The Best Australian Poems 2013 Read online

  from Devadatta’s Poems

  A star had appeared in the night sky,

  it was long and pointed as an adder’s tooth.

  The moon rose putrescent, bloody. All our

  elephants had turned viridian-eyed, wild.

  Dozens of snakes hissed as though a fierce

  wind blew. Many children fell ill,

  tottered on legs like blown-up bladders.

  All we could do was summon the Brahmins,

  watch as they poured ghee over the altars

  and burnt our cattle in sacrifice. After a week

  we had little left to offer, though we still

  dug fields, hauled water, turned the loam.

  We all felt Kapilavatthu was done for,

  that not one of those Brahmins had the verses

  to save us. We drank bitter herbs,

  flailed our skin with twigs we bought

  from the broom makers, cut our arms

  with shards from the potters’ workshops.

  We fingered crimson beads and performed

  small dry ceremonies in the dirt. Before

  that season finally turned, I’d often long

  for Siddhattha, for the little tunes he could play

  on his thin, twisted stems of grass.

  Something about his notes, their fine weaving

  through the dusk. When I listened, I thought

  of our clay daub, mud brick and whitewashed

  town as a grand place, one whose streets

  you could walk down squaring your shoulders,

  knowing that the gods supped at the flames

  that burnt on our altars. I don’t know

  what Siddhattha heard in the notes.

  Perhaps he foresaw the rise of the rivers,

  border conflicts in the west, heard the screams

  of our women and children, saw the smoke

  and the fires, saw Kapilavatthu overrun

  with Brahmins carrying slaughtered oxen

  and antelope aloft from all our fire hearths—

  all that blood and dung,

  all the vulture feathers in their topknots.

  A disaster

  Chris Edwards

  Here, too, some ground has been cleared

  by the square of its distance. He wasn’t specific,

  but more or less conceded he had elaborated the mad

  scheme that first gripped him as a student, the day he

  sat down together on the sofa, fifty yards of absolute

  darkness pocketing interjections as the years passed

  and the stunlight flickered. He turned to Dalgliesh,

  I mean Newton, and said: “What’s the matter?

  What did she say?” No one answered, but the

  crowd edged forward expectantly, having paid

  in good faith for an admission. He said Grace

  had the task of feeding the hens the details of her

  physical presence, and that his own individual cells

  had challenged the quantum flux to a duck race:

  having found a way to go wayward faster,

  he’d lost to his lucky stars — a disaster!

  (‘A disaster’ borrows words and phrases from Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way and from P.D. James’s A Dalgliesh Trilogy.)

  A quick drink at the bar

  Dan Disney

  Nothing mystical, it’s like ‘hey have an aspirin’

  the crazy breeders uttering injunctions like painted blue jays.

  When they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone

  willy-nilly as divine accidents amid the particularity of things.

  Inert as an absurdly large rule, they are

  nothing mystical, like ‘hey have a complex insecurity’

  categorical with basic speech, this awkward climate

  of hierarchies confused with delight.

  When they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone

  and nobody enters the yes-no dualism of I-don’t-know … underfoot

  the ground trickles with cats, trees, history

  it’s nothing mystical, it’s like ‘hey have a programmatic soul’

  they’re smiling back like boring paintings or a hands-on cure

  rehearsing with ginger ale.

  When they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone

  casual as cut moonlight

  and lonely as a surgical experience, pleasantly moist;

  nothing mystical, it’s like ‘hey have an aspirin’

  when they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone.

  An Ordinary Evening in Newtown

  Laurie Duggan

  1

  Camperdown’s for dogs,

  Friday evening in the park off Church Street

  a barefoot man

  carries a plank:

  it’s like

  La Grande Jatte

  for Airedales

  under the flight path

  2

  a square-faced guy

  underpants protruding from his jeans

  in the smoky atmosphere of the Court House

  the word HOT, above the wood roof of the outside bar

  (neon in daylight)

  ‘are you fuckin married or what!?’

  3

  in the Carlisle Castle ‘Crimson & Clover’,

  the forty-somethings

  (Church T-shirt,

  dingo before pyramid)

  vivid pink drinks,

  a faint vomit smell from the kitchen (cheese?)

  and now, the meat raffle

  ‘looks nice, but I’ve nowhere to cook it’

  And Then a Cup of Tea

  Mal McKimmie

  The Captain had a kipper from a previous daring breakfast

  Lodged dangerously close to his spine;

  But still he led his men.

  When he stepped from the wooden dinghy and waded ashore

  He was picking his teeth bravely with a fish-bone.

  The sun rose behind him and broke its yolk upon the New World;

  It flowed golden.

  Grinning, he dipped his little soldiers in it.

  Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning

  Ann Vickery

  after Frank O’Hara

  Forearmed is foredefeated,

  a spragged illusion that had me forever

  check the silver-leafed backing.

  What seemed like a vermillion mirror of sea,

  the work of rash gods competing over

  nose-powder and light. Salient image

  as tonnage of froth, the superficial pleasure

  of being someone else for the day.

  What wasn’t there cannot disappear,

  so why regret that awkward kiss

  over the smoker’s box

  when you decided to sit and clean the turnips.

  One employs colours in the afternoon glare

  but my feelings remain diffuse.

  Each memory from the same genre,

  duly sentimental,

  yet indistinguishable in the over-populated world.

  Does it matter who can gauge the lapping dark

  for you were everything once

  returning to dead layer, a general of still life

  hanging on the end of the dauphine’s stays.

  As Flames Were My Only Witness

  Russell Erwin

  After three days of wind pounding the midriff of hills

 
and nights of dry lightning fracturing the sky

  into the crazing of old porcelain it was no surprise

  when it came. In five minutes a towering cauliflower

  was spilling white curds, froth and tumultuous blossom,

  a fractal coolly replicating from a moment

  that was now far below, with birds

  like flakes of soot tossed in its turbulence,

  their cries plangent and scattering, and consumed.

  Driving beneath into that apricot-soft light

  was like being inside an evangelist’s blimp:

  a dome of chapel stillness, except for little flames

  at the hem like small faces sneaking entry under.

  For a moment there was a benign peace

  as is said of those hazy, uncertain states:

  the womb, anaesthesia, drowning.

  We think we know silence, it is our blue Pacific:

  the refrigerated, drained, arrhythmical kind,

  and the cupped, hill-to-hill kind, with a dog’s bark

  or the crack of a breaking branch to give it scale.

  This was something else—dense and pressing,

  even in that beguiling peace,

  vast and lonely as the space that clears

  the moment before judgement.

  As in the future when

  Jal Nicholl

  a big computer was doing the thinking

  for us, but fortunately feelings

  proved stronger in the end

  I was feeling little except for a soggy film

  brochure containing a childhood story

  a forgotten dictator getting dug up and researched

  still a hero to some

  the light from the window lit everything a

  special poetic shade of red

  Snow

  on the mountains behind the apartment buildings

  giving the former solidity if not—

  but I am carrying on

  collecting the action figures before

  the film’s even started

  a desire to be obsolete, to retire

  to one’s ancestral seat

  or to have your computer write

  your poem for you: these are the same

  yet the mountains do return

  some unassuming zest to the painting, suggestive

  of low-linteled houses on the other side with plots

  sprouting flash frozen veg, still green,

  that will soon turn round and return the suggestion

  At Lerici

  David Malouf

  for Carlo Olivieri

  Darkly at anchor

  in the roadstead, ships keep close

  the secret of their journeys,

  and the islands theirs.

  History is made up

  of nights such as this when little happens.

  Lovers in their beds

  whisper and touch, a new player

  tumbles onto the scene.

  Crickets strike up

  a riff on the razzle-dazzle

  of starlight, then stop.

  The blissful friction and pointillist

  throb of night music

  is older, runs deeper

  than speech. An electric

  flicker the planet’s first

  incidence of traffic.

  Then heartbeat. Then thought.

  We sit in the warm dark watching

  container-ships ride

  on blue-black moonlit glitters.

  After long

  journeying arrived at the high tide

  of silence, after talk.

  Autoethnographic

  Michael Brennan

  And still the feeling hadn’t left us, something had

  been missing all the while, back there, beyond

  the Great Forgetting. Worse, the moments when

  we could convince each other it wasn’t not there

  had become fewer and further between, a daily

  clutch of episodes before that great ocean of

  mind would slink in, cruelling. It was a junkyard,

  a shipwreck, a six car pile-up at the end of our

  tongues, perfectly out of reach. Georgia suggested

  we were characters in a pilot for a TV series that

  never went to air. Someone had been picking

  us off one-by-one since the last ad break, taking

  the weakest, the meanderer at the back of the

  pack, the sweaty little accountant with the pocket-

  protector and broken glasses, the cheerleader in

  matching Adidas skirt and mules. There had been

  a series of pits, balled spikes, bear traps, bodiless

  hands reaching from the brush, faces concealed

  in sweat-stained hoodies looming out of the

  damp forest that was otherwise so distractingly

  scenic and exploitable. At night we could hear the

  muffled breathing nearby, a hunter’s soft treat,

  voices turned low plotting in a language all their

  own. We were in a forest of cannibals, overrun

  by human sacrifice, suicide bombers, terrorists,

  sub-prime mortgages and hoodlum cross-dressing

  freaks. Each morning we took a head count

  and the two of us were still there, while the day

  stretched on repetitive and overfull with promise.

  The coast was just beyond the next rise, we would

  meet the friendly locals who would offer us the

  choice bits of their exotic cuisine and ancient folk

  wisdom, then validate our parking tickets before

  guiding us to the safety of a shopping mall. But

  Georgia was adamant, it was a cliffhanger we

  would never get to the end of. We were stranded,

  facing each other with only our fear.

  Basic Hut Methodology

  Ella O’Keefe

  take your platform boots off

  Kevin

  you’ve killed a deer to make your point

  but our tea and biscuit sensibilities

  will cope

  we forgive you

  you’re charming!

  hiding from your vanity

  likening molten glass to tartiflette

  in the fresh peat you hammer a sign

  ‘Not Hobbit-Town’ (it’s cute)

  then later tell the production crew (sternly)

  “this not aspirational! This is economical!”

  Marxism 101 plaything

  soliloquies about the means of production

  while you go on dung safari

  afterwards the gang pretends to piss in a bucket

  you call the result a “manly amount”

  150 years of Britain’s industrial history

  at the bottom of a Hackney canal

  which swallows your magnet with an erotic slurp

  there you go all doe-eyed

  banging on the shed roof

  but we’re weary

  of plumbing double entendre

  Kevin and the engineer boil a kettle

  “shall I play mother?”

  that curve came from a tree

  gun powder tamped into the trunk

  a certain “massive quality”

  boy with a simple dream

  to own a patch of woodland

  (where there’s a thing there’s a fence)

  you
r friends show how they feel

  by building a a straw effigy

  and lighting it with flaming arrows

  Black Throated Finch

  Brett Dionysius

  By the pool, their fingernail-sized gullets undulate briskly

  As if they are guilty celebrities scoffing a midnight treat,

  Their black cravats panting with excitement. They can’t

  Stay in this kitchen heat for long; fluent in the language

  Of dehydration, a fast tipple or else they’re dumbstruck.

  Their image burned into extinction’s cyclopean retina,

  As if this fragile flock gazed into the sun directly, or they

  Were a picnic of ants fried by a bully’s magnifying glass.

  The dam water is a current running through their bodies;

  It sets off the electricity of their flight, as one they scatter

  To the air, like a handful of wedding rice. Their fall might

  Weigh as much; in the billionaire’s thoughts he’s ripped

  Out the earth’s coal-black throat; the box trees cut open

  Like rich sediment. Their habitat halved like a seed cake.

  Blind Spot

  Justin Clemens

  Slip id to lop its

  nob, lost din on lip’s nil boil,

  dot sin’s lid to sop.

  Slits’ slop spills to list lost. Slip

  lip blot to top, lob it up,

  spin bits to bile, so

  pot nibs to soil n sob n

  lop it lop its top.

  Bringing You Home

  Susan Fealy

  You’ve stained my sleep again and your tiny clothes

  tangle their arms and legs in my washing machine.

  So many headless bodies

  and now your wriggly purple flesh,

  two white straps on a new white nappy, wet,

  wet, wet, urine soaks it, and you, and me,

  before I can hook your spider legs

  back into their flowered net.

  Dark silk clings to your skinny neck,

  yet no spider ever lifted sounds like this.

  Your eyes are marbles in a slow slot-machine

  and there you’ve scratched your face again.