The Best Australian Poems 2017

by Sarah Holland-Batt

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