The Best Australian Poems 2013 Read online

  from each other but never knew it, sang their Hosannas

  to different Gods and croaked here only eighty miles

  and twenty years apart. Would I assimilate

  or be assimilated there,

  an exile in a land of unfamiliar rain,

  a thonged exotic flaw in emerald terrain?

  No theme comes from exile except exile, something

  no one bothered to tell the ex-pat generation.

  Until now, I thought.

  I watched some yachts puff south like beeery slobs, all gut

  and no behind. A seagull carried on like a galoot

  above my head and then the path began declining

  into oblongs balkanized by weed-cracks, kindling

  memories of jigsaws:

  fitting patiently on wet Sundays piece to piece,

  sifting through the pile for the opposite

  of a promontory of clous: portly swastikas,

  running men, whimsies, wheat sacks,

  Swedens, Sulawesis, bits

  of continent or a cauliflowered florescence, Mandelbrots

  ferning into shapes running through my bloodstream.

  And then the bigger pieces: the absent shape of you

  to which no piece will fit, like emptied rooms

  in a house no longer habitable.

  Loss ineluctable: there is no cure, no magic zebra

  crossing to a lossless world. Aslant in the breeze

  I walked the cliff-top walk, totally alone

  at the other end of love, on the way from one littoral

  to another, balancing an act

  in a world out of balance, piecing together words

  to confront something, long ago put to the sword.

  Level with my eyes a seagull hovered, motionless

  into the wind. I passed beer cans in modern middens,

  dandelions on the path’s port side

  while slowly from the north-east, thunderheads of mackerel-

  mottled clouds began to coolly spit on the caramel-

  coloured cliffs. It’s funny how it worms

  its way in, love, diasporated like a swarm

  of angry bees bearding a heart.

  The continents are the oldest divorcees, having drifted

  apart for eons. Next to them we’ve barely tiffed.

  But still you reappear, even if only as a pronoun

  which has to be emptied out or not pronounced

  as it once was: as you.

  Almost anyone could be one of them,

  the economy of love which we won’t fathom.

  You can stand for anyone now, there is no end:

  the reader of this poem or the one you need

  as elementally as air.

  And so I kept on walking, finding in a word the future

  and the past in ever-repeating series bearing a kind of fruit

  into the present. And as I walked, I came to resemble Achilles

  racing the tortoise, never overcoming, in the end, a calculus

  of ever decreasing lengths.

  But I wasn’t frustrated — au contraire — I was fascinated:

  for love, like every coastline, properly considered, is infinite.

  Country Chinese Restaurants

  Mandy Sayer

  There’s always one in every town

  Coonabarabran: Golden Sea Dragon

  Dubbo: Fu Lee Way. Maybe your car

  Broke down, or you’re on the road

  With someone who doesn’t love

  You anymore. Manjimup: Fu Hua

  Kangy Angy: New Shanghai. Always

  A fish tank in one corner, walls

  Panelled with imitation teak, plastic

  Scrolls of misted mountains, water

  Falls, a lone man fishing. Toowoomba:

  Ni Hao; Wangaratta: Koon Way. Vinyl

  Booths, nylon lanterns, laminated

  Menus flecked with soy, old prices

  Rubbed out and handwritten in pen

  A teenage girl at the back, hunched

  Over homework, harangued

  By her mother into waiting on you

  Numurkah: Jung Sung Harbour

  Gilgandra: Dragon & Phoenix

  The chef has fled and the father

  Is frying. They’re usually empty now

  There’s take-away. Four-dollar

  Cocktails & paper parasols. Maybe

  You’re on the run – an unpaid hotel bill

  Or worse, looking for something you

  Never had. Mudgee: Kai Sun, Wagga:

  Lum Inn. The wok-steamed weather

  & Confucius in a cookie

  Crowded Hour

  John Tranter

  A, Tangerine, lipstick 1962, daring

  Hint of flame and wild behaviour,

  E, lemon, sour surprise and rave, your

  Suspicious self out for a welcome airing

  On Fifth Avenue, your midday saviour

  A transparent fellow spirit, the caring

  Caress of a martini smoothly preparing

  Your conscience to accept a second favour –

  Bartender’s gift of one half-empty bottle –

  I, corn silk hair, love at full throttle,

  O, blue shadows, delicate gloom

  Pricked with traffic lights in the evening air –

  U, olive green of underwater hair –

  Scuba, the acronym, in the crowded room.

  The Consonants

  John Tranter

  B, brave brown, C, icicle

  Pendant, D, dun though pale,

  F for faint mauve, fish and bicycle,

  G, gothic paint in a green pail

  H, an ambulance red and white,

  J, lemon rain, K, snakebite,

  L, bandage around M for kill,

  N, no concrete freeway crush thrill,

  P, torrid personals, Q for Quimper,

  R, pale reptile, Sun and beach

  And T-shirts, V, abrasive screech

  Where a red vixen might scamper.

  X is just black, Y mottled spoon,

  Z pale grey sleeping under the moon.

  Dandelion

  Will Eaves

  Skies cross my window with the sound off;

  below a sprung herb shudders at life-speed,

  rewound; upstairs letters joined in silence

  from a man who was involved but hit upon

  a delicate code to tell me of his New Year’s Eve

  at Graubünden, “firework amazing, very long”.

  In a drawer of old bills keys to rooms

  that stay unlocked. Books everywhere, of course;

  among them voices raised and heard, never alone,

  the ones married to harp and flute. And luck.

  Which of the psalms will hear the clouds as

  they pass overhead, a stave of wires their nest?

  What makes them beautiful? Why do they tear

  themselves apart like ageing stars or clocks?

  Darkness Speaks

  David McCooey

  None of it is true: I am

  neither malevolent nor

  mystical. You have nothing

  to fear; I am the one who makes

  things terribly bright and

  dramatic when they need to be.

  Like when I spill myself a

  little at sunset. Night after

  night you dream of me. One day

  you will wake up properly,

&
nbsp; and there I will be, at last.

  Your new and endless climate.

  Don’t look at me; I don’t compose

  any kindertotenlieder.

  Dawn

  Sarah Day

  Dawn finds its way into the house

  through every recess,

  projecting on to walls oblique

  slow-motion shadow cinema:

  toy canoe and sailing boat

  navigate the bathroom wall;

  a trompe l’oeil window onto moving trees

  configures near a kitchen cabinet;

  water, in an unwashed bowl,

  attuned to some vibration

  ripples across the ceiling;

  a teaspoon on a sill glances ...

  through cracks and keyholes, light

  lets itself into the house,

  not as a sly intruder

  but with radiant in-pouring,

  a casual, brilliant right of entry

  Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara

  Jennifer Maiden

  Years ago when John Forbes praised

  my later work, he said my Problem

  of Evil was influenced by Tranter’s

  Red Movie, and being younger and furiouser,

  I rang Forbes and explained P. of E.

  was actually written first. The paper

  printed an apology but wicked Forbes

  started at once to speculate that Tranter

  had based Red Movie on P. of E., a claim

  of which I thought I’d better warn Tranter,

  who laughed:

  ‘Anxieties of Influence’, and that phrase

  came back to me recently when a reviewer

  said I’d learned a lot from Frank O’Hara.

  I explained to my daughter I’d never

  read O’Hara and she, the Fire Tiger,

  defended me on those grounds, so the reviewer

  professed shock that I had never read O’Hara.

  I wondered: am I shocked myself

  really that I’ve never read O’Hara? I do

  not miss O’Hara, but I said I would

  write a poem called Frank and I about us.

  The imaginary O’Hara would confess

  of course that he has not read me either,

  despite which we would feel quite at home.

  I see us relaxed on a gritty tenement balcony

  on a star-chilled American evening

  with drinks in our numb hands speculating

  why poetry is so much about denying

  what one is not, and why anxiety

  about influence is stubbornly so scary.

  ‘I’ve heard you use long lines’, I

  would say, and explain, ‘The longer

  lines in my last book were two typos I

  just missed and not an urge to run

  some novel verbal marathon.’ He might

  reply, ‘My long lines were a try

  at showing poetry is still not prose, however

  long the line and to avoid the slashes

  which Olsen thought pauses for breath.’

  I nod, ‘I’ve used slashes, too, but not

  for that, just to intensify

  and quicken the pace.’ We would

  be getting on quite well by then. ‘Someday,’

  I’d say, ‘I would like to read you, but

  of course now there is my current worry

  that influence might be retrospective,

  and that I’ll recognise your hand

  in everything I’ve written, anyway.’ He’d say,

  ‘I don’t think it’s likely – aren’t

  you more into the lyrical? You look

  sort of more lyrical but that

  might be the light.’ I would wonder: have I

  aged back to O’Hara’s age? He died

  before he turned forty and maybe

  one ages to the time and company.

  Or maybe there are such lost creatures

  as poets and each meeting each at first

  in any place is nervous and newborn,

  under erudite, angry cover. My daughter

  thought the critic was doing the haka. I

  might have done the haka with O’Hara

  had I read him, but in the ever

  new American night I would rather we

  still sat there still, regaining self-

  sense outside the great archives of torture.

  Did you mean iteration?

  Melinda Bufton

  The gmail interpolators algorithm my message to be about love poetry

  They are wrong, all it is is

  That I sent you a poem and said

  love in my signoff.

  To put the two together, presumptuous much, huh!

  Machines – like data amoeba – sit back on their clever heels and think they are all smugly knowing about love.

  They are not.

  Even HAL, you do not get this even though you hung out with those guys for ages.

  In Japan they labour yet to create these feeling machines

  Always careful of the uncanny valley

  And it wasn’t until I was ensconced in your circular screen that I realised

  When the trance soundtrack kicked in and the small images spun like the

  Talking rings

  That I realised this was the technology you had developed

  This was the sphere you had written

  The code for, in the all-encompassing round

  My mind took off in some various syntheses as I realised how conversant we are.

  I could recognise you,

  by the concept.

  Disappearing Act

  Felicity Plunkett

  for Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975)

  ‘because gravity overpowers me’

  Things tilt,

  fall

  over and we

  do: stasis a moment

  before the forwards-

  jolt.

  In a slippery-shingled world

  gravity became your ludic conspirator:

  your avant heavy with visions

  of afterwards.

  Your early work

  charts falls: ‘Broken Fall (organic)’ from a bike

  into an Amsterdam canal;

  ‘Broken Fall’ into a trestle;

  from a chair perched

  on the roof, becoming

  again the bundle your mother

  threw to make

  an impossible escape. ‘Fall I’

  Los Angeles 1970

  can neither forget nor recall

  Winschoten 1944.

  For you at two

  your father’s execution

  meant only abandonment.

  Resistance, courage, harbouring

  the persecuted: ideas beyond

  the world of your days.

  The words of your work collect

  a toddler’s small syllables:

  PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME

  Later, a film so stark

  (then a postcard, another

  film, a photo)

  that unstopped tears

  collect all tears:

  I’m too sad to tell you:

  testimony of one who saw

  but could not phrase:

  particles of innocent witness.

  And learning through this

  grief’s isolation

  and the falling o
f all art:

  thoughts unsaid

  then forgotten

  At the end

  in Search of the Miraculaous:

  a lonely voyage to

  break a-

  cross

  the Atlantic

  fall into the vanishing point

  no roof, windows

  tilt, no earth

  all

  tilt: the sea’s windows

  opening to the miraculous.

  (Note: Dutch-born conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea during

  a solo voyage and artwork called ‘In Search for the Miraculous’.)

  Drowning dream

  Bella Li

  That August I began to dream of drowning. It was the season of water – strange storms troubled the air. All day I crept along the edges of rooms, avoiding the precious windows – half ajar, propped open with old newspapers – where the green sky pooled. Outside, whole oceans flooded the garden, encroaching on the house and its sagging porch. On the first floor the eaves – swollen, bloated with salt. On the second the mirrors, weeping sodden light; the carpets stained with moisture. On the third I studied the ceiling for cracks through which the rain might bloom. The attic and the landing damp. The skirting and the sideboards. The clocks. Only once (in the afternoon) I moved down to the basement, where a man – quiet and still as a mouse – floated face-down in the dark. Above us, the house hummed like a machine.

  Dual Citizen

  Tracy Ryan

  1 Pass

  Jus sanguinis, law of blood

  as if by transfusion

  you lived on, involuntary vampire,

  I carry

  by former marriage a mantle

  you never wanted –

  Swiss Australian –

  wherever you lived,

  you did not belong,

  were the black sheep,

  scapegoat.

  Is this what you

  impart, what I

  inherit?

  2 Assisted Passage

  Lobbed across continents

  with a sweetheart on the SS Sydney

  Come to Sunny Australia!

  no word of English but

  this is the house that Jack built

  lodged in a Nissen hut,

  set to cut

  lengths of metal

  for a suitcase company

  in a country that didn’t rate