Every morning light gathered us in avenues; each evening we swam in yellowed glass. Summer pressed us down like someone fixing a stamp. Regularly we bathed in the dirty sea near the harbour mouth. We knew love like twitchings of light at the end of bed frames. We gathered being like those fisherman netting fat, glistening prawns. The city steamed and glowed, summer stretching out like a body on a bed. In the morning we saw ourselves as a photographer might see us. On evenings we were pale fish swimming and turning.
3.
Roots spilled on dark sand like wild calligraphies. We climbed, slid back, clambered again, grasped the long tendrils. You held on to my ankle and hauled yourself up my leg. Our backs held down sand even as wind gathered it. We scrabbled forwards and upwards, finally within reach of high ground. A pathway and cottage, a broken window allowing us in. Two stones on a bench and a smashed porcelain statue. On the cottage’s other side, a cliff face and cleft sandstone. A painted gathering of sheep. We stood above fluctuations among fingers of sun and irascible air.
Paul Hetherington
Mister Lincoln or Camp David
i.m. Fay Zwicky
Cormorants at dusk fly in
Under the life-boat shed at the pier’s end.
Each arrives at their end
Of a day’s fishing, their beaks
Suddenly open, panicky, necks back
As they gain timber and shadow.
For a second I think
They are choking on air
That they might not get to
Folding their wings peacefully for the night
That they might need more medication
Or somesuch.
Ringing off, I can still hear your voice.
I keep wanting to ring you back.
God knows what we might have chosen
To talk about: the Self and its vicissitudes
I suppose, the poems that confined us
The Crazy Janes that would not.
In this garden, there’s a dark red rose
On a tall straight stem. A blunt man would
Just pick it for his friend: and how we cursed
The curse of bluntness. Some of its petals
Are edged with black, from frostbite.
I can tell you now it’s either called
Mister Lincoln or Camp David.
But you would know that.
The Camp David is thorny.
Each day, when I take my pick of whatever
I can hear your throaty voice
The old smoke still roiling in it.
Barry Hill
Song not for you
After ‘Das Lied des Zwerges’ (‘The Song of the Dwarf’), Rainer Maria Rilke
Crooked blood, stunted hands, cripple,
out of place – uncanny how small
thoughts can be, while I’m incomparable,
only a dwarf because the so-called average
person is taller. You ought
to just walk on by, but don’t. Ever thought
how inflated you must look from this
height? When I walk or shop, I’m inspiring,
it seems. Fantastic to see you getting
out, you say, imagining waking
up in my body, the courage
you’d need not to kill yourself, stat.
How do you live with that?
That’s me wondering back,
distractedly eating (wow!) a sandwich.
In my home, I’ve made it so I come
face to face with the cupboards and oven, belonging
as we all want it. I sleep in my bed (sometimes
alone). At work, my cubicle’s longer
and wider than yours. True,
this isn’t much of a song –
but then it never was meant for you.
Andy Jackson
Head Wound
The carcinoma left a bullet hole
High on my forehead. It looked like a tap
By a pro hit-man. In fact the killer’s role
Was played not by a pistol-toting chap
But by a pretty female whose light touch
Sliced out the blob and pieced a flap of skin
Into the gap. It didn’t hurt that much.
When finally the pit was all filled in
A pink yarmulke of Elastoplast
Topped off the job. The whole thing happened fast.
The wound, alas, healed slowly, but the heap
Of duct-tape mercifully was replaced
By one neat bandage, though I had to keep
Changing it each second day. I faced
At least three weeks of wearing this square patch
And there were interviews for my new book
Demanding to be done. A tale to match
My rather daring James Bond sort of look
Seemed called for, so I mentioned MI5,
A mild gun battle. I got out alive.
No sooner did the first show go to air,
A dear old lady stopped me in the street
And said I really ought to take more care
In gun fights. I thought her a shambling dunce
But only for a moment. All the fault
Had been mine, for expecting that my smirk
Would flag the gag. Alas, there is a rule:
The straight-faced joke that might work on the page
Is death on TV. I should act my age.
Clive James
Barns in Charlevoix
I like the barns, their air of constancy,
their un-renovated geometry, their wooden deshabille,
that they have high hipped roofs — and windows
set without regard to symmetry — that they are unpainted,
the wood grey or brown with age, with parts that lean in
or out, that some are abandoned but endure, that one
imagines the light inside — diffuse and murky
or the doors opening wide and a sudden shaft
of afternoon pouring like honey into dark tea
and the scent of hay and sweet apples on a high
shelf – the horse and cow smells fading,
old leather bridles, iron parts of farm machines,
sump oil, the ammonia of mice,
rough hessian sacks of chaff and bags
of chicken feed, that time here re-collects itself —
sleeps like Keat’s Autumn on the bales — and
does not wake but dreams of waisted frocks,
wide hips, foals, fiddles, harvest suppers.
Carol Jenkins
Greenfield development
The white farmer takes a piece of flat earth to market.
She is no flat earther.
But the land’s overcropped, and she’s sotto voce with the throb
of four generations’ profit and loss. Skin cancers profit her brow,
hands, arms and legs; four sons field the catch in her voice,
fence her in so she sells quickly. Her nib bleeds out over the contract,
fine cursive streams going nowhere. Hawkish, a pair of cufflinks
and a pair of wide agate eyes, watch. Fast settlements confuse
attachment, history. Wadawurrung. Wadawurrung.
When did her boys begin to look like undertakers? She reaches
for her comb, hands it to her middle-aged youngest, his Adam’s apple
a jitterbug combine. He wants the deal more than any of them,
is neat enough (most days) to shake hands with a city future.
Outside, the horizon squints, elongates in the heat.
The blistered ute bonnet, parked beside the agent’s new car,
rebukes; yet her father’s cataract stare once frightened bailiffs.
After the signing, the phone’s off for days. When she sees
her best fields carved up, pink allotment flags blowing in the wind,
she thinks it’s some new kind of sow stall.
Then lifestyle’s cropless verbs appear as billboard sig
ns.
O bury me under the latte lake, she thinks, looking out
her kitchen window, from a past of minute hands,
good black earth and sponges sunk in the middle.
Next day, billboards truck to the lee of the sales office,
marooned in dirt.
Old ewes with pinprick eyes nudge carpeted heads in puzzlement,
gather by strange rectangles of shade. New-poured slabs,
white as snow, cramp thin soil, portals to nowhere.
She holds her mug tight, holds and breaks,
all the lambing woolly beauty of memory.
A. Frances Johnson
Murray andante
The night fills with Bach
with the clear cold
a gas fire doesn’t touch
outside rattle of a skateboard
not gelling with the violin
skateboard guy, I’ve seen him before
rolls back towards Gilbert Street
the slow movement begins
it’s not quite a baroque town
the grids almost classical
but the Bach andante claims it
now the outside softens
again giving access somehow
to measure, of steady streets
lack of blue shadow and a
width of days along with my
steady lostness in a bowl
of clarity, while above my eyes
the green and grey hills
need to stretch my thought
and rain suddenly hits the roof
then stops, quick, all this water
that doesn’t go to rivers
that doesn’t cease the drought
nor bring me back to
a mind that accompanied me
once through funky allegros
and andantes and other
more humid songs
unlike the passing of trams at
Pirie Street, as lawyers progress
to sandstone courts where
cameras linger, sensations of the local
a city’s petty crimes
well, that’s cross continental
like the sad river, as even
the blind hours remind me
killed state by state, classical neglect
not even this rain nor
this music allays.
Jill Jones
Almost Pause/ Pareidolia
Narcotics cannot still the tooth
that nibbles at the soul.
—Emily Dickinson
Labile wonder, no rabbit-like fear, sea hares
filling the tide pools with their magenta ink are
flamenco dancers as much as mermaids were
dugongs. All those sailors mistaking the docile
monogamists for sirens. How often we graze
our hulls on rocks of clear vision. Still, we have
to see it with our own eyes, their turning tricks
their light desires, billowing in the space between
landforms, soft folds shape. Forest cockatoos
have entered the city. Baroque ripples in their
wingtips indicating stress. Married to what
we intuit as signatures, this persistent cleavage
A sickle shaped leaf at the base of one remnant tuart
Slow chanted count of the mopoke above our heads
While in camp fire ash, the roughly laid out matrice
of squares on a turtle’s back speaks of net. Here a man
quadriplegic, has been taught by his mother to make
a sign of the cross with his tongue. Number
the things played out in the mouth. Language hesitates
to enter the concealed strand of vertebrae beneath
a dark lick of scales, uncoiling across blackened remains
of balga, racing as snake into our shared vision. Our
hands extensors and abductors gripping themselves
riven in resistance, the words ‘beyond regeneration’
heard again in a stand of sheoaks. We can follow
the blood red trail of uneaten zamia nuts out
of scalded wetlands. Mining mountains no longer
unmoved, even this verse cannibalizes itself
remembering the feast to come. Like, when I
use the word ‘eternity’, when what I mean to say, is ‘water’.
Amanda Joy
To Paint the Inside of a Church
After Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev
Beneath the glamour of the pipe organ
there are bellows. Underneath the church
of the Grand Prince there’s the dour
obligation of immortality
as if it were the family business,
and preparation for an abiding name
exists like Latin classes.
Andrei is trying so hard
not to make a mark or a sound
but cannot help it—something unattached
to ego drives on this faith painting,
though the body that germinates
belief still throws such shade
he feels impelled to the crossroads
of yellow flowers buzzing
so full of bees that if this scene were shaken
upside down it would not be pollen
that trickles out but legs and wings.
Beneath the pipe organ’s glamour
there is a pit that breathes
and every tone must be mixed precisely.
Imagine the months and years
of painting the inside of a church
while others have their tongues cut out.
To paint the inside of a Russian church
dome in the fifteenth century
is to be the very sound of a bell.
*
A fire once started can take care of itself—
all it knows is eat.
It can clear a field so nicely.
This can be good or bad for us.
No rules call and there is no dialogue
with the conscience,
only giving things to fire and
allowing the instinctive eat.
Andrei did not approve of how the pagan
woman loved but I think she won.
To live inside a church
whose walls you paint
is to live a life of scaffolds.
His shroud is a bell.
His cloak is a bell,
feet bells and all the violence
he sees is a tonal gradation
towards the most splendid red—
one forever repeated blow
and its resonance.
Carmen Leigh Keates
On Loss
I
And when I go there now
sometimes at night
the old familiar paths
deserted, and the trees
just stirring in the sky,
I call your name.
The agapanthus are in bloom
death flowers, and the
peach tree looks small
and ordinary now,
but then, that morning
it shimmered in the light
a dream of whiteness
alive and unashamed.
II
So many seasons now
life goes on
unchallenged
unaware of us.
This cut, this total
final cut
like a dead weight
that presses down.
Death needs no one
comes wrapped
in self-sufficiency.
Do you hear?
You all who strive
for self-sufficiency
this is the way.
Antigone Kefala
A New Norcia Subset
The Benedictine community at New Norcia inflicted sexual abuse on school students on an almost unprecedented scale in Australia during the twentieth century. Further, given
New Norcia’s control, displacement and exploitation of Aboriginal children and people, everything we write about the place has to be viewed in this context. The poem itself cannot exist alone, cannot exist outside this context. This is no longer the grubby secret of the Catholic Church, but public knowledge. No poem can be a celebration.
1. False Starts
Where the great flooded-gum fell or was felled
close to the East Moore River a count of growth-rings
shows almost four-hundred years with guesswork
filling the hollow with logic. And those false starts
where the chainsaw bit and didn’t talk, rejected
by a harder layer of time where firebark annealed
against the sawteeth, the vicious chatter, and retreated
then went deeper again to find another rebarbative
layer of history decades ago where something surfaced
in its locale in its heartland, the very essence of its
tree-being its witness of prayers circumferencing
as exoskeleton the language of country reaching
out of its skin to resist and say, We are still omnipresent!
these bites just up from the full cut the absolute
severing from its massive fallen body in segments
alongside a deadend road. This is where we start
and finish, near the blossom-zone of curving grey
honeyeater beaks spiking late-winter nectar making
the seasons name in their system every time they
spark and then chase each other toward progeny,
their sanctifications, their decisive moves
towards a start that will have no end.
2. Cactus Islands in Moore River
Beyond the forbidden sign (heavy machinery)
where the bridge overs a rapid of a bloated Moore River,
an island either side of the melaleuca-sucking flow—
scum and froth and purity all at once, the grassed
channels conduits for herbicide-orange and malfeasance
of riparian agriculture clotting at the islands’ sharp
points and the giant cactuses metastasising the arterial,
the fleshy land. Can we support this image of damage
without it collapsing into metaphor of xenophobia
or can we go back to the dispossessed and claim
on their behalf or are both pictures in a dialogue
through which we might make some sense? Or words
fail when the river flows and when it dries and pools
fester with lunulae of algae and choked microfauna?
I would wonder this and write it differently,
but the mess of thought is pinned to the picture
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 7
