position.
As if the viewer
should tick a box
in approval
& move on
perhaps ‘liking’ it
on their facebook page.
(their ‘mental’ facebook page)
Does anybody
do that,
like it that much
that they could bother
to register this vote (?)
their
‘shared concern’?
I doubt it.
But then
I am whistling the
wrong tune.
I read in Denton Welch
(the Journals)
of some gypsies he hears
coming home from the pub
singing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’
1946
My father used
to sing that song.
I love it.
The
opening notes
of the John
Coltrane version.
My father
sang it often enough
for me to know the words.
Denton, near the end—
“Chopin pours over me from the wireless.
Nothing but this small picture will be left
of the day. Many years after, people may
be able to read then say, ‘He was cold; he
watched the sunset; he ate a chocolate,’ but
nothing more will be left to them.”
Today I worried happily,
wrote stuff, ‘asseverated’,
was alive. It was supposed
to get cold—but it didn’t.
Ken Bolton
Discovered in a rock pool
A star-shaped object rising up
out of the water – five
wavering arms, five
spokes of a chariot wheel, five
curved cylinders, at their centre
a cluster of grey barnacles, small pearls, a silver light,
the water that drips from them
heavy with salt, oxidized
incrustations. A star tiara
from a drowned mermaid, the wheel
of some vast chariot washed up.
And, as it breaks the surface, this sharp sudden
fragrance like plants left
too long in narrow vases, the water
like urine drained out of dried twigs.
The wheel is a ghost of a wheel.
The fiery chariot’s return to
the kingdom of salt. And everything
shrinks and is less than a token
miniature apple, a walnut placed
as a skull-shaped offering on an
altar to placate the goddess of devouring.
Effigies stored in a rock pool.
This is surely someone’s
childhood not mine. Such simple things
might be placation or destruction. Starfish
or a galaxy intact
as its detritus. Burnt out. Cooling off,
cooling off in a solution
of brine and midday sun.
-- Whom do you seek?
The woman at the centre of the starfish-wheel asks me.
-- I am after another life.
Peter Boyle
There and Then
Friends in a field, their shadows running long into the untilled
ground, and I’m busy trying to catch up, calling for them to
hold on a moment, the voice unfamiliar and the words not my
own, and when I wake I realize the last thing I called to them
might have been the name of the town we were all looking for,
but now it’s a summer morning, the light coming in urgent with
day, sheets strewn at the end of the bed, and by the time my
mind reaches out for it, that name or word or thought, it’s gone,
perhaps lying there up ahead, with them in the town beyond
the old shed at the edge of the field, with its collection of
discarded tools, hoes and picks and shovels still caked in loam
and soil, the old two-furrow plough and an empty feedbag.
There’s a persimmon tree, with its thin covering of leaves and
its branches weighed by tightly packed, hard orange orbs, dense
and ripening, and a thicket of rosemary sprawling about in
the autumn sun, gone wild, looking like it might take over the
world with its thick rough tines, the heavy scent that rubs off
onto skin and lasts all day even after you wake. But thinking of
that town my friends have gone on to, looking out the window
at the summer light, the raging open blue of the sky outside,
I cross past the old shed to where the harrowed ground forms
the first hint of a path between the cherry trees lining the field,
to where a pair of jackdaws come in from the north, creamy
white throats quiet as the flat slate sky above, flit between some
memory of spring, the one gone or the one up ahead.
Michael Brennan
Waiting on Imran Khan
I knew they were trouble the moment they walked in.
I was eighteen, bookish, I’d not yet learned
to build a public face. I was laid open like an oyster
on a salted plate. The uniform was no help,
nylon trousers cut into my soft waist and thighs,
standard issue, there was no bigger size. Summer – the dozy
lunch time shift. Office workers, pensioner couples
sharing, before the cool waterhole of the cinema.
Then, eight or nine men all preening, careening,
igniting against each other. Who was the roughest,
who had the biggest, who was alpha,
and who was his bitch. With my greeting (guinea pig
tentative, I kick myself now), I became the pitch
for a practice hit; a boy’s own way to rejig
the middle order of the Pakistani cricket team.
I’d never admired Imran Khan as a cricketer –
too cool and vain – I preferred flashy and passionate
like Dennis Lillee, or stately and dignified
like Clive Lloyd, but even so, it should have been
a thrill. I’d been following the Test series,
a fan since Dad and I sat on The Hill.
For a young man they might have been jovial,
but when I seated them they broke into a dirty laugh,
staring hard at parts of me. I delivered their tray of Pepsi,
my hands shaking so the glasses sang like bells;
not one of them took pity. Imran Khan sat
at the centre. He said something I did not understand
and some of them hooted, one snarled, their eyes
were hot monsters, some swearing softly,
gesturing at me. I met his eye for a long moment
and saw carefully manicured disgust
at the humiliation I was heaping upon myself
by being a young woman, by walking the floor
in my awful uniform, my flat, black lace-up shoes. Yes,
I was walking the floor: earning my own money, slowly
forming the dense quartz of my opinions, polished and patient.
Lisa Brockwell
The Pig
Who would write of a pig
and what would a pig know of Spirit?
Who would think that the soul of a pig,
as it leaves the pig’s body,
would create the slightest disturbance in air?
What would a pig know of agony?
What would a pig know of death?
The screaming of a pig
that shreds the air above a village
is no more than the sound
a heavy metal table makes
as it is dragged across stone.
The motionlessne
ss
of a mother in a sow stall
is no more than a pig at rest
the groaning
only the closing of a metal door
far off inside her.
David Brooks
Siren
We walk past the ruined past
pasted to the Academy’s cloister walls,
past broken Latin stones’ fractured inscriptions,
one fragment reading ‘OVE IS’,
and I know that though the sea is coming
and volcanoes are not finished with us,
crossing this garden in this courtyard in the evening
with a sentry in a box by the iron gate
watching black-masked fundamentalist
speeches on a laptop on his desk,
all seems to be falling into place
temporarily and beautifully.
You say goodbye, we say goodbye,
and we drift away down a hillside
past a bar where young people under awnings
drink and talk into the evening, seeming
to know how to live deep into this night,
how to make the harmless sounds of conversation.
We want to sit here too with them on the hillside,
a scooter waiting outside
and an unearthed monstrous stone foot or hand
propped artfully somewhere nearby.
The bluestone cobbles tire our feet as we go down
to a tram where more people out of the night
talk, drink, lean a cheek on the black window glass
of the swinging electric lozenge whose brakes hiss.
As a child I was impatient for night to come properly down,
as if doubt infected the universe as long as dusk lingered.
Doubt was the rope that tied hands behind backs.
Doubt was the door left half open.
Doubt would keep you from the confessional.
I dragged blankets over my head
and my body in soft napped cotton pyjamas
as night at last came down over me neatly.
I wanted it there, then I wanted it gone
when I opened my eyes.
Night, larger than any cathedral, larger than our suburb,
was the thing squatting over us more ancient than childhood,
always interested only in itself.
Tomorrow the sky will reveal a smog-grey streak
swiped across the distant mountains.
We will walk to the top of a nearby hill.
I will remember your legs over me in the night,
your shoulder against mine,
bodies we cannot untangle, their unreadable parts,
Gullivers to the ropes and threads of the night.
We will walk to the top of a nearby hill
and remember something
as the hill falls away below a low wall
all the way down to a river that rolls like a prisoner
in its narrow cell until its mouth spits out the broken
vowels and letters of the past in unheard howls to the sea.
This night in the Academy’s cloister
we passed a beautiful stone coffin,
the sliced off tops of columns,
a cocktail party under arches,
and we feel right, we are right,
we step out into the night
and drift down the hillside past a bar
where people sit in semi-dark talking
of the life they have or might have,
glancing up at us as we walk among them,
the night perfect, us perfect too.
The sea is moving, insistent
and volcanoes are considering
what sounds they might now make.
The enormous ruins are held down
and scraped back by bony hands.
The sirens we will hear tomorrow
from the park where we walk
will never cease, they will go round and round
sweeping up whatever they can in their path.
Kevin Brophy
Suspended Belief
‘What emerges from urban pixelation is the greyest of mysteries, furtive glance down an original sidestreet.’
(James Stuart, ‘Guangdong Sidewalk’)
(vision in a Guangzhou wet market)
Discontinuous schedule:
your skeuomorphic watch relics itself,
winds back nothing
weaponises everything.
Live chickens calling from cages
like a chorus in a tragedy.
Your great grandmother’s cleaver wiped clean
after cutting a neck in her apartment kitchen.
(curriculum vitae)
Banyan trees with limbs
crosshatching whole apartment blocks,
the sky’s sketched edges
rapidly darkening,
and a day already
performance reviewing itself,
with birds retrospectively true
just perching there in point form.
(spring meditation on Du Fu’s autumn meditation number eight)
Two immortal companions share a Mercedes
as evening approaches Shanghai.
And when their vehicle passes Yuyuan gardens
shadows float over rebuilt walls
causing vendors look up with concern.
Surely you sense these two even now, don’t you,
when the lights on Weihai road flicker?
Stay calm. Predict a surplus. Everything is gain.
(Deutero-systematic perception)
At a traffic crossing
in the French concession
a peripheral injunction arrives,
spirit-whispered like the oral law.
But you can only half-hear it
over the world’s constant notifications,
those angel-servants delivering winds
when trucks flash past.
(incarnate suburb)
The quarried stone body of the city
is not your body, for the paths
of Beijing’s citizens are beyond
tracing out. You remember
being younger, learning about China
from a returned church missionary,
copying his measured facts onto a piece of white
cardboard, reading the country back into yourself.
Lachlan Brown
Rooibos
the day goes by
all day it’s a bit later
than it should be
by late afternoon
there’s less than an hour
to wring
colour
from the backyard sky
~
crouching in to the internet
to counter
intensity,
lassitude does work
eventually
~
is it ok, in a deflated poem
to just keep everything
on the surface,
be abstruse?
for instance -
scraping a page of coal
into an imitation hybrid
like an open cut simile
the section
that could change everything
the way
some chance concatenation
can
plus there’s always
‘the things it’ll do
not to be a sonnet’
~
stumbling
on spongy wetpoured rubber
fig litter fake footpath
under the long limb of the tree
big fig on Ocean Street
a moment’s notice
passing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
institut
is it full of maxims?
sensor light tripped
Jupiter
slowly moving
towards Venus
as we turn
a space station
ascends between them
little Pluto’s due soon
close, not close enough to see
these things
seem what?
wondrous?
& the less wondrous stuff
rocket parts
collision fragments
defunct satellites debris crap
orbiting
a spaced out graveyard?
on earth an irregular line -
bulky polymer bins’
angles gleaming
the lane’s dark sentinels
in the convolvulus
a wet stick spider
protects its sac
of spiderlings
~
up early, quiet
at the stove
brewing rooibos
it’s spitting outside,
remember
‘devils’ tears’
sunlight’s shower of rain
by the freezing Spree
a post-wall anniversary
‘Happy Birthday Burger King’
was possibly
the last sentence
you ever said to me
there
near Lichtenberg,
on Frankfurter Allee
your style of joke
now
worn thin
~
making sure
the grill door’s slid to
& locked
driving southwest
in a borrowed car
ignoring
warning beeps
& the dashboard’s
little blinking light
buildings stuck
around
the airport tunnel exhaust stacks
blood & fur
squashed brushtail possum
on the M5
show me
a marsplu
a marsuple
a marsupial
no one likes
~
so,
what is
‘cool jazz’?
~
disconsolate today
it’s like
my hand is
planted
next to
the mexican marigold
& is going to grow there
~
a hyperactive sparrow
flits in for seed
~
can’t get up
imagine
tunnelling to java
~
like to keep
some mistakes in,
like a drip
in a monochrome painting
Pam Brown
bound
a small book with a varnished
wood cover bound with leather
flowers from the holy land inscribed
to my mother from a friend in the armed
forces bill, jerusalem 1941 flowers and
views of the holy land it says inside in three
languages hebrew english french each of twelve
The Best Australian Poems 2016 Page 3
