The Best Australian Poems 2011 (3 page)

Resonant surgical anecdotes roll on:

spiral fractures from middle-aged skateboarding.

Old antipathies are instantly renewed:

‘Still writing away for X-Ray Spex, I see!'

When it comes to stories of jumping the fence

– ‘For years I had been walking insincerely' –

many think I told you so, some feel cheated.

Vanity comes creeping out through tiny cracks

to bask in the sun: It was so cold in there!

But what's-her-name still speaks just often enough

for her silence not to be significant.

Outside: fractured slabs of concrete glistening.

Frangipani flowers lie crushed in the round.

 

Departing steps have a pasty sibilance.

A pair of near-perfect strangers, one patting

pockets in search of a lighter, the other

returning to return a mistaken coat,

make the first moves of what could turn out to be

a long conversation begun at the end

of a reunion where late-bloomers gloated

over the popular blonde who peaked too soon.

I am sorry I cannot publish your poem.

The subject of a lost ant is truly original

and the dialogue between said ant

and blade of grass is certainly moving

(it moved me to write you this note).

May I suggest the repetition of ‘Mummy'

be rethought, as some reader is bound to

point out that ants do not have individual mothers,

nor are they able to weep. Of course,

poetic licence can allow such anomalies;

however, describing the ant as three

black peas with miniature Meccano legs

is rather a mixed metaphor, which fails

in the final stanza when the ant

becomes a shrunken horse.

And finally, the form of the poem,

although inventive, is quite difficult to read

as the words do not meet up around the antennae.

Scenery emerges from the picture like a train

just emerged Jolimont-way from the

tunnel system, Melbourne, 1966 – in time

for jewels and binoculars hung from the head

of a mule – all roads to Port Phillip Bay.

Young mother pegging diapers on a line –

a black crow in its pulpit yawning the day's

sermon to conscripts ganging the platforms –

flashing backyard suburban jingoisms.

We look back through the poem and see

only the wisteria creeping under the windows,

a trellis, a flyscreen door and dead lawn

a million miles from Saigon. The train rattles on

from station to station, parsing the signals,

numbing the arses of generations to come

without ever upsetting the status quo.

Arriving one day at the end of the road

like a detail conscientiously ignored until it

punches you in the eye – imagining some

real estate genius struggling to find metaphors

that fit the marketplace: southerly prospects,

ocean views, all modcons. Grey ships ply

the dun-coloured textbook waters and turn

into History. It's cold and you shiver a little.

Out beyond the big picture the refinery lights

are coming on – the tide heaves towards its

Bethlehem. A hundred years and nothing

remotely imaginable, thinking why here and

not some other place, far away under monsoon –

Agent Orange sunsets making hell a scenery.

But the poem is only a way to dream without

having to suffer – and it dreams us too,

on the other side where time is forever

advancing like a threat. Night stabs a thorn

into the mind's eye – we end where we began,

riding the line until the words stop. The

silent machines take us back out of the picture.

A train's windows flash past like cinema:

Something groans. Something else gets born.

Scarlet nail polish and lipstick.

Plastic surgery on her once-prominent nose.

Edith summers in Cornwall,

winters in Athens.

 

Her latest novel is selling well.

The cook, the gardener,

will receive a Christmas bonus,

compensation for enduring

Edith's moods and temper

when she finds living

harder than writing.

 

Characters like Clarissa and Harold

appear to her

as she drives,

as she walks along the river.

 

Clarissa,

eldest of two daughters,

an amateur botanist and watercolourist,

infatuated with her piano tutor.

 

Harold,

a neighbour's only son,

asthmatic, excused from sport.

Interested in astronomy

and the treasure underneath Clarissa's skirt.

 

Desire,

the primary emotion that moves plot and pen,

stirs the serpents in the garden,

coiled in the shade of the family tree.

 

Images crafted into words,

words crafted into images.

Truth and fiction,

lying down in the same bed,

entwined,

no longer strangers

to each other.

 

The white heat of writing –

thoughts, visions

becoming words,

lifting the writer and the reader

beyond the page,

to where the self is seen,

an ant

struggling with crumbs,

one day to be crushed

beneath a wind-blown twig.

 

On a good day, five thousand words.

On a bad day, the snapping in half of pencils –

the study mirror reflecting

Edith asleep on the sofa,

one shoe missing,

an empty brandy bottle

in her lap.

 

Edith waking

with hangover –

legs of straw on which

to inch and tilt

towards the horizon

of the kitchen sink,

a much-needed glass of water.

 

Edith

straightening cushions on the sofa,

lighting the day's first cigarette,

asking the walls

what post-war England could be

if Nigel's plane hadn't been

shot down over Berlin.

 

The roulette wheel spins,

the white ball

comes to rest on zero.

 

Not every player

will risk as much again.

 

Edith alone

with her characters.

Maybe in the next book,

Harold, through his telescope

will view the flare and fall of a comet,

an arc of light that once scarred the heavens,

now reduced to a photo, data in a journal.

Clarissa will disturb his ordered world

by becoming pregnant.

 

The characters' world changed by

a birth,

a wavering allegiance,

an affair revealed,

leaving a known path.

 

All that threatens and excites,

asks us to consider again

human nature

as it slithers away

from definition,

Edith will examine

in her next book.

 

Already she knows its title,

writes it out neatly

on a fresh sheet of paper.

 

Tomorrow will be a good writing day,

if tonight she's able

to sleep.

The comics were best kept simple –

The Little King, Boofhead, Brenda Starr.

The King never spoke

& others spoke ‘but briefly'

in his presence – announcing

something – this or that –

& the King would leap,

scowl or shrug,

exclamation mark

above his head.

I understood him

from an early age.

The cartoonist's

ineptitude

was essential: Boofhead's

Egyptian style

of ambulation,

his Egyptian surprise.

‘The true archaic simplicity'

as someone might have said.

Arms akimbo, one leg lifted,

mouth open, his eyes – did I

ever see him sleep? – pools

of black.

The amateurish, confident

styling of Brenda Starr.

Where is that world now?

I wanna go there & roll

cigarettes, roll my own

smokes, as Dan Hicks

had it – later, in a more

sophisticated age –

an age that

looks back –

at the King affronted,

Boofhead flummoxed, or

Boofhead stymied,

Starr crying or

having a thought …

looks back, looks back,

astonished at that innocence.

My dream once for the north wing of the building –

a vast mural of Fred and Wilma, done

‘after Poussin' – is on hold. Unregretted.

 

What do you say to Jackson Pollock in a lift?

Obviously, the numbers climb higher and higher,

and expensive graffiti gets pulled out of the wall

 

at midnight, and carried away on a truck. You say

Que sera, sera
and duck. Straightening up, slowly,

I explain my other dream to him: Géricault's portrait

 

of the back of Delacroix's head in old age.

Jackson laughs – ‘Like mine of Bill de Kooning

aged ninety!' he says. Downstairs we throw the spray cans on the fire – watch them explode.

for Newstead, Victoria: 3462

 

She is walking on frost at dawn

beside the highway that runs through the town

Over the bridge with a full river below

With black gloves on, she is planning for the town

Picking up a flattened beer can

Putting it in her pocket

 

then thinking of the four boyfriends she had

before she met Bill and settled down

Tucker   Ross    Bonici   Smith

and then Bill Menangartowe

who gave her the horsewhip

that he plaited with the three king browns

the ones he killed especially

                     
how many men have killed things … especially, she thought

 

the whip hangs on the wall of the long-drop

with the view of the mountain

where ghosts maintain fame

                     through legendary gambling debts

                            bestiality

                            leaning on the shovel at

                            shallow graves of native men

 

Bill Menangartowe is home

dreaming of new teeth

so he can eat Harcourt apples and his wife's dry roast beef

that he complains of

                     there he is

waking

pushing himself from noisy bed springs

              recognising his father's thumbs

as he pushes shells into the gun

crows and lambs sewn together in the distance

              are the crows complaining?

              have the lambs had their eyes pecked out?

 

Bill walks barefoot across the floor and out the door

Into work boots striped by slivers of dawn

 

He hunts for rabbits

the old-time meal

a recipe that only the older women know

from years ago

when mothers were few around here

              wondering

over cups of tea punctuated by sounds of a sparrow hunt

              how tiger snakes got into linen cupboards

and how people were allowed to swim nude in the Loddon river

              when the town has a policeman

 

When the moon is up her house is quiet

 

she can't sleep though

there is too much to plan

 

for the others in the town

on their fourth new start at a life

And those still on their first, awake,

from the night before

gambling online

through cups of tea

that are made

when the internet connection drops out

 

              She imagines the town as blue feathers

and all the children safe under wings

 

But a south-easterly pushes cloud into the moon

and her pillow goes dark

the wind pushes the colossal gum tree that saw the start of fences

              saw white rapes

black births

                                                        heard the secret songs

              and all the fights that followed

its trunk, full of wire, beer bottles, and horseshoes

an unknown baby skeleton

 

the wind pushes at the tree

and it falls in the dark

without a sound

to cut; to run; to stay in a burrow underground; to impersonate a tree in autumn; to approach the world with an open heart and an infinite capacity for disappointment;
nm
rapturous dismay; joyful ingratitude;
nf
a type of boxing match used for divination or to contact the dead; a woman who lives off the immoral earnings of more than three husbands; (
S Am
) a pitchfork with an angel's heart; as in (
Cu
) the termites have crawled into the piano, or (
DR
) he who drinks the sea must nurse the oyster; (
RPL, Chi
) unworthy of entering a shopping mall even in a cyclone; (
Per, Ec
) gifted with fingers small enough to befriend dustmites; (
Mex, Col, Ven
) not to be trusted, not to be believed, also patron saint of fish; (as a colour) yellow, orange, red or brown; (
ornith
.) a seabird with golden wings and hard onyx beak or a small bird afraid of swamps seen only during ill-omened festivities; from Arabic, a tree that befriends doomed travellers; also see medieval Latin, a table for unwritten books; (
colloq
.) to succeed, to fail, to cough, to lose one's way etc.