The Best Australian Poems 2013 Read online

  It’s time to snare those starfish hands—

  but God, how to blunt such silver flecks?

  Bushfire Approaching

  John Kinsella

  I

  I am ready to evacuate if need be.

  My wife emailed to say a fire is out of control

  on Julimar Road, less than ten kilometres away.

  She says she’ll return with the car, but I say it’s okay,

  we’ll monitor and speak through the gaps.

  She insists she will return: listening to the chat

  in the library at Toodyay, seeing smoke in the west,

  checking the FESA site. I say I will take a look outside

  and get back to her in minutes. She is waiting. I climb

  the block gingerly with my torn calf muscle striking back,

  and see the growing pall over Julimar. A great firebreak

  and a bitumen road are between here and there, I reassure,

  though I will keep a close eye on it. The breeze blows

  from the east, but is ambivalent and could swing

  about. There are no semantics in this. And Paul Auster

  is right where William (the lumberman) Bronk was wrong:

  the poem doesn’t happen in words, but ‘between seeing

  the thing and making it into a word’. Location location location.

  As evidence: if fire sweeps through, only the mangled

  metal of this Hermes typewriter will remain,

  a witness, philosophy in-situ vanquished, and an elegy

  made from bits of a different seeing with different words,

  remain. Figurative density will take hold, and landscape

  will be less fragile, the font more robust. It won’t rely

  on paper: ash become an idea, a taste for some.

  You stop seeing the red when it’s on top of you.

  But true burning feeds on ash and the idea

  of fire: it perseveres and requires only oxygen

  and memory. Wild oats caught in my socks

  taunt my ankles. Fuel for fire. In all seriousness.

  II

  I am not hearing AC/DC’s ‘This House is on Fire’

  out of perversity. This morning a rush of colour

  brought on a flashback, and I’ve not had one of those

  for a decade. Strychnine-saturated, like the bush

  where rangers claim to conserve native species

  through poisoned baits. Rapid heartbeat, dry mouth,

  outbreaks of laughter (grotesque, face of death),

  colour codings of annihilation: spiritual and topographical.

  Phantasm of acid trips – pink batts, supermen, green dragons,

  orange barrels, purple hearts, clearlights, ceramic squares,

  goldflakes, microdots, lightning bolts: nomenclature

  of William Blake and weird melancholy of habitat loss.

  Lost and unfounded. A run on images. Voices in the room.

  Excruciating paranoid cartoon violence. So, I check

  outside again and the plume is still moving southwest

  though the wind is tentative and temperature

  up five degrees over the last thirty minutes. This is realtime,

  unlike hypnogogia, hallucinations? Grounds for worship.

  Foundational ontology. I should mention that I have flu

  and that’s why I stayed home in the first place. Harvest

  is full-on though I have finished grass cutting here.

  I wore myself out and my defences are down. Run down.

  Antibodies hesitant if not docile. I make rhetoric

  out of the flood of image-fragments: seems like good sense,

  making the best, keeping a grip, cool in a volatile situation?

  III

  I’m abandoning my poem on the wheatbelt stone gecko

  and the ‘keeled tail’ of a black-headed monitor

  which is running amok through the roof, along walls,

  scaling trees with maritime skill. The images lack

  explanation and coalesce, are minimalist, but will

  serve as a poor kind of last will and testament.

  One sheet in my pocket, and it will be this.

  IV

  The wind has dropped, though smoke – not impenetrable

  but more substantial than ‘thin’ – hangs over the block,

  a tentative fallout. The birds are doing their silence

  thing, or have shot through. We keep no birds in coops.

  The air is almost acrid. Defend or abandon?

  It’s when the smell of burning reaches upwind

  that you know it has bitten deep. Firebreaks: check.

  Water: check, but if the pump goes that’s an end to flow.

  Fireblanket: check. Personal papers and evacuation pack: check.

  No room for ‘literature’: just this poem, paperweight.

  Ready to lend a helping hand: always, to best of ability.

  Essential medications. Maybe the boy’s most precious toy,

  but he wouldn’t expect it. Something of my wife’s.

  Insects thick on the flyscreens: suddenly Hitchcockian.

  V

  Smoke-mushrooms are haloes about wattles they haven’t yet touched

  where it counts. Prelude. Early life of devastation, its long legacy

  too long in its brief moment of, well, beauty. Back again after

  staggering uphill – glimpses of lush green moss amidst stubble

  and granite are bemusing and bizarrely cheering – and all is suddenly

  military, warzone, combat. Helitacs, fixed-winged water bombers

  coming over the hills. Dousing. Or maybe it’s anti-militaristic?

  No time to think about this. Three years ago, fire destroyed

  forty homes just south of here. It was like this then, too.

  VI

  Alert Level: ‘a bushfire is burning near Julimar and Kane Roads’;

  ‘stay alert and monitor your surroundings’; why use quote marks?

  This is barely copyright in the life and death of it. Plagiarism?

  Blame burns with a heat unlike any other and burns long

  after last embers have faded. And with days of heat and high

  winds ahead, even a dead ember might find heart again, and leap

  to the occasion. Elemental showdown. Proof. Precedent.

  Test case. Habeas corpus – the body present. The burning

  question: people build houses in the bush, then blame the bush.

  My brother, life-long surfer, says: If I get taken by a shark

  remember it was while doing something I love in its universe.

  Remember me in this light. The fire has jumped Julimar Road.

  Chimney

  Maria Takolander

  By day it does its thick and heinous work,

  only slowly,

  clogged with the sweat

  of coal, meat, sticks and wood.

  It is like a character from folklore

  —or something older—transmogrified

  into this domestic hunkering

  of brick and soot.

  *

  In the evening it partakes, ominously,

  of the sky’s transfiguration into night.

  When the men and women have come and gone,

  like loaves of bread,

  and the darkness solidifies and the children dream,

  the cold of the planets begins to seep in.

  Before dawn, with the embers quiet,


  the chimney opens itself to the stars’ dying light

  from Chinatowns

  Kim Cheng Boey

  Over and over you study the menus, the recipes, the difficult names

  of herbs and roots, the cures that awaken a forgotten hunger.

  You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them

  like sutras Xuan Zang fetched from India, testing ways

  return might be possible against these homesick inventions,

  trace the traveller’s alien steps across borders, and in between

  discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns

  grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home.

  City workers during morning rush hour, Collins Street, Melbourne, 2013

  Peter Bakowski

  Perhaps not fully awake, elbowed and bumped, you alight from trams,

  Exit Parliament Station, to join the ballet of the brisk.

  Rebel by sitting on a park bench. Such a luxury may incite a

  Scowl on a passing face. Reading the

  Obituaries in The Age, you’ll learn how often a certain

  Nuclear scientist was married. This knowledge of a more troubled life may

  Allow you to take a break from painting the town grey.

  Look at the bird borrowed sky. It’s not raining rats and tarantulas.

  What a gift is hunger. Because of it your ancestors left their caves,

  Explored plains, valleys, rivers, seas. These

  Adventures became paintings, songs, tall tales, family legends, headlines.

  There’s the story of each person, on the trains, trams and street corners.

  How vulnerable you are, how strong you are. I want to reveal your

  Essence via the camera of this poem, as you swarm and

  Rush in the business district, glancing at your wristwatches.

  Closed on Mondays

  Pam Brown

  too nice

  & when you leave

  everything is white noise,

  no traffic,

  no music, no muffle,

  just thick air

  whirring

  greyness leaks

  into the afternoon,

  a dirty kind of day

  kids are rolling

  down a mound

  of irradiated tilth

  the world’s

  assembled curatariat

  is queueing unhappily

  for their passes

  in light drizzle

  perdido’s

  on eastside

  & I’m trying ballerina moves

  on the fibre mat,

  preceding biceps curls

  with pitiful

  one kilogram weights

  a tiny plastic ‘T’

  snipped from

  a price tag,

  caught in the mat

  is there any

  news from Mars

  that’s better

  than here?

  *

  latest is

  R.Mutt’s a meme

  it was when you said

  “say

  ‘thanks Marcel’”

  *

  death’s announced

  to

  a quick declivity

  (joke)

  of upload, list & link —

  scrolling,

  the final ritual

  mourners weeping,

  for themselves,

  no ghost

  in the crematorium machine

  *

  like Georges Perec wrote —

  Nothing is happening, in fact

  every single thing’s

  a tourist destination

  &

  everything’s

  available to everyone

  taking phone photos

  of the brickworks stacks

  from the back seat

  on saturday night

  gawking at the mud

  caked on cars

  drifting

  on the flood plain

  *

  time experienced

  as a perpetual rush

  to

  the latest in new

  o no

  it’s Monday

  it’s closed

  & you reveal

  a dour scepticism

  of pop culture

  but

  I’d give it

  another chance

  following

  my dorky polestar,

  relentlessly discursive

  *

  open the cider

  ‘thanks Marcel’

  *

  so you want

  to write in a cave

  &

  take your source material

  with you?

  *

  searching all over

  for the house

  where it’s quiet

  because

  Wallace Stevens

  says it is

  *

  a vase

  of droopy roses

  fine dust

  covering

  a tower

  of expended

  nivea cream jars

  *

  &

  when I arrive

  there’s a manuscript,

  poems, new to me,

  open for reading

  the first pages

  have

  draft numbers—

  Draft #1 Draft #2

  —at the top

  before anything else

  the rims around

  my eyes

  feel tired

  the empty room

  purrs its scope

  I imagine

  a well-polished

  furniture voice

  trying nonchalance,

  the sheets of typing

  called

  “my stuff “

  *

  it’s coming along

  *

  stretch out now,

  a woven plastic lounge

  muscle & bone grind

  shoulder bone

  grind

  warm your dead feet

  beneath the baobab tree

  *

  thin transparent oil

  slowly leaks

  from the barrel

  of the souvenir pen,

  the plastic historical figure

  no longer slides

  along the mini city backdrop,

  he’s stuck

  at the bottom of the scene

  *

  mid april

  &

  the xmas wreath

  is still pinned

  to the front door

  of the neighbour

  who died

  on boxing day

  Co. Kerry

  Paul Kane

  for Peter Steele

  The very smell of the sea beckons –

  pungent, redolent of other shores.

  I walk the beach with my forebears.

  They set off and I returned,

  We have found one another out.

  The lighthouse at Fenit

  looks in all directions at once:

 
comings and goings its only concern.

  This is a place of stone.

  This is where the long view obtains.

  Limestone conglomerate

  holds it all together.

  Beyond the farthest reach of this ocean,

  someone dear is fading fast away.

  He may be gone as I say these words.

  His faith is that he has always been the life

  that is leaving him, leaving us.

  The sea beckons. The lighthouse is dark.

  Clouds obscure the high hills, the wind is steady.

  This is where we find ourselves.

  Coastline

  David Musgrave

  I walked along the cliff-top at around eleven

  one September morning, wondering why the level

  of the sea at the horizon

  seems always higher than where I am, even though

  the waves kept shuddering into spray on rocks far below.

  Was it a kind of horizontal vertigo,

  or a species of the sublime, a newly released cogito,

  I think therefore … I must be a dwarf

  standing on the shoulders of other dwarves, each one shorter

  than the one before? I filed this thought for

  later use and kept walking past clumps of bustling

  grass, on a concrete path glittering in bright sunlight,

  past a jogger threshing air,

  all elbows, knees and sweat, who paused a moment, oinked,

  or so it seemed, and jogged on. The morning light coined

  a mint of silver on the ocean, golden shivers

  of droughty stalks flared from the footpath’s fissures

  and I was rich for a moment,

  richer than the waterfront exclusionary

  viewkeepers, the prinked promenaders, even the cemetery.

  I passed a clique of tourists gathered at a corner

  of the white retaining fence, where locals reckon

  the face of the Virgin Mary

  appears each day at around eleven, and armed with cameras

  and mobile phones they waited with a calm air as

  if faith was merely a matter of patience. I prepared

  to wait for a while as well, but nothing appeared

  to happen, so I strolled on, dissatisfied

  as ever. Back then I wanted to be an anagram

  of what I should have been: not a Manager

  but a flâneur perhaps, or a traveller or taghairm

  prophesying in ox-hide by a stream, or migrate

  in reverse to my two great-

  grandfathers, Musgrave and Quealy, who lived across the Shannon