The Best Australian Poems 2016 Read online

  Natalie Harkin

  Tinnitus

  5,000 angels dance on a pin

  creating a thin, high-pitched singing

  in the empty area of my ear,

  plucking each high harp string

  in a Morse of ping and whistle;

  I can hear the whistle

  but can’t discern the music,

  suffer its relentless din – day

  into stinging night into day.

  It can’t be cured the doctors say

  so they play audiologists’ tricks

  to fool my brain. My curative sound’s

  the shilly-shallying of surf,

  of water fussing and trembling

  on sandy shores, or flopping

  a susurrus over rocks. You can hear froth

  laced to the surfaces of sound.

  For a year I’ve listened

  to this slumbrous rustling cure,

  surf splashed in the computer’s core,

  gushed through the car’s soft speakers,

  water thrushed over my head

  in whispering sleep.

  And still the angels sing

  their dog whistle tingling,

  their unchanging I-Ching,

  the shrill denizens of my inner ear.

  A thousand pins drop tinkling

  down cliffs of ice, and zing

  again in a tympani of feeling;

  for folly is as folly does:

  this brain is not for fooling.

  Dennis Haskell

  Archive Fever Making Tracks

  the arkhē appears in the nude—Jacques Derrida

  You are I am a tracker bent crouched close to the page ground looking

  for traces and signs that sense you has have passed this way

  You sniff sniffing for the scent of absence you

  but above all feeling

  for the gap in your my life

  that wants to fill this page

  alone

  The air is incandescent

  The white page track glows

  Emptiness talks back talks back talks back

  to the heat that cracks open the world ground

  This is a land of surfeit and lack

  of hardness and clarity of image

  of absence that opens out

  or closes up the world

  and sometimes the heart.

  Dominique Hecq

  Derrida, J 1998 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trans Eric Prenowitz, p. 92.

  Black Dress

  For TAW

  This black dress

  is also a painting—

  it hangs on a wall

  where light holds it close.

  It’s a doorway to places

  no-one quite knows;

  that bloom and rain

  with extravagant vistas.

  We’ve sometimes entered

  into the painting

  dipping dark hats,

  watching children

  riding down lanes

  (their slit-eyed scrutiny

  prickling our backs),

  finding a house

  made out of art—

  colourful images; chaotic signs—

  and in a long room

  have seen a black dress.

  Approaching the work

  we’ve watched ourselves there,

  climbing through streetscapes,

  avoiding riders

  and ducking rain,

  entering a house

  made out of painting,

  finding a room

  with a black dress inside.

  Now standing here,

  outside of the image,

  the dress seems mute

  hung on its wall;

  yet inside the painting,

  through folds like a curtain,

  we glimpse narrow laneways.

  The sound of rain

  is prickling our backs.

  (from ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’)

  Paul Hetherington

  Relocation of the Big Prawn

  Cutting you loose was always the Big Hernia,

  five crustacean manholes and an ocean view semaphore.

  Severing yourself at the canticles was the angle grinder’s delight,

  guide lines and trophy wives scrapping for a slice of spine.

  Upmarket seashells splitting effigies of you,

  spraying mantis spilling multiple eulogies in reverse.

  Downtown, cranes shrapnel our deep dream limelight,

  tethered to the countenance of primordial withers.

  Hindenburging the Baudelaire was just a serving suggestion,

  the dust of syphilitic kings sulphuring the contradictory.

  Negativity these days means ‘how to deflect light’,

  Gulliver’s Travels ghostwritten by miniature Don DeLillos

  sepia the distillation of several small children into Norfolk grog.

  I want to swim upstream like a deathwish, through permafrost, to Canada.

  Relocation means taking it offshore. So we flush out the interior

  and reroute the Pacific. Seared to the pig iron of a new beginning,

  we becalm posterity, pop their eyes out on stalks. In the tunnels

  of a granite bedroom I wrestle and tug. Misreadings underwritten

  by fantasy gambling—the stochastic improbability of this whole

  thing being true. Of an evening I thrash responses to the electric

  field, parry the overdetermined placenta of hair, miasma, sweat.

  In the absence of fixed references, you avoid me and I prefer it.

  Too much proximity fills my holes with lungs. I dissolve to be,

  scuppered in the inevitable playlist, half-lunged in the backflip

  of the ocean suite pedestal. At reception, the welder’s pen hustles

  while I swing, huddled in the roof space of countries old and lost.

  Down below, henchmen fiddle with the drains, swearing like nuns.

  The new guy severs a number of feelers, wonders—what fresh

  apothecary will bleed this mother’s tongue? An old hand floats

  to the surface, joins us at last in the reappearance of our long-lost

  juvenilia. The number of relationships formed on the basis

  of a single misinterpretation is how the apical resorption

  of the skeleton explains a decrease of the kype in kelts.

  When the hacktivists come we’ll scrub our hands with lemon,

  warm water, blood, Greyhound ourselves senseless on a dirge

  bound for Ballina, where the replacement of your breeding

  teeth will make love to the hygienic cruelty of my Titles,

  Feedback, Loops. In the hinterland, we’ll build an art gallery

  that truly shreds, draft a tell-all sign for the soothseer’s

  window in open source aspidistra sans. We’ll feel nervous

  about the past and nostalgic for the future, skywrite the word

  jukebox in bits of broken. In the cubby of a keyhole winter we’ll say

  the right words are hanging from the trees, each one a fruit

  of historical strangeness. In September, we will cut down

  their bodies, wind their salutations into sheets.

  Fiona Hile

  Modern Woman Sonnets

  (Labé 21; 20; 11)

  What places a man beyond comparison? What shape

  and shade and look drives us to despair the least

  circuitously, without the patience pace

  for comedy or tragedy?

  What playlist most befits the whole

  man, who can he outsource his outpouring to, who

  still plays the lute, who could be Nature for him?

  Let’s say we are, at least, a breath-piece

  with a sex a gait a tract and a brain upturned

  and we each can know one thing at a time

  and t
his is mine:

  all the art that improves on the world

  has a tinkling-nóthing effect

  on lust’s blue hot blue overruns.

 

  There’s a face precise from the deep’s allowance:

  the stranger on a sofa I knew just once,

  the pristine first sight before the second sight

  that love claimed with its almost-claws.

  Seeing how he loved me hard

  I took pity, utter, and then fell despite,

  in the valley of the young and well

  in a lot of little hurries, detailed rushes

  in a dearth of field. Grey green incertidumbre.

  But as I watch now the low-pressure system

  massing darkness its gale-forces

  smearing stars, I wonder who-what did finely arrange

  my shipwreck on my rocks, then en plein air

  cross-hatched from cliff-top in thin ink the scene.

 

  How lovely your eyes and their looking,

  small gardens with sex-minded flowers. …

  into flesh le fleche de l’amour shot from

  their shaded bowers. My gaze was holding, calling

  wrongly your bluff, me and the blown rose

  and its fresh interpetals of air.

  So I’ve cried my days down the days-drain!

  You my eyes were lit lucky objects of his eyes

  but you my heart—meat!—with your surface-envy

  retreated past red past desolation,

  till that first replication which was desolate. …

  Let none believe I’m a single cell at ease,

  not when my heart and eyes can’t share

  a good or bad or neutral word.

  LK Holt

  The change room

  This morning, walking almost naked

  from the change room toward the outdoor heated pool,

  I become that man again, unsettling

  shape to be explained.

  Such questions aren’t asked to my face. Children

  don’t mean anything by it, supposedly, so I

  shouldn’t feel as I do,

  as my bones crouch into an old shame I thought

  I’d left behind. Chlorine prickling

  my nostrils, a stranger

  compliments me on my tattoos and shows me hers –

  a dove in flight over a green peace sign –

  as if the canvas was unremarkable.

  She turns and limps away,

  and something makes a moment of sense.

  I lower myself into our element

  and swim, naturally

  asymmetrical and buoyant. Quite some time

  later, showering, the man beside me

  is keen to chat – how many laps we’ve each done,

  how long I’ve lived in this town, the deep

  need for movement.

  Speaking, our bodies become solid.

  Andy Jackson

  The Jews of Hamburg Speak Out

  Voyage of the Damned (SS St Louis, 1939)

  To all those who seek asylum, do not think

  we have forgotten you.

  Four months before the boil on Europe’s knee

  burst open, we were thin with hope like you,

  sallow with stars

  and reeling from Krystallnacht, whose terror

  was untranslatable. We fled.

  The ship transporting us through the dark

  raised a sham swastika up its mast.

  I recall, one time, standing on the stern

  under a sky that did not smell of death

  as the tail of Germany diminished

  to a speck.

  Such luxury on board! Cut glass and chandeliers,

  but even so,

  they turned us away at Havana, you know.

  The doors clanged shut, the inns all full; the same old story

  at port after port. Our ship retreated with a vertebral groan,

  sailing east towards the death camps of home,

  whose gates swung open to receive us.

  Lisa Jacobson

  Plot Points

  On the rafting ice

  The afterbirth of seals

  Leaves stains like pink blancmange.

  Glyco proteins in the fish

  Keep them from freezing.

  M13 in Hercules

  Is a globular star cluster –

  A glitterball that my mother

  Could have danced the Charleston under.

  She had lovely hands.

  Renoir, choosing models, always looked

  At their hands first.

  After the war, at Lodz,

  On a tour of the concentration camp,

  Rubinstein said ‘I was born here.’

  In Melanesia, the House of Memories

  Contains the treasures of the tribe.

  The Somme chalk was good for tunnels.

  When the barrage broke them,

  The parapet bags spat white.

  At Kokoda, the treetop phosphorescence

  Turned the night to Christmas.

  The Aussies in Tobruk

  Brushed dust from bully beef.

  In the dry valleys of Antarctica

  Dust is raised by the katabatic wind.

  With the Wehrmacht stalled in front of Moscow,

  Even the grease froze. The 88s

  Were jammed by their own shells.

  Rasputitsa was the mud

  Of spring thaw and autumn rain.

  On a hard day in the Alhambra

  The Sultan sent an apple

  To the virgin of his choice.

  The logo on your Macbook

  Is an echo of the manner

  In which Alan Turing killed himself.

  In the battle for Berlin

  The last panzers were overrun

  Before they reached the start-line.

  A dead hippo in the Tiergarten

  Had an unexploded mortar bomb

  Sticking out of its side.

  While you were reading this

  Millions of stars moved closer

  Towards their own extinction

  So many years ago –

  But let’s believe our eyes:

  They say it’s all here now.

  Clive James

  First contact, Kakadu

  Leichhardt’s grasshopper

  And then one wet season there

  you were. Lightning-child, improbable

  creature feeding, secreted

  on red rock, blue sky articulating

  brick-red-ink-blue limbs, clefted

  close to January waterholes

  where locals plunged and carried on

  as if there were nothing extraordinary

  about that Sunday afternoon, as if

  it weren’t the first and last time

  we would see you. Surrounded by a high-pitched

  insect-churring in the scented aromatics

  you were eating, voraciously, head tilted

  above a shrug of denim shoulders. Intense

  vibrato resonated. We felt as much

  as saw your tensile antennae

  sounding, sensing something out there

  far beyond us, this improbable future.

  Virginia Jealous

  Diary of an Anti-elegist

  1.

  Even poetry dements in the end; fatal attractions to dank earth

  and ash albums don’t fool or buy time. Poetry cherry-picks memory

  for its own ends; yet that’s a medicated narcissism for some.

  Earnest elegies are often rejected by dogs and children.

  Listen to them howl. Voting for life outside of ritual.

  I’m on your side; I’m with the hounds and the kids.

  I won’t let elegy make you over into a bad oil painting,

  don grief’s sack cloth pantomime.

  Next time I see you walking down the street, checking for spot fires

/>   in unseasonal autumn heat, light fidgeting up the shape of you

  between drunken ghost gums, I will laugh and say:

  the death of my father

  has not made a poet out of me,

  no, not yet.

  2.

  One thing: If you do the clanking chain and sheet,

  let it be pure sight gag.

  The quiet wit of the dead is yours. We expect nothing less

  than theatre-restaurant ghoul. Our task, to entreat you

  to turn up late to a Xmas of bad bon-bon jokes

  and re-gifts. We will be waiting, in sodden crepe crowns,

  drinking from someone else’s warm stem glass, rare cooked animals

  pressing down on First World intestines. All of us vying

  to claim you. When it’s too ha-ha or too sad I will bang my glass,

  as ageing relatives blow fluoro party whistles,

  hoping they’ll be first off the sinking ship. Before she jumps,

  one loved aunt flushed with booze

  and sundowner syndrome, confides en passant:

  the death of your father

  has not made you a joke teller,

  no, not yet.

  3.

  You chose a plain pine box, authenticated lightness

  a clear and quick return. Death’s a quick diet in that respect,

  though the anorexic spookhouse cheapens –

  neither sums you up nor summons you.

  Most days, light and lightness refuse to pun.

  Meanwhile, daylight’s broken projector screens your old movie

  in fits and starts, in the shady zones. I guard my ticket jealously,

  fighting the light to scratch you out of faded Kodachrome.

  Some days I catch sight of you sweeping leaf litter

  down the coppery tow paths of late afternoon.

  You always put a plant in the earth the moment it was

  given to you. Weighted it in. Now I am putting you in,

  not as swiftly as you would have liked.

  You have no technique I hear you say. Build it up around the bole.

  Water it in, pat it down. That way it will flourish.