The Best Australian Poems 2011 (12 page)

It's a road you recognise from a car ad. What's it like to live here,

do you think, driving the same winding stretch every night,

waiting on set – that is, at home – for your thirty seconds

between snatches of
Law & Order
? And how do places

become redolent with stories, I wonder, what do they tell

about us?

 

We're already back at the house, though, drinking coffee as

morning mist drifts past. We flip a coin to decide who's taking

the kids to soccer and who's going to the beach with our young,

loosely clothed friends. They remind me of evangelists, the way they

perform without being prompted, sipping coke, laughing, having a great

time. Later, while you get grass stains out of the whites and I

knock together a no-fuss dinner, all I can think about is fucking them,

like, really going at it, real rough, dirty sex.

 

I need to go for a walk, step outside the frame,

marshal my resources. I think about when we bought our first house,

or got our first newspaper subscription (I can't remember which),

and it's apparent, even then, that things were already breaking

down. And so projecting forward, we can only wait to see

our hearts breaking, be recast, lose sight of what matters. There were no

simpler times, it turns out, no house by the beach. I don't recognise

anything now, much less tell stories or go driving, but

whatever happens, I look forward to looking back on this moment.

Now is the time for the crucial chandelier.

Choose an hour when no one else is there,

the heat intense, the couturiers gone away.

Lead me down a circuitous route

barely speaking, the better to anticipate.

Part the leathern doors and introduce me

to the obscurest church ever visited.

Teach me about its forked history,

how it was bombed and rebombed

and sulkily rebuilt.

Point out the seminal chandelier

with its thousand-year-old brass

flung into the Tiber in a vandal's pique.

Indicate each notch on the ruined pulpit,

the mincing lion and indignant unicorn.

Move ahead of me into the sacristy,

remarking on a particular cerement.

Reveal each nuance of your classic neck.

Outside

There's a dragon wind

 

A man comes to give a quote

For the dead trees

He clears his throat

 

I think he is going to go with Proust

‘Your soul is a dark forest'

Or Gibran (popular

At weddings and funerals):

‘If you reveal your secrets to the wind

You should not blame the wind

For revealing them to the trees'

 

Instead he tells us

Two thousand

Two hundred

Cut to the ground

He rides a Segway through the topiaried hedges

of the
Institut pour le Développement Harmonique

Next it's granite and a TV spin-off

while she squirms in the scullery, an emulsifier

and a theodolite on each hand

when in Preston she crossed a ditch of sobs

 

She gathers the covenant to heart, before it lobs

her followers. Thought sledges

a wicket, but whether from glee or a stand

against corruption, who knows, a fit of pique

may as well summarise. She blogs: a death-defier

He pails water from a trough

 

parting a fence's palings with finesse, a cough

whistles. The demonstration magnifies her probs

and immanence, an astrolabe warped like a tyre

falls across some scratched ledgers

that yearn to annotate and squeak

of her chlorophyll, but awfully fanned

 

cards gloat and claim the land

was swamp. All bets are off

Return to the campfire: its clique

substitutes logs for chairs and sprigs for knobs

a saddle supporting her head edges

its cinders, i.e. the remains of a local flyer

 

promoting the environment, as if what they require

could ever class a gluey saraband

over dinner of fried wedges

He resumes the inspection, with Prof.

at an elbow, advising how to maximise jobs

and measuring exactly where the fountains leak

 

Whirr of helicopter off screen, over to Seek

.com. Either that or the National Choir

warbling probity, while an overseer dobs

her in. His wistful Peter Pan'd

check a rabbit fence will slough

the paddocks, while sunset's pink valve ceases pledges

 

– all Greek to her, she dredges

up some prior ownership, he bobs

among the damned, all the usual stuff

 

The trouble is they look so ordinary.

No tattoos no stubble and no concealed weapons

tucked into the belt

spoil the cool immaculate hang of their suits.

 

These Brahmins of the caste

system we shouldn't call a market it sounds

like the butcher and fishmonger and smells

off. The suits rob us of millions without

 

a single cop car screeching to a stop

(no melodrama, no bullet-proof vests).

The workers walk out into the too-real sun

and the directors pay themselves off

 

surreal millions, their features unremarkable

as if money erases them, and indifference keeps

them young. Not public signs for us to consider

these faces no one can bring to mind.

One day, eventually, no escaping,

I give a speech – special guest

at the podium: stress. Gem

of an audience, a convention

of lapidarists. Hot, I broke open

the topic.

              What was the problem?

I'd rather have been lost among rocks,

fractures and folds, than found

formally dressed, among strangers.

Exposed. They sat like fossils.

I gripped the podium as if

on a cliff, troubled there

by vertigo. Spoke. It was something

of a lava flow. My only hope

to cling to the script, stay cool

in the face of stony ridicule.

 

I'm flowing now, as if the video

won't leave me alone, the footage fresh

with my quaking. I go

along with the painted tribesmen, sad

to have their spirits stolen

by a rigid cameraman … walked

away from surprise applause, pocketed

their gift: a polished trilobite.

Give it, at home in my warm palm

– wide of any seismic likelihood –

a reception better honed

only in the Cambrian explosion.

What is it he's after – that book he lent you,

that tie left behind in your wardrobe?

Does he think you'll change your mind?

What is it he's after, this close to nightfall

and no lights on in the house –

bruising his knuckles on your door,

and you not about to answer.

He'll get sick of it, wait and see.

I admire your easy dismissal, glad

I'm not bruising mine.

 

You settle yourself back on me.

Hard, under the warmth of your skin,

to imagine being out in the cold,

standing on the other side of the door

with only your anger to hold.

for Peter Gizzi

 

We sit to a bowl of miso ramen,

same as the night before, only this time

you're coming down with something

and need the chilli. Later we'll sketch

a brief history of
risk
, the word's

first appearance in a seventeenth-

century translation of the Lusiad,

the Portuguese retelling of Homer

with da Gama as Odysseus; how

mortality data drawn from the plagues

in England gave birth to actuarial

science, and Halley, of comet fame

crunched the numbers for the seeds

of life insurance – the epistemic

shift from the providential view

that meant you'd sooner sacrifice

a goat before a trip than trust in

numbers. These days we rationalise:

what's the probability of the plane

falling out of the sky? You're far

more likely to be struck by lightning.

Did I tell you my father died in a plane

crash?
you'll say, and I – mortified

by my hypothetical, nodding as you

explain your penchant for Xanax

on cross-Atlantic flights – think back

to this moment, ladling miso into

our mouths, steam rising in winter,

you explaining how you nursed

your dying mother this September

and muttering, half under your breath:

Dying is so expensive in America.

an giv my best

ta y'r missus

he ends his mobile

 

trying to sell

something –

insurance

cars

ice cream

       it doesn't matter

 

the world makes sense

to him

 

flitting around

the c.b.d.

asking

       urging

              selling

 

the smart ones

will tell you

 

it's all just energy

 

they won't tell you

about the intelligence

behind it

 

that stolid

ruthless

poison.

With the slums of Paris as the norm

Of course Brisbane is exotic.

Imagine ripe mangos dropping on your roof

Or the insistent flight of flying-foxes

Every evening. Humidity

Could be midsummer anywhere

Particularly mid-continent. It will pass.

Growth – not human – is what matters.

Humans are peripheral here

Whereas they are all that matters in Paris.

Life might be something to use;

Here it does not count. Insects

Have as much claim: they are everywhere.

It is strange to feel so isolated.

Do I feel something is wrong? No.

Everything has its own proportion

But I will go back to what I think of as home

And in ten months I will think of mosquitoes

As the improbable cousins of humanity.

In bedrooms of Australia they are waking up and saying

What did I say and you know you should have stopped me and

My god did I say that and saying never that's the end of it no more

I'm giving up and swearing off it while their heads are full of saucepans

falling endlessly to floors made out of steel

 

And they are wearing cast-iron turbans that are growing ever smaller

round their temples while the stereo bangs on: it's descant sackbuts,

Philip Glass and Chinese Air Force marching bands and whining voices

Is that mine? that try to surface through the note-sludge and the chord-swamp

saying that's the end I know don't try to talk to me it hurts

 

The second last drink always is the one that does the damage what

possessed me to announce I love these cocktails I could drink them

all night long, or who says cask red wine's so rough let's have another

this is fun, it's Penny's big night out, it's Roger's last day with us

let's make sure we all remember while the café staff are laughing

looking on and counting money thinking ambulance or police

 

They're waking up and cannot face the ugly thing that's in the mirrors

that will catch them with its mug the simulacrum of a plastic drink cup

crushed, its two small pissholes in the snow glued somewhere

next to burst capillaries' cadastral lines around what was a nose

and will those tom-toms never cease

 

they're waking up if this can be called waking up instead of

resurrection from the dead and hearing noises coming out of furry caverns,

burred with algae, fungus, vacuum-cleaner sacks of dust and ashes

blurred with single malts and rotgut saying who's a clever boy

and who's a clever clogs and whimpering I know

I didn't mean it while massed choirs shout You did

 

Across the bedrooms of the nation they are crying o my god and omigod

and omg and g almighty Christ on earth and on a bicycle what happened

where was I when that truck hit me and I thought among this blasphemy

my misery must end why are you with me if not helpmeet, friend

to guide me through the labyrinth of sin, disgrace and worse, insult

my colleagues and employer and I have to leave for work now

 

They are speaking when they finally untie the Windsor knot that was

their tongue and making words out of the alphabet that's mixed up

saying Gertrude Steinways stone me, and the crows and all the raptors

Nevermore-wise as they hold their safety razors and attempt to shave

the hairs of dogs that stick out like whatever who remembers,

are those feet below me mine what face is this I have to look good

for the funeral somebody's, mine today

 

They're lying sweltering in their odour hell what perished here last night

what am I doing in this bed that keeps on moving who's that body here

beside me, they are saying this is rough hold on I'm falling through the universe

again this bed is slipping into space what is that figure on the carpet,

that's no painting that's my husband that's my wife I think I'm married

Who are you where am I now how did we meet o god not you

 

They're making whoopee in the barrel that is going over Bridal Falls,

Niagara, Wollomombi, Apsley Cataract, a dog a snake a wildcat

getting friendly as they tumble into mateyness and once again with feeling

to the top, here's Mister Sisyphus he's going up again

the warrior scuttling up the heights to that lone pine

that's every morning in the bedrooms of Australia