The Best Australian Poems 2016 Page 5
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.
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