Believe nothing she says. She isn’t lying, you wouldn’t
call it lying, but it is an artful art. A kind of inveiglement.
The inconstant narrative of bewilderment. She shivers but
she’s not cold, she says. It’s winter and we are all cold.
It’s cold. But fold away the facts, put them in your pocket.
This is a labyrinth, with a broken thread. Feel about in the
muck, in the dark, for the two frayed ends and make a knot.
It might hold. Or it won’t. Beat fists against your forehead.
Confess. You yourself have been dissonant with grief. Why
you write this. Late at night, jangled, without recourse to
irony or impatience or display, at least insofar as that goes.
You yourself would have tried the patience of a saint. So
do anything for her except believe anything that she says.
Jennifer Compton
Fallen Myrtle Trunk
in the temperate forests, the wet
sclerophyll forests, where the wind
moans in yourm leaves, a storm beating
in muffled drums at the entrance
to the underworld, the lands
of Gondwana, motherland of Australia,
South America, the hundreds
of years creeping, the moss about youm creeping
the growling thunder, the black sou’-wester
—by youm all this recedes, falls
like wilting springs
aged into agelessness, less
than age, giant
fullness, monoforest
bulk
of years and slowness
hint of snake while touch crumbles
like chocolate flakes, vibration vanishes
in yourm tomb, tombing
yourm slumber rots, beachwards
a giant petrified in light
imperceptible scuttle scattered
deeply, cavern hymns at
cave hertz, yourm august
specific music, cylindrical fugue
of dark brown scales, closed soft pink
to reddish grain, edified with mountain
ash memory, guardian of closed passage
pillar of larger sky, of facts like clouds
their sky ways wending
youm known the songs of lonely places
the ways of wet and wind, youm moan
of fire, unless the flames come slowly
for yourm return to drowsy
droning, the intoning
of the wizard priests
the sough of the southern seas
youm’re the stage before the sea
the ground’s stage, for all sea-yearning
yourm limbed stances
form too slowly for change, beneath
such gestures the black flock shelters, shadowed
in yourm underside, that invisible realm
of canal venom and webbed vein
to the light youm present carpet bridge, seedling
lives held by yourm unfolding descent, dark-
plumed monarch, ebony laced
with wing, by the mountain rills
down to the parched saplings
on the shore of a receding lake
youm know too much
of that escarpment beyond, rest
pray, yourm beast prepares for return
while everything frizzes, shifts
brushed and squeeze, sway
youm remain sound-like,
a solid gradient an always
line, travelling
and unravelling through the same place
yourm skin mimics lake ripple
grooved rivulets criss-cross like thickened years
currents of stone into softer solid
edging damp, ripples merged with moss
the land’s dry, soft with moss
a surface of crawling speckleds, blood legs and
black bodies, orange-like
fruiting bodies protruding from
yourm furry, whaled bulk
moss colony, moss scape, the stick shade
of a seedling wobbles
on yourm chest flecked with sonnet, leaf voltas
their dark green, lost brilliance
then fresh reds, pinked to orange faded
ragged, triangled teeth
and fruits of three small
winged nuts, subtle flourish
of yellow-green catkins, now a mouthing
eddy where a bough broke off
airborne spores of wilt lulled by such knots
have settled on yourm wound
one branch, there, pleads help
by reaching, others
arch hardened spines around gravity’s slide
while youm host the epiphytes
while the termites elaborate
yourm runnelled intentions
while moss slowly fingers, surrounds
slowly devours these juts of twig
slowly devours its own ground
which youm perform patiently for it
Stuart Cooke
‘Fallen Myrtle Trunk’ contains echoes of the following poems:
‘Mountain Myrtle’, by Marie E. J. Pitt
‘Out of Sorts and Looking at Elms’, by Simon West
meadows empty of him, animal eyes, impersonal as glass
Aubades
to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell in the cold unworldliness of water.
—J.A. Baker
1.
There is the time before the knowing.
When I see the fox, and stop
my breath.
It is so light on the path –
there will be no pawprints in the hard
earth. Rain drifts
grainily in
the air, but I have felt nothing
on my skin for hours. It is the time, after
all, before the knowing,
which is not time, but the pausing of it.
It trots towards me, noses
the wet underbrush,
keeping to the edges
of the path, delicate as the breath not
taken, the unmoving
air, that must
have moved – since it starts,
and scents in me what I’ve not sensed,
the deepest predatory
wish; that I want only to pin it down, bury
my face in its winter fur.
Struck now:
my knowing of it will be the worst
of all deaths. It skips
sideways
from the path. I find
all foxes are gifts; afire, already skittering
away at your presence.
2.
Exactness of the inexact
light on Moelwyn Fach;
dusty red-gold of an old
fox.
3.
Every tale is a tale
of parting; the poet’s
wife saw through
the kitchen window
a fox fleeing the hunt,
and opened a door
to it. It cooled its paws
in the slate-floored dairy
then left as it had come,
returned to its earth,
tail stiff, a brush
with death.
4.
It pleased you most
to use the word unruly,
as you lifted my hair
again from you face,
and rose to make
the coffee.
5.
After the Welsh of Williams Parry
Then with no
haste, no
fright, it slipped
its russet hide
over the ridge.
It happened:
the disturbance
of a shoo
ting
star.
Shevaun Cooley
Five Threnodies for Maralinga: Part III
When they came to Juldil Kapi,
called Juldi, called Ooldea Soak,
the United Aborigines Mission,
in Jeeps and covered trucks
they looked like moon men.
Soldiers everywhere,
the older ladies recalled.
Guns. We all cry, cry, cryin’.
Time enough to pack a dilly bag
of clothes, a framed photograph,
a child’s favorite toy,
before the trucks rolled out,
leaving mission buildings to heat
and swallowing dunes.
And she, between soldiers,
on those hard troopie seats,
secretly fingers a stone
held deep in the pockets of her skirt—
nulu stone, she thinks, last fragment
of the meteor.
Its dust colors her skin.
A hundred kilometers to the south
departing helicopters drop leafets
written in English
warning Aboriginal people
to not walk north.
But here on the savannah,
groups of figures separate in spinifex.
And later, when sky pressed toward them
like a wall, they laid their bodies
over their children
and rose again coated in tar.
Soldiers found them sleeping
in the Marcoo bomb crater.
They gave them showers
and scrubbed their fingernails.
But in the months that followed
their women gave birth
to dead babies, to babies
without lungs, babies without eyes,
and their men speared kangaroos
they couldn’t cook
because they were yellow inside.
Judith Crispin
Reservoir
Sleeping in its brick tabernacle
the still water is like an ear or radar dish
attuned to distant pulse. Incurious,
we’ve walked forever to school and work
past locked gates. The saw tooth roof
gives nothing away but scission with sky
and though the key-hole draws the eye, the pupil
contracts. Inside, a herringbone of oak beams
and rafters hovers over the water’s weight
and repose. Beyond the inscrutable iron fence
the street’s steep uphill/downhill zeal;
urban windows; the domestic race
of breakfast, phones and life and birth and death.
Inside this null-and-void this leave-no-trace
the morning sun has picked the lock,
entering through a gable’s little porthole,
bending light with its oblique know-how.
Sarah Day
I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields
in the Atherton summer.
My nose was bleeding and there
was no one out, not for miles or months.
My father
had followed the lake boats to Eyre.
He used to tie Jitterbees
to Eagle Claws, and name the bait
after my mother. But
he never caught anything,
not for years, so he named the bait
after me instead.
The devil held my hair back
as I washed my face in the kitchen sink.
The air was sticky and I could taste
ozone in the back of my throat.
The other boys
had found scorch marks
in the western fields, and my hands
still smelled of burnt sugar.
The devil and I sat at opposite ends
of the tiny dining table and listened to the roaches
scuttle beneath the refrigerator.
I watched the devil take the east road,
hands in pockets, eyes on the stars.
His shadow
kept me company in the door
frame. One day’s walk to reach Cairns.
He had a sprawling gait
and I thought, perhaps next time,
we’d try dancing.
Shastra Deo
Barnacle
I cut myself on a four hundred
year old barnacle. It was my fault.
I strayed into its seaside territory
by mistake. The ocean ambushed
me in the beach’s narrowed alley.
Cursed in a language before blue.
Its wine-dark shoulder-charge
knocked me onto its cobblestoned
street; my hand parachuted open,
launching like a grappling hook, but
gravity hid behind my legs & pulled.
Its edge opened up my palm neat
as a pay envelope’s promise. It
was part of a razor gang after all,
its cutthroat mates flashed shivs too.
Hard to imagine their cave hideout,
a distant cousin to the Himalayas was
once a mass of lifeless sea creatures;
fishbones, bleached coral, mother
of pearl, shell, grit rasped into smooth
particles by the tide’s kinetic sawmill
& risen as mountainous tomb.
Darwin studied them. Rubbed his
stiff fingers over their stars, old as an
Elizabethan dirk. He knew an organism
that lived so long, must know something
about morphology, longevity. Measured
their jagged coastlines, counted bubbles
that escaped from their miniature craters
He cut himself too, proffering his own
blood for science’s spell. His revelation.
The simplest live longest, the complex
die sooner from too many moving parts.
Anyhow, my hand opened its red smile,
& rebirthed its salt back into the mother
country’s briny womb. My blood oozed
in hot waves, as the flap of skin undulated
like a polyp helpless in a strong undersea
current. This stigmata; blessed ultramarine
pain as though light itself filleted my flesh,
each beam a butcher’s knife. That was then.
The scar is bone white as the string of dead
coral & cuttlefish backbone left by a high tide.
My children’s children’s children will see it die.
B. R. Dionysius
The Throne
In crisis
I go to the local library
and do not take out
the book I find,
this one or that one first,
what matter?
Outside beside my car
sits a strange chrome and vinyl seat,
part of a vanity set,
stranded, hieratic, ruined,
like the beautiful straight-backed
low seated chair-people
of Saint Martin d’Ardèche.
I do the visual maths.
Will it fit behind?
—no, there, rightfully, is the seat for our grandson—
I consign its odd allure to my phone’s photo bank instead.
I sit on it only once,
open its cream frayed seat
with its tooled insignia of promise
—nothing—
What does it mean
for home to be a failure?
What does it mean
for other places to be a failure?
I leave the throne to its own
mise en scène, neither
desolate nor replete
were I to claim it.
There is, after all, no mirror
in front of which to place it
though I fix my hair and do my lips
&nb
sp; before I reverse away.
Lucy Dougan
Six Afterimages
Peter Lanyon
those quadrilaterals,
hedges, a landing strip
seen through cross-hairs
that line, a strut or cliff edge
a sudden dip or buffet
a broad slash of blue
landscape, suggested once by a Claude glass
might be just this… this… this,
like ornithology: ‘for the birds’
Frank Auerbach
down Primrose Hill
two lights, feeble in middle ground,
hemmed in by shrubbery
orange visibility vests on a lime coloured oval
a street wet behind glass
pedestrians lit by the glow of phones
the open cigarette packet on the pub table
is a strategy, pencil backwards
on the interlocutor’s ear
dusty window panes
haloed by sunlight
bright squares on a bar floor
Alexander Calder
ballet shoes point upward
a slight figure, lifted
by a thickset one
the weight of both
an absence, suggested
by continuous line
so the testes become a leg
an elbow becomes a signature
the space enclosed
animate;
across the aisle
Josephine Baker
dances, her shadow
lifeless on the wall
Gustave Courbet
The cliffs of Ornans appear
as they do through the gallery window,
the local characters enlarged, a bourgeois presumption
to be bigger than Napoleon (a short man),
to inhabit a large canvas, as though
worthy of the academy.
What made him present himself, greeted on the road
by another figure (engaged perhaps
in mere commerce?) offer instead of an epithet
a commonplace?
Jacopo Bassano
Light breaks (or fades) over a distant mountain
but the figures in the foreground are too intent
to notice, animals martialled up a ramp in pairs,
eggs collected in a basket. The humans
bundle possessions, sort copper pans, have
no time to view even the rising water.
To the left a monkey holds what looks like
a sceptre – has all sense deserted these people
alive in the cramped space of a jigsaw? All questions
seem to have an answer in this world
but where is the cat’s companion?
Basil King
The face could be
lunar, its craters
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 4
