The Best Australian Poems 2016 Read online

  that impales your jaw;

  your profile is not equine,

  more Border Leicester.

  Someone also drilled three holes

  at your rear and four

  at the back of your head

  inserting and gluing

  the cut frayed rope.

  But your crimped tail

  and mane were tufts of stubble

  like nibbled wallaby grass

  when you first came our way.

  Your broom legs are so straight,

  slender as a racehorse’s.

  I forgot to say

  that there is some pathos

  about your routered mouth

  and its odd slope of forbearance.

  Your broom neck leans forward

  towards the future.

  I suspect you never boasted

  a coat of paint; nowadays

  you are so weathered you

  might be made of driftwood –

  a horse of the sea.

  Your balance is exact,

  the elipse of each crude arc

  rocker knows to baulk

  just before the tipping point.

  Earless, eyeless yet not blind,

  bereft of mane and tail

  you are steadfast, gazing

  through that vacancy

  to east and west,

  seeing not, in your long life,

  that children grow old,

  but how, from each tide,

  rolls the continuum of each wave.

  Sarah Day

  Following the many elbows of the Yarra

  Following the many elbows of the Yarra.

  Taking the racing line.

  Retracing the route to the Toorak school that

  did not teach, but bequeathed a tie.

  Perhaps, I was blinded

  by the nostalgia of a life half lived,

  perhaps, and did not see

  the vixen spirit herself across the road

  just in time to feel the bite of my tyres.

  There was no time to brake.

  My foot was half on,

  half off, the accelerator

  when I felt the shock of her through

  my steering wheel, heard her cry.

  I could have kept driving into the night—

  the road was dead, the streets asleep—

  but could not forget that time when,

  coming down Brown Mountain in a Toyota,

  I killed a goanna and kept going,

  lacked the decency

  to drag her carcass off the road,

  and how I carried that sin

  in my glove compartment still.

  I stopped. Stepped out into the early morning,

  the air cold enough to turn breathe to steam,

  and stood by the taillights of my old 318,

  watched the fox lie in the glare of a street light,

  half a world away from her natural home,

  and felt something close to pity.

  Waited until a fleeting shadow

  —at first an eclipse—

  grew smaller, darker, then manifested

  as a wedge-tailed eagle that landed

  on the double-white line without a sound,

  wing tips sweeping the leaves

  from the blue-black road.

  The eagle was telling me

  she was watching me

  watch the fox.

  So, now I knew I had no choice.

  I had to act. I left my car behind,

  purring its soft red cloud of carcinogens,

  and heard my boots strike the bitumen

  as I drew close enough to see my animus

  reflected in her animal eye.

  The vixen was breathing

  —more like panting—

  and unable to move more than her head.

  Without thinking, I reached down

  to touch her burnt orange fur,

  but she had seen enough of my kind

  on her backyard travels

  and, throwing her head up, caught

  my thumb in the trap of her razor teeth.

  What happened next surprised us all.

  Without speaking,

  I took off my old school tie

  to bind my bleeding hand,

  walked back to the car,

  popped the boot and came

  back to the fox with the wheel jack

  swinging low from my good hand,

  then let that hand rise and fall

  beneath the shadow of the street light,

  and listened to the sound

  of steel splintering bone

  while the eagle lifted herself from the road

  to seek solace in the sky.

  Joel Deane

  The Silence of Siskins

  For my grandfather

  He circles my arrival

  on the calendar.

  It is late November

  and it doesn’t snow.

  A wooden pallet

  hardens his bed.

  He dreams of grandmother.

  He doesn’t want new dreams.

  Two siskins in cages —

  their song frozen like the air

  that other November

  when she lost her heart

  cleaning and baking

  for those who might arrive.

  Above the fireplace a few flies

  are nervous company.

  ‘Not easy on earth,’ he says,

  ‘not easy below.’

  Jelena Dinic

  untitled: villaknelle xvi

  I think it’s awfully dangerous to give general advice

  to those dying of drink or shipwreck, suicide, one thing or another

  once you know how to observe them, it’s wise

  not to try to form people in your own image: fancy old

  fashioned boom boom, cloak-and-dagger Georgian scenes, I think

  it’s awfully dangerous to give general advice

  as one gets older one cannot distinguish genius

  among new, younger men (‘purchase woollen underwear because of the damp stone’)

  once you know how to observe them, it’s wise to

  visit the dead in their triangular sitting rooms

  wives typing forgotten names that no longer exist

  I think it’s awfully dangerous to give general advice

  to revolutionaries weeping over a cat that’s gone wrong

  a force without it’s limitations, once

  you know how to observe them, it’s wise to violate

  the laughing sources, common as speech, essential and permanent

  and gloomy indeed, I think

  it’s awfully dangerous to give general advice

  once you know how to observe them, it’s wise to

  violate rules

  Paris Review, Spring-Summer 1959, #21 (T.S. Eliot)

  Dan Disney

  Right Through Me

  Little mortal,

  afraid of all the sounds that

  see into my body, afraid

  of the techo’s patient gaze

  at the big screen where

  Mr Muerto might be playing.

  When they pin me to the plasma

  the bony bit of me in tiny

  with one perfect stone, is it,

  or knot from some ancient accident?

  Can you remember any trauma?

  they ask, and I want to say

  childhood falls from trees,

  delirious, just because you could,

  and being pulled roughly back

  from dreaming on the Capri funicular.

  But I just shrug

  and feel the rightness

  of withholding these lived jolts that

  go right through me.

  Lucy Dougan

  A northern winter

  For Ken Bolton (who found it)

  1

  bitter gall in afternoon light

  strobos
copic beech

  ‘we will shortly be arriving at / Rainham’

  a stationmaster spits the whistle

  Tate Modern: Delaunay (Robert) and Severini, Munch and

  Bonnard, Jonas Mekas’ films. Gerhard Richter.

  Before me (from the members’ room), St Pauls and the

  Millenium Bridge. I will walk that way towards Lamb’s Conduit

  (via Shoe Lane, Holborn and Red Lion Streets), for Peter Riley

  and Peter Philpott at The Lamb.

  a glass, seemingly of port, at the window of The Dolphin

  (this sad enterprise of notation)

  2

  Today I sit downstairs in the office, looking out the back

  window to our garage and wall and, above it, the last few yellow

  leaves against a (rare) blue sky.

  I see the sage plant beneath the window and immediately smell

  (purely imaginary) sage.

  3

  What troubles me about Jackson MacLow’s methods is the mere

  thought of method. It seems essential that these works enunciate

  their principles of construction i.e. primary text, letter selection

  and secondary text. But is the knowledge of this supposed to

  bolster our appreciation of the result? If so are we admiring it

  because it fills the brief or are we admiring it for what it is? The

  two things are not necessarily compatible. MacLow realised at a

  certain point that there was no such thing as the purely aleatory,

  that the first principles were already an aesthetic decision.

  4 (Three musical interludes)

  i

  Charlie Watts, dapper in Hatchards bookshop

  a South London accent that may have been worked on

  ii

  in my head, the Horrie Dargie Quintet play

  ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’

  iii

  I’d always hated Gary Shearston singing ‘I get a kick out of you’, but suddenly in the student bar, Roehampton, it all, especially the violinist, sounds good.

  5

  The snow from two nights back hasn’t melted. Interesting to see which plants seem to have survived – lavender, thyme, oregano – that you might have expected to wilt. Tarragon dies off naturally, the rosemary hasn’t really got going.

  6

  A white oblong of sun on the bedroom wall

  Tonight, a reading in London which I’m not going to. That’s three London events I’ll have missed this week. Two because of weather, one, inertia.

  7

  nothing in this drawer

  a tangle of script

  ‘snowbound’

  I feel less ‘at home’ here than I did a year ago. But would I feel ‘at home’ anywhere else?

  8

  If I have always envisaged work as music why do I still fear abandoning a patina of sense? The poems on the surface are ‘documentary’, but documents themselves don’t ‘last’. We don’t read the poets (for the most part) for insights into the contemporary (though they ignore the past at their own peril).

  9

  speckled lights from Christmas

  fake chandeliers

  out there it’s winter still

  the bulbs in public gardens unopened

  I decided today, walking through Canterbury, that what I feel now is a kind of blankness, a nothingness which seems neither bad nor good, neither exhilarating nor terrifying. It is maybe ‘despond’. I need to emerge from it to write again, or if I write again I will emerge from it. I’m not certain which of these is true.

  Now, I suppose, is the moment I stop being an observant tourist and become an ignorant local. Yet at the same time Australia appears an even odder construction. I mean I love it, aspects of it at least, but from here it’s a peculiar thing. The fires that I know much about make it to the UK news, as does (as ever) ‘shark attack’.

  I belong to a space that nobody here will recognise.

  10

  spring bitter

  and bitter spring

  at The Sun

  shadows on a page, the rise and fall of breath

  striations in an enormous fireplace

  marking time

  marking, re-

  marking

  ‘Jim Thompson

  never materialised

  again’

  11

  The Fitzroy Tavern, Charlotte Street, last seen in, was it, 1992 or 1987? The ‘writers and artists’ bar is downstairs, but I stay up, ‘not writing’, trying to remember the name of the Italian restaurant I’m supposed to be at in half an hour.

  telephones that ring like telephones

  the ghost of Julian Maclaren-Ross shuffles past

  ‘a violent hash smoker shakes a chocolate machine’

  12

  teasel

  the burr of the plant, dried,

  a device for carding wool

  leaves that jump (dead ones) with a sound like raindrops

  small greenish birds

  an orange butterfly (fritillary?)

  now I know the yew, found in churchyards, is poison to livestock

  13

  and now it’s daylight saving

  when will the scaffolding come down?

  and what place for this scaffold

  in the age of interruption?

  miniature daffodils under the tarpaulin

  a sign (‘The Sun’) on its side;

  inside, from the rafters,

  hops, still green from summer

  Laurie Duggan

  Black Deaths in Custody

  despite the cost a new gaol has been built

  it seems the incarceration rates are trebling

  I only came here in the role

  of a Deaths In Custody inspector

  all the cells are stark and spotless

  blank screens watch from the corner

  the offices have the highest technology

  the faces of the staff still look the same

  when I walk down this wing and peer

  into this filthy room the door closes behind me

  the feeling in my heart is changing

  from a proud strength of duty to fear

  all the stories I have ever heard

  stand silent in the space beside me—

  a coil of rope is being pushed

  under the door of this cell

  Ali Cobby Eckermann

  Hearts and Minds

  What was that horror film with Peter Lorre?

  The man who’d lost his hands,

  On whom the hands of a dead murderer

  Were grafted (gruesome story)

  And rapidly proceeded to transfer

  To him the killer’s murderous commands.

  And yet it’s said of heart transplants that patients

  Inherit from their donors

  More than that vital muscle. They present,

  It’s said, strange alterations

  Of predilection, mood and temperament

  (Changes of heart) known to those foregone owners.

  The heart, to the Egyptians, was the seat

  Of mind, intelligence.

  But did they really, locked in silent thought,

  And feeling the heart beat,

  Sense consciousness behind the sternum, caught

  In a cage of ribs, watching, as it invents,

  All this? Can we be sure it beats behind

  The sockets of our eyes,

  The hand-propped forehead, one inseparable

  Hybrid of brain and mind

  Autonomously humming in the skull?

  Too dizzying a crux to analyse.

  What if, no neural spectre we possess

  And call on to reprise

  The fictions of the self in which it’s pent,

  It washes bodiless

  Around us like a primal element,

  Like weather blowing through the open trees.
r />   Stephen Edgar

  working from home – to do list

  12 buttons brown thread

  take your psyche for a walk

  pack the wheelchair

  into the station wagon

  for the doctor’s

  kiss the cat

  kiss the cat?

  the cat died years ago

  water the herbs

  pray over the olive tree

  drench your yesterdays in salt water

  mend your mother’s trousers

  get the sewing machine serviced

  forgive someone something

  try to remember what it was

  cook tea tonight

  it’s your turn

  get the washing off the line

  before it rains

  make another list

  fill the thesaurus

  check the oil and water

  in the dictionary

  find a page of tomatoes

  in the fruit bowl

  stack the bookshelves with rice

  dust the wattle

  water the nouns and verbs

  prune the adjectives and adverbial clauses

  write a downpipe print a seedling

  phone a friend

  take yourself out and shake

  the crumbs onto the grass

  listen to mozart or the clash

  bpay something

  narrate a tree or a mote of dust

  eat hopkins drink leonard cohen

  smell the first leaves of your next book

  brew them in your best pot

  haiku your neighbour’s cat

  finish your new cardigan

  put teardrops into a dry eye

  leave nothing out

  and everything in the rain

  including yourself

  writing

  Anne Elvey

  Death of a Year

  Our memories of ruin fail to make it through customs. The

  helicopters rave, make no sense; somehow they know what they’re doing

  But go back, thoughts, to laughter and neurotic running around

  a European city. An exchange of books through a third

  party. There is one friend in these cases that takes on a huge

  debt. The newspaper columns write themselves, they are writers of a generation, they

  were implicated in the mistakes that everyone made. To not

  enforce them in an obit would itself be betrayal. White

  spaces indicate hospital, erect letters represent love. We were