can appear

  to rear

  at the angle

  of a bull seal

  when it plunges ashore.

  There is a constantly seeping water

  that is silver,

  striated on each billowing slope.

  What I want to evoke

  is the summer—how it seems to have let fall a sodden cloak.

  In winter, there hove

  closely above,

  from out of murk,

  the Flying Dutchman’s hulk,

  but with April, a stream is gibbering its way

  in the floor of the valley.

  Such a place

  was like a man who had a ‘gallows face’,

  of whom they’d have said

  he invited

  his involvement in tragedy.

  The light at the time I say

  is on the loins

  of these stocky mountains,

  like the sword blade they would clean

  beneath the arm, on their linen,

  but not on plaid,

  and carried lowered.

  The MacDonald clan was hospitable

  to a rabble

  in the pit of winter,

  1692, as required by honour.

  At their hamlet of whitewashed stone,

  through the vale, they’d taken in

  each steaming cow and pig and hen,

  and the 129

  mercenaries, who outnumbered them,

  come to proclaim

  William as king, imposed upon

  Scotland, too. The chieftain

  had been loath

  or tardy about the oath,

  who lay down

  with arthritis and chilblain,

  and now must pay a fine.

  The interlopers sprawled

  along the bench, in each household,

  watching the children fed from a spoon,

  and drank the whisky, with its fume

  like the mist above a loch.

  What a piece of work

  is man—how devious

  in the spontaneous

  refined high level

  of his devilishness.

  Not one of the troop betrayed its intent;

  and nothing was meant

  for the hosts, on turning up

  a card. They noticed only the hearth fire leap

  in a drowsy pupil.

  Ten days passed (an ordeal

  of itself) before the signal

  at dawn—a bonfire, in which the families woke

  and saw how murder broke

  out of those faces. A sword went in

  the servant girl, where the soldiers had lain.
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  The stranded or fleeing were chopped down—

  they shed a limb

  as they tried to climb

  on the salt-packed snow,

  or saw a sword-tip throw

  about them the watery

  loop of blood. Blood flew away

  like the flight of the galaxy.

  Some were allowed

  to escape, who’d have to wade

  thigh-deep, with just a shawl—

  like broken crows they crawled, their call

  flapping. When you come into this region

  you won’t need to summon

  what you should feel—

  our old disquiet, of betrayal,

  will overwhelm. I have thought

  on what is meant

  by the dark sisters, those immemorial

  mourners, in their veil.

  Whatever level

  of existence, however deep we plumb,

  things come

  in packages, are separate;

  they co-operate, or assert

  themselves, to annihilate

  what constricts them. All things, we find, will fluctuate

  on this scale. It is said the truth can set us free,

  if only of the illusory.—

  When you are there, you might feel

  that evil is in the molecule.

  the dead are with us

  Kit Kelen

  the dead stand by us

  peer over our shoulders

  into the coffin

  for this long last glimpse

  no glass

  just this final mirror

  there’s always

  one hair out of place

  and poignant that

  they cannot touch

  you read it here

  Kit Kelen

  the dead speak

  in the eternal present

  that’s how it is when

  your date’s set in stone

  on the far side

  of a hyphen

  The Ear Especially

  Corey Wakeling

  You don’t need eschatology to see the finitude

  in all this. Cantilever arm of all sweetness,

  pinions of every description

  in the sinew of its reaching out. And towards

  what? The globe is fine corpulence, the flesh

  of the ear especially,

  vigour of sports car on wet May bitumen slighting

  the bone catacomb smart. Paris, hello. Where

  have you hidden my brother, and Now,

  my brother’s brotherhood. There is a Southern Californian

  song about all of this that eschatology

  cannot penetrate. So stop, sweet claw of new day,

  digits clammy.

  The clay pits, to gasp with hand on back of head,

  to be lulled to sleep like the puppet infanta,

  side with brother clover and fatten wanton,

  lope the lambent disguise if but only in the moment

  of finitude. Need not finitude to see the sweetness

  in all of this that made eschatologies

  unrenewable, when instead,

  and we do know this, the fossil only comes twice,

  as in: all time under, the all time no time above.

  That grasp, darling hand, park your car, knowing restlessness

  and velocity in the woken, in the face.

  The God of Bone and Antler

  Daniel East

  What passes here for air is dry.

  Four bare rooms and four doorless frames

  sixteen unwindowed walls of caulked pine

  and countless things with claws that scrabble

  in the dry above.

  If it lives

  it lives like a shadow, preceding and anterior

  to the light, tethered at the edge of vision.

  Your feet below are naked.

  As you creep across the boards

  there is a scraping, a thunk

  a hiss, clock, hiss and clock

  of limbs as they strike ancient wood.

  An antiphony of bones, a twitching cow skull

  in a nest of horns.

  It has no songs, it is kin to stone and ferryman to beasts;

  language makes no purchase

  and keeps no token or effect.

  You wonder as you go within

  elbows held over your breast

  if it thinks like a draught horse working a bit –

  teeth wearing flat on steel.

  If it lives, it is behind,

  cracked hoof seeking the shelving of your heart.

  The inevitable beauty of the viewer when faced with the partitionist tactics of the situationist lover

  Fiona Hile

  You and your beauty ask questions of the viewer such as

  What is Form and Why is this Happening?

  The viewer not wanting to exceed the beauty

  of the inoperable sees she must match its unstoppable

  theory to overdue notions of the apartheid of literature.

  Nothing to see in the spectacle of your lips

  but the insistence of the letter in the mire of

  situationist abandonment. Keep telling yourself that

  the poem is a container for the formless horror of your

  eyes as emotion skinning you to the scrutiny of the

  automaton as inadequate representation of the poem as a

  container for the formless horror of the delimited passion

  of the never stops not being written

  The Life Inside

  Judith Rodriguez

  A little house, a little house.

  Heard from the yard:

  fresh voices at the door.

  A little house.

  A little house.

  The shelves that fill,

  and cups along the board.

  A little house.

  Two chairs pushed close,

  the crossword page filled out.

  A little house.

  Heard from the bed:

  the hot wind all night long.

  A little house.

  The photos stare.

  The phone shrills once and stops.

  A little house.

  Heard by no ear

  the messages repeat.

  A little house.

  The orchard

  Hu Xian (translated by Ouyang Yu)

  Happiness came with such a vengeance ...

  In the darkness, an apple

  Had left its branch

  ‘Last night, whose heart thumped violently?’

  Someone fainted in the thunderous rain

  A fine shadow

  Swept the land before it died

  – the orchard in the summer, shining light spots

  Were following me all the time

  Under a tree, I listened, my ears pricked

  Within the clean flesh of the fruit, a creek rushed scouring

  I sensed that happiness was slow

  And that it required me to lighten my steps

  Branches extending themselves, the green waves of the orchard were quietly rolling

  It was not till then that the old orchard peasant told me

  That he sometimes would dream of his own death, like an apple falling

  The owl painting

  Thomas Shapcott

  The owl looks angry. It also, I think, looks very frightened.


  The artist has been scrupulous. The beak

  And claws are not to be trifled with.

  The setting is specific – a Queensland bathroom

  Already old-fashioned if not dilapidated

  So that the bird, perched on the rim, looks out of place.

  That is the idea: discomfort and confusion

  Enough for anger to rise in anyone. It does.

  So that the painting expresses complete resentment.

  Why my former wife bought it is completely obvious

  and it has nothing to do with value – at least, not as money.

  It has something to do with isolation, however.

  And, for the first time, I think of that bathroom

  As place of confinement, a tortuous space.

  Wings are not given to us, but claws are.

  There is nothing more terrible than confinement

  Or more endangering and threatening than fear.

  We might not have beaks but we have other weapons.

  The Roadside Bramble

  Peter Minter

  Walking late by a roadside bramble

  Hoops of brittle thorn, a caul of dead grass, quiet rust

  Frost-burnt une feuille serrate

  Motes fall and swirl as brassy notes and cobwebs

  Tangle straw stems in mossy dirt, the gravel wash

  A stripped page of newspaper rotting, crushed

  Polyethylene terephthalate

  Half-full of piss or rain water, the sign of a dog

  Chalk eroded in the furrow of a wheel

  Gone a little wide on the corner, or a near miss

  Now overgrown in parochial paspalum, afternoon light

  Cold and real, bees somewhere in the shadows

  A thought of honey in the thicket

  The grey common behind a wire fence half down in the damp

  Bruise hung on the smoke

  Of a sundog burnt in hazy sky, translucent

  Sleep stuck in the cavernous dawn of a bramble there by the roadside

  Where I hurry into the emaciated past

  Where dry straw recedes speechless into the middle distance

  A skein of mist settling over a paddock

  Air still, damp, muddy in my nose as the scent of blood

  Steel cold hockey bone blue, knee high

  Twigs and the hair on my skin lift in the golden aperture

  Of the sky’s milk crystal

  Fanned behind a brittle stand of eight grey poplars

 

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