The Best Australian Poems 2011 (4 page)

at eighty-six and ninety-one they are still together

more or less

and greet me at the door

as if I am the punchline to a joke

they were just recalling

 

my mother staggers sideways in the drive

my father reaches for a wall, a rail, an arm

with the urgency telephones demand

 

they know what it is now

and do their best to hide this knowledge from us

agreeing to be forgetful and ever more frail

they can't help grinning at the picture they must make

 

they expect to be driven to appointments

they say are medical or therapeutic

 

my mother toys with the idea of a new knee

my father trembles to the tiny drum machine

beneath his ribs

 

and their eyes go cloudy, ears a solid silent blue,

their mouths half open to let out the unspoken

because they know what it is

and now they want it more than this old world

 

the small days come, flowers in the garden,

drugs delivered to the door, postcards in the box outside

 

she has a sturdy stick to hold down against this earth

tapping as if to wake someone down there

 

a warning they are coming

for Gig

 

you said we didn't but we did

       have telephones

              in seventies share houses,

bulky bakelite telephones

       ringing as often

              as Frank O'Hara's

and Brigid Berlin's did, a decade earlier

 

we had honour systems –

                     add phone calls

                            to a running total

       in a column under your name,

like a boardgame score,

                                          pay up

when the household bill arrives

 

*

 

I could ring to say

                     sometimes I imagine you

       in a Max Ernst collage

                            (
Une semaine de bonté
)

 

there's a woman reflected

              in an ornately gilded mirror

                                   behind an open door,

you're the other woman

              guiding a feathered bird-man

       into a high Edwardian

                            drawing room –

he carries a tooled leather bag,

              he seems to be a doctor,

‘mind how you go doctor'  you say

       ‘just step over

              the apopleptic monkey, doctor'

 

doctor feathered bird-man

                     brings sleeping elixir,

       an anodyne

 

*

 

in sleep

              I'm filled with thought,

my dream constructed

              not by surrealism

                            but by Slabs R Us,

solid, solemn, grey

 

half asleep, half dreaming,

       a phone is ringing,

              I hold the earpiece close –

  friends pollute the swoony hours

                     with caring

 

in a poetry world

       everything is providential,

                     or not,

and, sometimes,

              just life on hold, call waiting,

       like Tennyson's poetic

 

reading now, quiet,

                     a newer title –

       I always skip

                     redacted poems,

the crossings-out seem obvious

       and attention seeking –

you would agree?

              your number's in my phone,

       I could call to ask.

last drinks at the

friendship bar evanescence

is my pashmina no apology

for the lack of a biography

anyone could see it

coming runes in the fettuccini

is one way of looking at it i

suppose all the decades of

romping in the hay production

figures never disputed now it's

time to leave the wagon to

serenade its own wheels   how

black the glossy stars this enchanted

evening mario stranger than anything you

could call terrestrial bow ties

Then one evening, after the gallery, hung with invisible

abstracts, you take me apart to flesh the miniatures:

a fleck of craquelure, speckles of mascara from my

              shadow eyes, already panda-streaked.

 

I fail to notice how you slip the pieces in your coat pocket.

Distracted as I am by wolf hands, the hairs in your cleft

neck. You're not, but you might be, up yourself, I think,

              skating across the vestibule floor.

 

How the light divides the dream, menacing, promising

shyness or indifference, I cannot tell, though it amounts

to the same verdict. Is that what you mean about pleading

              guilty as the fig trees stir, balmy in winter?

 

Some evenings are this fragile. Rainbow lorikeets court

the soft crumbs, a magpie takes off with a crust, clouds

skim over the Finger Wharf, footsteps trip in the Domain

              where the pine scent lingers as lips:

 

ours for a flower moment, the botanist's pinnate rose

is a name calling to its mute echo. Bats skip and loop

the legible sky in their quiet frenzy like involuntary

              kites between metallic and neon spires.

 

So dusk emulsifies desire, or maybe it's the reverse

– we are tenants of this periphrastic end. Office cubicles

half-lit, ladder the sky, turning their discretionary gaze

              to what's sketched by the carbon ink.

the irony of green rain

is not lost on you

 

the rank apocalypse

stalks the landscape

 

spreadable butter for your convenience

where would we be without

 

your depressive head

mocks you from its alcove

 

cars whizz both ways

the question remains

 

like a daytime tv show

where someone you're sure

 

is yourself in disguise

makes predictable jokes

 

laughed at by machines

On a hot day the North-West Plain is so flat it isn't.

The horizon curves and stirs like a wisp of moustache.

Animals burrow that aren't meant to burrow.

Prey walk past their predators under a white flag.

The eyes of roadkill are left to boil in their sockets.

The can of beer is dry when you open it.

A cigarette is rolling another swagman.

The motor smokes nervously before you start it.

The mobile phone sweats, whimpers and croaks.

The devil is on holiday in Tasmania.

The paddock on the left is Texas.

The seat of government is the only tree.

We'll take a rest-stop at the next mirage.

Is it far? It has been. Are we there yet? No.

              At almost noon. 

He sees only figures              no game.

 

       They clap.  Céline has the ball.

              He raises his palms, then lowers them.

 

Just go, just go.   Clap, laugh, go.

 

              Their shadows curl

under them: falling leaves.

The ball hovers above the beach, eclipsing the sun a few inches.

He eases back

he becomes sand.

another team needs restructuring

her boss seeks rejuvenation

he likes a shiny new worker

 

in glossy black accessorised with chrome

she's the facilitator who holds the coalface together.

strong jaw   teeth without stains

she click-clacks his documents

 

past your use-by date
, he

exposes her in public

whips her back into an angry V.

her rusty assistants jam

printers, shredders, fax machines

Gary was being extremely annoying with the glue-gun, as a parody

buffoon gets stuck to the routine and then can only separate

by ripping off his own souls while his kaleidoscopic pantaloons

spiral outta control like a flotilla of combi-vans

driven by acid-hippies through the violet hill-deserts of ma mind…

do you too smell the blood of a nationalised energy foundation?

You have to keep the abecedaria flying, or, if not flying, at least floppily erect!

(uh-oh, here comes that dynamic psychotherapy again, Gwyneth,

you're for it now! It'll make you springen, springen wiff 'appenis fer sure,

as the flashers go off with epilepsy-inducing arrhythmia.)

Please don't bother me with your body any longer, I've enough

of orgasms and orgies to last me ten thousand lifetimes,

and it's a better bet to go pale over a flaccid biopic of a pallid poet,

because my wound-dark nerve-endings are just sooooo sensitive they quiver

at the merest trilling of those much speculated-upon boronic microparticles –

Fargh! your vulgar disinhibiting fanfare can be only dreadful noise to me!

 

Wrapped in bulls and balls,

squiggle me macho.

Seek out my women,

how I make their

bums, breasts and bellies

fold up into furniture,

gore them into dripping tears.

I am potted, baked dry,

moulded by España's rough hands.

If you are woman don't catch the

attention of my one red eye.

The New Zealand poet settled to his coffee at the Astoria in Lambton Quay

kindly hunched against the bitter wind at an outside table because although

he hated us when smokers ruled the world he pities us these days of leprosy.

 

He spoke of our late mutual friend from Lecce who, whilst living in Venice,

paid his respects to Ezra Pound on occasion – as one would – the poet sunk

below the waterline into the clarity of incommunicado and monkish accidie.

 

One day the poet raised his head and spoke – four lines – from out the deep

of his mistake – four good strong tough lines that anyone could remember

and the man from Lecce did and they became the punchline for a story.

 

But but
– I said.
I have read those lines, unattributed, in a book of verse.

Four good, strong, tough lines that were worth remembering, and so I did.

Such Antipodean chutzpah to plagiarise Pound, his brilliant rottenness.

The mother is now the child

and the daughter scolds her

for driving late at night

and the mother cowers

on the sofa half afraid of her.

 

Her disgruntled child seems

taller and stronger than she remembers

and the daughter goes into the kitchen

to cook some beetroot broth

and they sit in the lounge room

 

quietly together, not a word spoken

and then the mother nods off

to sleep watching television

and the daughter carries her

to the bed and watches her mother

 

dream and she stands over

guarding the bed like some Roman sentry

and then finally she goes to bed to plan

the next day and this is love

in a strange disguise, but love nonetheless.

They've found something nasty

              In the small bowel.

They need to be hasty,

They've found something nasty

And not very tasty.

              Throw in the towel!

They've found something nasty

              In my small bowel.