The Best Australian Poems 2013 Read online

  Melbourne, still home

  to men with Spam-coloured

  faces and no-coloured hair

  who stand around on Fitzroy corners

  waiting for the saloon-bar doors to swing

  and hack away at winter mornings

  with lungfulls of Holiday and Horizon

  until the first cold Draught

  hits the bottom of the glass

  and who have never yet called home

  on a smartphone.

  My Husband’s Grave

  Andy Kissane

  I ripped a cotton thistle from the grass beside your grave.

  No doubt you stepped on them on your last march,

  pulled the spines from your trousers, admired the lovely

  purple flowers. How far you walked, past burning haystacks

  and deserted houses, past women who looked at you

  and looked away. I’m sure you dreamt of the shady verandah

  at home, bees flitting about the garden, my plum jam cooling

  in the kitchen, a long letter safe in your overcoat pocket, a poem

  written on the back of a handbill advertising cod-liver oil.

  Your dear friend, Miklós Lorsi, was shot beside you,

  the bullet slicing into his chin where he once rested his violin.

  If you’d marched with the second unit you would have lived,

  Miklós Radnóti, like your poems—poems the earthworms

  did not eat; love as tough as a thistle and as hard to eradicate.

  my singing empty hands

  Shari Kocher

  i hold the boat steady and my sister

  climbs in the boat smells of lavender

  as only the image of a boat

  can smell of lavender in a dream

  water purling at the lip my sister

  has not grown any older

  my sister says

  i smell like garlic

  my sister takes the oars

  you sit she says i row don’t you know

  anything? my sister’s words

  smell strongly of washing powder

  she flinches when i touch her

  shut up she says just let me row

  my sister’s hands on the oars

  smell of soap and some sinister

  cheap perfume my daughter sometimes

  wears when she is angry my sister

  closes her hands on the oars

  my sister does not see me at all

  there’s the smell of kelp in the water

  some rival in her head do you remember

  nothing she says you say is true

  i taste the snow in the air between us

  my sister rows

  precisely and with determination

  the book grows soggy in her hand

  ink grass clippings blood

  why aren’t you helping she cries at last

  thrusting the oars at me as she sheds

  her crocodile tears you never do anything

  the book with which she has been rowing

  from under her lashes my sister

  watches me my sister’s tears

  taste like lamingtons my sister’s voice

  shines with the cut of scales

  my sister does not see through her crying

  the flash of real fish in the flashing water

  my sister sits in our small boat

  in the middle of that wide little water

  with rounded shoulders

  the smell of iron filings

  something burning

  she wears our mother’s hair

  Nostalghia

  Carmen Leigh Keates

  after Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

  In sleep he is sent

  to a memory that nears

  its incarnation.

  He can see his silhouette

  in the distance,

  it walks a dusk horizon

  that curves like the top

  of a molecule.

  His real life earns

  a passing mention

  in a lengthy deposition

  under hypnosis.

  *

  In the caverns of the baths,

  in his clothes and shoes

  Gorchakov walks through water;

  there is all the difference in the world

  between here and home

  and as he wades

  he smokes a cigarette.

  Gorchakov is in danger.

  He can be both

  inhaled and blown away.

  Rather than a reflection,

  on a mirror he is condensation.

  Sometimes he is just

  the breath of a dog.

  This poet is a photograph.

  When the emulsion

  of his thin silver present

  is exposed to light, it channels

  an old instinct’s pictures.

  His country has formed crystals.

  *

  At nineteen I was a receptionist

  at a photographic college.

  One of the students

  was a man from the mines. He said

  Where do accents come from?

  And I said something about

  kinds of English sounds breeding along a line

  – an auditory line of whomever ended

  up in Australia, for instance.

  In-bred voice noise.

  And he said, But at first?

  What is an accent in its own place?

  It must be something in the rocks.

  *

  All the water in this film

  is actually voice

  that has decomposed.

  In Gorchakov’s head,

  in moving countries he

  has started a precipitation.

  Think how Domenico’s house leaks

  even when it is not raining –

  somehow, sonar has bled.

  Gorchakov’s old memory is animated

  and it transitions through states.

  A liquid distilled from his country

  is in his blood.

  *

  At the moment of heart attack,

  it is the gas of this country

  that drifts from his mouth.

  As the poet becomes unconscious

  a stratum is formed

  and in this layer

  memory is a demon that walks

  like a soldier from a tunnel.

  Not in vain

  Michael Farrell

  You think of gracious ladies, I of gents: not so

  young, dressed in rain. We are quiet, mad, like drummers looking

  for a band. We turn over the soil, marvel at

  our tranquillity. All’s well in Paris, according to

  the TV. Magic roofs of thatch have descended

  creating brown shadows. A rustle and bark, but no

  dog in the yard. We’ve seen the international

  children crying at the graves of Tutenkhamen. They’re

  on tour like us. Cairo’s Proust iguanas his gay

  eyes, his gay neck. The sacred lawns are being mown. Mainland

  ways. Five minutes sunshine, then Fleur-de-Lys Island.

  The attitude of the pottery up there’s chilly. We

  throw rocks at its crimson calm. I’d come to imprint

  the sky on my green-gold mind. At first I felt flush, vain

  boggled. Cooing
images of the lotused ground.

  Sunny creature, resting through spring ... grace to be visible.

  Nyirbator

  Oscar Schwartz

  on top of the bridge

  the danube’s bullpit the mosquitoes

  the brown stones the currency

  accumulating everything as it should be and

  hair emptying into a plastic bag

  outside the synagogue my arm

  itchy I pray for the return of

  a name this is all so super it is

  also regular and I see it as a bright

  pink boarder or empty glasses frames

  or a nut shell this is you watching me

  behave like a nut shell entirely tied up

  to some familiar name stoned marble

  this is you petrified stoned palpable

  the nut is no longer moved by stimuli

  not even purple grapes or purple light

  on barmitzvahed hands the most

  precise siren is silence and if you

  wander through the mass names and

  rub your eyes is it because you are

  expressing sadness or is it because

  I happen to be playing with a name

  as it used to be I do feel like I’m watching

  you yes I am from a bridge do me a favour

  visit my family tell me their names

  Ochre

  Ali Cobby Eckermann

  green and bright blue flits of colour

  swirl in a mallee-grey underground

  amid constant bird song harmony

  along the riverbank bee eaters

  dart rainbows around her head

  as she paints her body with yellow ochre

  splash crimson on bleeding eyes

  through the tunnel of darkness

  honour the dead

  Ode on Love

  Petra White

  What he has taken of me

  I don’t even want back,

  I don’t want to want back.

  This new happiness holds up

  a novel mischief that waits in the near.

  Why so indispensible?

  Before I knew him I did not need him:

  if he goes I must replace him,

  as if I could. And that circling body-mashing doubt.

  How he throws me

  into dark and retrieves me!

  And with gazes like little riffing flames inhabits me.

  What does the bottom-most soul know of this –

  that basin of us

  concerned only with survival,

  collecting residual passion

  and washing clean,

  shining up that bit of us

  that cares nothing?

  That idea that every lover is the same,

  that there’s a template, a type,

  that what I call all-but-worship’s not this man but an all-man man

  likely to be just like my father:

  being one man he is all,

  many desires folded into one bright

  bouquet of obsession that springs from the heart like Spring.

  He is coasting along his own midnight.

  The trapping of his breath, the only outward sign,

  I devour it like meat,

  as if it was him,

  tenderly and watchfully in all love’s creepiness.

  Love is a thing, the self’s

  undoing that it begs for.

  He twitches out hot shivers of love he shifts away from,

  exalts and voids me

  with the economy of a waiter emptying a whole table with one hand.

  Power to love draws the long breath from me.

  Petrarch made this a joy, an Other queening distance,

  love never shaken by reality, never

  whittled by exchange.

  I fear whatever we have will puff like a daisy.

  And if not?

  Mutuality, mutability, love nuanced and grappled, hard.

  This seam of encounters can’t peg itself down,

  it is or isn’t, it is high or low, a scythe swinging in, or out.

  The self tries to locate him, and itself

  in all the moving signifiers of love,

  lover and love, meaning and feeling,

  things that says, love this one, not another.

  I lie in bed scratching at the night.

  Absent, his beauty

  evaporates. He flickers before me,

  knowable-unknowable, central lover, man-figure

  skating so sweetly at the edge of a beauty.

  How I hope against. How I want to know if he.

  And love dares the self.

  To risk what there is in hope of havocking more to risk.

  Trying not to try to purloin him whole

  but keep him near – to tell my heart so stupid!

  The drawbridge clatters up.

  Old Europe (2)

  Adam Aitken

  You don’t need to queue at the entrance

  but then so dark your captions now unreadable

  since the children left.

  Come dine with me in a dead café.

  Let’s dance in my old Turkish residence

  lined with uncut books

  where a cigar accords with taste

  and the chocolatier snores.

  You may need to sidestep the urine.

  Rémy flew home in a djellaba

  the armless no glory veteran

  the pigeons don’t bother with the bread

  the accordion’s sellotaped to wheeze a tune.

  The Romanies sell puppies to lovesick tourists

  but the light is what we dream,

  Saron’s scything searchlight,

  the Eiffel Tower a blingy earring

  on the ear of Europa.

  In the courtyard of a hôtel particulier

  she showed me the seventeenth century

  rainwashed and dishabille

  with a horse in harness

  and a Russian lover who won’t spy for money or love.

  A warning: the shih tzu twins are locked in

  patrolling my millionaire terrace,

  the road a crime scene below, a day-for-night

  with Citroen and café shoot-out.

  You might have to step over the body.

  I only come here for summer,

  for language, macaroons,

  delicious cod. Good thing Cheryl

  got the handbag she wanted she’s

  so persistent we filmed it.

  On Dreams

  Diane Fahey

  It needs a strong will, and patience

  to hold the dream inside the body

  while the mind imprints itself with icons

  of bright smoke, and an arm reaches for pen, paper.

  Timed out, the dream’s beyond reclaim:

  a shoreline’s wash of moon eclipsed by cloud.

  A dream saved is this glass of water

  which lights a piecemeal, bizarre version of a room,

  encrypts and reverses a text in progress,

  swells, presses flat, these fingertips.

  As the day warms, the glass collects dust,

  fresh shadows, kaleidoscopes gold air.

  You sip from it, drinking the room, the dream:

  here and now and then; nowhere, never.

  On Not Getting my Spray Can Signed by Mr Brainwash

  Jaya Savige

 
after Elvis (2009), by Thierry Guetta

  It’s not that I’d prefer

  another portrait of St. Michael

  to Elvis wielding an M16

  designed by Fisher & Paykel.

  Wait, I mean by Fisher Price –

  point being I appreciate

  a top shelf Invader piece

  as much as any Eurydice,

  and I’m pretty sure I get

  the way our fetishisation

  of the toy assault rifle

  inflects his canonisation

  as The King. It’s just that capital

  encourages this: the endless

  permutations of its effects

  are hardly less mindless.

  The hubris is in thinking

  of each meme-savvy mashup

  as a protest, allied to a flash

  mob trashing Topshop.

  It’s not. This canvas is passive

  as TV. No caulking with irony

  can prevent its shtick’s hull

  ripping on the reef of cliché.

  I pray to Duchamp not to be

  the guy who cries Scheissers!

  unfazed that he’s conscripted

  by the thing he criticises.

  Outstretched Arms

  Lachlan Brown

  for Noel Rowe

  maybe I’m getting used to it the drive down the M5

  black bitumen as smooth as any beach

  the search for parking in Randwick heels clicking

  in hospital corridors and my brother’s

  measured breath intensive care is

  quiet like a library where machines and nurses

  speak in lowered tones as if death was sleeping nearby

  not to be awakened we’re trying to talk to him

  but it’s hard to speak to stillness

  the doctors keep saying you must remember

  his coma score was very low

  though young people often surprise us

  my youngest brother should be studying for the hsc

  according to my parents

  instead he carts his dreadlocks and skateboard

  past hospital security and tries to chat up

  the pretty british nurses

  I don’t know how to comfort him when he starts crying

  so we don’t talk much about the accident

  or the operations that aren’t succeeding

  instead we argue about the radio station in the car