The Best Australian Poems 2017 Read online

  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