The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 2

  Their temper a red-fleck twitching in an eye

  While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number

  Robert Adamson

  cobalt

  Co–nclusion: following find in 1982 by local sponge diver

  Mehmed Çakir & 11 campaigns {over 22 000 descends} the

  Uluburun drowned in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of

  the 14th century BC {see golden scarab inscribed ‘Nefertiti’} &

  amongst other treasures of this Late Bronze Age trove a

  single ingot of pure blue glass proving such perfectness lasts

  from Persia & Pompeii to Tang & Ming to the Congo

  & Zambia belt you are my plenary blue at rest upon

  fingers tables of kings you make love with eyes make

  cats made of stone stare back this is when I love you

  best one stable isotope 11 meta states a church where

  the Virgin locks out shock & we’re safe but sometimes

  the door divorces its hinge & Kobold the Goblin gets

  a foot in o wobbly-wobbly-precarious-psyche stories

  packed with dirty bomb endings everything starts to

  turn black sometimes you weep way down within &

  your tears fall silent like gamma ray ash your grief can

  wipe out the world sometimes you wail like a doomsday

  device emit a steady sad-sad pulse but you always mend

  & you always return & you always remind no matter how

  hurt that “Mutual Assured Destruction” spells the word/

  world mad

  Jordie Albiston

  Gypsy

  You come from a family of boys. I come from no family at all. My great-grandmother was born with holes in her earlobes. Romany. Gypsy. A caravan child. I remember my childhood of Russian Caravan Tea, all lapsang souchong-y. You think Gypsy means Gypsy Rose Lee and regale me with stories of her speaking at Union Meetings. I wait for the striptease. We run away to Coney Island. I thought it would be all yellow neon ice-cream cones before we take the D train to Brooklyn. But my dreams short circuit. There is no Copacabana or Tropicana. No birthday cakes like the ones I dreamt about in the Women’s Weekly cookbook. Coney Island is Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs not Rapunzel’s tower made of inverted cones covered in cream. You take me to the boardwalk but never under it. I take you to the sideshow where the bearded lady reads your tea leaves and points out the long plait curling itself around the rim of your cup.

  Cassandra Atherton

  Reunion Song

  Every time she saw herself in the mirror, I remember, she pushed her chin forwards so as to stretch the skin of her neck. The crushed tram ticket in her throat produced the crumpled husky sound itself. She had seen a throat specialist at one point and I told her a long anecdote about my trip to NY, which fanned out from the phrase ‘detective work’ which I used to describe my absorption in research. I sat there, in the library, for 9 hours a day, a short lunch in the brisk sub-zero sun, and spoke to her of the blizzard and its pattern on the east coast. A doctor pointed the sharp beak of curlew at her neck which twitched like a nerve as she sang: it’s nearly 10! We had had another wine and met outside the pain – 7 years. Most of the local bars were closed and the cellar was closed to the public given a whisky festival. I stirred honey into the corner of my mouth and went to itch my own brain through a hole in the back of my skull obscured by a flap of thick hair. The texture of a soccer ball retrieved from a swamp, my mind. Colour of cross trainers, lycra. She’d been an avid runner. It’s harder to communicate the evening without thinking about breakup (ours) and death (her mother’s) but we used those words. The light was very low.

  Luke Beesley

  Flying Foxes, Wingham Brush

  For Deborah Bird Rose

  Some of the bats are elbowing their way

  along the branches, a collection of broken

  business umbrellas. Some hang like charred

  pods, or look like furry oriental fruit

  wrapped in silk sashes. Others are handling

  the stretch of their black elastomer wings

  as carefully as women checking for snags

  in their stockings, ready to step out for the night.

  But the smell of the place—decades

  of urine, faeces, birth fluids, rotting body

  parts and figs, putrid as a munitions factory

  with its cloying nitrates, its biting ammonia.

  At dusk when the bats take off, the sky

  becomes a long sheet of gothic lettering—

  some won’t return, they’ll swing by their

  feet on highwires, doomed stuntmen

  still in their leathers. Newly-orphaned bats,

  grief-stricken, will roost on Hills hoists,

  snuggle against the lingerie and socks,

  the sharp metal squeaks sounding like calls

  from their mothers. Some believe bats

  are demons’ hand puppets, the souls of

  unburied infants, death-messengers nibbling

  at the edges of our dreams, but I love to listen

  to them sending out their clicks and squeaks,

  flying under the moon, the crystal brew

  of stars; how after sweeping upwards, they’ll

  backtrack to parks, yards, hearing all the angles

  and contours in our gardens, soliloquising

  their way through tunnels and labyrinths,

  weighing their love of nectar with the love

  of night-flight—scent-resonators

  of the season. Now high in these branches

  they’re as chatty as children fuelled by

  afternoon sugars. They hug themselves lightly,

  closely, the way tree-lovers hug wood.

  Judith Beveridge

  The Grey Parrot

  After the painting The Grey Parrot by Walter Deverell, National Gallery of Victoria

  The far city must make itself known

  even here in the sitting room and

  barred by winter branches. The skyline

  with its towers square as pillars

  built of blocks could be here

  as much as then and there and is

  in any case beyond hearing.

  Long withdrawn from the city

  that oversees life to a home

  where rapt stillness is a cultivated

  guest and the ghost of light

  leavens the chores of daily bread,

  she would come to lend her features

  to ideas she understood

  could be treated most faithfully

  in art that generates no

  propulsion other than

  this same descent into pleasure

  gently shared between minds

  – those branched apart by

  evolution, or merely space and time

  Judith Bishop

  Time is a river, time is a bridge

  Time is a river that passes through you, crossing and recrossing, rippling score of silence under the bridges of your life, and you wonder if it can be the same river or the same person twice, the amber glide of the Arno, the spring light polished in memory, a long scroll of plainsong flowing out of some deep medieval past, and I am back here in middle age, mid-river, the Ponte Vecchio downstream a golden span, a bridge crossed a lifetime ago, sniffing out echoes of that early spring morning when our steps rang out softly on the stone streets on the other side of the river, our first morning in this city that seems to go in search of itself, piazza by piazza, church by church. In the hostel kitchen Ansgar had said, “That is why I come back every year, the beautiful stone alleys and hidden gardens.” Each spring he made his way here from Skagen, after his wife’s death. His words came slow, the Nordic accent laden, as though they were slow steps in heavy snow. After breakfast he led us, shuffling in leather loafers worn as his face, through quiet streets of shuttered windows and arched doors, the stone alleys that gave nothing away, the April
light shifting with each turn, brightening the top of the buildings, parleying with the counterpointing shade, foreshortening and then lengthening perspective. Ansgar moved so slow it was as if he wanted us to read the unwritten history of the city, the journal our steps traced on the rivers of worn stone. The old man’s drooping mouth curled in a child’s smile as he ushered us through a gate. To a pause in time. And we sat at the fountain in the cloistered garden, ringed by arched galleries of a convent. Ansgar held out a brown paper bag, the tremor in his hands at breakfast gone, his fingers gnarled, skin thickened from a life trade in carpentry. The cherries sparkled in the chant of light and water, and we ate without a word, on our foreign tongue the dark crimson flesh turning into sweet wine. And the pale blue light in Ansgar’s eyes answered the chords of the Florentine sun, the peace settling on his face like Victor Sjöström’s in Wild Strawberries, the peace that had travelled a long way from home, from the pine forests in the deep north, the hidden fjords of Ansgar’s life, from the past, from its glide into the future, travelling through the seasons to hold this gate in time open.

  ***

  Time is a bridge you cross and recross, the river’s song unchanged in memory’s burnish and in your mind’s reliquary this frayed image of the naked Christ, the pale sheen of its slender carved body suspended in space, calling from the sacristy of lost time, that spring morning when Ansgar led us to the plain Romanesque façade of the Santo Spirito. In the nave we stood, still in the hull of a submarine ark, and felt the press of silence, emptiness contained, and then the distant hum, long deep waves of soundings, till like struck bells, we heard it ring on and on within us, calling us to step across the threshold, through the door in the aisle to the sacristy, the life-size crucifix bathed in the floating panes of light from the apse windows, hung by a thick wire rope. Naked Christ, not even a crown of thorns or a modest loincloth, his long slender arms held up as if in flight, the right foot nailed on top of the other foot, so the knee and hip are canted to the left, in counterpoint to the right tilt of the downcast head, its finely chiselled hippie face and eyes closed in the perfection of death. No hint of resurrection, this quiet death coming to life under the sculpting knife, unpeeled to the mortal light. Such perfection learned from anatomising corpses from the basilica hospital when Michelangelo found refuge here at seventeen. You wonder about the young man he picked to be this serene Christ, the body still garbed in its mortal dress of joy or pain, coiled in pain or taut in lust, not this loose-limbed pinioned repose. We bowed before its beauty, then bought postcards from the basilica shop. For years the dead face was taped to the wall above my study desk, till it vanished in the move to another country, another life from yours. And each Florentine spring Ansgar sent a postcard to you, then silence. Time is a river you recross, ford to the place you have been before, the past coming alive on the other shore. Memory’s guesswork, crossing another bridge, from the Duomo side, my feet feeling these streets without a map, as Ansgar’s did, trusting memory’s route, drifting past the open market, the morning light now warming the tree-lined piazza and the face of the Santo Spirito, streaming through the high windows to find us standing in the sacristy, dipped in the font of silence, as if in the vault of held prayer, before the hanging, waiting body.

  Kim Cheng Boey

  Reach & Ambition

  For John Jenkins

  I Reach & Ambition

  Late at night, up, looking at

  the things on my mantelpiece

  a profusion of crap, clutter & gewgaws

  a range of detail I love (John’s photos of it

  came today, reminding me). I look at the pictures

  blu-tacked there, above—postcards of paintings

  1900 to 1920s mostly

  but some Manet, some Fragonard, a Boucher

  Michael Fitzjames, a Chardin—a piece of paper,

  yellowed, proclaiming “Honeymooners star

  Meadows dies” (with a picture of Art

  Carney, Gleason, & Meadows), a picture

  of James Brown being ‘assisted’

  to his feet

  by a Famous Flame, a large photocopy picture

  of Pam, 32 or 3 . . . Anyway, the Manet—

  two white camellias glowing

  against a black ground—makes me think

  Look at things! & on that basis

  I think I will search out

  the book of Manet’s flower-pieces

  & then, depending what that does to my brain,

  re-read the Tranter poem I find,

  placed in the back of this book. ‘Loxodrome’.

  And maybe I will

  II Gone

  Left of the mantelpiece,

  beneath the Chardin (a small, be-suited,

  silver-haired boy—regarding a spinning top

  on the table before him), four

  tiny spots,

  of blu-tack,

  form a rectangle

  where a stamp should be—a patch of torn envelope

  & the postal stamp that was on it. Gone. John’s photos,

  tho, reveal it to have featured a dalek.

  U.K. recognition for Dr Who. I am relieved.

  For months now I have been aware

  of the missing stamp, & had looked about for it,

  thinking it showed a Chance Vought

  Corsair, a fighter aeroplane of WWII

  that I had liked. (‘Liked’.) I had been a fan of the plane

  in my teens—& surprised to receive its image

  as an adult forty years later stuck on an envelope,

  & looking so American, mid-century & ‘of its era’.

  I don’t know who had sent it to me

  tho there are only a few candidates.

  But now I see it is only a dalek—was only a dalek—

  & I care nothing for Dr Who. The fighter plane

  will show up one day, within a book of poems,

  marking a spot to return to—in O’Hara or

  Towle or Berrigan, Padgett or Mathews—

  & I will be surprised & admire it for a second

  III (Further)

  Further right—

  beyond a photo, from the outside,

  of the front of the house at Westbury Street,

  where I lived nine years—a photo

  Mary gave me, the house white, window-sill

  & door pale blue, maybe the fancy iron lacework

  at the eave below the guttering blue too

  the whole framed by the green leaves of a tree,

  the wood of the tree an angled dark accent

  at the right . . . Anyway, near it

  are some designs of mine, screenprinted

  or water-coloured, & some pictures, with figures

  (it occurs to me now)

  grouped in threes.

  One, rather Pop, shows a mother & father

  clean-cut, at a restaurant, flanking their son—

  the cartoon ‘Burt’ from The Muppets who looks

  straight at us, while Mom & Dad look right,

  alert to . . . a nightclub act? a waiter?—

  something outside the picture. Of course

  Burt looks bizarre. Above, women clean up the Reichstag

  after WWII—three women, it appears—in fact

  three pairs of women—bend, mopping or shovelling

  at rubble, dark figures, shapeless,

  dwarfed by the immensely tall

  pale Greek columns of the ruined building.

  Beside Burt & his parents, a photo from late 19th Century:

  “The Match-girls’ strike: their pay was docked

  to erect a statue of Mr Gladstone” says the caption.

  High-waisted skirts & tight, formal blouses,

  all with hats—their best clothes—one looks pretty

  & all look aggrieved & sure of their cause—

  then a Braque or Picasso abstract—smudged,

  glowing grey, & brown, & white, of a kind called (once?)
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br />   hermetic

  IV ‘Loxodrome’

  John’s poem, John Tranter’s poem, ‘Loxodrome’, I was

  about to call it ‘Lucasade’, is great.

  On first reading I was conscious

  mostly of its easily maintained urbanity

  & its complexity, charting a move

  from North to Southern hemisphere—

  in a corkscrew motion?—via visits to certain

  ‘places’—New York, Paris, Australia—

  & poetic spaces—Baudelaire, Ashbery-&-O’Hara,

  Forbes—& to poetry readings & events, & then

  his response. It includes two pieces of

  information I recall giving John, knowing they

  were his kind of thing—about Freud

  & Arthur Hugh Clough. Now I read the poem

  closely for the sense & grammar

  of the construction. Good to have that clear.

  In the poem John imagines me

  spying on him thru the fence—as

  he cleans the pool, pointing out

  annoyingly, a leaf he has missed?

  Then John Forbes, in JT’s dream,

  notes an error in one of his poems.

  In fact, I see a change that could be usefully made

  myself, tho not necessary & I doubt

  I’d point it out. “(R)ecalls, for us, a tireless

  mechanical rocking horse / galloping evenly

  over the heather, the rhythm / soothing

  & slightly narcotic.” Would that be better?

  Maybe not much. Maybe not at all.

  V The things JJ liked

  The things that John must’ve liked—

  (tho he liked it all, the confusion)—

  at one end of the mantelpiece a small yellow

  monoplane, high-winged, its propeller & wheels

  of a like yellow—an infant’s toy—one wheel

  a little broken. It sits, like everything, wedged in,

  between jars & dishes (of paper clips, pencils), pencil sharpeners (one

  —one of these—in the shape of a nose), small bottles I must have liked

  —for their shape & colour—two ‘metal’ milkshake holders

  cast actually in ceramic, one with a bunch of pigs-bristle

  paint-brushes rising out of it, like flowers from a vase.

  The second one (both are mauve) has a small flyer